I just finished Metal Gear Solid 2

[kingoffighters]

At least everyone acknowledges how retarded Indigo Prophecy got unlike MGS2.

What? I thought the point of this post about how retarded MGS2 (and Tim Rogers).

[NeoZeedeater]

I was speaking in general. MGS2 has a good number of people on the internet defending its story. Indigo doesn't.

[George]

I think you can chalk that up to the sheer amount of people who played MGS2 as opposed to Indigo Prophecy being fairly obscure. I'm sure the level of absurdity is proportional.

[NeoZeedeater]

I thought about that but even still, I have come across a ton of people that have played Indigo Prophecy but not a single one praising the second half of its story.

[kingoffighters]

Both story lines are non-sensical garbage.

[Josh]

I don't have any posters on my walls.

[Waffle Jump]

The Colonel going apeshit was one of my favorite things from this.

[StriderKyo]

What? I thought the point of this post about how retarded MGS2 (and Tim Rogers).

It's ridiculous, but I don't want to come across like I'm purely deriding it.

The first MGS I don't like. A lot of that was because I didn't play it until the MGS Bleem disc came out for Dreamcast; by that point I'd read years of praise for it. I went in thinking it was this Japanese Tom Clancy thing but instead I got the worst issue of X-Men ever. Chris Claremont never wrote dialogue as horrific as "love on the battlefield" on his most hung over day. Years ago I played MGS2 on Xbox up until Fatman and figured it was more of the same.

But Metal Gear Ac!d taught me how to enjoy Metal Gear - that game wasn't done by Kojima, and it comes at you from the first scene and says "this is a weird story about psychotic puppets and everybody's on drugs." If Kojima's Metal Gear games weren't so coy about selling themselves as something else they'd probably have come across better to me. And seeing the MGS gameplay broken down into a series of menu options gave me a new appreciation for it. MGS had just felt like a glorified Atari 2600 maze chase game to me (Telegames presents: Mr. Blue Cone Avoider!), and to some extent it is. But the way the missions in Ac!d are put together showed me a lot of the gameplay's depth and variance.

So, if I look at MGS2's story as just a cacophonous symphony of nonsense which amounts to some kind of giant insanity-bomb dropped on my brain, it's fun in its own way. There's a spark that goes off every time another 150˚ twist in the story occurs, even though the plot completely collapses under their weight.

And while Tim Rogers doesn't know how to express it, there is a metanarrative about games and the experience of consuming them as media in there that's sort of interesting - it's the kind of thing Warren Ellis always writes except he's a writer and not a game designer so he knows how to do it. Whether the fact that Kojima chose to include that in this game is completely self-indulgent is up to you to decide.

[Josh]

So you're saying that love can't bloom on a battlefield?

[StriderKyo]

Only between an otaku convention and a sniper wolf. After they've kinda met once, briefly.