Perception, Information, and Reality: Metal Gear Solid 2

I tried to start writing this about half a dozen times in my head, and each time, I stopped and started over.  Each time, I tried to tackle it from a new angle, and each time, I had to give it up.  Eventually, I threw my hands in the air, said “fuck it!” and decided to have a beer.  The throwing my hands in the air and saying “fuck it!” were figurative.  I tend not to do things like that when my wife is around, as I think she’ll start worrying if I’m talking profanity and gesticulating to no one in particular.  The beer was entirely factual.

Really, what can I say about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that hasn’t already been said a hundred times over?  That hasn’t already been observed with more depth, and the benefit of more disciplined and motivated research, study, and applied thought than I have the will to muster? 

And the fact is that, at this late date – some thirteen years after the game first came out – there really isn’t much new ground to cover.  You can view the plot of Sons of Liberty as a deconstruction of the tropes and story beats of the previous game, or you can view it as a reflection of those tropes and story beats.  You can say it’s director Hideo Kojima’s attempt to troll fans of the series in the name of getting out from under the behemoth he’s created (he’s said on several occasions that he wants for the love of God to stop making Metal Gear Solid games, but can’t seem to stay away; it’s his baby, after all, and even if he wants nothing more to do with it, he cares too much to let it go wrong in someone else’s hands).  You can say that it’s clever, that it’s overwrought, or that it’s wrought just fine.  You can say that it’s stupid and pretentious and silly, or that it’s serious and deep and turgid with meaning.

You can, in fact, say pretty much any damned thing you like about Sons of Liberty, and that’s really the whole problem I was having at the beginning of this writing.  One of the really interesting things when it comes to talking or writing about Metal Gear Solid 2 is that no matter what you do eventually wind up saying, you will inevitably and without fail find someone, somewhere, who will agree with you completely.  Few games have engendered so much discussion, from forumites shouting profanities at each other (and their respective mothers) to intellectuals dissecting the narrative, the meta-narrative (that word rubs me the wrong way), and the structure of the game itself.  Most of the other games I can think of off the top of my head tend to inspire a sort of general consensus of opinion, with usually a dissenting minority.  At the very least, the opinion on a given game tends to break down along certain types: More casual fans of first-person shooters, for instance, tend to like Halo, while hardcore fans of the genre (especially on PCs) tend to loathe it.  But opinions on Sons of Liberty tend to be pretty scattershot and without any real consensus, even within an otherwise like-minded group.

And whatever I might say, the plain fact of the matter is that someone else will have said it first, better, and with more effort put into the facts and the reasoning.  And let’s be honest, here: I do this because it’s fun, because I like to write, and I need to keep writing on the regular.  I also do this because it’s a great way to articulate my thoughts and feelings about the various games and other assorted media that I have thoughts and feelings about.  It’s why I’m mainly positive in these write-ups.  I tend not to keep things I dislike, and I tend not to dwell on them very much. 

But when it comes to Metal Gear Solid 2, there’s one thing I think I can say about it that I think most of us can agree with: 

It was one of the first – perhaps the first – major block-busting, system-selling title for the PlayStation2.  For a lot of people, it sold them the system.

*             *             *

The original Metal Gear Solid had been a runaway success, as I believe I might have mentioned.  It was one of the titles that cemented the original PlayStation’s status as the system to own for serious players who wanted to be at the leading edge of the evolution of the medium.  Not that that other systems of its time weren’t worth owning – there are plenty of worthwhile games that came out on, and were exclusive to, the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn.  But if you could own only one system, and weren’t an absolute Nintendo or Sega diehard, the choice pretty much made itself.

For evidence of Metal Gear Solid’s deep and lasting success, you have only to look back to the last time you had to grit your teeth and sweat through an ill-advised and poorly devised stealth section in a game that otherwise has no use for stealth.  There is no praise quite like imitation, even if the imitation is sort of pale and bland (if not just plain sloppy) next to the original.

Of course, when talking about the PlayStation2, it’s questionable how much help Sony needed to sell their system.  Coming off the success of the original PlayStation, Sony’s PS2 didn’t have a lot in the way of stiff competition.  The Dreamcast was an admirable machine, and a forward-thinking one in many ways, but Sony was destined to crush it.  The PS2 was an overall more powerful system, and had the benefit of functioning as a DVD player at the same time that the DVD format was really beginning to take off.  It didn’t hurt that the system was actually priced somewhat lower than DVD players at the time.  It also had the benefit of not requiring you to forsake your PS1 library, since there were only a very small handful of PS1 games it couldn’t play.

