Metal Gear Solid
Yeah. The first one. The Playstation One game. I’d never really played it, although I scored a copy on EBay a number of years ago. My Playstation 3 plays PS1 games, so I gave it a go. The game actually looks pretty good with the PS3’s smoothing. But I played through until the part where you need a cigarette to see the lasers and quit. I’ve got no stomach for repeated fetch quests in games like that anymore. I do admit that I probably didn’t experience enough of the game to rate it fairly, but I give it a C-. Travesty for MGS fans, I’m sure.

Metal Gear Solid 4 got rave reviews, but I was really disappointed to find that the gameplay felt just like the older games in the series despite better graphics. As much as I really want to, it seems that I don’t like Metal Gear Solid Games. C-

 
It’s good that I have a chance here to write about Metro 2033, because I don’t think I’ve yet had a chance to discuss the game here. For the most part, I found it to be a passable shooter. But whatever thing about it that some people seemed to love – I just didn’t get. I got killed dozens of times because I wasn’t playing the game the way it wanted me to play it, and there was no indication anywhere as to how I was supposed to be playing. I got stuck and nearly gave up more times than I could count, but inevitably found my way past those points. I ended up stuck in a library where some demon was trying to force its way in. I know there was supposed to be some way to open this one door, but I never figured it out. I decided that the game was not fun enough to warrant the amount of frustrating effort I’d been putting into it. The game wasn’t absolutely horrible, so I’ll give it a C-.

Maybe it’s a game that we didn’t hear of until years after its initial release, maybe it’s just that we were busy at the time in our lives when the game released, or maybe we just weren’t interested. In any event, all gamers have games that they’re a bit ashamed to have never played, and I’m no different. List of Shame is a short series of articles in which I plan to cover the games on my own personal List of Shame.

Nineteen Ninety Eight. It sounds like such a long time ago. And it was a fantastic year for video games. And while a number of my list-of-shame games come from 1998, the only one I currently own is Metal Gear Solid.

While the Playstation 3 I own isn’t one of the original models with the Emotion Engine that runs Playstation 2 games, all Playstation 3 consoles will run old PS1 games. This is why my copy of Metal Gear: Solid that I picked up on EBay some years back has been sitting on my shelf alongside Dead Space and Batman: Arkham Asylum for the past year or so.

I’ve played the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 3, which I still own. I’ve even played 90% of the way through Metal Gear Solid 2 in one of the worst PC ports I’ve ever seen. But although I’ve played some of the training missions in Metal Gear Solid a couple years ago, I’ve never played the actual game.

I plan to play it. At some point. I don’t know when.