This won best writing at the GDC Awards if you want to understand how dire video game writing and what's considered good writing has been. Emil Pagliarulo is the enemy of the written word, there is no clumsy piece of dialogue or ham-fisted theme he can't make worse beyond your wildest imagination.

The morality and gameplay have been completely gutted of previous Fallout complexity, and in its place the Bethesda formula has been injected. For what it's worth, it's not a bad formula. Exploration guarantees you finding something weird and interesting. Once you abandon the hope of finding something meaningful and thought-provoking and accept it as a series of vignettes of bizarre stuff it goes down cleaner.

It does abandon the Monty Python jokes of Fallout 2 though, which is a net improvement. Very much a mixed bag.

Name a more hyped release than Halo 3. Then name a game that lived up to the hype like Halo 3.

One of the greatest single player FPS campaigns ever made. All the buildup from Halo 1 and 2 pays off in 3. I’m one of the weirdos who didn’t like Halo 2 very much, but loved Halo 1. Such a tight gameplay loop and it gives you so many new toys to play with in the Halo sandbox. Then, the story payoff at the end is emotional and so satisfying for people who love the series.

Multiplayer in Halo 3 was the place to be in 2007. Some of the best map design around and amazing weapons to play with. The progression was purely cosmetic, yet it kept people playing for years. Compare that to CoD nowadays where they are constantly giving you items to keep you interested, yet people bounce off faster.

Forge and theater were the first of their kinds, and they haven’t been matched in several aspects. The amount of time I spent in both of these as kid, not even playing, was more than I spend in modern shooters now.

Halo 3 wasn’t a game, it was an event. So much love and care went into this, and it shows 17 years later. So many memories were created because of it, and I’d never trade them for anything. There will never be another release this hyped ever again.

We've got our first contender for the most unintentionally genius game of the year. I knew I was in for peak when David Harbour stumbled across a magical talisman that teleported him to an eldritchian nightmare realm where the streets were always night and massive scum-covered flesh creatures were watching his every move, and he was like, "huh, now this is a predicament. Anyway, I have a mystery to solve!" And then proceeded to keep that exact air of extreme disinterest about discovering that cosmic, supernatural magic was a tangible, real part of his world for the next four hours.

To be clear, this game is a mess. While the environments are stunning and the sound design is top-notch, It's glitchy as hell, the combat is broken and feels awful to play, the dialogue is stilted and the puzzles are your pretty standard "wacky key" Resident Evil affairs. But there's just something about a scuffed game that lulls my bargain-bin-ass right in like a moth to a flame. Whether it's a bowl of soup in the background of a cutscene just freely stirring itself or one of the final bosses stopping mid-fighting me to reflect on his sins, this was some Grade-A jank.

If we're being real, probably best to wait for a sale or avoid it completely; it's not really worth your time. But my god, with the combination of two lead characters who seem to not give a single shit about being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare and combat where enemies will just walk through gunfire like your lobbing fruity pebbles at them, this whole thing is an essential one to play drunk with the homies.

Since reading The CRPG book and educating myself more about the origins of the genre, I've taken some time to sample the first entries of all the biggest long-running franchises - ULTIMA, WIZARDRY, THE BARD'S TALE, POOL OF RADIANCE, etc., and I think that this is the most immediately accesible iteration of that common experience they were all going for back then.

Really fun world to explore with just a hair more QOL than its contemporaries. Still brutally difficult and yet totally breakable, still byzantine yet overly simplistic in certain aspects, still ... just insanely old. But a good time if you're game for it!

The level design straight up sucks. Like shockingly bad. It's got a serviceable start that feels like it COULD go somewhere...But as soon as the Psycho Mantis fight ends, the rest is 100% padding with some of the laziest level design physically possible. Almost immediately after that fight, another boss starts. Except you don't have the sniper rifle required to fight it. To get this weapon you backtrack pretty much to the start of the game on the complete opposite side of the map, then run all the way back to do the fight. Half a movies worth of cutscenes (And standing in an empty room for over a full real time minute) later, the next gameplay segment starts near the room where you picked up the sniper rifle...You are then supposed to run all the way back to the boss room they already made you backtrack to fight.

