Retronomicon 11.18.09: Metal Gear Solid

Posted by Lee Price on 11.18.2009

This week the Retronomicon slips into a sweet body hugging stealth suit to take out a group of strange soldiers intent on leading the world into a state of permanent warfare. So whip on a bandanna and hide underneath a box as this week the Retronomicon looks at Metal Gear Solid.

Greetings to all of my fellow retro-heads, I am your host Lee Price and this is the Retronomicon, bringing you the best column that remembers when this was all just fields. I figured after the cuddliness of last week's entry I'd go for something with a little bit of a harder edge this week. Strangely enough this week's entry made its impact on Western shores in a similar time period as Pokémon did too. But before we get to that I have happy news for me. I finally have a PS3. It took me long enough but I now own the big three consoles of this generation. Incidentally busting out MGS4 for the first time this week is partially what inspired me to do this week's entry. I have also been blasting my way through GTAIV again. I love that game so much more now that I've played both Saints Row games and seen what a buggy mess the game world's in both of those games are when compared to Liberty City. I love it and hopefully I'll be getting the two expansions when I finish the game, with the intention of going through it all at once. I also finally got round to visiting London this past weekend. Twenty three years old and Saturday was the first time I'd visited my country's capital city. Still, I had an awesome time with a very good friend and could have spent literally all day in the Natural History Museum if there wasn't other stuff I wanted to do. But enough about my gaming habits because I'm sure you're only here for one thing so welcome to the...





Comments

A fair sprinkling of comments last week for Pokémon so lets dig right in. August had this to say about the little video clip;

OMG, was the Mew video legitimate? I think I just creamed myself.

*busts out his old gameboy and pokémon red*

As far as I'm aware the video is legitimate my good man/woman, and the method has been floating about for donkey's years now. I just hope you changed your trousers after your little "accident". Remember people don't like to be around the smell of fresh cream!

Next up we have AG Awesome;

Red was always my first though I wish Yellow would get re-released as it was my favorite. Maybe a DSi VC title if they ever go that route...

I could certainly see the Pokémon games working in the DSi environment. As for me, Blue was my first so naturally became my favorite. I'm not sure why though, I assume its because it took my Pokémon cherry.

Third in line is the always awesome Armando Rodriguez;

I still have Pokémon Blue and play it from time to time. The thing that killed my love for Pokémon is not the gameplay mechanics: I think they are solid. What killed my interest was that they expanded the roster of Pokémon too much and they are getting a bit stupid. At least most of the Red/Blue/Yellow ones were based on animals and plants, but some of the new ones are a bit too much.

I couldn't agree more. Personally I think the series peaked with Gold/Silver. Since then its pretty much been a rehash of the original games, with less and less enticing new Pokémon with each iteration.

Next up is The Salms who displays a decidedly perturbing view of a particular cartoon character;

Who's that chick to the left of Ash?

Doesn't matter...

Hey baby, how YOU doin?

That chick is Dawn I believe, and she puts in an appearance in the Diamond and Pearl version of the TV series. She also looks like she's about 12. Shame on you Salms!

Next up is shaydee who had this to say;


Pokemon is still great in my opinion.. if you didn't own the first 2 generations. after gold/silver i feel they basically repeat themselves with different monsters. They still have 4 of the 5 original HM moves. as for where the series could go.. I'd actually like a game where you physically CAN catch them all on 1 game. No trades, no downloads. I know that's not going to happen. Alternatively they could go fallout 3 style and make a pokemon slayer game. basically you have your gang of 6 monsters (as live bait) and an arsenal of weaponry and hunting items. The pokémon world is full of bounty hunters and they hire merceneries to capture or kill/skin/stuff and mount (or just sell the carcass for $$$) if done right, it will work. It'll just be a total re-write of what the franchise was all about.

While I'm not too sure about the merc idea, I've been busting for a version of Pokémon with all the little beasties available for capture. Granted it takes away from one of the principals that Tajiri hoped to implement with the whole trading Pokémon aspect of the series, but I believe the series has gone on long enough that a massive free roaming game on the Wii, taking in all the worlds and Pokémon would be a massive way to give the series a final send-off. I can but hope.

And finally we have Joe Kerr who disagrees with my assertion that Pokémon isn't as popular amongst the kids these days;

I don't know about that. The first grade classes I work with are WAY into it and so are my younger cousins, they know the new guys like I knew the original 151. I think it's still going pretty strong.

