Definitely recognized one of those stock explosion shots from Spongebob.

I remember my old college roommate telling me about how much he loved this game. We were talking one of the first days back on campus and trying to make common interests (We didn't have many outside of both liking Halo) and he mentioned how much he loved this game. As some added context, my roommate was the most normie person I had ever met in my life. He would get laid by random chicks like once a week. He exclusively used his computer to study and play that shitty looking amazon mmo. He literally didn't know the name of a single youtuber or internet personality in general. And even him, King of the Normans, had played and loved this game before me, a "Capital G Gamer" had. What a shame.

In possibly the least shocking turn of events ever, I also liked it quite a bit. I expected it to be some kind of old PS1 level jank but it was surprisingly fun throughout! The "Advanced Pac-Man" tier stealth was engaging throughout the playtime, it never got dull cutting as close as possible to the dogshit AI grunts and narrowly weaving through cameras to save on prescious Chaff Grenades, or just throwing caution to the wind and running through hordes of grunts until you can hide out just long enough. Feels very arcade-y in the best way possible. Lot of fun setpieces too! A couple of mild stinkers in there (I have literally no idea how the roping section was supposed to work) but for the most part enjoyed them for how varied they were. That includes the staircase ambush. And the torture segment. I thought both were cool.

Bosses are a bit more iffy. Each of them can be fit neatly into one of three camps: Too easy to note (Mantis, Ocelot), mildly frustrating until you get the hang of it (Wolf the first time, REX), or very fun to cheese (Standing behind a tree and peppering Wolf with missiles the second time, playing peekaboo with Raven around a box forever). Felt like maybe there were a couple too many, but they rarely got in the way.

Then there's story. The big ticket thing. The first truly cinematic experience in vidja, showing once and for all that Sony Does What Nintendon't. God, it's insane how much a decent sense of direction and moderately good voice actng can make a story as infodump-y and long winded at times seem not boring! You'd think more games would take that approach. The Codec calls of staring at barely moving portraits can drag a bit but other than that it was thoroughly engaging, especially for the time period. I find it hard to add anything new to the conversation of Kojima's odd writing style but I will say man knows how to write a gripping military political thriller with heavyhanded references to real world topics! Except for the whole situation with the Master, I have no idea how he thought that would fool anyone. No offense to Cam Clarke, he's great in plenty of other stuff (killer7 and Back at the Barnyard) but he really can't convince me that those are two different people.

Good game. Very good game. Unsurprisingly. Now, I gotta go tell Paul his ex-roommate has played his favorite kino.