The new games on shelves this week are:

Burnout Paradise for the (PC) – reheated leftovers.

Ultimate Shooting Collection (Wii) – Extremely Unimpressive Unleashed!

And…

My World My Way (DS) – In this Japanese Pouting Sim, you play a little girl named Elise. You are infatuated with the Prince of Happiness, but he is uninterested due to your lack of experience (read: a penis). So you, being a powerful pouter, venture out into the world to get experienced (read that however you want). This actually sounds pretty good. I might have covered this if I hadn’t already rented: METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS!

Before we begin, I have to get a couple things out of my system:

Penis dick snake wrinkley one eyed uncle cockstache dickopotumus

Yes, Metal Gear Solid 4, the final chapter of the Solid Snake saga. Indeed, this time he is wrinkly and has one eye. So will we all, someday.

Before we get started with the game, I should fill you in a little, just in case you aren’t familiar with Metal Gear.

The Basic Idea: There’s a tank that looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex and it can shoot nuclear missiles anywhere in the world. This is Metal Gear. Terrorists want it.

It is a normal, cold-war era action plot filtered through the kaleidoscopic imagination of Hideo Kojima – one of the weirdest Japanese people, ever. For instance, one character is a gay, dance fighting vampire with a bowie knife codpiece. None of that is metaphorical, or even exaggerated. His dance fighting style is Flamenco.

Now you’re ready, and so am I. Let’s play Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots!

There is a ten minute install.

Screen tells me: Puts controller down

I see a wrinkly old man with a mustache and a mullet slowly smoking a cigarette – that’s Solid Snake (son of Naked Snake, I shit you not). Eight more minutes until I can play. Oh, I get it, his progress on the cigarette represents the progress of the load. He’s done! He’s…lighting another one! It is 2:46 pm, and so far I have watched an old guy with a mullet smoke two cigarettes. It’s like hanging out at a Reno casino. Finally! He smoked four goddamn cigarettes. Now we are ready to go.

I press Start without picking up the controller.

White flower petals blow across a graveyard while a guitar gently plays. A man is standing in front of a grave, he…lights a cigarette! No wonder he’s so old looking. He pulls a gun and gets on his knees in front of the grave, he puts the gun in his mouth!

Now a metal praying mantis chases a motorcyclist who shoots it with an uzi while someone reads a poem. I didn’t see that coming.

Screen tells me: Please press start

There is a live action guy cooking a vulture and prying the lips off an alligator. “We are ready for the ceremonial snake cutting,” he says. “This is the last chapter in this snake’s life!”

Ooookay.

Screen tells me: Please press start

“In the not too distant future. On a tired battlefield. War has become routine.”

Huh? It obviously needs more flamenco knife fights. Metal Gear to the rescue! Credits roll, dudes in trucks with guns in a wartorn landscape. Indeed, this is routine!

“War has changed,” says a gruff voice. “It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity, it’s an endless series of proxy battles fought by mercenaries and machines. War, in its consumption of life, has become a well oiled machine.”

“He who controls the battlefield controls history.”

All the guys jump off the truck into a firefight, but their guns don’t work. They’re slaughtered. One guy, with a cigarette (!!!) checks his gun before jumping into the firefight. Oh, I’m controlling him! I get to play! It’s 3:04. Lessee…

Screen tells me: Picks controller up

Run in circles: Check!

Crap, he took off on his own and crawled under a truck! I wasn’t finished repeatedly standing and kneeling! This game just played itself, because I was being too stupid. There’s orange crap on the screen. I think I’m supposed to play again.

Thank you, game.

There is a body on the ground next to me. I teabag him repeatedly in a hail of bullets. The game does not take over. I am in control!

Some guy just told me to stay out of sight, right after I picked up a submachine gun. I go around a corner ready to shoot people (routinely)…and the game takes over again.

Screen tells me: Puts controller down

Everyone gets shot. I assume I’m the one doing it. Go me!

There are mooing sounds. Everyone stops fighting, and looks for the cows. Wow, it’s giant robots! They stomp on everyone! I’m not sure the word “routine” means what Kojima thinks it means. I’m in control again! I run like a woman! The game instantly takes over, ashamed of my cowardliness.

And now I’m smoking another cigarette. Sigh.

Whoops, robot attack, it’s dripping blood on me from the person its trying to eat. Without a mouth. It almost hurts me, so I whip off my cloak and reveal a skin tight body suit. I am buff! I am kicking ass and running. It wraps its tongue around me and tries to suck me in, but I do kung fu and kick its face! I can’t wait to start playing this! I am so awesome at it already! Robots are everywhere! What am I going to do?

Ha! I think I hid in a box. Oh no, the robots are going to kill the box! Ha, but it was filled with watermelons. It was a watermelon box. Robots hate watermelons, so they leave. Oh, I was hiding against the wall because my skin can turn colors, I was smoking a cigarette the whole time!

I use my knife to check a dropped weapon for booby traps. I haven’t pressed any buttons this whole time.

Do I want to save the game? Jesus, after all that effort?! Of course!

Now I’m at a graveyard, the one where it looked like I shot myself. But instead of committing suicide, a helicopter shows up. I tell a guy in the white coat “Otacon, even the dead have ears!”

