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| Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater by FABIO 01/13/2005, 2:26pm PST | ||||
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| Dig the James Bond opener. "Snake Eater" sounds infinately more retarded when sung instead of spoken. Lots of kaleidescope colors with x-ray'd snake skeletons crawling everywhere and some chick singing "Snaaaaaaake Eaaaaaaaaaaateeeerrrrrr" over and over.
I gave this game one more chance. The first thing I get hit with was 2 minute radio conversation from my commander about how he's changing his codename because he picked the wrong one. The old one was "Tom" after The Great Escape movie because "tom" was the name of the one escape tunnel the nazis didnt discover, so the name was lucky. But then he explains that he made a mistake and tom was one of the tunnels that was discovered, he even ordered the film from the company and watched it again before the mission just to make sure. All the other conversations are pretty much along this (and MGS2's) line; they cross over from "amusingly silly" to just plain retarded. Then it was on to more retarded stealth. This game takes everything that's wrong with the whole stealth genre: moving slowly and getting fucked for being discovered, and hits you with it full force. The game claims that Snake got his codename because he sheds his skin or whatever, but you'll soon discover it's because he crawls everywhere. You'll spend the vast majority of the game (slowly) crawling everywhere. Crawling is done in 1st person so if one screenshot had to sum up this game it would be lots of grass obscurring your vision from ground level. Everyone likes to poke fun at the next generation "elite" guards from the first MGS game for only being able to see 10 feet straight ahead and not hearing you run around on concrete floors. Also the radar that somehow detected when enemies were aware of you, the direction they were facing, and their vision cone. But you know what? Considering the mechanics of the engine and gameplay, it worked. Without the radar, you're forced to constantly stop and look through 1st person to see if the coast is clear. Enemies have no such limitation and can now see you all the way across the screen. You'd think if they wre going to force you to look through 1st person so much, they'd allow you to move around during it. No such luck. The unused right analog stick would have been fine for that. Get spotted by an enemy with 5 times the view distance as you or from making the slightest bit of noise from walking through grass and it's off to alert mode. At this point, you have two choices: reload or just run and ignore all the enemies. Trying to hide and run down the alert timer is futile. Once on alert mode, enemies instantly know where you are at all times. You can round a corner while guards are still over 100 feet behind you, go hide in a vast sea of tall grass far from the corner where you have 95% camo, but when the guards round the corner they will immediately head straight to your hiding spot and start shooting you again. Even in the lower alert "evade" and "cautious" modes, guards will still always move right to your hiding spot, only now they're walking instead of running. The only way to really hide is to go someplace where guards can't follow you like crawling (yes, more of that) under a building, so the whole camo system is pointless there. Trying to hide is made even more pointless by the fact that it's much quicker to just reset and reload than it is to wait out the alert timer which takes about 3 minutes and is reset by the slightest things like a guard discovering a footprint (I'm assuming). And the reward for all this? Certainly not the story. I'll take everyone's word that the boss fights are enjoyable, but you have to ask yourself if they're worth this. Like the past metal gear games, there's a bunch of amusing little things you can do with guards: shoot a beehive so it falls on them, catch a snake and throw it at them, etc. And like past metal gear games, doing these things takes 10x the amount of time and effort it would to just take the easiest path and shoot them with a silenced weapon, so you'll do the amusing things once for the sake of novelty, then never touch them again. This game fails completely in what Beyond Good & Evil taught us. That game took a bunch of different genres and gave you only the most fun bits of each while cutting out all their bullshit. With the stealth portion they showed us that the secret was not making it so dreadfully slowpaced and putting the player in danger when discovered, but giving him a quick way out so he wasn't fucked and didn't have to wait many long minutes crouched in a corner for the alert to cancel. The only thing Snake Eater has over BG&E is that it lasts longer, which actually makes it worse. Final score on a scale from 0 to 10: Play Beyond Good & Evil instead. |
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