See I have the exact opposite experience. Apart from a brief fling with the series, my younger brother has rarely been all that bothered with Pokémon, and he is of the age where he will be following all the trends at school. Same with my younger cousins. I wonder if its something to do with where we are at. Perhaps the series is still going stronger in the US than the UK, I dunno.

Anyways enough with comments for this week, its time to get to business. So strap on those rose-tinted specs because this week the Retronomicon takes a look at Metal Gear Solid.



The Background

The enigmatic Hideo Kojima had rarely been heard from after the release of his original Metal Gear games. Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake had been pretty much the biggest and best reasons to own the relatively unpopular MSX2 console, and once said console had been relegated to the backlog of history, the games had seemingly gone the same way.

Kojima had never quite hit the jackpot with any of his subsequent games in terms of commercial recognition, both Snatcher and Policenauts never quite gaining the following that their quality deserved. On top of that his magnum opus had been bastardized with the release of Snake's Revenge on the NES, which was developed by Konami without Kojima's involvement and in the process sparked the creation of Metal Gear's true sequel, again on the MSX2.

Despite work beginning in 1995 on what was originally envisioned as a 3DO game before that console's failure, it wasn't until 1998 that Konami and Hideo Kojima were ready to unleash the biggest and best game thus far in the series on the PS1. In truth, despite all the hype surrounding its release, there are few who could have really foreseen the impact that the mighty Metal Gear Solid would have on the gaming landscape.



The Game

Metal Gear Solid was quite unlike any title that had been released up to that point. While stealth had been incorporated in titles before, most notably in the previous Metal Gear titles and a little bit in Goldeneye, the gaming world had never seen a stealth based game with the sheer scope of the fully 3D Metal Gear Solid.

The plot of the game revolves around Solid Snake, a former soldier who is brought out of retirement to infiltrate a nuclear weapons disposal facility near Alaska to investigate and neutralize the threat posed by his former allies, FOXHOUND. On top of this he must rescue two men that the group have taken hostage, the DARPA chief Donald Anderson and Kenneth Baker, head of a massive arms manufacturer.

Snake had previously been living a happy life freezing his nads off in the Alaskan wilderness, so is understandably a little grouchy that he has been called into service again by Colonel Roy Campbell. His mood isn't improved once he learns of the true reason for FOXHOUND doing what they are doing, that is to gain the launch codes to the top secret Metal Gear project that most thought to have been terminated with the destruction of Shadow Moses.

Along the way he also has to deal with his developing feelings for the Colonel's daughter, a green soldier named Meryl who basically serves as Snake's secondary reason to find and defeat FOXHOUND once Sniper Wolf is finished with her. There's also Otacon, a man who eventually becomes Snake's most trusted ally but starts out as a rather strange little man who wets his pants at the first sign of danger and has an alarming addiction to mech based animé.

There are also a renegade group of supervillain like soldiers to deal with, the main concerns being Revolver Ocelot and Liquid Snake, the dragon and the head of FOXHOUND respectively. For the sake of simplicity, because God knows the Metal Gear plot is so convoluted it can make the unwary gamer's head spin, Liquid is Solid Snake's brother, cloned from the same genetic material as him, with said genetic material coming from the greatest soldier that ever lived, Big Boss. Liquid wants to reclaim the Boss man's remains for reaons not entirely clear and there is some bull about one of the brother's being given dominant genes and one recessive, though this doesn't really play into the laws of genetics all that well. All you really need to know is that Liquid has a massive chip on his shoulder when it comes to proving his superiority over Solid and this is reason enough to pound seven shades out of him.

Ocelot is the most wily character in the Metal Gear series, and MGS sees him at the peak of his treachery and double-crossing. While the Patriots and the like weren't introduced until later on in the series, the player can tell that there is something a little... different about Ocelot. He doesn't seem to follow orders as blindly as the rest of FOXHOUND, and its little wonder that he is the only member of the group to survive the game. His cunning combined with Liquid's desire to beat Solid and regain their "father" Big Bosses remains, alongside the rest of the freaks of FOXHOUND provide for a superb cast of enemies for Solid Snake outside of the rank and file soldiers that you spend the levels dispatching.

So in very basic terms Snake has to prevent the launch of Metal Gear REX, which is a nuclear capable walking tank, save a couple of people, help out Meryl and Otacon and kill all the bad guys. Now anybody who has played a Metal Gear game knows that I could probably spend the entire column and more spouting off about the story of the game, which should give you a clue as to the main drawing point of Metal Gear Solid. The story, while long-winded, is amongst the best and most cinematic ever released on the PS1, hell its up there with the best ever. There is not a single bit of FMV in the game, the cutscenes are presented using the in-game graphics engine, a technique that helps keep the whole game flowing together rather than breaking up the action to show flashy video. It was also a technique that quickly came to be adopted by other games of the era and is just one of the multitude of ways that Metal Gear Solid was streets ahead of its peers.

