I have finished
Metal Gear Solid.
So, I get to the end of the Metal Gear fight and I'm like, okay, blowing up a giant mech with a missile, not bad for an ending, let's watch the cut-scene.
Oh no, first I have to punch out Liquid Snake while shirtless. I alread moaned to ya'll about my
love for the unarmed combat mechanics, so you guys can imagine how much I enjoyed that. After getting bested many many times, I finally punched him off the side of the mech and was happy to settle in to the final cut-scene.
Oh no, first I have to go through a long complicated escape sequence with a third person machine gun. At that point it was about 3 AM, and I decided the end could wait another day.
This afternoon when I went back finish, I died another handful of times. At a certain point I figured I was missing something obvious, so I googled the final sequence (I didn't look for a walkthrough, I went to some other message board where they talked about the game. I know I should have experienced Tsumuri's dopamine low for doing it, but damn it I was really happy to learn that I could hold down the triangle to do the last chase in first person. After that, I beat the thing on my first try.
Here's the ending breakdown (I still haven't learned how to upload photos here yet...)
Game Level / Normal (Don't care, won't play without Radar)
Play Time / 12:52:09
Save / 14 Times
Continue / 72 Times (I feel like half of these were due to one fist fight or the other)
Being Found / 39 Ties (There's more to life than stealth
)
Enemies / 257 Killed (that seemed like a lot to me at first, and then I remembered that there was one enemy that I would shot in the back of the head while he was peeing EVERY time I passed through the area)
Rations / 136 Used
Code Name: Shark (I guess because I killed a ton of people?)
Special Items
"Camera"
"Bandana"
I guess because there are two discs, and also because there is a relatively smaller amount of content on the second disc, I expected the game to be much longer. That it wasn't is a breath of fresh air to be honest. I think hearing someone yell "Snake? SNAAAAKE?" one more time and I would have left the experience feeling weary. As is, I found the game to be fun, a little, but not a lot, challenging at times, and a major kick of Nostalgia. I probably played the demo for this game roughly 12-15 years ago, so finally seeing the whole thing through was more satisfying than I can really explain.
Also, side note, when you guys played this back in the day did you ever read the mission logs? They are dotted with typos. My favorite (and first) was when I came across the word Sanek, and it took me longer than I'd care to admit to realize they'd misspelled Snake.
I'm having a hard time giving this a single rating, so I'm going to break down the elements.
Game Mechanics: 6.5/10 This might be unnecessarily harsh, but if you're going to make a big deal out of fist fights, you owe it to the player to make the hand to hand combat mechanics more intuitive. Not being able to have any control over the camera, unless I'm switching to first person mode in which case I'm immobile, got old at times too. Also, that the game explained every nuance of each dot on my radar but failed to teach me to use the machine gun in first person made me give it harsher marks as well).
Visuals: 8/10 Yeah, the character models are hella polygonal, but for 98 this game looks and feels incredible. I've played Ps2 games that this one puts to shame. I'm also giving points here for interesting camera angles during cut-scenes)
World Building/Kojei Whackyness: 10/10 The "plot" to this game is nuts, but I found its bizarre twists and turns to be more endearing than inane. Also, I played this on an old TV so when the screen went black during the Psycho Mantis fight and it said Hideo on the top right of my screen, it really did have the intended momentary freak-out effect. I think if I'd tried to take this game seriously I would have been annoyed, but because I relaxed and let the game by it's beautifully strange little self I found myself really enjoying it. Hell, I even went out of my way to chat with people about on the codec consistently. Also, the villains have some majorly Bond-esque names that make them extra fun. Also, Cam Clarke and Jennifer Hale (who are both credited under other names for some reason) are some my favorite voice actors.
Effectiveness of Overwrought Moral Lessons: 2/10 Despite what I said above, being reminded to live and love about 300 times got kind old, especially as the "reward" for finishing like every boss fight. Also, Maybe in the late 90's people weren't thinking about the threat of Nuclear Warfare and needed a sobering reminder, but these days Presidents and Dictators are subtweeting threats at each other and promising fire and fury, so ending with a statistic about the amount of warheads still in the world neither surprised me nor made me rethink how I felt on the subject.
If you average this out, it amounts to a total of 6.5, but I wouldn't weight all of the categories equally. If you forced me to, I might give it a 7/10 to a 7.5/10, but I'm also recognizing that I have some heavy biases about the control schemes (in fact, that's half of why I made this my "Hard" mode for the month).
I'm going to take a long break before I start
MGS2, I don't want to burn myself out, and I feel like as much as I loved the Kojimaness this time through, I don't want to that charm to wear off due to overexposure.