When most people think about Hideo Kojima, they think about the massively successful Metal Gear Solid series. While some would say that it died with the original PS1 entry in the Solid series, most people can appreciate 2, 3 and even 4 for the excellent games that they are, even despite subjective issues with Kojima's directorial and writing style.
Not Tyrone Rodriguez though, former IGN editor and founder of NICALiS, the company responsible for the Cave Story port to the Wii. After a brief conversation about the quality of Japanese developers, a topic that has come up a lot lately from indie developers, the subject of Konami came up and Rodriguez bluntly game his opinion.
And then I mentioned Konami. "Konami doesn't make good stuff," he argued. He says in particular that Metal Gear Solid developer Hideo Kojima should stop making games and start making bad movies (ironically, Kojima just might). "He's terrible at making games. Metal Gear is good in spite of him. I haven't enjoyed a game of his since maybe the original Metal Gear Solid, maybe." He feels the recent ones are tedious, riddled with bad writing, bad story-telling, and bad control.
I suppose it all comes down to different strokes for different folks, and a decent amount of people (just check out the sales for the series) wouldn't go without him. NICALiS have had their own sets of controversy in the past; including negative reaction to blocking their characters from being used in the group project Indie Brawl and removing Let's Play videos of the Japanese version of Cave Story on copyright grounds.