Gameplay wise Metal Gear Solid was a revelation. The core design and play of the game hadn't changed much since the MSX2 games. You still sneak around, using cover to avoid detection by guards and cameras, all in aid of reaching your various objectives. The implementation was streets ahead of the competition though. Guards reacted with an intelligence previously unseen, following sounds to investigate, the game incorporating a useful knocking maneuver to take advantage of this, checking out footprints let in the snow, as well as investigating obvious hiding places such as ducts and the infamous cardboard boxes when in an alert phase.

The way around the guards was simple. Either stay out of their line of sight by learning their patrol patterns and how best to bypass them. Or incapacitate them, either with weapons or a sneaky little choke hold. In all fairness, the PS1's restrictions meant that the guards sight was limited to a few feet in front of themselves so it wasn't the hardest task in the world to avoid them, but the way they reacted to their surroundings, the noises, the subtle differences such as the footprints mentioned earlier, set them apart from any AI enemies that had been seen on a console game up to this point. There's a reason why Kojima waited so long to bring Metal Gear back to the forefront and its because he needed consoles with the power to deliver his vision as he saw fit.

At its heart though, the game is basically a massive fetch quest. You need to get various keycards or weapons to bypass certain areas, so there's plenty of backtracking involved, as well as potential to get caught by the patrols. This doesn't erode from the fun of the game though, as there are so many little touches that make Metal Gear Solid perhaps the defining game of a generation. How many games of this era allowed you to place a block of C4 on an enemy while he takes a leak, then blow him up when he returns to his colleagues? What about identifying Meryl when she is in disguise by looking at the way her arse wiggles compared to the other guards? Or how about Psycho Mantis' ability to read your memory card? All in pretty much the same area of the game! There are so many little things in this game that push it past even being labeled as great, right up to the rarefied air of being a true, bona-fide classic of computer gaming.

The list goes on. How many people were stumped by the cryptic statement that Meryl's codec code was on the bottom corner of the CD case? This little stunt encapsulates what Metal Gear Solid achieves in one revelatory moment that can't fail to bring a smile to your face when the penny finally drops. What about Psycho Mantis being able to read your controller inputs? Another penny dropping moment that gives MGS an extra dimension that games just didn't have at that time. It broke the fourth wall and forced you to think about things in ways that no other game had managed up to that point. It was, in one word, genius. For me the main thing that stands out for the Metal Gear series has never been the story, though its amongst the most developed and impressive in gaming history, but all of the little touches that go into the games that prove that the series is a labor of love for Hideo Kojima, and nowhere is this more obvious than with Metal Gear Solid.



You also have the boss battles. Each enemy you face has to have a different strategy employed against them, and it is a joy to figure out just what ways you can deal punishment to an enemy. Do you engage Sniper Wolf in a sniper's battle in the snow covered wilderness or do you just fire guided missiles in her direction? How do you intend on dealing with Vulcan Raven's massive tank? The boss battles provide a shot of straight out action and tension that is different to that offered by the main game. Stealth is the order of the day with the normal soldiers, but when it comes time to play with the big boys there is rarely anywhere to hide and you have to use all of your wits to get past the members of FOXHOUND. Each encounter is memorable, some more so than others of course, with special mention going to Psycho Mantis, the battle with Metal Gear REX and the hand to hand fight with Liquid. But all of them add to the game, as well as providing storyline exposition in their aftermath that helps you see just why the members of FOXHOUND do what they do.

Graphically the game was a revelation for its time, and at one point could hold claim to being the most graphically impressive game on the PS1. It eschewed the pre-rendered backgrounds of other big titles, like the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy series, to go for a fully 3D look that ended up immersing the player in the world on a scale that other titles couldn't manage. Metal Gear Solid, while no longer one the best looking games about, is one of those rare 3D PS1 games that hasn't aged visually to the point where its laughable.

The fixed camera helped display the environment perfectly, though its use did necessitate the inclusion of the radar system as it hindered your view of Snake's surroundings somewhat. This little problem would be solved in later games with the introduction of the first-person view to Snake's repertoire but it could be a little irritating to deal with when you weren't sure what cover would be available up ahead and had no way of finding out without journeying onwards.

