I still think I am the last word in nerds. My life - if you can call it that - is reduced to nothing but dreaming, analyzing and speculating about Metal Gear Solid 4 incessantly. For months now. My idea of fun is probably watching “Naked and Solid Snake” (I could not be cornier!) in epic close quarters combat on the shores of Outer Haven.
As the release date looms closer I find myself sneaking around like Snake and philosophizing about the recent wave of global changes that have altered the course of humanity, for I belong to one of the lost souls of Gekko-Island who shall mourn on for weeks the passing of a hero that once stood the test of time and fought valiantly for his country, the true patriot perhaps. There are so many memories attached to this game that is almost seems impossible for me to believe Snake will actually die. This flashback then, is to me and my nerdy brethren who have endured all the anguish and wait for Solid Snake’s Final Mission.
I can never forget the day I had gotten MGS2 after big fight with a friend who claimed MGS was the Half-Life of the console world. Like any self respecting geek from the bowels of geekzilla, I ferociously fought a highly pitched battle over Gordon Freeman being a whole lot cooler than some random Snake chap. Solid Snake seemed just sounded like slang for penis, I exclaimed, and with this unbeatable bit of logic, shut my friend up. He stopped trying to convince me with just words then, and offered to pay half the price of the game if I didn’t like it. So I went back clutching the videogame of the Spiderman Movie (I am a huge Spidey fan) and completely forgot about this game called MGS2 which lay stashed in an obscure corner of my room.
Spiderman was a bore — the annoying camera angles were painful, and the game was less inspiring than the original PlayStation game, and so returning to Liberty city seemed the only sane option and that is where it all began. My idiot brother suddenly decided to play Frisbee with my lone copy of GTA III and well the only apt word I can use right now is smithereens, fate had been unkind to DMA design.
My life in shambles, and suicide seeming to be too complicated an answer, I hesitantly put Metal Gear Solid 2 into my PS2 to cheer me up. As the shadowy figure walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I felt my stomach knot up. The musical score, the atmosphere, my mind refused to process beyond that, to sum up all the exhilarating emotions flowing through my veins - the Dorkinator had finally gotten a new lease of life. And that’s a capital ‘D’ people.
The following week was filled with a lot of travesties as far as my parents were concerned, I fell sick every alternate day, my academic performance suffered. My family thought that I’d have a pretty decent career as a crash dummy. Solid Snake, Raiden, Liquid Snake, Ocelot, Olga, Fat man, Solidus, Fortune, Emma, Octacon, the Cyborg Ninja, Colonel Campbell, Metal gear RAY, REX, Big Shell, Tanker, Patriots, Dead Cell, Vamp, SSS, Philanthropy, The President of the United States were the only words that had engulfed my brain in a vortex of conspiracies and counter conspiracies. I was beginning to have a mighty tough time learning to breathe and recollect the course of events since I had never played the original Metal Gear on the PlayStation.
All of us remember that the area where Campbell tells Raiden to switch the Console off because you’ve been playing the game for a long time. Well I went bananas and was some how convinced I was being stalked by the PS2, I did have the game running for atleast 5 hours that day non-stop, this machine made up of plastic and silicon was actually telling me to stop playing, I heard of men being controlled by machines in the distant future but this was ludicrous, nonetheless I obeyed, only to find out later that this was built as a part of the game.
I finished the game on a rainy day, as Raiden and Rosemary walked into the sunset and Snake and Octacon figured The Patriots had been extinct, my life also came to a brief standstill, and my parallel universe had finally been subsumed by what is called “The End”. I had to go back and restore GTA III to bring some form of sanity to my life, but Liberty City was not going to be a part of my scheme of things for a long long time. Dammit Snake, you’re still my main man and you always will be!
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