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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
Going through this rather long list of games, there have been times where I've been excited to get a game of something going. It might be because I hadn't played it before, or that I knew nothing about it and wondered how it was good enough to make it into the 1001 list. In this case, the more I got back into Metal Gear Solid for the first time in a looong time, the more I wanted to not write anything about it and keep playing instead.
I used to watch much more TV than I do nowadays, and when browsing channels to pass the time there would often be a film on, and I - like many others, I'm sure - have a list of films that just make you stop and watch them. Take Con Air for example. You can't not watch it. It's a masterpiece. Face/Off. Speed. Die Hard with a Vengeance. True Lies. The list goes on and on, come to think about it.
They're all movies that took over the evening, usually each and every time I found out that they were on. They all happen to be action movies, but the likes of Grosse Pointe Blank and The Devils Advocate also have their place in the (apparently growing) handful of movies that I attribute with 'must watch, right here, right now'.
That's my long-winded way of saying that Metal Gear Solid found itself on the 'must play, right here, right now' list, despite having completed it many a time before, so you can probably guess how this post will turn out...
Fond Memories
Let's start with a trip down memory lane. The February 1999 edition of the Official PlayStation Magazine UK is in my possession. Pink and purple artwork of what I would soon learn to be the Cyborg Ninja spans the white front cover, a theme carried over to the greatest demo disc in history. Metal Gear Solid is playable. Play it. Play it now. You won't regret it.
While the magazine is no longer with me, the disc certainly is, and my first quest of this entry was to see how rusty I was with the game after all these years. I don't know for sure when I last went through the game, though I suspect I might have done so around the time of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which would have been around 2008. Let's call it 10 years since I've touched it, and we'll see what multiple console generations have done to my memory.
Would you believe I've played all (*ish) of the Metal Gear series multiple times? Not with that kind of run you wouldn't. That was shocking. I'm calling bullshit on those searchlights. Anyway, that was a bit of a failure, where I'm going to blame the controls and then my awareness of the severe lack of ammo, and then more blaming of control sensitivity. But mostly that was all on me.
How can I improve on that?
Back in the day, I also had this unofficial guide - so unofficial the maps have all be pulled from multiple screenshots, rather than a direct source at Konami. It's amazing to compare guides from then and now, but that's not what I'm here to do. I'm here to play this game, and I definitely didn't have the guide when I first played through it.
If I did have the guide, this page would have been a lifesaver, because I actually had to write to Konami (via the only address I could find in the manual, no doubt), saying that my cousin and I are absolutely struggling against the true Vulcan Raven boss fight, without a clue in the world on how to defeat him. A reply came back however many days later with four posters and pens, accompanied with the words 'we can't tell you that, but here are some freebies'.
Maybe that's why I bought the guide...
Anyway, Metal Gear Solid was incredible to the 11-year-old me and I've kept up with the series ever since - well aware that it didn't start here, yes, thank you. It's time to fire it up and see how far we get this time...
Fun Times
Ah, this screen. We've sat through one hell of an introduction, following Solid Snake on a mission to the Fox Archipelago in Alaska where things are about to heat up. It's tense, it's moody, it's atmospheric. We are watching a film, complete with on-screen credits and cutscene camera angles that I failed to get screenshots of because I was content to just watch the film.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
The Docks and the Heliport beyond them are made for multiple purposes, chief among them being an area to allow players to practice and experiment, and a way for creator Hideo Kojima to tell you that things are going to be different with this game, and you're going to like it.
You are forced to wait for the lift to descend here, so you might as well play around with how you and the guards behave. They've got set patrol routes, but they'll pause to yawn, allowing you to sneak by unnoticed. They'll get distracted by sounds, from you knocking on a wall or running through a puddle. You can run and crawl and wall hug, and if things get hectic you can punch, kick, throw and even snap the necks of anyone who needs dealing with.
Mostly though, you just run to the safest spot of all and wait for your cue.
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| Why thank you. |
More cinematics, and by now you might be starting to wonder just what the ratio of movies to gameplay is. It's a staple of the series, and Kojima is a storyteller. It's a story desperately in need of an editor and a rewrite sometimes, but it's a grand story nonetheless, and you're right in the thick of it, along for the ride.
Your support team are introduced early on, and the game starts off with Snake being a bit of a dick, you might argue. You could blame the writing or having something get lost in translation, but there are times when the philanthropic hero of the later games is actually just a trained mercenary who doesn't give much of a damn about how others see him.
