MGS4 was great. best? I don't know about that...

Really? I thought Portal was brilliant in every sense of the word... One of the best this gen and one of my favorites of all time.

The cutscenes were the most horribly cheesy thing I've ever seen in a game. Maybe it's not knowing Metal Gear Solid (I never played the previous ones) but wow.

NO MARRY ME!

However, as far as gameplay (all 4 hours of it), I thought it was great.  That tornado musket was quite possibly the single coolest thing I've ever seen in a game ever.

It's good, but not the best this generation has to offer. I'd put it up there with Twilight Princess, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Halo 3 as least deserving of the praise it got. Good, but not amazing, and at least (game mechanics-wise) better than the other 3 I just mentioned.

My list of best this gen:

Gears of War (cover system was a great innovation)

Dead Rising (for all its flaws, it was ridiculously fun to trash hundreds and thousands of zombies)

Super Mario Galaxy (brilliant level design and control)

Uncharted (I don't care what anyone says, or what scores say, that game rocks)

Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (After playing this, I don't know how anyone could be psyched for RE5 and go back to slow and clumsy thumbsticks)

Story is the most important aspect of any medium, so yes, MGS4 is the best game this gen by far.

Look... Some of you may have been very involved with the story hence why you see the game in this godly light...and thats fine. But if you skip the cutscenes, all you are left with is a mediocre action game with stealth elements and a few cool bosses.

My biggest dissapointement is the lack of humour in MGS4. Previous metal gear games always had this subconcious theme of humour and never took themselves too seriously... for example, when Raiden meets snake in MGS2 and says "are you going to be ok?" and snake replies "I'll be fine' and points to his infinite ammo bandana from MGS1.
Or when you are climbing the long ass ladder in mgs3 and a James Bond theme starts playing... Or when Snake is wearing the mask of that Russian generals gay lover...and the general grabs his private parts and says "Wait a minute...who are you?".

MGS4 story did not have these moments at all and did not work for me. The 3rd time Otacon starts crying over Naomi when she dies... cause he cares about her or something for having a 1 night stand with him I was lauging my ass off...what a pansy.

@ disolitude: Are you serious? MGS 4 was not funny compared to the other games? Sorry, but I have to disagree completely.

It seems like Kojima didn't want to make Snake look so much bad ass in this one. He actually made him look human compared to the other games. That's probably the first thing I noticed in the game. Remember his cigarettes? Always made me laugh. Also, remember that codec call near the end of Act 4, with the disc swapping stuff? What about Johnny, he's back right and better than ever? When Snake crouches for too long, his back starts to hurt and all (and it can alert soldiers, pretty much like Snake when he sneezes in MGS 2 during the Tanker), that ''Mr. and Mrs. Smith'' part was pretty Kojima-style cheesy, when Sunny brings some ''eggs'' to Snake (lol), Johnny trying to grab Mei Ling's butt, Drebin's monkey hooked on cigarettes, when you grab that statue in Act 1 and break its ''junk,'' the guy with the ''!'' haircut (if that's not a tribute to every MGS game...), etc. I could make a list with more humor parts than all of the other games combined.

Sure, I did miss the bad ass Snake that uncovers the whole conspiracy and stuff, but I'd say Kojima still paid a decent tribute to every single characters in the game! ^_^

I said I started out Loving the game and I ended up dispising the game. Implication - Gameplay = awesome, story = trash for me.

Furthermore I was extremely forgiving of this game, it was my first PS3 game for a while and I wanted to see the game in the best possible light. I couldn't, absolutely couldn't.

I laffed too...

Nope smg is better in my opinion brawl too.

MGS is not supposed to be funny. Kojima admitted himself in an interview that if he could he would go back and edit out a lot of the in jokes and humour of the series to keep the narrative focus grounded in a more serious tone. MGS tells a serious tale and is meant to educate viewers, the jokes were just a bonus and never meant to be central.

Also people complaining about the lack of gameplay, if you have a problem with deep storylines why even play MGS4? Go back to playing pong or tetris or something. Millions obviously enjoy the hours of cinematics and the storyline plays a far more important role than the gameplay in this particular franchise.