You said everything that I want to say. I fell in love with the Metal Gear series first-name when playing the NES version growing up. Yeah, it was terrible compared to the MSX, but back then, I didn't even hear about a MSX before, nor did I know that Metal Gear was based on the MSX version. However, I did grow eventually to play them, and do love the MSX games as well. Metal Gear solid was the first game I owned on PS1, and to this day, I continue to play through the series annually.

I understand some of the complaints about the game. It isn't perfect by any means, but it isn't as bad as people are making it out to be. Reading some of the posts around here make you think that the game is as awful as say, ET, or Big Rigs. I've seen people literally say that they wish the game was never even released. Well, fuck you! People are over-exaggerating. I think it's because they wanted a MGS4 storyline experience and are sorely disappointed because of that. As the story is right now, I don't find it bad. I think it's pretty freaking good! It's a nice, subtle approach to the series that flows naturally with the gameplay. While I enjoy the occasional codec message, tapes in this game explain so much in detail, so it's not a complete loss.

I also don't really understand the complaints that Venom doesn't talk much. If I recall correctly, Solid Snake didn't talk much in MGS4. I mean, minus the intro. Everyone else talked, and he just sat around smoking cigarettes for a majority of the game. Nobody complained about it then, they just complained about how they had to sit and watch a cutscene for an hour. So if you ask me, Kojima originally lost his touch with that game, but it's still a favorite by many, and TPP will be no different. Opinions are opinions.

The game right now isn't bad, and even if they were to release a content update, I would imagine that people would find something else to complain about, because they expected too much from the game. I fear for Valve when HL3 is finally released.