Maybe he's comfortable with who he is and who are we to judge. It's hard to get slapped when you're miles away from whomever you've offended. Then again, they might not be the offended type...
While a lot of the story unfolds through cutscenes, there's just as much that happens through Codec conversations, which are essentially very cheap to make cutscenes, and with the disc space available on the PlayStation, an audio file goes a lot further than video, even allowing for optional conversations with your team for more in-depth and contextual information.
Maybe you could learn some proverbs from Mei Ling or some military jargon from Nastasha Romanenko. I bet you forgot she was even in the game, didn't you?
The cutscenes finally die down and I continue to get spotted by searchlights (still declaring them to be bullshit), but I get through the Heliport, and I get through it by whatever means I like. Metal Gear Solid gives you more freedom than you might expect in terms of getting the job done, especially in the early stages.
Weapons and equipment are procured on site, so it's up to you to explore the map and find yourself something useful. Some are obvious, like the Chaff and Stun Grenades, as well as the Rations, but others are more hidden, like the SOCOM pistol in the back of the truck. Grab them all, don't walk too far on the snow and progress through one of the two air vents to get inside unseen.
Actually, no, do walk in the snow, and watch the level of technology that Metal Gear Solid introduces. The 'highly developed senses' of the genome soldiers allow them the smarts to see footprints, question whose they are, and follow them to find an answer. As in the previous level, running through puddles will produce similar responses, and so the game teaches us that the environment is as living and breathing as the guards that occupy it.
It's a shame that as soon as you enter one of the vents, this technology is never used again during the entire game, but still, bonus points to the development team there.
It doesn't take long for you to find your first person of interest, the DARPA Chief Donald Anderson, locked in a cell. Luckily for you, the guards are useless and the air vents are open, and we get the joy of seeing the incredible detail of the character models - and no, I won't be trying to get Meryl to exercise in her underwear.
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| More like Sassy Snake |
Joking aside, these models do just enough. They don't emote, they don't react, but put them in the hands of an animator under the supervision of a director who knows his movies, and Metal Gear Solid makes you forget all about it, even when it directly points out to you how basic and minimal the detailing is later on, when referring to characters eyes.
Anyway, fast forwarding a little, Johnny tells us to shut up in there will we, the DARPA Chief dies from a suspected heart attack, Meryl breaks out of prison, steals Johnny's uniform and threatens to kill us, before armed guards come in and shit hits the fan.
The funny thing about this scene is simply that after I had captured all the screenshots, I skimmed over the guide to find that there is no originality left in this world.
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| OC, do not steal |
In case you hadn't worked it out by now, I was very much still on board with playing Metal Gear Solid. The pace of the game kept going, and while there were opportunities to stop and come back to it another day, I kept saying that it's been a decade or more, and this is just so engaging. I want to keep playing. I want to see how much I remember. I want to experience it first hand all over again, so I continued.
We need some C4 to get to our next objective, so we've got to raid the armoury for supplies. If you're not stocked up on ammo yet, this is your best chance for a while. C4's normal use is to be stuck on a wall and detonated whenever you need it to blow up, but the bold (and, frankly, the utterly sadistic) amongst you, you can stick it to a guard's back...
There aren't any guards here yet, but there is a boss fight coming up, and it introduced a popular character to the gaming world twenty years ago.
He's not much to look at, but Revolver Ocelot will go on to be more important than anyone realised back in the late 1990s - probably because Kojima had written himself into a corner, but I'd like to think that it's mostly because he's just that damn interesting as a character. He was inspired by Lee Van Cleef and carries a Colt Single Action Army revolver to complete the Western look, but he isn't a cowboy and he's not a joke.
It's weird. In some senses, Metal Gear Solid shouldn't work, but then neither should Con Air. The premise is absurd, yet it's unforgettable. It's a must watch. MGS is a must play. They're both flawed, certainly, but here I am, still playing it.
Wasting all my ammo trying to remember the quirks of the pistol, but still alive and progressing through the fight to rescue Kenneth Baker, the ArmsTech President.
Oh, yeah, and the Cyborg Ninja was introduced and actually ended the fight and saved Baker for us, but don't worry about that. Worry only with where you put the CD case.
Sadly, I can't recall how I found Meryl's codec frequency in my youth. I suspect I called the Colonel enough times for him to spell it out to me, and for me to spell it out to you - though by now you should probably know this - you have to grab the box your game came in, turn it over, and look at the screenshots for a Codec conversation between Snake and Meryl, which would reveal her number.
