MGS4 COUNTDOWN - MGS3, DAY ONE



I suck at this game. Tremendously.

First of all, let's point out I'm playing the original Snake Eater, evil camera intact. This doesn't help my dreadful problem with this game - the backgrounds are so gorgeous and lush and 'busy' that I can't actually see the terrain, the relevant items, or the enemy soldiers about nine tenths of the time, and usually end up running Snake blindly into electric fences, dogs, and bullets.

The Vegetarian Run is working out nicely. It eliminates the constant hunting aspect, and streamlines everything, since there's a lot less plants to worry about than there are animals. It's also not significantly more difficult, since fruits are pretty common, effective, and come in groups of about ten a go.

Hmm. Anyway. Onto plot.

I find it really strange that the meme machine has made Big Boss into a sex god, when Solid Snake is the one who's actively portrayed as sexy. Not that I wouldn't hit Big Boss so hard he wouldn't be able to get out for a week, but the point still stands; looking at the memes you'd think he was some ultra-manly Bond-and-Chuck-Norris pinnacle, but in game, he's...sweet. Games should not make me want to hug six-foot-five bearded men and tell them everything will be alright. But Big Boss manages.

In a sense, you could say that Big Boss and Solid Snake are attacking the same set of archetypes - Snake attacks it by taking it to its logical, ludicrous extreme, and Big Boss attacks it by going the opposite direction. The contrast between Solid Snake and Big Boss is really well played, although there are some ham-fisted homages - for instance, at the beginning when Snake introduces himself to Para-Medic, he quotes Snake's 'names mean nothing on the battlefield - after a week, no-one has a name' line, which really doesn't make any coherent sense with Big Boss's character; it's just an arbitary nod to tell us 'yes, this guy's like Snake', and it serves only to muddle him and his motivations.

'Names mean nothing on the battlefield' is the opinion of a jaded soldier, not the 'natural-born fighter, not yet a soldier' that Big Boss is. He could be regurgitating something The Boss taught him, which I'm going to assume for the sake of my sanity, but it wouldn't make sense for him to say it while attempting to flirt.

But the thing is, Big Boss isn't jaded like Snake, and neither is he naive, like Raiden pretended to be. He's independent, but he doesn't shun company, and neither does he cling desperately to it. Compared to his predecessors, he could have been a dull middle-of-the-road character, neither wangst nor comic. But he manages to be the most explicitly 'human' compared to the other two ('killer' and 'lunatic'), and so he's endearing. With Big Boss, we both laugh at his idiocy and gasp at his effortless coolness, and neither side detracts from the other. Being openly emotional lets us understand his thoughts and feelings more than Snake, terrified of his own emotions, and yet he has the Awesome Factor that Raiden sorely lacked.

He also takes both sides to somewhat greater extremes than his predecessors; Big Boss is explicitly called a 'child' by the other characters, and his driving relationship with both his CO and his mentor is a paternal one. And, of course, some very clever direction means he ends up with the gamer being made to feel far more responsible and guilty for his actions than a player of MGS1 ever felt for Snake's actions.

In a sense, it makes him a little easier to 'pour yourself' into than the other two; Snake (who was so cool that gamers were content to watch him rather than become him) and Raiden (who gamers didn't want to be).

The only problem, I'd say, is with his voice portrayal; When Big Boss sounds like Solid Snake, the particular timbre and enunciation sounds too deadpan, and doesn't fully express his character. When Big Boss deviates from the Solid Snake voice, the vocal quality suffers greatly. I suppose it couldn't be helped. The Japanese were lucky in that they went for a more neutral timbre; if you listen to Akio Ohtsuka's performance of Big Boss, he manages to be incredibly expressive without dropping Snake's timbre for one second. Notably, he Japanese Big Boss laughs a lot more.

....oh god, what. I'm supposed to be talking about the game, not writing an RP app.

Okay, have a bulleted list of the notes I took during the game:



- Big Boss gets called a 'pantywaist' about a minute into the opening cutscene. Well done, Kojima.

- I absolutely love the 'not to spoil anything, but this bit isn't the main plot' dialogue at the beginning of the 'Virtual Mission'. "Sounds like a training exercise." "I assure you, it isn't." And they go over and over that argument until the gamer gets that this is just to let them get used to the buttons. Great use of reverse psychology.

- I also really like the slideshow in the Virtuous Mission briefing. It's so well-done and manages to be really nice to watch despite being, basically, half an hour of stock footage. (I hear they blew most of the budget buying rights for the footage in that scene.)

- Big Boss certainly gets the best 'this is your main character' reveal, with him slowly removing the mask to the most haunting bit of the most haunting piece of music in the game in the middle of the jungle with the parachute flowing to the ground behind him in slo-mo - absolutely gorgeous. I'm glad they didn't just stick him on an elevator like usual.

