A year or so again I received the Metal Gear Legacy collection and MGSV: The Phantom Pain as a gift. And after a lot of life happening, I finally decided to buckle down and starting playing through the series. The idea of which has been daunting. The Eight main story games are accounted for here, minus Ground Zeros(which I'm not sure I need to bother with) form a daunting marathon over the next few months which is one of the reasons I've waited so long.
I've previously only played two games in the series: Metal Gear Solid on my PC in College and the NES port of Metal Gear when I was a kid. I have a general idea of the plot of the series from the internet, but for the purposes of really appreciating the series, I'm going to go through the main storyline games in release order, both to see the mechanics evolve and watch as the plot changes and gets retconnned as the series goes on.
First up....Metal Gear(?)
Starting at the beginning then, is the original Metal Gear for the MSX2, a console which apparently nobody outside of Japan heard of and thus, very few people played the game. Instead, most people probably played the NES port instead, which generally follows the same idea as the base game but executed differently, which occasionally I will touch on.
My first challenge was finding the damn thing, because when I popped in the game disc, I was presented with MGS3, MGS
eace Walker and MGS2. The other disc had MGS4. Inside the game case was a code for downloading MGS and the VR missions from the PS network, but the original 2 games were missing. After poking around for a bit, I finally realized they were hidden within MGS3's main menu, because a previous version had them built in and that's the one in the collection. Too bad even the included manual doesn't say "Hey, go to MGS3 to play the original 2 games".
Having figured that out, I started playing. The game is fairly bare bones, much like the original Final Fantasy from the same era. There's no intro and half the games plot is described in the game's manual/Wikipedia page and pretty much boils down to thus: In the mid 1990's, a group of mercenaries, led by a living legend, form a rogue state/"fortress nation" called Outer Heaven, somewhere in South Africa. FOXHOUND, a US Special Forces Unit and the first of many colorfully named groups in this series, sends agent Grey Fox to investigate and he's promptly captured just after he sends a message warning about "METAL GEAR". So Solid Snake, a rookie on his first day, is sent in to find him and deal with Outer Heaven. Because if one of your best agents failed, sending the new guy is the next logical move.
From there on everything is pretty much as you'd expect. Snake rescues Hostages(including a scientist and his pretty daughter involved in the Metal Gear program) and eventually finds and blows up the Metal Gear, a Nuclear Armed Mecha. The big twist is that Big Boss, Snakes superior officer in FOXHOUND is also the guy running Outer Heaven, and Snake has to kill him(in the room right after Metal Gear) before escaping the facility before it explodes in a mushroom cloud.
The gameplay itself is fairly simple, though both annoying difficult at times when it?s not surprisingly easy. There are patrolling guards everywhere with the spatial awareness of a particularly stupid pile of bricks. There are no hiding places other than behind pieces of wall(or objects such as tanks that are effectively walls), this is balanced out by the fact the banana guards only see exactly in line in front of them, so standing literally just off their line of sight renders you invisible to them. Sometimes this makes the game feel easy, except that a lot of areas have tight corridors with little way to stay out of their line of sight.
Them seeing you puts them in an alert mode, which sometimes turns off when you kill an arbitrary number of dudes (except when it doesn?t) , sometimes turns off when you leave the room(except when it doesn?t) and always turns off when you enter an elevator(which also act as save points). In some rooms, you?ll trigger an Alert Automatically and have to either exit or kill everyone in the room. Also, guards pretty much respawn every time you enter a room, so clearing them out only helps you in the very short term.
The maps are laid out in a very video gamey fashion, in that they feel more like mazes then any places people would actually work. Keycards and objects are used to gate progress and keep you running around looking for items to open up new areas of outer heaven, sometimes doing a lot of backtracking. There is no RADAR like in later games to help navigation, most of the areas are distinguished mostly by the color of the walls and floor.
Hostages are sprinkled throughout the game, and rescuing them is key to a sort of character upgrade system. Snake starts at one star rank and with every 5 hostages recued, gains another star. Most importantly, this allows you to hold more ammunition for all of your weapons, more rations(essentially health kits) and gives you a bigger health bar. There?s also two doors you cannot open(which contain vital items) without a 4 star rating. Constantly, killing a hostage instantly demotes you by one star.
Boss battles are here, but half the time it feels like you stumble into them. This game is where the original quirky metal gear mini-boss squad started, with straightforward yet videogamey names such as shotgunner, machine gun kid, flametrooper, etc. There?s also other bosses such as a Hind Helicopter, Tank and Bulldozer at chokepoints that need to be taken down to proceed. Unfortunately, almost all of the bosses are almost insultingly easy. The Helicopter itself literally sits on the upper half of the screen and sprays bullets in a pre-set pattern, and there?s a spot where you can just stand there, avoid all its fire and blow it up with a grenade launcher.