It's nothing but repetitive, empty game design that has you backtrack through already mediocre level chunks. The next part of the game has you climb 50 flights of stairs, then climb down only to see the last few stairs are broken, so you climb all the way back up, do a boss, and climb back down. Then they have you re-fight the sniper boss again. 2 hours of actual gameplay in the entire game and they had to resort to reusing bosses. The last hour of the game is spent climbing the metal gear, with key in hand to deactivate it. Except oh no, snake dropped the key, climb back down to pick it back up, climb back up to use it...Find out you need to backtrack to an earlier icy section to get another key...You get there and realize you have to stand in the ice for like a full minute to get the key. Then climb up the metal gear to use it...Then backtrack to a section even farther behind the ice room, with TWO elevators you have to wait in on the way, stand in the room for a minute, then go all the way back to the metal gear, climb it AGAIN, final boss time. (Climbing up or down the Metal gear takes nearly a full minute every time) This is the game's finale. For as much talk of this game being a masterpiece that was ahead of its time... I WAS expecting the horrible 80% cutscene to 20% gameplay ratio because I know MGS is just like that. But I wasn't ready for 80% cutscene-5% gameplay, and 15% of the most blatant and obnoxious padding the industry has ever seen.

I already didn't think the first chunk of the game was that great, featuring mediocre, easily ignorable stealth, and slowly crawling through vents. But then the last 2/3rds of the game hits and its as though they realized they spent all their time and money on (terrible) cutscenes and have nothing to tie them together. This barely even qualifies as a video game. Besides the padding I went over, there's only a few small, square rooms with a couple easily avoidable enemies roaming them. This game is tiny, giving you a game-space to exist in was a complete afterthought. It's astonishing they managed to make such a short game with such a tiny world take 2 discs, likely just because of how bloated the story is. Though I will say they crammed a lot of cool visual details in here at least. Watch an hour of cutscenes, walk to the other side of an empty base, watch an hour of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 40 minutes of cutscenes. The game structure is maddening, the only thing of substance you ever do is fight some random boss fight, most of which really aren't great either. Your kit is clearly intended to be somewhat unwieldy and awkward, you're meant to be sneaking around not gunning people down. Why then is a majority of what little gameplay there is--forced action set pieces or boss fights? Nothing about this game even feels like a stealth game, moments where you need to sneak around enemies are few and far between and even fewer are moments where doing so is even a challenge.

If this game was judged on its gameplay, it would get middling reviews at best I feel like. The story is make or break, it's the ENTIRE game. 6 hour game and 4 of those hours are cutscenes. And idk man, I get that it presents itself as way more cinematic and ahead of its time than you'd expect out of a PS1...But that almost feels kind of reductive to me. Like "aw how cute the ps1's trying to be cool". The only thing that's actually ahead of its time is the excessive amount of dialogue recorded. And yeah there is a lot of extra dialogue if you call certain characters at certain times. But you can't just record a lot of dialogue and suddenly you're a masterpiece. Kojima wants so hard to be a movie director and that's apparently super cool for a video game especially one this old. But if you treat this game like a movie...it's the most boring movie possible. Flat cinematography, hammy as hecc writing, abysmal pacing, messy and uneventful. I'm down for some ham but this game REALLY thinks it's saying something. Dying characters just run down their Wikipedia article telling you all about their backstory in an attempt to get you to care about them last minute. All character growth or relationship advancements feel rushed and unearned, which is shocking given the runtime of the cinematics and dialogue. I'd say only Otakon feels like a real person who builds any kind of legitimate relationship with Snake. It's just so boring, 4 hours of someone info dumping either about themselves or about worldwide politics.

