My History With Metal Gear

By George Walker | March 4, 2008

Apparently, MGS4 is too big to fit a 50GB Blu-Ray disc. This is why, explained Kojima, a few features had to be dropped from the game.

This is another reminder to me that the Metal Gear series has not exactly aged well since the good ol’ days of the NES.

I played the original Metal Gear and was pretty much stumped. I had a hard time getting past the first two or three screens. The concept of sneaking around and trying to avoid contact with the enemy was totally foreign to me. Stealth gameplay? What’s that?

After a few years, I decided to go back and try again. I picked it up again after I had finished Snake’s Revenge. This time around, things made sense and I finally finished the game. Metal Gear was certainly one of my favorite games for the NES at that point.

Despite Kojima’s lack of involvement with Snake’s Revenge, I still enjoyed that title, as well. Yeah. That’s right. So what?

It wasn’t until years later that my love of the Metal Gear series would start eroding. Metal Gear Solid was released on PS1, and then a few years later for PC (which is when I picked it up and played through it.) I must say, I had a good time with that game. Right up until it came time to ascend Communications Tower A. Could they possibly send MORE enemies at you? No, they couldn’t, because they already brought in every faceless henchman from the four corners of the earth and crammed them into the top of Communications Tower A. Oh man, my favorite part was when you couldn’t see the soldiers shooting you because the camera angle was so retarded. Then, you’d be dead. Good times. Or not.

Unfortunately, this was the beginning of my hatred towards third-person action games. A hatred that was not to be assuaged until November 2006 when Gears of War arrived. (Though I still consider that game more akin to a FPS than a typical third-person game.)

So, I never finished Metal Gear Solid.

I didn’t play Metal Gear Solid 2 until it was released for the original Xbox. I understand I saved myself a lot of rage this way because I was able to play as Solid Snake right out of the box. And I’ll tell you what, I’d be pissed, too, if I had to play as that pansy the whole game. It was bad enough that you had to run around as Naked Raiden. I can see why Kojima is trying to make Raiden appear as a tough guy in MGS4. He’s got years of gamer-hate against the blonde bombshell to overcome. If Raiden is a massive bad-arse in MGS4, then it’ll totally justify making him the main character of MGS2, right? Okay, sure. But does he HAVE to wear make-up and high heels?

There are two other problems I had with MGS2. First, that “boss battle” where you fight wave after wave of Metal Gears has GOT to be one of the worst and laziest boss battle I’ve ever encountered. Play at a higher difficulty? Well, then you just have to fight MORE Metal Gears. yawwwwwwwwn

Lastly, the story is… hard to follow at best. Now, I’m the first to fall in line under the banner of deep storylines, but this is taking it to the extreme. Unfortunately, if you’ve watched a lot of anime (as I have) then you may find (as I have) that MGS2 is nothing but a conspiracy theory wrapped in a bunch of existential post-modern trappings that define mediocrity in some of the more serious anime series out there. I tend to think of it as National Treasure meets The Matrix Trilogy. In other words: meh.

After the MGS2 backlash, Kojima went back to Metal Gear’s roots by dropping Snake in the jungle and reestablishing the core survival/stealth gameplay for Metal Gear Solid 3. I bought it. I played it for a few hours… but unfortunately it wasn’t compelling enough to prompt me to finish it. I probably consider this one of my major gaming sins. By the time I got around to getting MGS3, I was already pretty deep into the Splinter Cell series. But that’s no excuse. I simply was too busy playing other things, I suppose.

Now we have Metal Gear Solid 4. There’s been a number of trailers now, and I don’t know which is more disturbing, Raiden’s stiletto heels of death or the unintentionally hilarious cow-bots. And now, it sounds like the game is going to be so full of conspiracies, over-wrought dialog, and cow-bots that they can’t even fit it onto 50GB of Blue-Laser-based storage.

Is there case for too much gameplay? If I’m 80 hours into MGS4 and I’m still fighting multiple waves of bovine leggy-bots, I’m going to eat the disc. I’m not even kidding here. I will smash the disc and physically ingest it. All 50GB of it.