Which was good, in hindsight, since that first year of the PS2 was honestly kind of dire.  Not that it probably mattered in the long run, but Metal Gear Solid 2 existed in some way as a sort of announcement to let everyone know (in case there was any question) that the next generation was here, and there was far, far more to it than having a better polygon count, smoother textures, silkier animation, and better lighting effects.

*             *             *

When I think about the ways in which technology improves games, there are two main ways I look at it.

First off, there is vertical improvement.  More colors possible, more objects on-screen, better music, etc.  This was essentially the sort of upgrade we saw from pretty much the beginning of video games up to the NES generation, and then again up through the 16-bit generation.  The graphics in games began to be less representational (where perhaps a stick figure, or a square, or an @ sign, or a vaguely humanoid lump of single-color pixels stands for your character) and more really depictive (the player’s character actually looks immediately evocative of a human being, with a unique appearance and maybe even a distinct sense of identity), the animations were more detailed, and the music (when present) became worth listening to.

Then we have lateral improvement.  These are improvements that widen the amount of options and broaden our idea of what is possible.  Nintendo introduced lateral improvements with their games for the NES.  Prior to them, the market was largely (this is not to say exclusively) dominated by games that were either created as home versions of popular arcade games, or designed in that mold.  Nintendo recognized that home systems were better suited to games that were longer, deeper, more thoughtful and challenging to more than the reflexes, and they and their third-party developers began making games accordingly.  The move from 8-bit systems to 16-bit systems was more of a vertical one, but then gaming changed laterally again with the introduction of 3D systems like the PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, and the Nintendo 64.  This was a rare moment when lateral change was an actual necessity.  Systems designed around providing 3D graphics pretty much required 3D games, and as we all rapidly discovered, what worked in 2D games did not necessarily work in 3D games.

Sons of Liberty seems to have sought to improve in both directions.

The vertical improvements weren’t hard to believe – in fact, they were pretty much expected.  Even aside from the fact that vertical improvements always occur when we move to a new console generation, you have to remember that these were the early days of the PS2.  Sony wanted desperately for all of us to believe that the PS2 was going to change how we interacted with our entertainment media – would, in fact, change the very nature of video games and interactive entertainment altogether.  There was a sort of breathless sense of wonder in the way industry pundits talked about the system’s two USB ports (which, ultimately, were rarely used), and all the possibility those represented.  It was as if they feared that having a really great gaming machine (for the technology of the day) that was also a fully functional DVD player, at a price well below what we might reasonably expect to pay for both of those things separately, might not be enough for some people. 

This was, by the way, the system that went on to dethrone the NES – which, you might recall, came to America in what was basically a vacuum, and had the market all to itself, uncontested, for several years running – as the best-selling console video game system of all time.

So, no.  Nobody had any trouble believing that the graphics and sound of Metal Gear Solid 2 would knock our socks off.  There’s a Penny Arcade strip that comments on this rather memorably.

But this was more than a longer, better-looking version of Metal Gear Solid.  Some of the improvements, we could expect.  Enemies might be smarter?  Oh, sure.  It was a given.  Hell, it was an unspoken plea, really.  The enemies in the original game were dumber than brickbats.  Naturally, this was nothing more than a system limitation, but it doesn’t change the fact that the enemies were difficult only because they had unlimited firepower which the player lacked, or moved in routines and numbers that compensated for the relative idiocy of individuals.

This is not to say that the enemies in Sons of Liberty put on a stunning display of intellect.  No, no, that would be overselling it by several orders of magnitude.  They are still fundamentally lobotomized creatures.  They will, after all, fail to notice that they have been shot with a tranquilizer dart in any place that does not cause immediate unconsciousness (and upon waking, they will have no memory of having been shot, or that anything might be even slightly amiss).  They’ll go looking for the cause of a disturbance if they hear a noise (or, again, if they’re shot non-fatally, or in a way that doesn’t induce instant unconsciousness).  But they fail to immediately associate being shot with the possibility of a saboteur or espionage agent in their midst.  But they will call for assistance if something seems awry.  There’s a command center that checks in with their patrols regularly, so you have to be careful about taking out enemies, since if the commander doesn’t get a report back, he’ll be more than happy to send in a squad of soldiers with shotguns and riot shields to check the situation out.