Bigger picture if a competent director took this story, it could be great. There's a lot of mystery and intrigue set up even early on. But, it's just like the game itself, repetitive and exhausting. Every scene is just people babbling to Snake for a painfully long time with snake just repeating what they said back at them but with a question mark, spurring them on to keep overexplaining it. Like bro the premise is just that the world was careless about disposing nukes and terrorists are exploiting that fact. Spend the game telling a story about that! I haven't played a lot of Kojima games but this feels consistent with what I've noticed so far, in that he mistakes the premise for the story itself. If Kojima wrote the movie "Cars" it would be a 3 hour film about the history of travel and how advancements in that industry can be misused by criminals. I'm on your side bro you don't gotta sell me on "war bad" just DO something with it! The execution comes off so hamfisted and preachy, resorting to live action footage to try and drive the point of how real it all is. Resident Evil is also about corruption and terrorists, but those games (And just about every other game ever) have you live out the consequences of the premise. MGS on the other hand plays out like random characters reading Kojima's high school social studies report. Only for the last page to be some pretentious think-piece about biology.

"Ahead of its time" doesn't equate to good. And I don't even think I agree this even IS ahead of its time. The graphics are beautiful and the voice acting is a lot of fun. Otherwise, games with better storytelling existed before and after this. Games with better gameplay and more coherent game structure had existed for nearly 20 years before this. 1998 saw Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Ocarina of time, Resident Evil 2, Baldur's Gate 1, Sonic Adventure 1, all games that pushed the boundaries of video game storytelling and gameplay, all in completely different and exciting ways. Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Mario party, MediEvil, gex enter the h*eckin' gecko also came out in the same year. Metal gear might be the only game of its time that DOESN'T go hard. In that sense it IS ahead of its time. Kojima introduced the idea of a "bad game" to the world.

I'm being a tad facetious at this point of course but I actually have no respect whatsoever for this game. I'm just saying a Kojima directed movie would be unwatchable.

Kojima is the video game equivalent to those 70's/80's movie "classics" your middle aged father shows you that turn out to be the most unbearable pieces of cinema you've ever seen. Kojima's storytelling and writing consistently receiving universal acclaim is a testament to how low standards for video games are.

Literal hours are spent not developing any character. The story is barely coherent, more focused on hammering in information about the premise you've already been told about in great detail 5 times over. Connective tissue and leads between scenes are so loose the game literally stops to recap how every event in the last hour and a half is connected because they seemingly knew how weak and unmemorable each scene was. Very little actually happens for major chunks...And when things DO start picking up, they actually slow down. Instead of building emotional connections and stakes naturally throughout the course of the story -- it waits until there's time sensitive urgency to ruin with droning, unengaging, one sided info dumps telling you why you should care about what's happening.

I've always been critical of Kojima games but I went into this one thinking his style may lend itself well to a point and click adventure game, only to find even this genre's gameplay is too much for him. Tedious and repetitive, performing the same 2 actions of look and investigate ad nauseam until you get enough dry flavor text for the game to let you move on. Beyond that there's shooting mechanics that get a grand total of maybe 2 minutes playtime in the entire game. Any moment that uses said shooting has to over-telegraph the encounter, killing any tension they may have built up. Which is a shame because if this game does anything well it's having some good vibes and atmosphere in a few scenes.

Under a different director I think there's a lot of potential here for a tense point and click adventure, with an engaging mystery-focused plot. But, we're stuck with Kojima, who's idea of being cinematic is 30 minute exposition dumps combined with almost NO animation whatsoever for almost the entire game. In fact one of the only things in the entire game that's animated is a female dancer in a bikini, so that shows where the priorities lie here.

I already don't agree with Kojima's approach of ignoring the gameplay in favor of "cinematic" storytelling. I think it's a complete waste and insult of the medium to basically say for a video game to have a good movie-quality story you have to just make a movie and not a video game. BUT if the story was actually good, there'd be something to get out of it and enjoy. I'm a firm believer in judging something for what it set out to do rather than what you want it to be. So even if I
prefer a different approach, I try to meet a game halfway and keep an open mind to its direction. With that said, as a movie this game is horribly written and derivative at absolute best even for its time, and that's really all there is to say about it.