Down the Rabbit Hole – Part 2

SNAKE? SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!

WARNING! May contain spoilers from Metal Gear Solid 1. If you care. I mean, come on. It’s been 16 years since this game came out. Statute of limitations is up on this one.

Boy are there some things your brain smooths over as time goes by. Things like how TERRIBLE games used to look! Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998, for the original PlayStation. SIXTEEN YEARS! I remember that happening! One of my classmates in 8th grade wouldn’t shut up about it! “This game is SO REALISTIC! The graphics are AMAZING!” Well, for the time sure. I mean, there were actual POLYGONS! (You can count them on every character model.) But boy, has that game not aged well. Characters move jerkily, textures are muddy, the whole game is in this fairly ugly brown/green/grey palette.

OK, so the game definitely doesn’t hold up in the looks department. It also has some pretty serious control issues. I constantly had problems aiming where I wanted to, particularly if it wasn’t at something directly up, down, left, or right. The camera control was atrocious – time and time again I’d get caught by a passing guard or auto-gun because I couldn’t see around a corner. Swapping weapons and items is a bear, especially once you have more than 3 or 4 of each. And WOW is controlling anything from the 1st person view (which a few boss fights heavily rely on) horrifically slow to respond.

“But Jesse!” you might be saying to yourself. “You JUST told us last time that you LOVED this game! What’s up with all the trash talk???” Don’t worry, we have reached the end of the bad stuff I have to say about this game! (Well, mostly).

The reason I loved this game wasn’t the gameplay itself, though that was pretty fun when you weren’t fighting the controls. And it certainly wasn’t the looks. The reason this game was so great was the crazy that is Kojima’s story! Once again, I’ll point you over this-a-way if you want to read up on the events of the game before we go on. …   …   …All caught up? Fantastic!

Alright, so just what is it about this admittedly crazy and over the top story that I was so drawn to? First and foremost, it’s the characters. Yes, a lot of the voice acting is over the top, but in such an awesome, 80s action movie kind of way! Every interaction you have with Liquid Snake almost like watching Alan Rickman in Die Hard. There is no subtlety in that relationship, and I love it. And don’t forget the whole Solid Snake / Liquid Snake reveal! Twin clones? Made from Big Boss’ DNA??? One totally ignorant of the others existence. The other, seeking revenge for wrongs unknowingly committed against him by the brother that doesn’t even know he exists. One designed to be the ultimate expression of the ultimate soldier. The other, given every proverbial short end of every proverbial genetic stick. But which is which??? (If you haven’t read the story summaries of the first 3 games at this point, you probably should. I mean, even if you have, all of this may not make a whole lot of sense. I know I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.)

Then there are the crazy, self referential exchanges that go on. Multiple times throughout the course of the game, characters will break the fourth wall with you: “Press the X button to regain your life! Don’t use a turbo controller or I’ll know!”; “I’ve got it! Use the controller port! Plug your controller into controller port 2! If you do he won’t be able to read your mind!”; having to contact a character for saving, who will literally ask you to “Save your data! I feel like something bad might happen.” It’s all incredibly quirky and fun. I literally laughed out loud at several of these moments.

Now, to be totally transparent, I used a walk through to beat this game. Again, I’m in it for the crazy, not the challenge. That said, even without it much of this game isn’t very difficult. My final play time was just over 8 hours, and I wasn’t exactly blitzing through it. The boss fights are, for the most part, downright simple. A few are frustrating, but for all the wrong reasons. For example, the 2nd time you fight Vulcan Raven, you are in this large room filled with big containers that break it up into a bit of a grid. He has a giant minigun that does a fair amount of damage to you, and a huge field of vision. Throughout the fight, he will, seemingly at random, patrol around this room, shoot you if he sees you, but not really attempt to follow you. The strategy for the fight is, essentially, shoot him in the back with one of your two rocket launchers repeatedly, while keeping your distance and running away from him after every shot.