There are two exceptions. The last member of the mini-boss squad, Coward/Dirty Duck is hiding behind hostages. Killing him is easy. Killing him without killing any of the hostages is hard. Kill one hostage and you?ll need to find more to rank back up to 4 star. Kill more than one might make the game unwinnable.
The reason for this because Metal Gear itself is basically a puzzle boss. It doesn?t move or attack, but rather stands in its hanger while you attack it?s only weak point: Planting bombs on its legs with C4 charges while lasers mounted on the wall try to shoot you. What makes this tricky is that you need to plant 16 charges in a very specific order(IE Left Leg, Right Leg, Right Leg and so on?), given to you by a rescued hostage earlier. Except the hostage doesn?t remember the final step in the sequence, leaving you up to guess(giving you a 50% chance of getting it RIGHT on the first try, assuming you made no other mistakes). Mess up any part of the sequence and you need to restart the sequence, which means you don?t have enough charges to win(you can only hold 20 charges at 4 star rank), so you might as well restart the battle. Even better, if you?re 3 star rank, you can only carry 15 charges and you don?t have enough charges to blow up the metal gear. Better hope there are 5 hostages left to rescue or you have save point further back before you fought dirty duck.
Strangely, this is still better than the NES port, where the Metal Gear never actually shows up in game. At one point you find a supercomputer (which is a giant CRT monitor) which you are told controls Metal Gear, so all you do to win is to plant a bunch of explosives on it before fighting Big Boss.
This is one of my frustrations with the game, where it felt like they make it unnecessarily difficult in order to pad out playing time. The fact one mistake earlier in the game can make it impossible to win, and it?s an easy mistake to make, even if you know what not to do. There are others as well.
The game allows you to equip one weapon and one item at a time, despite the 5 or so weapons and 20 or so items you?re carrying by the time endgame rolls around. Unfortunately, this means that you can?t hold a keycard and wear a gasmask at the same time, or wear a bulletproof vest while holding a keycard at the same time. This isn?t really a problem until you?re running through rooms filled with gas, any exposure without a gas mask drains your health very quickly and these rooms are almost always locked by doors that require keycards. So to get out of the gas filled room, you need to unequip the gasmask to use the keycard.
This leads to the next major issue the game has. There are 8 different keycards you can and will need to find to finish the game. The keycards are numbered, but none of the doors are(nor is there any way to associate keycards and doors by looking at them). So if you come across a door you?ve never seen or opened before, you pretty much have to stand in front of it and cycle through every keycard in your inventory until the door opens. Even if the room is filled with gas which is killing you while you do this. Even better, there?s no rhyme or reason for how the doors are numbered, so a 6 door might be behind a 1 door. Basically, it feels like this game wants you to make a map while you go along.
I was originally going to gripe about the fact Solid Snake is a rookie on his first mission inserted into hostile territory with nothing other than the clothes on his back, the codec radio and a pack of cigarettes, despite the fact he?s supposed to be a member of a black ops Special Forces team. However, Big Boss kind of justifies this during his big scene at the end, flat out telling Snake he was expected to fail and presumably, that would satisfy the US government and they would have left Outer Heaven alone because reasons. Who knows what Snake was told during his briefing, but since Snake is a blank slate in this game it?s really hard to hell.
In many ways, this game is very different then the later games in the series, but some of the series tropes are already present. The cardboard box makes its first appearance, though the banana guards are so thick that they only notice anything wrong if they see the box move(they?ll walk right across it, hurting you as they do, if it?s in their path).
The codec is here, but it?s functioning is room specific and most of what you?re told is fairly terse and not terribly useful. One channel can only be used in boss fights and will tell you what weapon to use to win. Another is used twice to open certain doors. The exception is near the end of the game when Big Boss calls you up several times and begins giving you orders that will lead to you getting killed. In his final transmission before you meet him, he tells you to abort the mission and turn off your console, marking probably the first 4th wall break in the series.
There?s also a bit of weirdness at the end where you descend ?100 floors? in an elevator to the Metal Gears Hanger to fight it, and then have to escape at the end by climbing a ladder(apparently back up 100 floors) before walking away from a nuclear explosion in the background as Outer Heaven self-destructs.
So after all that , while I appreciate Metal Gear for launching a series, as a game it?s hard to recommend. If it hadn?t been in the Legacy collection I probably never would have bothered with it. It?s really only worth the play if you want firsthand experience with a piece of videogame history, but otherwise a few minutes with YouTube and Wikipedia will more than catch you up.