Still the use of the in-game graphics engine for cutscenes also played a massive role in immersing the player into the game, as they could be implemented without loading screens to lend the game an immediate and cinematic quality that few up to that point had enjoyed.

Sound wise the game was streets ahead of the competition as well. It incorporated voice work on a scale that had rarely been seen before and it was all executed with just the right amount of hammy delivery to fit in perfectly with the game. The Metal Gear games have always had a slightly quirky sense of humor and Metal Gear Solid is no different, which means that it wouldn't be a surprise if Snake's surprised statement of "METAL GEAR!!!" upon seeing the monstrous contraption despite knowing that it was there was completely deliberate. Special mention must go to David Hayter for his role as Snake, as he provides the character with a voice so gruff and perfectly fitting that it would be impossible to imagine Solid Snake with any other voice anymore.

The music is amazing as well, from the operatic opening through to the tension of the alert phase music right down to the main theme, every musical choice in this game is spot on and brilliantly implemented. There aren't many games that have a soundtrack that is worth owning, but Metal Gear Solid is definitely one of them, and it would be well worth you while to track it down.

All of the elements combine to make Metal Gear Solid one of the most realistic, cinematic, tense and, most importantly, enjoyable games of the 32 Bit era. While not perfect, some cutscenes can drag and the inability to move the camera can be a bit of an annoyance, Metal Gear Solid was an achievement above and beyond anything that had been thought possible on the humble PS1 and established its creator as one of the truly great visionaries of computer game development.



The Aftermath

Metal Gear Solid went on to become one of the biggest selling games on the PS1, with sales topping 6 million worldwide, making it a household name in the process. Critical reception was equally rapturous, with universally high marks being awarded to the game by just about any publication that would dedicate space to it. MGS popularized the stealth genre and within months games were copying some of the multitude of brilliant ideas that the game introduced, though none could pull them off with the same panache.

The series itself has gone from strength to strength, despite Hideo Kojima's constant insistence that whatever Metal Gear game he is working on will be his last. The game saw the release of an expanded version, called Metal Gear Solid: Integral, as well as, up to this point, 2 sequels, a prequel, expanded editions of all of these, a remake, a port to Windows and a few spin-off games besides. With Metal Gear Solid the Metal Gear games gained the popularity that had eluded them on the MSX2 and has since become one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.

As for Hideo Kojima, much to his chagrin Metal Gear Solid has pretty much become the only thing the casual gamer is ever going to recognize him for. This doesn't seem to sit very well with the man at times. Hell MGS2 could have been seen as one massive "Take That" at the gamers who clamored so hard for a sequel to this classic, and not just because of the introduction of Raiden. Outside of the Metal Gear games, Kojima also displayed his flair for innovation with a GBA game called Boktai, which required you to charge up the main character's weapon of choice by actually using the sun's rays to charge the meter. Kojima created a legitimately solar powered video game weapon!

Outside of that and Zone of the Enders, which was quickly forgotten when it was revealed that an MGS2 demo came packaged with it, Kojima has done little more than work on Metal Gear since the release of Metal Gear Solid. He has his own production company inside Konami dedicated to his vision for the series and it is pretty much unheard of for a developer to become so encapsulated in a series that it overtakes anything else they do.

The real legacy of Metal Gear Solid can be seen today in just about any game that employs stealth. This was the game to popularize and, in many ways, perfect the mechanic. It also introduced a cinematic style that is aped by games the world over. It is a pretty safe bet that the gaming landscape would be very different if Metal Gear Solid had never seen a release.

The Final Word

Metal Gear Solid is hands down the most influential and important game released on the PS1. Despite its minor niggles and flaws, this is as close to gaming perfection as you will see on Sony's little console and still stands today as one of the crowning moments of computer gaming history. This game is that important.

The Price is Right

There are a couple of versions of MGS floating about. I'll include Twin Snakes because, despite some altered cutscenes and implementing some of MGS2's features, it is pretty much the same game. The Bleemcast! Version won't be getting a mention though. As usual, extra dollars for quality packaging.

UK

PlayStation - £15 – 25.
PC - Approx £15.
Gamecube (Twin Snakes) - £25 – 35.

US

PlayStation - Approx $20.
PC - $40 – 50.
Gamecube (Twin Snakes) - $30 – 30.

The Guy Who Can do it Better Than You

This week we return to the always impressive speed runs. Check it out.



Enjoy and catch you next week.