“I’m the only one who laughs at your jokes when they are so bad, and your jokes are always bad, but they’re not as bad as this.”
~Pavement
If you haven’t played metal gear solid before, you really should. The entire franchise. With the imminent release of metal gear solid five, mgs is in the air.
The games have aged remarkably well, even on the PlayStation. The mechanics may be puzzling to those unfamiliar, but the plotlines and characters are timeless. Metal gear solid 1 serves as the greatest eighties action movie story ever told, a brilliant tribute that transcends its source material. That story is still there. The story of a lone chain smoker trying to save the world, battling against elite goons and paranormal bosses, hiding in boxes.
The mgs series is one of the greatest, and to read or watch any if it would be robbing yourself. The series exists to be played, experienced, not vicariously observed.
Yet the mechanics of mgs1ps1 are antiquated as a John Deere rusted to seize, never to turn over. It’s a game controlled by a dpad, with textures containing all the fidelity of a Microsoft paint bucket tool.
The story, dialogue, characters, all still stand true however.
So what is one to do?
A GameCube remake exists, a total remake containing the control improvements of mgs2. GameCube graphics still hold true and please the eye, unlike the blocky polygonal purgatory of ps1 or n64 games.
The remake caught flak for escalating the cutscenes from relatively grounded to insane anime levels of action. With time this sin has faded, the new cutscenes pale in comparison to the insanity of mgs4. I actually like them, grounded with the background of an Alaskan nuclear disposal site, layers of color.
Complaints are common about Twin Snakes’ alleged easyness, but it’s really not that much easier. I found myself getting caught much more often than in the ps1 version due to increased enemy artificial intelligence. You can always turn the difficulty up anyways.
“I fall out of the car like a hostage from a plane”
~The Mountain Goats
I used to loop the game as a lonely kid, the ps1 version, beating the game over and over until I could do it in five hours without thinking. Even for me, I found the ps1 mechanics impossible to return to.
Play metal gear solid one, either again or for the first time, and play it on GameCube if you can. If you can’t, whatever.
You hear the new Wilco album? I don’t think it’s what I want.