(The tl;dr companion video to this article):

History has a tendency to repeat itself, it would seem.


That would go a hell of a long way in explaining why I have such a strong sense of deja-fucking-vu with these god damn feelings of mubble-fubbles bubbling up

When I started replaying Metal Gear Solid 4 (MGS4) this week, as a part of its inclusion in the Metal Gear Solid Collection: Volume 2 (MGSCV2), I had a lot of ideas about how I was going to cover the game. After all, even though the game hasn’t been re-released since its initial debut on the PS3 way back in 2008, the game was a big enough deal where it maintained cultural relevancy long after, and the wake of the lasting impression of its existence that followed were felt for arguably a long time after the fact. Being a great admirer of the series as a whole, admittedly, I probably let it live rent free in my head more than most others have, but my point being in all of this is that one of the upsides to covering re-releases of games that are more than ten years old, sometimes north of a couple of decades, one has had a lot of time to think about what to say, discuss, or comment on when the time comes.


…and hopefully that thought is a little more complex then just “old,lol”

Ironically, however, due to a combination of both a completely packed schedule, leading to restrictive time frames with which to write in, working my full time job all the while, and feeling a little more generally exhausted than I have been recently, the best laid plans I had for covering MGS4 with fervent gusto more or less shit the god damn bed in the past couple of days, leaving me scrambling to get any ideas out at all, as opposed to more fully formed and better developed concepts I’d have preferred to share with everyone. My weekend is coming up, so my fingers are crossed nothing catastrophic happens in the mean time, so perhaps I will be able to sit down and focus more intently on what to speak to in reference to what MGS4 looks like now, almost twenty years later, but until then, it’s going to be all aboard the struggle bus, cause she is leaving the station.


Kind of on brand for this game, honestly

One of the ideas I can at least present here at the moment, though not in the full splendor of detail I desired to dive into it with initially, was the utter queerness that goes along with games that focus so heavily on nostalgia as one of their hooks, as when the time comes to go back and replay the game that predicates itself so heavily on said nostalgia, it’s almost as if the game ends up becoming stuck in a different past, as past that technically belongs to a different identity in a way, one beyond its own form as a singular entity. I say this after having finished act 4 in MGS4, which was lauded by most who played the game back in the day (me included), as it let one revisit Shadow Moses, the setting from the first game, both in a retro re-visitation, and also in a modernization of the in-game environment, so one was able to appreciate just how far we had come in a mere ten years, while seeing it also in its original form, unspoiled by any years or cursed with a modernization of technology.


I feel like Cyborg Ninja technology kind of peaked in the 90’s, looking back

I have two kinds of interesting perspectives on this, though, I’ll focus on just the one for now, which is in direct acknowledgment of this articles name: “North of Nostalgia”, which acts as a reference to a book called “The Problems of Philosophy”, by Bertrand Russell, which was probably my first “serious” deep dive into a philosophical text, and one that stands as a great introduction to the field itself. In one section, Russell details the notion of where “North of” is, as in detailing a specific, physical location. Taken by itself however, with just the singular idea of where “Nort of” is, is in fact nowhere particular, one that is not a fixed point by its lonesome, and place that can not exist independently on its own. However, when made contingent upon a reference point, something can be “north of” an innumerable number of locations, effectively giving our bearings on a wide array of places that now exist, thanks to said reference point. In this way, and in conjunction with what I’ve talked about in the past, where I’ve discussed how bizarre nostalgia is, as it very much has a similar metaphysical premise, in that nostalgia is so amorphous, it really is more of an evocation of a feeling tied to the idea of something that once happened, which means in some sense, it is nearly an imaginative descriptor, entirely dependent on the contingency of another element in existence, unable to exist on its lonesome, and not one of solid description, or at least, varying wildly at a given moment, or depending on the citation at hand.


I wonder how many times Otacon’s voice actor (Christopher Randolph) is going to get paid to re-record this line

Taking both of these concepts together, it is then interesting, when we look back on MGS4 (specifically act 4), and enjoy the…err, enjoyment of the nostalgia…it then becomes more of a celebratory moment in reference to MGS1, which leaves one of the main thrusts of Act 4 from MGS4 as only a reference point to 1, which means its kind of a second hand amusement of a game that the game we are playing is celebrating, so we kind of end up owing more of that moment to 1, almost making 4’s worth entirely tied to 1’s in an odd paradox. Don’t get me wrong; act 4 does finish up on its own merits with a unique sense of identity, in that Kojima delivers the ultimate in fan service, by allowing the player to engage in a Kaiju battle as Snake against Liquid Ocelot while piloting a Metal Gear Rex in what is a Metal Gear vs “Off”, which again, is a hell of a garnish to a dish of savory nostalgia, but my point remains, that if we continue to layer nostalgia on top of nostalgia, we kind of end up losing “the present” to “the past”, leaving “the future” almost non-existent, in some sense, or at least, paradoxically self referencing in a sort of static kind of a way, as we are now buying a collection, that includes a game from almost twenty years ago, referencing a game from ten years before that, and we are enjoying our enjoyment of the nostalgia that once was and is again enjoyable. Progress is linear, by the looks of it.


My first thought with the Metal Gear Off involving Snake vs Ocelot: Look what the cat dragged in.

Quite sadly, I am completely out of time, though that was basically true when I started writing, hence why I just pulled, not unlike a rabbit out of a magicians hat, a one thousand word essay out of thin air in the blink of a fucking eye, so cheers to the expediency involved. Though I desire to articulate my point more effectively, I must edit and depart for work, though I’m satisfied I was able to at least capture the essence of my idea, which I desire to build on at some point in the immediate future (aka my imminent weekend), but for now, I’ll just let those thoughts simmer, and see what eventually comes out of the whole process. That’s how it has usually worked for me in the past, anyways, and after all is said and done…

…history has a tendency to repeat itself, it would seem.

Till next time.

~Pashford