The game does still makes dealing with enemies trickier overall, though. 

Once an enemy is down, he doesn’t disappear as in the previous game (or as in video games generally, which would cause enemies to disappear as much for system limitations – each enemy the system has to keep track of is one more drain on the memory, after all – as for any other reason).  They just lay there, unconscious, evidence to any other enemies that might pass by that something was out of the ordinary.  Nine times out of ten, if you just knocked the enemy out, the KO’d enemy would be kicked awake by his comrades, and upon awakening, would have no memory of being shot by a tranquilizer dart.  Or, you know, punched several times in the face, depending on how you handled it.

Dead enemies, on the other hand, can be even more trouble than live ones.  Once discovered, dead enemies will cause their compatriots to call for a sweep of the area, at which point you will be reintroduced to the guys with the shotguns and riot shields if you don’t stay out of sight and move quickly.  You can try to hide bodies by shoving them into out-of-the-way places (most often lockers), but God help you if you leave a trail of blood, which the enemies are at least smart enough to follow to wherever you’ve stashed their unfortunate comrade. 

Worse yet, God help you if you leave a trail of blood leading to your location, because you’re bleeding yourself (from being shot, see), or if you’ve been out in the rain, or swimming, and left a trail of wet footprints right to your hiding space.  Or if, while hidden in your locker, you make too much noise.  Or if the enemy saw you go into the room, and the locker was the only possible hiding place.

This was mitigated somewhat by the addition of first-person aiming, allowing you to look around, and target enemies and obstacles, beyond the range of what is otherwise readily visible while you indulge in the normal running and sneaking about (despite being in amazing-for-its-day 3D, Sons of Liberty still set the camera so as to give you a bird’s-eye view mostly, which is fine for small sprites on a screen, or even relatively simple PS1-level 3D models, but not so great for when you’re dealing with larger and more detailed character models and more intricate environments).  It allows you to fire on your enemies with precision so that you can kill them or knock them out instantly by targeting vital areas.  It also allows you to target objects in the distance that might cause a distraction.  For instance, you might shoot at a fire extinguisher down the hall from your enemy, causing it to go off, and causing the enemy in turn to go investigate it.

In short, the world is more wide open than it was in Metal Gear Solid.  This seemed almost unthinkable in a way; Metal Gear Solid itself was a pretty wide-open game compared to its contemporaries, and Metal Gear Solid 2 upped the ante in pretty much every way.  

*             *             *

It must be said that, occasionally, the Metal Gear series baffles me with its treatment of what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, military paraphernalia. 

The game’s opening mission tasks you with infiltrating a tanker ship carrying an experimental weapon called Metal Gear Ray.  This unit has been built by the Marine Corps, and designed to take down other Metal Gear units such as Rex, which you dealt with in the previous game.  You belong to an organization called Philanthropy, which is dedicated to stopping the proliferation of Metal Gear units throughout the world.  You have to take four photos of this one, from different angles.  One of these photos needs to show the Marine Corps logo on it, to expose the underhanded dealings within the U.S. military that led to its creation.  Which is all well and good, except, well…  It was 2001 when the game came out, and this section of the game was set a few years in the future from that point (2007; now well in the past).  Even in 2001, we had Photoshop, to the extent that photographic evidence could be convincingly faked for a variety of purposes.  So photos showing the Marine logo coming from a fringe NGO like Philanthropy could be easily dismissed as a hoax even then.

The other thing that bugged me was another scene (also from this section of the game) wherein a Russian mercenary commander shows up to begin the operation of hijacking the ship for nefarious purposes.  Solid Snake, our hero in this part of the game, sees him and immediately identifies him as Russian not, as you might expect, by the fuzzy brown hat with the star on it, or by his uniform (or the uniforms of the soldiers he commands), but by his haircut. 

“No Marine barber touched that head of hair,” Snake says.  To which my only reply is: bullshit.

I was in the Army.  I am not saying this to brag, but simply to support my point.  I met or ran across more than a few Marines during my job training and joint force exercises.  I have seen Marines with that exact haircut.  I’ve seen soldiers with it.  You know what I haven’t seen?  Soldiers (or Marines) with beards, or with unbloused trouser legs, or sleeves rolled up to their forearms (it’s either up to the biceps, or all the way down), because all of these things are against uniform regulations that have been in place for years – probably decades – and don’t look likely to change any time soon.  Yet these are all things that appear in Sons of Liberty.

