More speculations on the wondrous insanity that is Playstation.

I finished playing Metal Gear Solid the other day. This is only the second time I've finished a Playstation game, and it's the only time I've finished *any* type of game and immediately thought, "Whoa. I want to play this through again. Right now." In the words of whoever mispelled this first, Metal Gear Solid is DA BETS GAME EVAR.

The ending, however, was insane. (Spoiler alert.) Let me get this straight, I just spent *weeks* manoeuvering through vast levels of security, I spend entire days getting repeatedly stomped flat by a giant robot, blown up, gunned down, tortured by maniacs, sliced in half by invisible cyborg ninjas, shot, drowned, frozen, dropped into molten steel, shot again, torn apart by wolves, blown up again, shot again, and basically wasted hours of my life screaming incoherently at a small pixelated dude on a TV screen in a futile attempt to make him start doing the right moves despite my uncoordinated frantic wrong-button-pushing. I saved the WORLD, and the girl, and the scientist, and everything, OK? So what do I get in return?

In return, the little pixelated dude gets a snowmobile so he doesn't have to walk all the way home from the mission across the Arctic wastes, and he gets to - I hope you're sitting down and well braced against overexcitement - look at a caribou and tell his little pixelated girlfriend what it is.

I'm very glad the game took a relatively short time to finish. The only other game I've finished was Abe's Oddysey, which took me well over a year, and if my reward for THAT had been to explain what a caribou was, I would have been ... [insert Gary Oldman intonation from The Fifth Element] ... disappointed.

Brunnen-"Oh, Snake! You not only saved the world from nuclear terrorism, and saved my life and everything, and got stomped flat by a giant robot just for me, but you also are fully conversant with hooved ungulants! *swoon*"G