Metal Gear Solid Delta is whatever, I guess

I enjoyed it because it's Metal Gear Solid 3 and not because it's a remake. I would have enjoyed it more if I was just playing some form of Subsistence instead.

MGS3? Good game. I'd put it in my top ten and have said so for years. I played it on PS2 probably twenty times. About 85% of that knowledge transferred over to Delta, enough to know what I was doing but not enough to prevent feeling like my fingers were fumbling.

Kayin's post on remakes comes to mind, and I would say they have solid points but I can't completely agree. Obviously a remake and the original are not the same experience and you can never truly recreate the original experience via a remake. Hell, I just said I'd rather play Subsistence than the original version of MGS3. I'd also rather play FES than vanilla Persona 3. I'd rather play Maniax than base game SMT3 Nocturne. Yeah, I'll play the remake of Live-A-Live again before I go back and emulate the original again. So sue me for not having due reverence or whatever.

Harper Jay's post also comes to mind. The Boss's speeches about allies and enemies being attached to the times feels dated after the past 5-10 years of social media fueled bullshit intertwining with politics. We cannot get a game as weird and idiosyncratic as MGS3 again for various reasons including the fact that nobody would bankroll a third game like this. It's been almost ten years and we don't even have a third NieR game. Who fucking knows when Deltarune will be done and how many episodes we'll have to pay for.

I've thought to myself that I need to stop orienting my thoughts around those of others and I'm obviously falling into bad habits again. Sigh.

I did not have the vocabulary to understand this at the time: part of the appeal of playing older versions of MGS3 (or 2, or 4) as much as I did is the series' pseudo immersive sim quality. It's just that rather than creating the feeling of verisimilitude via a bunch of interacting, interlocking systems that interpret player behavior, Metal Gear stacks weird bespoke scripted interactions. Like, you can shoot beehives to make guards run off, but there are maybe three maps in the game with this. You can kill a guard then eat the vulture that starts eating the guard and the game will acknowledge this. MGSV went closer to being a scare quotes "proper" immersive sim on the continuum and lost some of the series charm but we're not here to talk about that.

What I'm getting at is that, if not "replay value" per se, there's a certain toybox element where you can poke and prod at the game with the various tools provided. I played MGS3 a lot because once I unlocked Stealth Camo and Infinity facepaint and whatnot, it was that much easier to just fuck around. It was indeed "play". As long as it wasn't that final stretch anyway.

Obviously now I am a much older person and the world is extremely different. It kinda feels like there's no point in "playing" Delta in the same way I used to play 3. What's the point of unlocking stealth camo? Games are just like, too much now. I can't just pop in the disc and run around holding up guards for two hours anymore because it takes three fucking hours to just download and install the game. It'll just sit there and take up 100gb on my drive. It would cost me seventy fucking dollars if I hadn't pirated it because I've already purchased at least three forms of Snake Eater and they are not squeezing more money out of me.

I've heard that Konami views Delta as a training ground for new devs to figure out what makes Metal Gear tick so they can make a new one, and frankly it just feels like a fool's errand to me. The idiosyncrasies of the series are so tied not just to Kojima but to the limits of the hardware and dev time that he and his team kept slamming up against. The boss fight with The End is spread across three different areas because there simply couldn't be a contiguous jungle. The verisimilitude is just an immaculately constructed facade on the bones of what the PS2 was capable of. What is remaking that supposed to teach?

The last straw for me was when I pulled up the second of the three new Secret Theater videos. The originals use existing voice lines and character models to pantomime various ridiculous situations and are generally beloved. This new one was pretty much just a model swap of an existing scene with random voice lines applied in vaguely comedic locations. It's tough to explain, but they really just didn't seem to "get" it.

I ended up uninstalling and deleting the game right then. I've got other things to play. Silksong's out.