I mean, these uniform issues don’t actually bother me.  It’s fiction; I don’t exactly have a stick up my ass about this sort of thing in and of itself.  But if you’re going to have characters make pointed observations about the finer details of another character’s appearance, and draw conclusions from those observations, it behooves you not to indulge in a practice I like to think of as making shit up.

It happens a few other times, too.  A character presenting himself as a member of Seal Team Six approaches the player (this time a character different from Solid Snake, code-named Raiden), and at one point in the conversation quotes what is apparently the motto of the British SAS: “Who dares, wins”.  I’m assuming that’s the SAS motto, anyway; Sons of Liberty tells me it is for the purposes of its story.  But who knows?  The game has shown a willingness to fabricate facts (“facts”) in the service of its story.  Anyway, the point is that after the character who says it leaves, Raiden is warned that this character might not be who he seems (spoiler: he’s not, but this being Metal Gear, no one is, not even said main character).  His use of the SAS motto is given as proof.  Because, naturally, it’s impossible that he might have heard it elsewhere and quoted it because he finds it to be insightful, motivating, and encouraging; or because maybe he cross-trained with the SAS or was on an operation with SAS operatives (as special forces soldiers sometimes do); or for some other mundane and perfectly understandable reason like that.

The kicker is that in the last example, we hardly need any warnings that the Seal Team Six operative, who gives his name as Iroquois Pliskin, is maybe not on the up and up.  His initial appearance is pretty suspicious, as is his cover story (glib, and given well, but still a little dodgy all the same).  The additional admonishment is completely unnecessary and overdone.  The same is true of the Russian commander in the early part of the game.  There are legitimate details the game could highlight to make its observations, but it prefers to resort to bullshit instead, and the only reason I can think of is that someone, somewhere, thought it wouldn’t properly showcase the characters’ knowledge of military minutiae (and therefore their being consummate warriors) if they did it any other way.  Which is asinine, but… here we are.

*             *             *

Speaking of asinine, I may as well get around to talking about the story.

Sons of Liberty doesn’t just go off the deep end.  To say that it goes off the deep end would be so understated as to be a lie.  What it does is dive gleefully into the deep end, head-first, mad-cackling, from a great height (possibly from orbit). 

I may be overselling that.  Somewhat.

Truth be told, calling the story asinine is probably pretty disingenuous.  Really, I tend to waffle on my opinion.

Some days I think it’s stupid, and gets in the way far too much for its own good, and why won’t these people shut up, can’t they see I just want to get back to the running and sneaking and shooting and into-locker body-stuffing?

Other days, I feel as though it’s perfectly clever, and can’t applaud it enough, and that even at its worst, the harshest criticism you can really level at it is that maybe it’s too ambitious.

In comparison, the plot from Metal Gear Solid is pretty straightforward.  Though, really, so is the plot of Sons of Liberty, at first.  Oh, to be sure, it’s a little more out there, a little more oddball.  Things don’t seem to make quite as much sense, and there’s a feeling right from the beginning that everything is ever so slightly off.  On top of this, the game’s story hits many of the same beats as the previous game, and has some of the same motifs here and there, though there’s often a new and different meaning to them, as dictated by the different context of the game.  It becomes noticeable to the player – hell, it becomes noticeable to the characters, even the hero, Raiden, who has “played” through the scenario of the previous game in a VR training simulation.

One of the central themes of the game is the nature of reality.  How do we decide what is reality, what is fiction, and how might an external entity’s control over information shape our understanding of the world and the very fabric of what we perceive to be real?  How do our perceptions alter our understanding, and how does our understanding alter our perceptions?

One of the things that’s interesting is that, despite the many and – let’s be fair, here – accurate claims that Hideo Kojima seems keen to ape Hollywood in his storytelling, there’s no real denying that at the same time, he’s perfectly able to tell his story in ways that would only be possible in a video game.  Playing on the theme of the nature of reality, Sons of Liberty does some of its storytelling through the very interface of the game.  The characters who relay orders, information, and advice to you through your codec go from giving bad advice, to going off on bizarre and completely irrelevant tangents, to spouting complete gibberish.  The Game Over screen pops up seemingly at random, in tense firefights, except the game isn’t actually over, and the window in the Game Over screen which normally shows a graphic depicting the manner of your untimely demise is instead a tiny screen on which you are still playing the game (briefly, before things return to what passes in the Metal Gear Solid world for normal).  And there are other, subtler signs in the interface and in the more mechanical elements of the game to indicate that things are going pear-shaped in a tremendous hurry.

