Its diatribing, despite CLEARLY being diatribacious in a way that must be deliberate, somehow manages to feel only a hair’s-width out of place. It is wrong to say that Metal Gear Solid isn’t up-to-snuff on its genre reading, let alone its -savvy, but it’s also completely fair to surmise that the goal was a widely-appealing military action-stealth-thriller. What I am saying: there is a huge, fundamental, canyon-sized difference in the Approach-To-Art that Metal Gear Solid has and the Approach-To-Art that Metal Gear Solid 2 has. (maybe.) I think the problem is that Hideo Kojima, nursed on his own work in a medium that developed in cultural isolation (the Visual Novel, heavy emphasis on the Visual aspect his text-based works always had more of an adventure game shine to them than the VN genre has come to embrace (not to paint the whole thing with one brush.)), got so good at masturbating that he could whip it out in front of you in broad daylight and, when he was done, you’d applaud. It was, though one hates to admit it happened this late, probably the genesis of postmodern videogame analysis the moment when we (should have) realized, hey, wait: sometimes a huge masturbatory disappointment is just a huge masturbatory disappointment, but sometimes, if it winks enough and leaves just enough leeway to believe that it’s in on the joke, that huge masturbatory disappointment can actually be a statement about the impossibility of creating art under capitalism.

It’s been sixteen years since Tim Rogers’s “dreaming in an empty room / (a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2)” and I don’t want to paraphrase an article that’s better than mine, so if you haven’t recently, go read it (again).

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