weekend at big boss's

I watched The Long Goodbye this morning. I didn't choose it for any particular reason, beyond morning movies being one of the few benefits of the, uh, "flexibly employed", and that while watching Ran yesterday, I was struck by how given all the rectangles I possess for enjoying media, mere stuff makes up the majority of it. Every time I visit my parents I'm bewildered by the television always being on, parades of tepid game-shows no one is interested in, morning, evening and nightly news attended religiously, cooking shows with recipes to not make and adverts and adverts and adverts… just so much fucking stuff. But here I am, child of cyberspace, the millions of lifetimes worth of incredible art accessible, watching a guy with admittedly incredible facial hair teach me how to assemble a model train set, a mild existential crisis brewing, a gnawing at the back of the skull, what the fuck am I doing?

I'm not pretentious enough to suggest anyone should engage with the highbrow. The other thing I watched this weekend was Techno Warriors, a movie in which virtual and non virtual cops fight M.Bison and a guy called Dinosaur, and it totally rocked. And not for nothing, have you seen what my website looks like, I love garbage. But y'know, some garbage is okay to eat, and it shouldn't be the whole thing. So I wanted to keep the train going with The Long Goodbye, and shocker, its great! It's a beautiful film with a palpable distaste for the cliches of the hard-boiled hero, but rather than merely building a cynical take down of Philip Marlowe, it transplants him into a world that has no real use for him, and leaves him to meander while he tries to help those around him with a moral code shot full of holes, as effectual as the absent gods of Ran. It's slow, luxuriant, the antithesis of stuff.

I think Metal Gear Solid Delta might be evil.

I brought it on myself. Because I was never going to pay for it, curiosity got the better of me when it was available by other means. Such curiosity didn't grab me for Bloober's take on Silent Hill 2, paradoxically because that is a work closer to my heart than Snake Eater, which is neither my favourite Metal Gear (that's 2, predictably) nor one I could have possibly had any nostalgia for, given that I didn't own a PlayStation 2. It's also, on the face of it, as far less offensive product. The Delta in the name apparently refers to "'change' or 'difference' without changing structure", which is a bewildering obtuse way of say its prettier with no real major differences. Bits that were missing from other re-releases are back here or remade, and there's some bones thrown to newcomers with a compass that points you where to go and a slightly more MGSV style control scheme, but that's about it. It is hard to be mad at, but in a former life I worked as a teacher, and well, I'm not mad, I'm not disappointed, I'm just depressed. It is possible to have fun, because Snake Eater is an excellent game, dodging the identity crisis of James Bond by letting all of the contradictions play into the narrative in way not dissimilar to the Chandlerisms of The Long Goodbye, but admittedly that film doesn't have a nuclear equipped tank that roars or a guy who can do hornet based telekinesis. But it's impossible to feel that there's any reason for it to exist, because it isn't meant to be enjoyed by humans. It is a safe bet for Konami, fresh of the safe bet of the Silent Hill 2 remake, though even safer given how much closer Snake Eater is to the modern Triple-A mono-genre, so there was less "need" to "fix" it. It is an object you can test your graphics card with, almost a hundred gigabytes of data to fill a hard-drive, a placation of those weirdos that got mad at the MGS3 pachinko machine for having shiny cutscenes, as if it being a machine designed to drain the coffers of aging chain-smokers was besides the point.

There are dozens of half finished articles on my hard-drive. One of those is about the Resident Evil remakes, and how even the one good one irritates me by calling itself Resident Evil, and how Capcom keeps making these without making the originals available in non-compromised form. As the most capitalist medium, you are not expected to treat videogames as serious art, even if they sometimes are. But I can't pretend even the Resident Evil games I dislike are well, evil. They might miss what I value in horror, they might be the bad kind of stupid, but even Resident Evil 6 is worth saying something about. The word that comes to mind with Delta is cosplay, but cosplay can be a charming display of creativity, whereas here I can smell the flies buzzing around Snake's gussied up corpse. Despite the hours and hours of labour, despite the rare earth minerals used up to make it and now run it, despite even the few stupid fucking changes like the fucking theme song now sounding like when freak du jour warbles their way through a national anthem at a sports game, or even the surreal moment of the Boss commenting on it "raining blood" made literal because it reckons perhaps correctly that you gotta be an A-class moron to be playing this, it doesn't manage to rise to the level of stuff.

It's nothing. It does nothing but take up space. It will make you think of nothing. At best it can only remind you that the conditions to make Snake Eater no longer exist. Even Kojima is making open world sequels now. I got up to just after the ladder, so I got to hear the mangled version of the theme song again. But thankfully I can choose. I can say goodbye.

And as Elliot Gould does not say in The Long Goodbye:

(please watch the movie thanks bye love you)