The more superficial, external elements of the plot are practically irrelevant.  After the opening chapter of the game, you are on a solo mission to the site where Solid Snake supposedly sunk the tanker containing Metal Gear Ray (except, as the player, you know that this version of events doesn’t quite square with reality; already, the game’s themes of truth, information and misinformation, and the manipulation of consensus perception, are at work).  On this site is now a facility called Big Shell, which is meant to be cleaning up the spill from the oil tanker (again, as the player, you know it wasn’t oil in that tanker).  The President of the United States is being held hostage there by a group known as Dead Cell, who were previously a unit of the U.S. military tasked with infiltrating U.S. facilities as a way to test their readiness.  But they’ve gone rogue, and are now making terrorist demands.  You’ve been sent in, alone, to stop them.  There are other efforts in progress as well, but these are largely diversions, meant to cover your own operation.

The deeper elements of the story have been discussed back and forth, practically to death, by now.  That the game performed the ultimate artistic bait and switch regarding players’ expectations has been discussed, but I’ll mention it anyway, because it’s an example of the game’s very existence being demonstrative of the point the game’s narrative is trying to make.  I’d call it the meta-narrative, if I didn’t feel like a pompous ass every time I even considered using that word.  (Damned if it isn’t tempting, though.) 

So, the first part of the game teases you by letting you play as Solid Snake from the previous game, then ditches him after that chapter closes in order to put you into the sneaking suit (here referred to as a Skull Suit, for whatever reason) of a new character, the comparative rookie code-named Raiden.  There was some furor over this, in certain corners of the Metal Gear Solid fan community.  In part, that’s because screenshots and videos of the sections of the game starring Raiden were presented with Solid Snake in his place, making the introduction of Raiden a complete surprise when the game first launched.  But this is all part of the meta-narrative (there, I used it); director Kojima is altering the information you receive, building up a false perception of the game for effect (in this case, to make some kind of artistic statement, no doubt).

You could, I suppose, have a discussion on whether Sons of Liberty is art or not, but really, so many of those arguments get tedious in a hurry.  In the main, whenever I’ve stumbled into a discussion as to whether such-and-such video game is art or not (barring a few places), the primary metric used to judge this is whether the particular neck-bearded, mouth-breathing, fedora-wearing, unwittingly Comic Book Guy-emulating self-styled “intellectual” troglodyte in question likes it or not.  There will be all sorts of eloquent circumlocution bandied about, but in the end, that’s what it seems to come down to in the majority of cases I’ve witnessed.  People who thought Sons of Liberty was kind of stupid and too clever for its own good (these opinions seem paradoxical to me, but I’ve seen people argue them both) tend to disqualify it as art.  Meanwhile, those who believe there’s more to it than the most obvious, seemingly trolling manipulations of its director – who believe these manipulations have a purpose, are going somewhere – tend to say that yes, it is art.

I’m most often in the latter camp, I suspect.  I believe Metal Gear Solid 2 is art.  Whether it’s good art, whether it’s art you’ll like, is an entirely different question, and one I’m not qualified to answer, and never will be.

*             *             *

Mundane Stuff: Versions and Availability

It occurs to me that, as I write about things, I should discuss their availability for anyone who may be interested.

So.  Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was originally released in late 2001 for the PS2.  It was eventually ported to the Xbox under the new title of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance.  This version contained a few new play modes and mini-games (like a skateboarding game) to tinker around with, as well as “Snake Tales”, which are brief missions you can play through as Snake, to see what he was doing while Raiden was trotting back and forth across the Big Shell complex.  The Substance version was ported back to the PS2 at some point afterward.

Honestly, it’s probably not worth a lot of extra effort and cost to get the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2.  It’s worth having, but probably not worth going out of your way for.  If you can save yourself money by getting the plain-vanilla version for PS2, then do that. 

