The Book of Revenant

This was written a whlie back and I forgot to post it? Oh well. Now that Metal Gear Solid 4 has released a few weeks back and I’ve been waiting for a price drop so my cheep ass can enjoy it, I figured I’d finally get this posted.

Way back in September of last year, I took a trip to Osaka’s beloved Den-Den Town with the intentions of picking various games. While talking with thetrin, I came to the realization that I no longer had a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 in my possession. A cardinal sin, considering it is one of my most beloved games of all time. My goal was set. Get a copy as soon as possible.

Little did I know that a collection of all Metal Gear games had been released in Japan. That’s right, from the humble days on the old MSX computing systems (ported over to the PS2) to the 3 released for the Playstation systems. It even has Portable Ops, one of the PSP games. Six games in total, and it was only thirty more bucks than the asking price of MGS2 by its lonesome. Sold. It even came with “Document of MGS2″ which is basically a documentary disc, and “Metal Gear Saga” which is a basic rundown of the games’ stories in chronological order. It also teases the senses with a brief look at Metal Gear Solid 4.

At that time, I had no internet, hadn’t started working yet and was still a bit jet lagged. So when I got home I plopped in the disc containing the two MSX games and started my journey. Let me tell you, it’s one hell of a ride.

Metal Gear is definitely dated. If you skip past a bit of dialogue, well, tough shit because the person disappears once you leave the room they were in. If you’re used to the Solid games, you might try to contact people via the codec only to find that they don’t answer ninety percent of the damned time. Snake also looks bizarrely like Steve Carell, which made me giggle as I ran around carrying a hand grenade. I had to resort to reading a walkthrough at least two times since I just couldn’t figure out what to do and didn’t realize I had to call someone in the right room and only when all the guards were dead. Blegh.

Now, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is amazing. While it was admirable to see all the aspects present in the 3-D games in the series start to develop in the first game, it was shocking to see how close they were in this 2D classic. The game hardly shows its age and would be just fine as a new release today were it not for the asinine graphical standards most gamers love to hold on to.

Metal Gear Solid is probably the most painful to play. The game is blurry, a bit clunky at points but still the wonderfully bizarre game that helped get me back into gaming almost ten Christmases ago.

Then we come to Metal Gear Solid 2, which is easily one of my favorite games of all time. Every time I play it is fantastic and I’ve lost count of my playthroughs. There’s really nothing more I can say about this game. I love it. I can argue for hours with you about the story, but in the end it entertained me and pissed off a lot of other people. The issue comes in the fact that some take it far too serious, which I can see annoying some people. And if you just played enjoyed it, even acknowledging how it can be silly as hell, you often get lumped into the ‘obsessive about stories in games and never reads a real book’ bunch. What can you do.

Conversely, Metal Gear Solid 3 was painful for me to complete. The story was great. Let me just get that out right now. Loved it. But the gameplay. Dear god. Having to manage your camouflage and wounds in the menu was just an unnecessarily hassle. Whoops, got shot! Losing blood! Let’s not use the bandage item and be done with it, let’s go in the menu where I have to select anesthetic, then the knife to get the bullet out, then sew the wound up, then apply the bandage. I can technically do all this while the enemy is still supposedly shooting at me, so it just feels strange and unnecessary. With the scenario being what it was they did what they could, but Metal Gear in the jungle wasn’t fun in the first game and wasn’t fun in this one.

MGS3 ruined my anticipation for 4. I’ll still pick up the game, but it dropped from “Day one!!!!!!!” to “Budget price, maybe?” I’m thinking another replay of MGS2 might get me in the mood for 4, but with my backlog being what it is these days, that just isn’t prudent. Oh well.