Ten years after declaring Grim Fandango its Game of the Year for 1998, GameSpot has bestowed that same honor for 2008 upon Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

I don’t really want to get deep into MGS4 here, because there were some things about it I liked, but I was struck by some of the comments given by GameSpot editors in the video posted alongside the choice, at least for the minute or two of it I watched. Most of them had to do with the game’s storytelling aspects.

“It finds a perfect harmony between gameplay and storytelling,” said one editor. “Some people said, ‘I watched it as much as I played it,’ but that’s part of what makes it so incredible,” added another.

To me, MGS4 had less of a harmony between gameplay and storytelling, and more of a yo-yo. I find it somewhat sobering that in a decade of astonishing progress in rendering, physics, interface, scale, and complexity, the high watermark for video game storytelling (at least, according to one particular site, notable for being both highly ubiquitous and read, and extremely long-running in internet time) has gone from being exemplified by elegance, breathtaking creativity, and amazingly sharp dialogue to being exemplified by overblown melodrama, ludicrously cumbersome plotting, and cheap tragedy.

It’s probably also worth noting, since this is ostensibly about games, that measured either in terms of pure hours or more charitably as a proportion of overall game time, Metal Gear Solid’s non-interactive cutscene content (including bits where you just move a camera around) probably outweigh Grim Fandango’s by several times—and Grim Fandango is a graphic adventure game.

Just sayin’.

I think I’ve had my monthly fill of cutscenes.  In the last six hours or so, I completed both Metal Gear Solid 4 and Mass Effect.

And then I won three rounds of Catan.

In the opening staff roll to Metal Gear Solid 4, there is a standalone credit for a “Rumble Director.” That is awesome.