Backlog Game 003: Metal Gear Solid
Main image source: www.retromags.com
Ok, right off the bat, let me be clear: Metal Gear Solid for the original Playstation was NOT part of my backlog.
In fact, Metal Gear Solid was a formative experience of my childhood (probably yours too), from the anticipation created by a brief in-game cutscene on a demo disc, to actually playing through the game.
What makes this game even more important to me is that this part of my gaming life was lived at quite a significant time in my teenage life. My dad was transferred back to my home country of France on very short notice in 1998 and I was not happy about that, to say the least. A quarter century on I live here again now and I love it, because the world is different and I (thankfully) have a very different mind set now than I did as a shitty, meat-wad teenager.
In late 1998, though, totally different story.
The 90’s were a helluva time to be a kid in the US, and from the ages of 6 to 14 I revelled in soaking up all of the decade’s pop-culture goodness, so as far as I was concerned, America was where I belonged.
But my siblings and I had no choice when faced with my dad’s news, so off we went.
Leading up to late 1998, I hadn’t really heard much - or cared much - about Metal Gear Solid, it was just some glimpses of headlines in magazines here and there I skipped over while reading the stuff on Perfect Dark.
That changed a couple of days before our departure, when my mom let us buy a bunch of magazines for the flight, one of which was the iconic (to me anyways) September 1998 issue of EGM with Solid Snake on the cover, about to ruin a Genome Soldier’s night shift.
Back then of course, game magazines were pretty much all you had available to learn about a game. Until the arrival of YoutTube, you didn’t just read articles once, you pored over them, studied them many, many times over, and spent hours imagining what the game looked and played like.
That was certainly the case for me, since when we moved in 1998, there just wasn’t any widespread internet or much else to do (yea, I know, being in France without anything to do sounds absurd, but again, I was a meatwad teenager) while we waited for our things to arrive.
That’s when I first started to get excited about the game.
How could anyone not get psyched about Metal Gear Solid after reading this description of the first big cut scene of the game. In reference to that heart-attack, the authors write:
“The first time you experience this is utterly incredible. Never before has a video game bombarded every available sense with such dramatic input.””
My indulgent parents, tired of my meatwad cries of “Mom, Dad, you ruined my life I want my friends there’s nothing to do here!!!!” finally broke down and bought my siblings and I a PAL PSX, which allowed me to view a cutscene on a European demo disk showing Snake about to face off against Raven, which only got me more excited.
But, being a spoiled asshole this still wasn’t enough for me.
Yes, we now had a PAL PSX and a small handful of ok-ish games, but new game releases tended to show up last in Europe back in those days, in inferior form due to the PAL standard. Those objective facts aside I simply didn’t like being in France. Sticking to only playing NTSC rather than PAL games (once my NTSC PSX had reached me from the shipping container) felt like an act of defiance, what I rebel I was!
So, once the game released, I had to wait once again for it to arrive from the US, which back then could happen on the timescale of several weeks, crossing into months.
After finally receiving the game, I played through it twice, to get both “Meryl endings”, and it was just as epic as my teenage mind thought it would be.
Now exactly 25 years removed (!) from the publication of the article in EGM, I can safely say that the boss fight with Psycho Mantis had as much of an effect on me as it did the authors. I also remember being quite proud of myself for figuring out the frequency on the back of the jewel case, with no easily accessible strategy guides at the time.
The anti-climax of Metal Gear Solid
Despite having had a lot of fun while playing the game, I’m not sure it had quite the overall impact on me that Hideo Kojima envisioned for players. As a 14 year old teenager, studious as I was, I just didn’t have the background and life experience to grasp the anti-war and nuclear non-proliferation themes (not to mention the fact that the US was still years away from the war in Iraq).
From a narrower, gaming point of view, what should have been for me - and likely was for millions of other gamers - the start of a long relationship with the franchise fizzled, though that was more due to timing than lack of interest.
The Metal Gear Solid 2 trailer that literally made mouths drop (mine included) premiered at E3 2000, with the game releasing in late 2001.
I was certainly interested in playing this sequel, but at the time I was heavily occupied with school and applying to college, then in 2002 I was studying for some pretty grueling French high-school exams, before getting ready to go off to college in the Summer.
So besides messing around for a few minutes with a demo on a friend’s PS2, that was it for me.
Making up for lost time…or at least, attempting to…
This was all a very long detour to say that while the PSX original is not in my backlog, every other subsequent game in the series very much is…
Or is that now “was?”…
For months I was super, super stoked on the idea of playing so many Metal Gear Solid games, so about a week prior to writing this I pulled out my Playstation Mini to play the OG and…
Yea, it was not good.
The graphics, cutting-edge in 1998, just don’t hold up in the same way Crash Bandicoot’s or Final Fantasy 7’s do.
I think a big part of the reason has to do with the color palette used in Metal Gear Solid, totally appropriate when trying to convey a cold Alaskan environment, but really, really rough-looking when blown up on a modern television.
Having said that, I can get over dated graphics if the gameplay is there, but frankly, the gameplay and controls just felt super, super clunky.
To start, the above-the-head camera meant it was difficult seeing what was ahead of me, and switching constantly to first person goggles felt really awkward.
More horrifying was the combat. Now, I didn’t expect anything close to Sifu, but everything about combat was difficult: lining up shots was a pain, the punching, kicking and throwing only felt like it worked some of the time, and even just running around didn’t feel “right”.
The result: I quit when I got to the Revolver Ocelot boss fight.
I suppose I could have toughed it out, but I have a philosophy when it comes to entertainment: its only purpose is to be fun, so if it’s not fun, there is no reason at all for me to stick with it, and I should bolt for the next thing that is fun.
Perhaps you disagree, but please keep in mind that I’m just one person.
I’m not at all trying to take away from the impact or the influence of Metal Gear Solid, both of which remain huge to this day. That influence was pretty immediately felt, because after Metal Gear Solid came out there was a trend towards stealth games, with Splinter Cell being one of the most notable offshoots (side note: I’m very excited to dive into that series and experience how it plays in 2023).
However, for now I’m left to contemplate my next moves with regards to subsequent Metal Gear Solid games: do I just watch a recap of the first game and go directly to the second (and third, and fourth…), assuming that the issues I mentioned were fixed on better hardware, or do I abandon the series for now?
What do you all think?