Not if I cut them off with my knife and put them on a necklace. I will try that as soon as I am in control.

He’s telling me they can’t figure out why my skin is wrinkly and my arteries are hard. I smoke another cigarette and think about it. Dramatic music swells! I get in the helicopter. There’s a guy in there who says he’s found Liquid Snake! He’s preparing to unleash his insurrection! I must track him down! But he’s so slippery!

Screen tells me: Press Start

Fuck yeah! I press start hard and with a sneer! Take that start button! I’m gonna do to Liquid Snake what I just did to you!

Now we cut to a scene where a little girl is singing a song, and there are eggs frying in a pan.

Act 1 Liquid Sun begins!

I hope it isn’t over too easy! HAhahahahahaha…ahhh.

Blah blah blah, more talking, and now I’m about to get to play! It is 3:30! The game tells me I have Octocamo – if I press myself against a wall, my suit will assume its patterning and texture.

Screen tells me: Picks controller up

I press myself against a wall and the Octocamo works! Only my giant silver mullet is visible!

The lame doctor guy who couldn’t figure out why I look old told me to avoid contact with people and that no one is my enemy.

I wander into a room and encounter two “non-enemies”. They non-shoot me repeatedly with non-bullets, so I non-kill their asses with my gun. Though they are now lying on the ground motionless, I throw an incendiary bomb on top of them. Because they…are NOT…my enemies! And they did not just die in a fire.

I run into a room and a guy is right there. We engage in a point blank shoot-out that lasts ten seconds, and I win! This really is like a movie! Then another guy shoots me in the back. I die. This movie sucks!

So I decide to go sneaky, not because I don’t want to kill everyone, but because I don’t want all their friends to kill me back. I crawl on my belly past the guards, and WOW, if I crawl slow enough I do the funky worm. I use only my pelvis and crotch to pull myself forward! That’s why they call me Solid Snake!

I find myself in a corridor alone with a single patrolling guard. I try to strangle him, but I’m pressing the wrong buttons, so I just repeatedly ram myself against his back. He grunts with surprise, then runs away and screams into his radio “I’m under attack!” I panic, and press myself up against a wall. Reinforcements arrive, but they detect nothing out of the ordinary: some boxes, a molested soldier, a mullet, and some ruined walls. Nothing to see here, Johnson was just goosing himself again and blaming it on American super soldiers.

The reinforcements leave, and I figure out how to grab the lone soldier. I don’t intend to kill him; he’s been through enough. But I’m not sure what else to do. I awkwardly fumble at the buttons, but nothing happens. How embarrassing. I finally slit his throat, putting both of us out of our misery.

Soon afterward, a tiny silly robot friend comes up and talks to me with Otacon’s voice (Otacon is the lame doctor). The robot gives me an eye patch called the “Solid Eye”. I am now one-eyed Solid Snake. Sweet, the robot wants me to have a silenced .45 pistol with a laser sight, and a tranquilizer gun. I will use the gun on enemies, and the tranquilizers on myself.

I am in the insurgent base. I make it into their infirmary, and steal their pentazamine. I wonder if they’ll flip out if I tranquilize their injured people who are screaming in agony. Hmm, better not. Only have enough for myself.

Holy crap! The battery on my space age eye piece ran out! What’d that take? Two minutes?

I decide to tranquilize all the screaming people in the infirmary. I mean, if you were lying on a stone floor bleeding, wouldn’t you want a dude with a mullet and an eye patch to shoot you full of tranqs? I could even kind of handle that right now, and I’m fine. Hopefully the other terrorists realize I’m shooting them with a good gun!

WHAT?! I ran too fast in the terrorist HQ hallways, and now they’re convinced I’m bad, so they’re shooting me to death. Even terrorists have hall monitors. And yes, terrorist hall monitors are dicks. This is bullshit. I lie on the ground waiting for them to kill me, and they forget I’m there. Then they step on me and are like, “What the fuck? Did I just step on an action hero?!” Then they kick me. Ugh.

Back to life, still determined to shoot suffering people full of tranquilizers.

Hey, I did it and they stopped complaining! Dare to keep terrorists on drugs!

Every single terrorist I pass is like “Hey, who are you?! Stop!” And if I don’t stop, they shoot me. So I have to stop while they look me over. I fill in the “Durka durka, Mohammad jihad” myself, though I suspect Solid Snake is thinking it, too. Fuck yeah!

I leave the terrorist headquarters, and encounter a monkey in a black leather diaper on a rug in front of an assault rifle drinking a Narc cola. The monkey is bald.

Screen tell me: Puts controller down

A black guy with blond hair shows up, and he pulls a grenade out of a handkerchief. A magical negro! He turns the grenade into an apple. That’s kind of anticlimactic. He says he can unlock the “PMC” guns so I can use them too. I didn’t realize I couldn’t use them in the first place. This guy’s name is Drebin. He wants me to have a huge gun. I like him! I will try to shoot him with it as soon as this cutscene ends. Then I will take all his guns, and his magic.

I’m rudely inspecting the weapon in front of him, asking him nerdy questions about the sight.