Sorry for the terrible size and quality

Here’s where the games camera and controls really hurt. The fight itself isn’t very difficult, but the room is large enough that you can’t see the whole thing on your radar, so unless he’s pretty close to you, you don’t know where he is. The 3rd person camera view isn’t much better. If you look at the image to the right, you can see what I mean. Unless he’s pretty close to you, in a pretty sizable room, you’ll have a hard time locating him until he runs back at you. One of the rocket launchers is basically a fly-by-wire system. You shoot a rocket, and then take control of it. Every time you turn, it slows down and gradually re-accelerates, and it has a limited range. That’s all well and good, when you know where he is. Otherwise, you blindly fly the rocket around the area, hoping to run into him from behind (if you try and shoot him from the front he just shoots down the rocket). With either better camera controls or a larger range on the radar, the whole thing would have been far less frustrating. As it was, the fight took far longer than any other in the game for me, simply because I had such a hard time locating the boss.

One other boss fight to mention, and it’s the 2nd to last one against Metal Gear Rex, piloted by Liquid Snake. This fight I actually found to be a bit more challenging….at least if you did it the way you were supposed to. You’re essentially fighting a massive mech that is shooting at you with homing missiles, machine guns, and if you get too close, a laser. There are two phases to the fight – one where you have to target a specific spot on the mech’s shoulder with a stinger missile while the mech is running around and shooting at you. The second phase the mech is immobile, but still shooting at you with all the same weapons. The way you’re supposed to do this fight (and the way that ended up killing me several times), is to shoot the mech, dodge all his shots, use a grenade that stuns it for a few moments, shoot it again, rinse, and repeat. What turned out to work much more efficiently was to ignore the mechanics of the fight entirely, just stand in one spot, and blast away one shot after the other with the missile launcher. As long as you have a few healing items in your inventory, you can do this very safely. I was consistently able to get through phase one of the fight, but kept dying on phase 2. After 3 or 4 times having to start the fight over again during phase 2, I decided  just to try blasting the thing. Lo and behold, it keeled very quickly. Kind of disappointing, really. Didn’t quite expect to be able to brute force the penultimate boss quite so easily.

Perhaps my favorite thing in the entire game was the live action video that played over the end credits. If you’ve read up on the story, you know that this whole series has a very anti-nuclear bent to it. So, after you drive off into the sunset on a snow mobile with the girl (or guy, if you didn’t save the girl), they start to play all these Alaskan nature videos! You see flyovers of giant evergreen forests, panning shots of babbling brooks, a mushroom popping out of the ground, eagles soaring, fish jumping, flowers blooming! It’s almost as if Kojima is screaming at you, “SEE WHAT WE MIGHT DESTROY WITH THESE EVIL THINGS??? DO YOU SEE?????”

Actually, my second favorite part happens right after this as well. The credits are over, the screen goes black, and all of a sudden you hear two people start to talk. In what is perhaps the most blatant “we’re going to make another one of these!” moves of all time, it’s revealed that there is ANOTHER cloned brother! And…GASP! He’s the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! Dun dun DUNNNNNNNN! You also find out that Solid, who Liquid had thought was the “perfect” clone, was actually the imperfect one after all! THE TWISTS! THE TURNS! THE SHOCKING REVEALS! Oh Kojima, I love you so much! Never change, OK?

It is exactly this kind of crazy, over the top, stupidly dramatic, shove your ideals in my face, totally nonsensical, and utterly BEAUTIFUL storytelling that made me love this game. There are times it takes itself far too seriously (video of the Alaskan wilderness), times when it totally doesn’t (really bad bathroom humor), and times when I just can’t tell (all of this cloning nonsense). Taken as a whole, it’s far from perfect. But I think it’s pretty great. I can’t wait to dive into the next one! I’ll probably write about that too, because I have faith in the crazy that is Kojima!

I give MGS 4/5 stars. And now this is, apparently, a review. Of a 16 year old game. You’re welcome internet!