- I really enjoy that initial conversation between Jack and The Boss, as well. It manages to get across both that they're really close and that The Boss is a kickass woman, but there's also the awkwardness there, with The Boss accusing him of not being a proper soldier and him saying 'no, no, I am all those things' and her telling him another reason why being those things still doesn't make him a proper soldier. It's very clear that he felt betrayed by her 'abandoning' him, and it's also a really nice display of his character that he goes from petulant child to rebellious teenager to mature adult in the space of one short conversation. BIG BOSS I LOVE YOU ETC

- I really have trouble seeing where I am going in this game. Please say this isn't just me.

- While goggling at him in the Survival Viewer, I accidentally made him empty his stomach contents when I quit, and I found myself saying 'oh god, I'm so sorry' at the screen. Oh, Big Boss.

- I get so hungry when I play this game. I have to have things to snack on or I can't concentrate on it. It's really kind of sad. I dream of biting into the crisp white flesh of the yobloko moloko, of slicing open a golova and eating the soft pulp inside. I even want to eat the mushrooms. I even want to eat the spatza. I even want to eat the gavials. I even want to eat Big Boss. I will have to play this game whenever I want to gain weight.

- Jim Cummings gets the Fly Award For Being The First Fake Brit She's Heard Not To Pronounce The Prefix 'Anti' Like An American With A Long I. Hear that, everyone? It's pronounced an-tee. With a short final i.

- The scene where Ocelot slaughters the KGB troop is pretty fantastic, because it's just so unflashy. He points his gun, he shoots a guy. He points it and shoots another guy. He continues doing so until he has run out of guys. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to see just how skillful Ocelot is than it would if he'd done a triple-anti-gravity flip-twirl while shooting five times in bullet time and then we see those five bullets hit the soldiers from different angles or whatever. It's probably done to make Big Boss's relatively unflashy fighting style seem all the more impressive during his scene, but it still really works.

- I notice when Ocelot looks up at Big Boss the unconsciousness-blur has a similar effect to how all the girls on Star Trek that Kirk liked were blurry. Lovely touch.

- It's amazing how much foreshadowing there is in this game that I didn't notice first time round. During the Snake Eater briefing, we can see quite a clear 'photo' of The Boss in a space suit, and it stays on screen for a relatively long time. Yet I never noticed. When EVA's undressing in front of Snake later on, you get a good look at the scar on her back - again, I never noticed.

- I have to say that a lot of the reason I like EVA is because she really, really messes with Snake's head and it's kind of beautiful. Particularly when she offers to do 'something special' for him, walks towards him really slowly, working her hips, leans down, and then says, really sternly, "I'll keep watch until dawn, now lie down." The look of terror on his face is palpable.

- Actually, the game does draw a few parallels between EVA and The Boss that I'm surprised I failed to notice. She tells Snake 'I saw the universe' when he asks her why she defected; this isn't very different to what The Boss tells Snake she saw, which made her the way she was. The game lovingly shows off EVA and The Boss's fighting abilities in pretty much the same way - the scene with EVA Mausering down the GRU guards in Rassvet is directed almost identically to the scene of The Boss shooting the fuel tank of the delivery jet thing. Some of EVA's more tsundere moments wouldn't be out of place coming from The Boss. Not to mention that when we see a picture of The Boss at EVA's age, they look almost identical. And EVA really adores The Boss - even when she's bound not to tell him anything, she still admits, "we get on quite well; we have a lot in common". Is Big Mama going to be a Boss figure in MGS4? Also, did EVA know about Ocelot's parentage? It's odd that The Boss told her old pupil, EVA, all these things, and yet tells her favourite, Jack, nothing.

- I remember when I first got this game and took the box home, I mentioned to my father 'I don't think a cardboard box would be very useful in the jungle'. He said 'maybe Snake hides in a crocodile'. And we both laughed. How we laughed. How I cried, later on, when I found the Croc Cap. KOJIMAAAAAAARGH.

- The Ocelot boss fight is fantastic. It's just so hilariously overblown. There's even TUMBLEWEED.

- I saved and quit, as per the schedule, after the fight with The Fear. Snake has arrows sticking out of his left nipple, left thigh, and the left side of his head. The arrow, in the x-ray, appears to be going right through his brain. This probably explains a lot about the stupid things he's going to have to do from here on in order for the plot to work. I'm going to let them heal in, for comic potential.

BEST DEATH SO FAR
- Being tennised between two gavials. One batted me onto the other; he batted me back. This continued until Big Boss ran out of health and drowned.

WORST MOMENT
- I should have gone before that really long cutscene.