I arrived at my obsession with the Metal Gear Solid franchise in a roundabout fashion. Unlike most people who play this game series, I never owned an original Playstation so I didn't get started with this game series at the same time as most people. One of my friends had the a PS1 and I wasn't too impressed with the games. He'd always rant and rave about Metal Gear Solid and I just assumed he was crazy. I was a Nintendo kid, so I was too busy playing Mario 64 and the like. I mean, at the time, they didn't even really have stealth combat games. It was just shooters and action games, so I didn't really know what to think of this Metal Gear Solid business.

However, when the PS2 came out, I temporarily jumped ship from Nintendo in favor of playing Grand Theft Auto 3. I had heard so many great things that I sold all my video games and consoles (I had a Sega Genesis smuggled in there somewhere) to buy a PS2 and GTA3. But even with the backwards compatability of the system, I never got around to playing Metal Gear Solid. I never even heard people talking about MGS2 or MGS3. Eventually I got sick of the PS2 and sold it in favor of going back to the N64, specifically so I could play Mario 64 (well before the days of the Wii Virtual Console).

More recently, right before the PS3 came out, I spent a year working at a local used CD/DVD/video game store where one of my co-workers was also obsessed with Metal Gear Solid. I didn't see the reason, really. At the time, the original game, used, was worth more than the PS1 system. Then one day at work, that co-worker hooked up a PS1 and played the game through to the end. It was pretty interesting, but it didn't latch its teeth into my psyche quite yet. I suppose I would have liked it more had I played it rather than watched the co-worker.



When Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out on the Wii, everyone made such a huge deal about Snake being a playable character. I didn't really care too much though. Mario and Link and link were my boys -- Nintendo kid to the end, or so I thought. Through the course of the game, I unlocked Snake as a playable character and he instantly became my favorite, surpassing even Link. This was based entirely on what I had seen in the Brawl game, not on any pre-concieved attraction to playing as the character (similarly, one of my friends has never played Fire Emblem, but he loves playing as Marth).



Last month, a month before Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out, I stopped back into that store that I used to work at. The same co-worker was still there and I mentioned how I loved playing as Snake on Brawl. He told me that if I loved Snake so much, he'd cut me a deal on a used copy of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for Game Cube. I figured, what the hell, I might as well. I took the game home, popped it in, and spent the next 6 hours playing it. I knew then that I was hooked. I knew that the cutscenes and the storyline were all specifically designed to keep the player playing, but this knowledge didn't phase me. I had Metal Gear Solid Mania.

In the last 4 weeks, I have spent every waking hour that I wasn't working playing some form of Metal Gear Solid game. I even went so far as to re-buy a PS2 specifically to play MGS2 and MGS3. I have it so bad that yesterday when I got home from work, I played MGS3 for 12 hours straight, sacrificing the needs to sleep, eat, and use the restroom just so I could beat it. I stayed up til 6 am and I missed a day of work today just so that I could finish MGS3. I figure what better way to spend the day after that than writing up a blog about how much you love the franchise. If that's not obsession, I don't know what is.

I am going to buy a PS3 for the sole purpose of playing MGS4 when it comes out next Thursday (well, I'll also play some GTA4 too since I can't play that on the Wii). I might even buy a PSP for the sole purpose of playing Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops so that I can continue the Naked Snake/Big Boss storyline. Sony and Konami have conspired with the devil to make me spend the most amount of money possible and strangely, I don't even mind it.

It's amazing to me how my Nintendo brand loyaltee was instantly shattered by these games. I mean, I still love Nintendo and all, but my love is more rational now. I won't hold Nintendo on a pedistal any more. I realize that Super Mario Galaxy can't even shake a stick at Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, which is kind of sad considering the 3 and a half year gap between their release dates (And even more sad because Twin Snakes is based on a game that came out around the same time as Mario 64). The weirdest thing to me about this whole process that I went through is that it took two Nintendo games to make me switch my brand loyaltee to Playstation.

I love Metal Gear Solid.