Next time?.
Metal Gear 2: Revenge of Metal Gear
I've previously only played two games in the series: Metal Gear Solid on my PC in College and the NES port of Metal Gear when I was a kid. I have a general idea of the plot of the series from the internet, but for the purposes of really appreciating the series, I'm going to go through the main storyline games in release order, both to see the mechanics evolve and watch as the plot changes and gets retconnned as the series goes on.
First up....Metal Gear(?)
Starting at the beginning then, is the original Metal Gear for the MSX2, a console which apparently nobody outside of Japan heard of and thus, very few people played the game. Instead, most people probably played the NES port instead, which generally follows the same idea as the base game but executed differently, which occasionally I will touch on.
My first challenge was finding the damn thing, because when I popped in the game disc, I was presented with MGS3, MGS
eace Walker and MGS2. The other disc had MGS4. Inside the game case was a code for downloading MGS and the VR missions from the PS network, but the original 2 games were missing. After poking around for a bit, I finally realized they were hidden within MGS3's main menu, because a previous version had them built in and that's the one in the collection. Too bad even the included manual doesn't say "Hey, go to MGS3 to play the original 2 games". Having figured that out, I started playing. The game is fairly bare bones, much like the original Final Fantasy from the same era. There's no intro and half the games plot is described in the game's manual/Wikipedia page and pretty much boils down to thus: In the mid 1990's, a group of mercenaries, led by a living legend, form a rogue state/"fortress nation" called Outer Heaven, somewhere in South Africa. FOXHOUND, a US Special Forces Unit and the first of many colorfully named groups in this series, sends agent Grey Fox to investigate and he's promptly captured just after he sends a message warning about "METAL GEAR". So Solid Snake, a rookie on his first day, is sent in to find him and deal with Outer Heaven. Because if one of your best agents failed, sending the new guy is the next logical move.
From there on everything is pretty much as you'd expect. Snake rescues Hostages(including a scientist and his pretty daughter involved in the Metal Gear program) and eventually finds and blows up the Metal Gear, a Nuclear Armed Mecha. The big twist is that Big Boss, Snakes superior officer in FOXHOUND is also the guy running Outer Heaven, and Snake has to kill him(in the room right after Metal Gear) before escaping the facility before it explodes in a mushroom cloud.
The gameplay itself is fairly simple, though both annoying difficult at times when it?s not surprisingly easy. There are patrolling guards everywhere with the spatial awareness of a particularly stupid pile of bricks. There are no hiding places other than behind pieces of wall(or objects such as tanks that are effectively walls), this is balanced out by the fact the banana guards only see exactly in line in front of them, so standing literally just off their line of sight renders you invisible to them. Sometimes this makes the game feel easy, except that a lot of areas have tight corridors with little way to stay out of their line of sight.
Them seeing you puts them in an alert mode, which sometimes turns off when you kill an arbitrary number of dudes (except when it doesn?t) , sometimes turns off when you leave the room(except when it doesn?t) and always turns off when you enter an elevator(which also act as save points). In some rooms, you?ll trigger an Alert Automatically and have to either exit or kill everyone in the room. Also, guards pretty much respawn every time you enter a room, so clearing them out only helps you in the very short term.
The maps are laid out in a very video gamey fashion, in that they feel more like mazes then any places people would actually work. Keycards and objects are used to gate progress and keep you running around looking for items to open up new areas of outer heaven, sometimes doing a lot of backtracking. There is no RADAR like in later games to help navigation, most of the areas are distinguished mostly by the color of the walls and floor.
Hostages are sprinkled throughout the game, and rescuing them is key to a sort of character upgrade system. Snake starts at one star rank and with every 5 hostages recued, gains another star. Most importantly, this allows you to hold more ammunition for all of your weapons, more rations(essentially health kits) and gives you a bigger health bar. There?s also two doors you cannot open(which contain vital items) without a 4 star rating. Constantly, killing a hostage instantly demotes you by one star.
Boss battles are here, but half the time it feels like you stumble into them. This game is where the original quirky metal gear mini-boss squad started, with straightforward yet videogamey names such as shotgunner, machine gun kid, flametrooper, etc. There?s also other bosses such as a Hind Helicopter, Tank and Bulldozer at chokepoints that need to be taken down to proceed. Unfortunately, almost all of the bosses are almost insultingly easy. The Helicopter itself literally sits on the upper half of the screen and sprays bullets in a pre-set pattern, and there?s a spot where you can just stand there, avoid all its fire and blow it up with a grenade launcher.
