Metal Gear Sigh

I finally got Metal Gear Solid 3 today. Yes, number four is out but I just got three. The reason is that I don't like the Metal Gear games but because I am a gaming nerd I want to be conversant on the popular titles so I attempt to play through them. Since they're popular they're also cheap to buy used (at least once the new game smell has worn off) and the worst thing that happens is I'm annoyed for a few hours and then I'm out roughly the price of a movie.

I've now played for nearly three and a half hours. Or let me revise that: I've played for roughly twenty minutes and watched three hours and ten minutes of poorly written, laughably bad cut scenes. The kind of stuff where a character says a meaningless line because it sounds portentous but it's actually pretentious (I swear it's like they wrote four different versions of each cut scene as they were pinning down the plot and then randomly decided which lines to leave in). I watched the clock and there was literally over an hour and half of cut scenes between meaningful game sequences (where I did something other than use the menu or walk between screens).

And that's why I don't like the series. I want to play a game, not watch a poorly made "spy thriller" by someone who thinks obfuscation is the same thing as cleverness. I'm sticking with it since the most fun I have with the games is providing my own Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary to those cut scenes. But as a game so far it has been failing just on the game to watching ratio.