Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

"This is good... isn't it?"

Source // Konami

Not too long ago, I said when looking back to the Grand Theft Auto series, I'd want to go back and play GTA IV before any of the others. It's not that it is the 'best', but it is the title that called to me the most.

There's another long-running series with games that ought to be returned to more than once, and another game with a '4' stuck on the end, but this one, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a lot more going on.

If GTA IV is something I want to go back to and relive, MGS4 is something I'm not sure I do want to go back to - not sure to the point of having spent the last few days watching some 7 hours of YouTube video essays on the game instead of actually putting it into my PS3 for the first time in years.

Metal Gear Solid has been my top-rated game on this 1001 list since its appearance and is unlikely to be moved. MGS2 and MGS3 are up there too, the latter still sitting in the top ten. MGS4... well, MGS4 has a lot to unbox and I'm not sure where to begin.

Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow

"Chief I'm picking up something. A distress signal."

You might think third-person shooter action stealth games are both hard to succinctly describe and dominated by the likes of Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, but there are entire series of games in this vein that players could enjoy just as much. Well, in theory. One of those series is Syphon Filter, of which I know so little about despite there being six games over the span of just 8 years.

As a fan of MGS, you might have thought I'd be somewhat aware of its competition, or at least somewhat similar games, but with regards to Syphon Filter and it's sixth and final entry, Logan's Shadow, that just isn't the case.

I was shocked to learn that this game was the sixth entry in the series, and shocked once more when it was initially a PlayStation Portable title, only getting a PlayStation 2 port three years later. To complete the shocking trilogy, it plays rather well. Let's find out how.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Pick your side carefully, now.

My track record with Splinter Cell games isn't exactly what you'd call spotless. I eventually made my way through a chunk of Splinter Cell, but it wasn't pretty. I absolutely didn't manage to get through much of Chaos Theory, but I was eager to find out more about both games, and the series as a whole.

Now we've got another instalment to add to the 'must get better at or die trying' list of Tom Clancy titles, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

Sam Fisher is not in a good place and needs to please both the NSA who employ him and the JBA terrorists that he's been placed undercover with. How far do you follow your orders? How do you keep both the terrorists and the counter-terrorists happy? Who will you side with when the credits roll?

It certainly sounds interesting enough for me to find out.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

"Quit your whining. The bullets went straight through. Now get up!"

The PlayStation Portable was a neat bit of kit. I got one early on its life, and while I probably never made the most of it, I have some damn good memories of various titles. The Metal Gear series, for example.

2005 saw the release of Metal Gear AC!D and its sequel, a turn-based collectable card game tactical RPG that I think is all kinds of fun and worth playing without a moment's hesitation. There was also a digitally animated adaptation of the Metal Gear Solid graphic novel by Kris Oprisko and Ashley Wood, which I am absolutely gutted that I no longer have (so far as I can see), though I do cherish the actual graphic novel itself.

That brings me neatly onto Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, the fourth Metal Gear on the PSP. Just think about that next time you wonder what happened to the PSP. It was loved, that's what happened. Metal Gear had been proven to work as a card game and a visual novel. The PSP was clearly a capable little machine. Could we squeeze a full Metal Gear Solid game onto it?

The answer is 'not quite', but while we didn't get a mini Metal Gear, we weren't left with a half-arsed product, either. Are you ready for some Metal Gear on the move?

Hitman: Blood Money

"Names are for friends... so I don't need one."

I'm a fan of the Hitman series. Not a massive fan - I still haven't gotten around to the latest trilogy yet - but a fan nonetheless. Thanks to the success of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin on the PlayStation 2, I was introduced to the series, but didn't venture out to play them all, with Hitman: Blood Money being one that I didn't bother playing.

A mate did. He said it was good. That's about all I know of the game, beyond the obvious 'murder people and get away with it' deal that Agent 47 has going on...

I imagine this to be a great improvement on the formula, perhaps easier to control for console players. Not as brutally strict with its enemy AI as previous instalments have felt. Eh, enough speculating, more discovering.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

"I already don't like you - don't make it worse for yourself."

You're not afraid of the dark, are you? In a world of Tom Clancy's making, you should be. They lurk in the darkness. They strike from the darkness. They embody the darkness. And no game renders darkness quite as well as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third in the stealth series.