There are two exceptions. The last member of the mini-boss squad, Coward/Dirty Duck is hiding behind hostages. Killing him is easy. Killing him without killing any of the hostages is hard. Kill one hostage and you?ll need to find more to rank back up to 4 star. Kill more than one might make the game unwinnable.
The reason for this because Metal Gear itself is basically a puzzle boss. It doesn?t move or attack, but rather stands in its hanger while you attack it?s only weak point: Planting bombs on its legs with C4 charges while lasers mounted on the wall try to shoot you. What makes this tricky is that you need to plant 16 charges in a very specific order(IE Left Leg, Right Leg, Right Leg and so on?), given to you by a rescued hostage earlier. Except the hostage doesn?t remember the final step in the sequence, leaving you up to guess(giving you a 50% chance of getting it RIGHT on the first try, assuming you made no other mistakes). Mess up any part of the sequence and you need to restart the sequence, which means you don?t have enough charges to win(you can only hold 20 charges at 4 star rank), so you might as well restart the battle. Even better, if you?re 3 star rank, you can only carry 15 charges and you don?t have enough charges to blow up the metal gear. Better hope there are 5 hostages left to rescue or you have save point further back before you fought dirty duck.
Strangely, this is still better than the NES port, where the Metal Gear never actually shows up in game. At one point you find a supercomputer (which is a giant CRT monitor) which you are told controls Metal Gear, so all you do to win is to plant a bunch of explosives on it before fighting Big Boss.
This is one of my frustrations with the game, where it felt like they make it unnecessarily difficult in order to pad out playing time. The fact one mistake earlier in the game can make it impossible to win, and it?s an easy mistake to make, even if you know what not to do. There are others as well.
The game allows you to equip one weapon and one item at a time, despite the 5 or so weapons and 20 or so items you?re carrying by the time endgame rolls around. Unfortunately, this means that you can?t hold a keycard and wear a gasmask at the same time, or wear a bulletproof vest while holding a keycard at the same time. This isn?t really a problem until you?re running through rooms filled with gas, any exposure without a gas mask drains your health very quickly and these rooms are almost always locked by doors that require keycards. So to get out of the gas filled room, you need to unequip the gasmask to use the keycard.
This leads to the next major issue the game has. There are 8 different keycards you can and will need to find to finish the game. The keycards are numbered, but none of the doors are(nor is there any way to associate keycards and doors by looking at them). So if you come across a door you?ve never seen or opened before, you pretty much have to stand in front of it and cycle through every keycard in your inventory until the door opens. Even if the room is filled with gas which is killing you while you do this. Even better, there?s no rhyme or reason for how the doors are numbered, so a 6 door might be behind a 1 door. Basically, it feels like this game wants you to make a map while you go along.
I was originally going to gripe about the fact Solid Snake is a rookie on his first mission inserted into hostile territory with nothing other than the clothes on his back, the codec radio and a pack of cigarettes, despite the fact he?s supposed to be a member of a black ops Special Forces team. However, Big Boss kind of justifies this during his big scene at the end, flat out telling Snake he was expected to fail and presumably, that would satisfy the US government and they would have left Outer Heaven alone because reasons. Who knows what Snake was told during his briefing, but since Snake is a blank slate in this game it?s really hard to hell.
In many ways, this game is very different then the later games in the series, but some of the series tropes are already present. The cardboard box makes its first appearance, though the banana guards are so thick that they only notice anything wrong if they see the box move(they?ll walk right across it, hurting you as they do, if it?s in their path).
The codec is here, but it?s functioning is room specific and most of what you?re told is fairly terse and not terribly useful. One channel can only be used in boss fights and will tell you what weapon to use to win. Another is used twice to open certain doors. The exception is near the end of the game when Big Boss calls you up several times and begins giving you orders that will lead to you getting killed. In his final transmission before you meet him, he tells you to abort the mission and turn off your console, marking probably the first 4th wall break in the series.
There?s also a bit of weirdness at the end where you descend ?100 floors? in an elevator to the Metal Gears Hanger to fight it, and then have to escape at the end by climbing a ladder(apparently back up 100 floors) before walking away from a nuclear explosion in the background as Outer Heaven self-destructs.
So after all that , while I appreciate Metal Gear for launching a series, as a game it?s hard to recommend. If it hadn?t been in the Legacy collection I probably never would have bothered with it. It?s really only worth the play if you want firsthand experience with a piece of videogame history, but otherwise a few minutes with YouTube and Wikipedia will more than catch you up.
Next time?.
Metal Gear 2: Revenge of Metal Gear
