The Unnerd

 Ever since the uprise of games incorporating social networks (like SocioTown) and games of casual genres (Guitar Hero, Wii Sports, Nintendogs) the common hardcore gamer has to feel nerdish again - even more than before. Because now we're not only people "who play videogames", we're people "who play hardcore video games" [...]
(show me)(don't show me)

And what is it that you do as a hardcore gamer these days? When the market is flooded with pieces of software that claim itself to be "party games" - where I feel the utmost extent of anger that my body is cabale of bearing because a clumsy collection of mini-games can barely be called a game in my opinion - all we gotta do is sit tight and wait. Oh yes, the day will come and sometime finally a real game will show up. A game that is able to feed our sophisticated desire for challenging gameplay and compelling story. Although mostly we get blended by stunning visuals and after realizing we get disappointed by frustrating or boring gameplay, finally the day has come. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots has finally been released. A sequel most of us hardcore gamers have waited since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty, actually. A game that is able to deliver chunk after chunk content with continuous breath-taking story, mixed with tremendously superbe style and well-aimed humour. A game that can manage to satisfy a desire for hardcore gaming content, a desire that Hideo Kojima has created deep in our hearts for content that he has been awarded for. And finally he does deliver this - and it just blows your mind away.

But what is this? Now that the overall gaming audience has been expanded - 2oo7 biggest year for videogames yet - now that Nintendo has sold a nearly uncountable amount of hardware units to people previously referred to as "non-gamers", now that there are people who do spent time in front of their PCs and home consoles unlike ever before in their lives, to take part in quests, missions and fairy tales, in form of social network games or party games - or even casual games - now that they think they are Gamers, they think they have the right to dismember glorious games like MGS4 and recommend people to not invest their time in it?!?!

Oh world, what has become of you?

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[...]
Millions experience that freedom most fully in online games that involve other people. My favorite games provide a sort of social framework within which the players set their own storylines over weeks, months or years.
[...]
Metal Gear Solid 4 is not like that. Instead it is a linear narrative by the Japanese designer Hideo Kojima. You, the player, are along for the ride. M.G.S. 4 is Mr. Kojima’s world, and you are just passing through for the moment while he tells you where to go next, what to do and more or less how to do it.

The plot, which encompasses the final act of the near-future warrior Solid Snake and a cast of foes and rivals, bears the burden of wrapping up the series’s two-decade history. It has so many loose ends to tie up and so many characters’ destinies to reveal that it can feel like a catalog of unfinished story arcs.

So Metal Gear Solid 4 really isn’t my kind of game.
[...]
>> Q: NY Times.com

I don't care that he's turning his direction, that he's just making an introduction, that he's "going somewhere with that" - guys like him should never even touch games of such high caliber. It's not his world and never will be!
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