Sam Fisher returns in all his gravelly-voiced glory to split jump up walls, dangle from pipes and interrogate soldiers before ghosting back into the shadows. The many, many shadows. May your brightness and contrast settings be set in your favour.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

"Smell some lead, prisoner!"

I've seen quite a bit of The Chronicles of Riddick series, from the films to the anime and back. It occurred to me, though, that I hadn't seen the most recent film, Riddick. So I watched it, and all the way through, had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind: I had seen this film. Everything is so familiar. Have I just completely forgotten the entire movie? Is it that kind of action film? So like the others that you forget you've ever seen it?

While I mulled that over, I was installing The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, a first-person action game set before the events of the first film, Pitch Black, detailing how Richard B. Riddick got those fancy eyes of his.

I suppose you'd have to know a bit about the series to know about the importance of his eyes. Hmm. Let's see how well Escape from Butcher Bay can fill us in.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Now there's more of you sneaky little devils?

Better in every way, we're told. You'd hope a sequel would be, I suppose, and the next sequel to get looked at is Sly 2: Band of Thieves.

The gang return. Their cel-shaded style returns. The inspector trying to hunt them down returns. It seems an awful lot of things return, actually, so how is it all going to turn out better than Sly Cooper?

Second Sight

Are you getting a sense of deja vu?

The PlayStation 2 had a little bit of everything, and third-person action-adventures were everywhere. But not all of them involved a protagonist with psychic powers to manipulate their surroundings. At least two of them had that, one of which being Second Sight, from the minds behind the TimeSplitters series.

It was an intriguing idea, but despite my gaming life being dominated by the Sony console back then, I didn't ever come across Second Sight, and my interest was only really a passing one. It wasn't on my radar, and it's time to see what we're missing.

We're going to really need our brains for this one.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes

Metal Gear?

You probably know that I'm quite a fan of Metal Gear Solid. I've played the games, I've bought into the spinoffs, I've read the graphic novels. But I draw the line at having the buy an entirely different console to play a remake in the form of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

Emerging onto the GameCube in 2004, this remake slapped Metal Gear Solid onto the bones of MGS2, allowing for a greater degree of control, updated mechanics, and graphics you could actually see. Look! These people have faces!

As great as MGS was, however, in 2004, I was playing Snake Eater on my console of choice, the PlayStation 2. I wasn't bothered about The Twin Snakes, mostly because it wasn't available to me. I was aware of it, and it's noticeable differences, but I was in no need to play it.

Did I miss out? Is this the game we've all been waiting for? It's finally time for me to find out.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

"We're in a jungle!"

Source // Metal Gear Wiki

The year is 2003. We've all thoroughly enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, even if we have no idea what the heck was going on by the end of it. We didn't like Raiden very much, but the next generation gameplay more than made up for that.

How do you build on the success of the sequel? Where does the story go from there? The answers came at E3 that year, as the trailer for the next title was shown to an excited audience: Obviously, you take it right back to the Cold War in the 1960s, replacing the entire cast of characters in the process, and jazz it up with lots of spy film inspired cinematic camp. Kojima, you genius...

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a strange one, and it's often hailed as one of the best titles in the series. Does it still hold up a decade and a half later?

Manhunt

Viewer discretion is advised.

Manhunt. The game that made Grand Theft Auto look like a cartoon. A grungy, gritty game of brutal realism presented as a survival-horror snuff film. There just isn't anything like it, certainly not in late 2003.

To say it was controversial is an understatement. Those who had an agenda against video games now had the most obvious target under the sun. Those of us who actually played video games just had another third-person game where you take out faceless goons for good. It was turning the violence up to 11, yes, but it was nothing too new, was it?

Well, despite there being two games, both of which appeared on the PlayStation 2, I have never played them. I know of them (who doesn't?), but never really needed to play them. To see them some more, yes, definitely. I want to know what all the fuss is about. But playing them wasn't urgent or essential back then, and it hasn't been ever since.

Until now, when the 1001 list strongly suggests we must play Manhunt.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

Warning: Guards are alerted.

In what must have been 2002, I played a demo for a kind of game I'd never played before and was bemused at it being a sequel. "How can there be a Hitman 2: Silent Assassin when there was no Hitman?" I thought, like a fool.

