The Metal Gear Solid HD collection is out, and it looks shockingly good. I think it’s a pretty well-known fact that I’m a huge, sentimental fan of the franchise. To be quite honest, it’s one of those few I love enough that I don’t know where my personal reaction begins and my critical lens — you know, the distanced thought I try to give games so that I can talk to you guys about them independently of my own taste — ends.

Okay, I’m a huge fan. But then, even in my work I’m known to prefer games with voice and character. In MGS, that voice and character often veers into the arena of self-indulgence, and jeopardizes things like mass appeal or conventional design wisdom, and even still I prefer it to games that are cleaner and much better crafted.

MGS demands a lot from its players in terms of investment and patience. Its story is not accessible, and it turns over and over on itself like a coiling snake in its attempts to make its numerous meta-meta-plot loops connect. Yes, you have to sit through a lot of dialogue and cut scenes that are nakedly imitative of film. Some people argue that Hideo Kojima, who is director of the series and thus assumedly responsible for its tone and character, is plainly resentful of his audience and of the industry in which he works (I agree). Plenty don’t like that.

But to me, a work of creative storytelling needs to reflect the creator. I want to be able to talk about what he or she wants to say, and what their work says about them. I always have something to say about MGS. The media I know I really love will put the hair up on my arms no matter how much time passes, and no matter how many times I experience it (sidenote: I feel this way about Neutral Milk Hotel’s song ‘Naomi,’ one of my favorite songs ever).

My dear game industry: I rarely write scored reviews, but if I had, I would put an eight and higher on everything you have released this fall and winter. You have done well, you have done so, so well. Congratulations. It’s one of the highest-quality crops of games I’ve ever seen. But I will not remember them in ten years. I am sorry.

I’ve never met a working game designer that thinks MGS is great. I spoke to one lately who said that Tetris is perfect and MGS is not, end of story — but the thing I think the games industry fails to understand about its audience is that we care a lot less about perfection than it thinks. So for the people who always are asking me what’s the big deal about MGS for me, even that’d suffice as an answer: Because it’s interesting and I want to talk about it.

I’ve started sort of replaying all of them since the HD collection came out. My friend Sarah is my copilot, having read in Tom Bissell’s lovely book‘s appendix about the time when he spent a few hours playing MGS4 with me and listening to me chatter about how I feel it’s a metaphor for the things Kojima wants to say about the 21st century games industry. No, I’m serious.

People ask me a lot if I have written much about my thoughts on MGS, which I’ve mostly shared through conversations with others and on Twitter and stuff. Writing it out formally has always seemed too fangirlish. But in the next couple weeks I’m going to try to do it, like, to some extent.

Speaking of fangirlish, I’ve also made a few MGS1 tribute banners and