Second MGS4 review in -score 92 "story too complex"

[windbane]

rocketpig said:

GotchayeA said:
I just saw NGE two years ago and loved it. Every episode is hilarious; I've never laughed so hard as I did when a friend and I watched the last episode together.

Rocketpig, I hadn't considered games as potentially competing with movies. Now that you bring it up, I can see it, but I long ago gave up trying to really 'get' greatness in art, so I'm afraid that's not much of an endorsement. I'd always pictured them as trying to approximate 'The Little Prince'. Something of a "here's a world, now be free" sort of thing. I thought that Mario 64 and Shadow of the Colossus were fairly artistic. The key for me has always been a fully-imagined world that the player doesn't feel constrained by - games, for me, have always been exercises in freedom. I can understand the movie thing, but I just can't feel it.

Don't you think it's sad that we view such an incredible medium in such a fancy-free way?

The medium is not very old. Cinema pales in comparison to books when it comes to storytelling, as you say, and yet it manages to do it quite well. Videogames are interactive and therefore can be many more things, but they can also be interactive movies. I think MGS was a great advancement in that genre. I was amazed, and to some extent I still am, when I first played MGS at how it seemed so much like a movie. I showed the theater mode to my grandmother and she liked it as a movie. I also saw Gone With the Wind with her, and I don't think she'd compare the 2, but it's still done well. My point in that videogames are growing in many ways. Exercise machines and interactive movies. MGS does an excellent job with the latter. Clearly we all have different tastes, but I would think people could at least recognize that MGS does a decent job of producing an interactive movie experience, even if it's not all super brilliant. It's not all supposed to be. Btw, I've seen Magnolia...it's certainly no Godfather....but it's good for what it does. Isn't that enough? Does everything have to be the greatest experience?