These days, I'm far more aware of the existence of the PC, and other gaming platforms that don't come from Sony, and I know that it was Hitman: Agent 47 that was the start to the series. But it wasn't the first Hitman game for an awful lot of Hitman fans.

Silent Assassin was my first Hitman game, a game of stealth, unlike any other. Hiding in plain sight was the aim of this game, and only the bald-headed, barcoded Agent 47 had big enough balls to get away with it.

I've not played it for a long time now. How much can I remember?

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

HOT CHICK WITH GUN BUSTS AMPHIBIOUS YUCKMOUTH!!!

Source // Moby Games

Like the master thief that he is, Sly Cooper ghosted past me like he was never there at all. I had only a passing awareness that he had a few games and no real interest in them. When it came to 3D action platformers on the PlayStation 2, two far more notable series got the limelight, those, of course, being Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter.

I was a Ratchet fan, there wasn't room in my mind for anything else in that genre, and it would be more than a decade until I saw what Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was about, thanks to this 1001 list.

Don your cap and equip your cane because we're about to retrieve what's rightfully ours - straight out from underneath the noses of a cast of colourful wrongdoers.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

"Listen up, all you motherf--"

Look at that. Back in 2002, that screen represented the height of console technology. The powerhouse that was the Xbox burst onto the scene to try and steal...

That's all I've been able to recover of version 1.0 of this post for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. I was in the process of adding a few new paragraphs based on some developments I had replaying the game, but then something happened, and that something ultimately resulted in a blank blog post, and I don't have backups of whatever I write. I assumed Google did. It does not. 

So all I've got are my screenshots and my memories. I only wrote it a matter of days ago, and last played the game just over an hour ago, so I should be able to cobble something together. Where were we?

... the spotlight from Sony and Nintendo, and several titles sure did turn some heads for one reason or another.

If you weren't after the multiplayer mayhem of Halo, maybe you would welcome the lighting engine and cloth physics in espionage thriller Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. I say that like it's all the game offers, but that's not the case at all.

No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way

You found abandonware.

I don't recall where I first saw No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way, but on account of its troubled history, it was probably during the early days of researching this 1001 list. Since then, I've been quite interested in finding out about it, because there aren't too many games out there that look like this.

Set in the swinging '60s, cat-burglar turned spy Cate Archer must thwart the evil plans of H.A.R.M. in a globe-trotting, gadget-filled first-person action game. Imagine if Austin Powers was a serious James Bond film, and you're getting closer to what NOLF2 is like.

At least that's my impression based on what I see and read. Playing it is another thing...

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

"So all I have to do is push the Action button in front of the computer once I have the pictures, right?"

Source // PlayStation

I absolutely loved going back through Metal Gear Solid when it appeared on the 1001 list, so you might be able to guess how much I was looking forward to getting around to the PlayStation 2 sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

While the die-hard fans would go on to buy Zone of the Enders to play the demo, I couldn't justify buying an entire game I wasn't sure of to play just a snippet of a game I most definitely did want. Instead, I had a VHS of that E3 trailer, and then a magazine demo finally arrived, and then magazine article after magazine article kept my interest until the game finally released.

Delayed in Europe, we got a bonus DVD as means of an apology, full of behind the scenes, making of stuff. I gave it its own case, complete with homemade box art. I think it may even have been done in Paint. If not, then Jasc PaintShop Pro.

The point is, I was quite a fan of MGS, and when I was done with MGS2, you can bet that I also bought MGS2: Substance when it came out, complete with gameplay tweaks and extra modes, including skateboarding. Madness.

So. Having not played it in a while, can I still get through the demo?

Thief II: The Metal Age

Did I see something? Anything?

At the time of writing, Summer is threatening to appear throughout the heavens. The sky is blue, the trees are green, the mood in this place is lifting, and I'm sat here trying desperately to play the darkest game on the planet, Thief II: The Metal Age.

Sequel to The Dark Project, The Metal Age brings us more first-person stealth action in the role of a master thief, Garrett, armed with his fantasy steampunky tricks of the trade that players of the first game will be familiar with.

Not that you'll be able to see any of that...

Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear?!

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...