The wonders of physical media, eh? It's a shame I don't actually know where my Metal Gear Solid case is. I might have it, but I probably merged discs into the VR Missions expandalone spin-off case, whose back doesn't look like this:
Gah, that artwork. Incredible. Managed to write about Yoji Shinkawa for my art coursework later in life too. Love it. Anyway, here's the screenshot that I no longer need, not because I looked it up online later, but because 140.15 is a number that is forever lodged in my brain to save time looking for the back of a PlayStation game box, and it should be in your brain too.
After introductions and councilling, I'm ready to head back towards the surface and get on with my mission - sorry, by the way, Baker is dead, suspected heart attack, what's going on, who was that Ninja, plot, plot, nuclear weapons are bad, find Hal Emmerich.
And then this bastard came into my view.
That's a SOCOM Suppressor in that item box. I don't need it, but I want it. That's a sleeping guard. I should be safe to get the item, but I'm paranoid, so I'll choke out the guard - I don't care about getting a good rank, I've been there, and done that. This time, I'm going into business for myself.
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| Shit, threw him instead. |
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| Shiiit, armed response. |
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| Well, small bonus there. |
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| Shiiiiit. |
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| Damn. Should have called Mei Ling. |
And that's where I ended my run, however long it was after I started - with a mistimed button input. I was tempted to carry on, I really was, but time was against me.
Frustrations
So the button sensitivity isn't ideal - maybe because I was emulating my disc rather than digging out and hooking up the PlayStation, and using an Xbox controller to do so. The movement is a little 'off', but then the series has gotten better and better, so I'm more used to the modern iterations of the sneaking mechanics. Those I can probably get used to, though I did run out of ammo quite easily.
The cutscenes are most definitely present in the series already, and you better buckle up and watch them. Skippable though the vast majority are, they are the focus of the game, really. You're not playing an action game that takes you from point to point, you're watching a movie that requires you to do this and that in order to watch the rest.
Gameplay has you move around the facility as you please but is still pushing you down one corridor towards the finale. You're shoehorned into where you need to be, but you can do things at your own pace. Play around with the mechanics, explore the air vents, backtrack even when not in a section of the game that requires it.
That's actually one of the off-putting things about Metal Gear Solid - the enforced backtracking to pick up weapons and items. There's a lot of it, especially near the end, and all you've got to push you along is codec conversation after codec conversation. Some of them are well written.
Not all of them. But many. It's kind of like how a lot of Con Air is nonsense but we gladly watch it anyway: "Put the bunny back in the box".
The writing and the story are unlike a lot of what you've seen in gaming so far. There are games that take their cues from movies, games that are story-centric, games that are action packed or require a bit of thought before blindly rushing in, and games that allow you to be creative in your problem solving - but none of them can combine elements quite so well as Metal Gear Solid.
It might go a bit overboard sometimes. Do I really need to know how a Personal Area Network key card uses the salts in my body as a transmission medium to tell a door to open? Probably not. But does all this technobabble add to the dense world that exists in Metal Gear Solid? Oh yeah, you betcha. But it's a frustration. Edit that stuff.
Final Word
Speaking of editing, it's occurred to me that this post isn't particularly helpful to someone who hasn't played Metal Gear Solid before, so in order to rectify that, I'll say "If you haven't played Metal Gear Solid before, go and play it. I can't tell you why. You'll see why."
It's a cop-out, sure it is, but there's something about Metal Gear Solid that makes it so good and me so unqualified to talk about it. It's been analysed to death elsewhere on the Internet, so whatever I can add isn't going to do much for it.
The only thing that occurred to me when playing it again was that, unlike any other game (in recent memory, concerning this blog at least), this felt like a piece of media that I just had to consume. It stopped being a game to play and have fun with and became a movie that I wanted to see again, there and then.
It's not a long game. It's not too complicated. You'll get stuck in places unless you know of all the gimmicks it uses already. You might be weirded out by the blurry faces and strange characters, but millions of players weren't twenty years ago, and the series has gone from strength to strength since.
It is, simply put, a masterpiece. A flawed masterpiece. An unmissable flawed masterpiece.
Fun Facts
Many facts to choose from, but the one that surprised me the most is that in the entire game there are only 23 guards that you have to avoid one way or another. You'd find that many in a single room in other games.
Metal Gear Solid, developed by Konami, first released in 1998.
Version played: PlayStation, 1998, via emulation and childhood memory.