seiberwing

I was lounging around at the Triadhouse yesterday evening and I thought I'd give Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a spin. I played through the Big Shell mission up to right after the defeat of Fatman and the giant lecture from cyborg ninja dude and then promptly forgot to save, so savewise I'm still before the fight with Fortune.

It doesn't seem to be such a bad game so far. The autolock for shooting is a real friend of mine since I can't shoot for shit, and most of the sneaking around is pretty fun when you're not stuck in the middle of a puzzle and trying to figure out why Raiden can't just walk over a pipe the height of his knee rather than crawling under it.

But the writing. Oh god, the writing. Let's just say that when Yahtzee mentioned in his review that Kojima was big on the words he was not fucking kidding. I don't know, maybe it was because I was at the beginning of the game and got more exposition, but I'm pretty sure this game has more cutscenes than freaking Crisis Core and I can't take five steps without people calling me on the CODEC. A few times I actually had to call people back to get my mission objective because in the midst of all the wordswordswords I actually forgot what I was supposed to be doing next.

I can't really pass judgment on most of the characters because I don't know them that well yet. The pages and pages of backstory that get dropped on me at every available opportunity don't count, because if anything that makes me like them less. I don't need to know that our bomb defuser had a tragic past and accidentally forgot to tell Fatman that blowing up innocent people is wrong, and that he hurt his leg only he didn't because he was guilty and faked it. We know the guy for approximately half an hour, trying to manipulate us into caring about him through telling rather than showing is seriously bad writing and besides that it's dead boring. I felt like I needed a book at some points.

Snake Plisskin (come on, who the heck are you fooling?) is also okay, because at least he seems competent. Raiden's a complete dip with an annoying habit of repeating what other people say and needing everything explained to him before he gets the general idea. I think they sent him in because he was too stupid to ask questions.

Also Rose needs to go die in a fire or something, I'm not sure why they thought it was a good idea to put Raiden's girlfriend on as his data analyst when she won't stop talking about April 30th and how romantic it was that time they went to the Empire State Building. STOP TALKING WOMAN I JUST WANT TO SAVE MY FUCKING GAME I probably forgot to save because I subconsciously didn't want to hear her jabbering again.

The villains so far are actually pretty interesting, possibly because they don't talk as much. Fortune is completely off the deep end, obviously, but she seems to have a good reason for it. Fatman is pretty cool by benefit of being reasonably clever and unique, even if he's basically a fat guy on roller skates.

And Vamp is, um...yeah. ^_^;; For Vamp alone I'd probably play the entire game through. If I actually owned the game and a PS2, I mean. I don't suppose anyone knows where I could some fic of him?