I’ve had a weird couple of months – I wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner and then fall asleep while reading about Détente and classes of chemical weapons. Sometimes I hang out with friends. But otherwise I just read and sleep. This past month in particular, I’ve noticed that my days are slipping by me faster than usual. Which is alright I guess, I’ve got some pretty cool things on the horizon. Tomorrow I’ll busy myself getting Metal Gear Solid V ready for Tuesday. I’m excited for what might be the last big Konami console game. I won’t be able to pick my copy up for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been building the hype up for this for years.

See, I haven’t felt excited about video games in a really long time. I mean really excited. Sure, I enjoyed Splatoon, but it wasn’t something I hung onto every scrap of information for. It doesn’t mean as much, because it’s not a series I’ve held close for a number of years.

Something else happened about a month ago, my Playstation 3 died. More specifically, it’s on the sputtering, yellow light to death. I can’t bring myself to unplug it. I’m looking over at it right now. There’s a thin layer of dust on the glossy casing. I’ve had my PS3 since the 24^th of December, 2008. I think I’ve spent more cumulative hours playing it than any of my other consoles. So while I could be playing other games on other systems, I’m refraining because a stupid sense of attachment to a shiny, over-sized George Foreman-grill of a console. Here’s to you, buddy. I remember pining away for you like it was yesterday.

My first job was at EB Games, I started in April of 2008. In my interview, they asked what my favourite game was. When I answered Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence, they asked why I specified the version. I said the improvements to the camera made a huge impact on the gameplay. They seemed impressed. I was hired for the store closest to my design school, so sometimes I’d skip classes to pick up a shift or two. Sometimes I served the lecturer I had a crush on. I felt pretty cool.

I was pretty shitty at my job. I was surrounded by disgusting game bros, mothers who would ‘go ask the man, because he’d know more’. But I enjoyed it, because every so often I’d get to talk about how good Resident Evil was. I used to work the Thursday night shift with a guy named Ben, who was in his thirties and a dead ringer for Louis CK. He still works there every Thursday. He was pretty cool.

June 12, 2008. The release of Metal Gear Solid 4. I was working the day before launch and getting all of the pre-order copies ready. I didn’t have a PS3 yet, they were still $799. I was earning about $200 a fortnight if I was lucky, there was no way I could afford one on my own. I had the biggest nerd blue balls, flipping through the hardcover collector’s guide, thinking that maybe I was out of my league with his game. Everything about its presentation seem to not want to include me as a demographic. There were too many guns, everything was beige, and all I had seen of the game seemed to take place in a generic Middle Eastern country. I didn’t want to give up hope, I was too excited to be let down by this.

My manager caved in and let me borrow one of the pre-order bonus DVDs the night before launch. He let me take home a promo poster as well. I was so excited. The poster was heavy, it fell off my wall a number of times and I’ve since had to trim he corners because of how tattered it was getting. The bonus DVD was just full of trailers and a timeline for the uninitiated, but it was enough to tide me over. I returned the DVD to my manager the next day, and bought the hardcover collector’s guide. It came with a numbered print of Old Snake. I framed it and it sat next to a bunch of 1960s Women’s Weekly magazine cut outs in our lounge room. I kept the guide on the shelf, its time would come soon enough.

I remember working Christmas Eve, eyeing off an 80 GB PS3 that had a post-it with my name on it out back. I was still on okay terms with my dad back then, he was gonna pick me up after I finished and we were going to drive back up to the Central Coast. When he arrived at closing time, my months of being (relatively) independent paid off, and he bought me the PS3. It came with LittleBigPlanet, and Army of Two. I then picked up a pre-owned copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 off the shelf. I was working with Ben that shift, he gave me a better discount than usual.

It was a three hour drive up to the coast, and my mind was on the contents of the boot. It was a painfully slow drive. We finally pulled into my dad’s apartment complex and I rushed upstairs. I ripped the box open, and was suddenly at a loss for what to play. I brought my copy of Fallout 3 with me that I’d purchased months before in anticipation, but settled on LittleBigPlanet. It was cheerful and fun, I liked stamping leaves over everything. Ruining levels with my dumb sticker collection was instantly satisfying. But other games were waiting. I booted up Fallout 3. It was the first time I had been presented with a character customisation screen. It was overwhelming. I killed a couple of Radroaches. I thought that kid from the Tunnel Snakes was a dickhead. I killed his mother.

I had bided my time long enough. I carefully took Metal Gear Solid 4 out of the case. I sat anxiously on the floor in front of the TV while the game took its sweet ass time to install. Tension was mounting. The live action intro played and I thought there was a problem with my game. Kojima got me real good. I heaved a sigh of relief when I realised that the entire game wasn’t going to take place in Generic Beige Scarf Land.

Metal Gear Solid 4 was quite difficult. But I stubbornly stuck with it all through Christmas Day. My dad told me to go to bed somewhere around 2am. I obliged, but then slipped back out to start playing again a few hours later. I was up to the cut scene on the Volta in Europe. It was insanely ridiculous. My heart was in my throat when I thought Meryl might have died. She was, and still is, my favourite character. I thought the Akiba-is-actually-attractive reveal was kind of heavy handed. But I was happy they didn’t kill her off.

I was overcome with pangs of nostalgia in the Shadow Moses chapter, even though I hadn’t even finished Metal Gear Solid by that point. I had a good feeling about how the game was going to pan out, I was ready to say goodbye to Snake.

I finished it around lunchtime on Boxing Day. It was taxing. I was drained. The final hour of cut scenes had fallen short of my expectations. Snake was still alive? Meryl got married? Raiden had a fucking family reunion?! I didn’t really think much of it at the time, mainly because I was so overwhelmed by the sharp turn the story took at the last minute. I had thought it was pretty good in my immediate hindsight. But it never sat quite right with me. I realised I shouldn’t have put it on a pedestal.

I’m trying really hard not to fall for the same trap again. It’s very hard to try and not hold Metal Gear Solid V to a high regard even if I haven’t played it yet. I feel like I’ve been through a lot in the years since it was announced. I was there when it was just a fan conspiracy after an ‘unknown’ studio teased a ‘new series’. I remember the backlash over David Hayter’s departure. I swallowed my pride when it turned out I didn’t mind Kiefer Sutherland’s voice acting in Ground Zeroes. I squirmed uncomfortably at the breakdown of a sexualised female character whose rape is used as lazy ‘gritty’ storytelling. This series has been with me a long time, and maybe it’s grown up past me.

But my PS3 is sitting roughly two metres away from me, frozen in time. I didn’t back up a single thing on it, and now it might be too late. So many late nights playing co-op Resident Evil 5 with friends, so many weekends spent mashing buttons in Bayonetta and Devil May Cry 4, all of those drunken nights crying my way through Siren Blood Curse, my many months of unemployment wasted on Catherine…my PS3 has so many memories, it’s been with me through six houses, two boyfriends and three TVs. I’ve wrapped it up in baby blankets and taken it to LAN parties. I rediscovered childhood games like Crash Bandicoot and Abe’s Oddysee with it. My PS3 has been a more consistent figure in my life than my parents. It’s seen me through my depression, a close friend’s death and kept me sane when I couldn’t hold down a job.

But now my black box of escapism is no more. I’m not giving up on games, that’s for sure. But it wouldn’t seem right to jump back in. My PS3 had a hard life, but life goes on and sometimes you’ve gotta make sacrifices. Rest easy little guy, because you’ve helped me more than anything ‘real’ ever did.