I ask Otacon over the raidio if I can trust Drebin. And Otacon is like “You can trust him to sell you guns. What more is there?” I’m beginning to like Otacon!

Now Drebin wants to inject me with nano machines. What could go wrong? Anything for a new gun! Ugh. Listening to his theories about the war economy is worse than a shot in the neck. Jesus, now Otacon wants to talk about war philosophy, too: “Can you imagine what would happen if war disappeared overnight?”

“No, as an American gamer dork sitting on my couch in my suburb I can’t imagine what a world would be like without war, jackass.” Argh, cutscene ended and Drebin is gone. I will shoot him later.

Screen tells me: Picks controller up

Heh, I found a Playboy on the ground, and looked for it in my Items menu, but it wasn’t there! I looked and looked. I closed, reopened. Turned off the system, turned it back on. Cussed a little, and then I looked in the Weapons menu, and lo and behold, there it was!

I put the playboy down on the ground, which I didn’t mean to do. Then I got down on the ground myself, and rubbed my body all over it. Also unintentional. Like really, it just happened. And it is as impossible to explain now as it would be in real life. Once you put down a Playboy, you can’t pick it up no matter how hard you try. It is a trap apparently, and when enemies stop to look at it, I can come from behind and grapple with them.

I walk around a corner, leaving my porn behind, and there’s a guy shitting in a barrel, while another guy shakes it (the barrel, not the shit). The barrel tips over and the shitter runs away with his ass in the air. I decide I want that barrel. That’s right, the one someone was just shitting in. It is now in my inventory, wherever that is. I can even hide inside the barrel! How comforting! If only I had my Playboy now. Hey, when I’m in here I can tip it over and roll!

I roll about thirty yards, then get out and puke. How realistic!

I explore an empty hotel full of bombs. I go through a door and a nervous young man puts his gun in my back. I can tell this is a cutscene so I…

Screen tells me: Puts controller down

…while Solid Snake wrestles his assailant to the ground and sticks his gun in his face.

Meryl, my character’s ex-girlfriend, shows up and tells me to drop my weapon. Awkward. I say “Fox!” but I don’t mean to say it about her, there’s a Fox emblem on her chest. Not that I was staring at her chest, anyway…

She asks “What happened to your face?” Nice to see you, too.

She tells me her team is Rat Patrol Team 01. Wow, the guy who stuck me up was the one shitting in the barrel. I have his barrel. I don’t offer to give it back to him. He abused it. I hang out with Merryl and her buff friends and the shitting guy.

Meryl launches into a lecture of “Modern Combat Nano Systems and How They’re Used By PMCs.” Blah blah blah. Jesus, never shuts up. No wonder I dumped her. But now that my face is messed up, I wonder if I could get back with her?

After a half hour lecture on nano machines and combat teams, Meryl starts getting really weird and emotional, ranting about her father who she always thought was her uncle, and how he married a woman younger than she is. Oh no, frog soldiers attack and interrupt the conversation. Just, darn it!

Screen tells me: Picks controller up*

We’re escaping the hotel, and my camouflage suit has assumed the black and gold diamond pattern of the hotel carpet. I look like I just got off work at Cirque du Soleil. Johnny literally craps his pants during the fight, and then feints. Maybe my suit isn’t so embarrassing after all.

Merryl’s buff friend with a Mohawk shoots a frog woman approximately 100 times after she’s down. She dissolves into blue fire. AWESOME. Then Meryl wants to talk about nano machines again, instead of the crazy shit we just saw.

Meryl’s team leaves, so I stroll up to the surface and shoot some people in the back. I am about to duck into a bombed out shelter when another cutscene begins.

Screen tells me: Puts controller down

A terrorist tractor rolls down the road with terrorists in tow. I fall in behind them and all seems to be going well, until the tractor hits something! The driver stomps the gas, but it won’t budge, and no one behind the tractor, including myself, can see what’s going on.

As the terrorists round the sides, they see that a giant armored panther with extremely well defined, feminine buttocks is biting the tractor blade and…crying. Probably about her father. Snake decides to hide next to the wall and smoke while shit goes down. And boy, does it ever.

A vulture cyborg swoops out of the sky and shoots missiles at everyone while screaming “Feel the rage!!” The panther with a girl butt just keeps biting the tractor, and then one of the terrorists starts shooting his buddies, because he’s being controlled by a girl cyborg puppeteer floating above him! Then a girl with tentacles sprouting out of her head and a hot figure starts ramming her limbs through peoples’ torsos, while cackling maniacally. What violent mood swings! The scene is bloody, and all the deathbots have like huge butts and boobs. It’s awesome, and definitely the best thing I didn’t play all day.

And really, that sums up Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It’s really fun to not play, and even after I wrap this up I look forward to barely playing it well into the week. Thanks for reading, and remember, keep those snakes solid!

PS: I would like to stress that I didn’t make shit up. A guy really does shit in a barrel and Meryl really does complain about her dad. There really is a gay dance fighting vampire. This really is one of the weirdest games you will ever play, once.

Read more: Metal Gear Solid 4, video game, Video Games, Joe Dodson, Entertainment, Video Games

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