So Close and Yet...

I just finished a nearly perfect run through Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence the other day. For ultra-competitive overachieving gamer geeks, that has a very different meaning than the way I'm using it. For them, it means finishing in the fastest time with the highest ranking without setting off an alarms. For me, it means doing and getting the coolest stuff with a minimal amount of hassle and a maximum amount of fun.

The Metal Gear series, despite having at least one or two sections in every game guaranteed to drive you apeshit, are actually very pro-fun. So for those of us who want to earn bonus goodies like the Infinite Face Paint and the Stealth Camo, we don't have to finish in a certain number of hours with a limited number of saves and no alarms--we can just try to hunt down secret animals and find and shoot frog coin banks. Yes, in the middle of all the cold war rhetoric, epic monologues about death and battle, and boss fights, you can play mini-Pokemon.

Unfortunately, I did not, somehow, catch them all--there are 64 frogs spread throughout the game and you don't know until you finish if you missed once. And, apparently, I did. Chances are good that I missed one of the frogs during the high-speed motorcycle chase sequences, where you have shoot frogs jammed into corners and stuck on top of stop signs while being ridden around all over the place and shot at.

Do I:

(a) reload those sequences? (I saved all of them separately)
(b) replay the whole game all over, making careful note to hit every, single fucking frog?
or
(c) give up and move on?

I'm inclined to say (a) since if I choose (b), I'll be burnt out on the game and less likely to play again with the stealth camo. There's no point in winning the stealth camo if you're not going to use it, after all.

As for why I don't choose (c) (but probably should), well, that's a story for another post. But I do think it does have something to do with why I've played MGS: Snake Eater and Subsistence (Subsistence is essentially the director's cut of Snake Eater) through at least four times, and Resident Evil 4 no less than three times. Considering I'd be hard-pressed to think of a game I finished more than once in my entire life (I think I finished both the Japanese and American versions of Tenchu, but I'm not sure that counts), and those two have happened in the last year, I think there's more to it than coincidence.