Third time's a charm!
This was the oldest game on my backlog by a few years, first purchased all the way back in 2002 before I had any idea what it was, honestly. I remember firing up my PS2, starting the game on normal difficulty, and... immediately getting seen by guards, and killed, in the tanker level. Stealth, as a concept, just wasn't for 14-year-old me; that guy had been conditioned to blast his way through action games, killing every bad guy along the way, and as soon as I realized this was a game about sneaking around quietly, I dunno, it just had no appeal.
Flash forward a year or so and I decide to give the game another go. I use easy mode, I sneak around and try not to draw any attention, and still the whole thing just isn't my speed. I quit the game after what I'm later convinced is a couple of hours, but a recent memory card check reveals was only half an hour.
Nine years later, I finally get around to playing Metal Gear Solid, the first one. I like it but don't love it. I convince myself, however, that it'll be the push I need to jump back into Metal Gear Solid 2. It is not.
Seven years later, I do it. I do the damn thing and finally play Metal Gear Solid 2 as a 31-year-old man. As a father with limited free time living in 2019, I play on "very easy" mode and use a damn walkthrough. (Why not? I'm here for the story anyway!)
This game... is a masterpiece. I mean, it's hard to say I even enjoyed playing it, given my history with it. But the plot, the themes, the tricks it pulls... holy shit guys, what a mindfuck. What an eerily accurate prediction, pre-social media, of our "post-truth" world. Smarter and more invested men than me have written all kinds of praise about this game and about what an epic trolljob it was when it came out and about how finely it has aged.
(Still kind of played like ass, though. First-person shooting on the PS2 is an experience best left in the past!)
See you in five to ten more years with Metal Gear Solid 3, I guess.
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