Later still, an HD version was made available for the PlayStation3, PS Vita, and Xbox 360, as part of the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, where it comes packaged with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (the improved version of the original Metal Gear Solid 3) and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.  The Vita version of this seems to omit Peace Walker.  There is also, for absolutely completist nutcases*, Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection, which includes basically every single Metal Gear game Kojima ever directed up to that point (Metal Gear Solid and its VR Missions expansion are available through download vouchers), with the PS2-era games and Peace Walker remastered for HD.

*I am a completist nutcase, surprising no one.

The Long and Stealthy Road: Metal Gear Solid

Some games, I had to learn to love.  Metroid was one of those, which I first encountered when I was about eight or nine.  I didn’t know how to play the game at the time; the concept of a game that was nonlinear seemed foreign and strange, and I didn’t really comprehend how a game could work without discrete levels.  Its openness and freedom felt hostile, almost cruel, when contrasted against my expectations.  I shelved the game for years, only coming to it again with real interest when I was about 13 or 14, maybe even slightly older, which puts my finally learning to appreciate Metroid right around the time of its inimitable sequel Super Metroid.

Metal Gear Solid was another of those games.  It was the second PlayStation game I ever played, if demos count (the first was the disappointingly brief demo of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, also on that same demo disc).  While the demo for Metal Gear Solid was also brief, it left me feeling strained, stressed, and completely bewildered by the time I managed to blunder my way into the tank hangar, which is where the demo ended.  At that point, I thankfully took out the demo disc, and popped in my brand-new copy of Final Fantasy VII.

Like Metroid, I just didn’t get Metal Gear Solid at first.  The idea of a stealth game was foreign to me, and when I began to realize what it entailed, I was sort of horrified.  Every single other video game I had ever played, which involved conflict with a clear enemy, encouraged – often plainly incentivized – direct confrontation with said enemy.  The idea that I should sneak around my enemies – not just sneak up behind them to defeat them, but avoid them altogether when lacking the tools to deal with them more permanently – baffled me.  I mean, I understood it intellectually.  But every reflex I had ever developed for a video game, every habit and way of thinking, encouraged me to engage the enemy in some way.

It didn’t help that immediately prior to owning a Playstation, the next most recent video game systems I owned were an 8-bit NES and a TurboGrafx-16.  I was used to a D-pad, two face buttons, Select, and Start.  I was trying to get used to a controller that added two face buttons (and labeled all of those face buttons quite differently) and four shoulder buttons (not to mention two analog sticks), in a game that demanded that you use all of them pretty much constantly.  A certain embarrassing amount of my fumbling about was spent literally fumbling with the unfamiliar controller.

“How is this even remotely fun?” I asked myself, and promptly forgot all about it.  Like my first bumbling, confused encounter with the original Metroid more than half my life ago (at that point), I didn’t understand it, and because I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t enjoy it.  So I put it out of my mind.

It’s an odd reaction to have had, I think, considering the Metal Gear Solid series has gone on to become one of my all-time favorites.

*             *             *

In my mind, it feels like a lot more than three and a half or four years.  It was Christmas of 1998, and I was 17 when I first played the Metal Gear Solid demo.  In the late spring or very, very early summer of 2002, I finally broke down and bought Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty at the PX on Fort Lewis, when I was in the Army. 

I can blame Headhunter for this.

Headhunter was originally a Dreamcast game, made in Europe, and like a number of Dreamcast games, it got ported to the PS2 when the Dreamcast was discontinued in early 2001.  Headhunter had never made it to the U.S. on the system that spawned it, but we eventually got the Playstation2 version.  I’m not sure why I bought it.  I had a fair amount of disposable income in those days.  The Army’s salary for lower enlisted soldiers is not, and never has been, particularly great, at least when you look at it on paper.  But it turns out you can make your $800 a month base pay (not including extra pay for groceries, since God knew whether, as a journalist, you’d actually be able to make it to a dining facility in time for a meal) go quite a long way when you have nothing more than groceries, a landline phone, and dial-up internet to pay for.  So the chances were good that if I was more than a little bit interested in a game, I’d wind up buying it.

The problem with Headhunter was that it never really came together in a very satisfying way.  There were all sorts of neat things you could do to sneak around your enemies.  You could toss empty bullet casings to draw attention away from your location.  You could shoot pools of oil or gas that might build up beneath vehicles to cause an explosion, and make your way out in the confusion.  These are the things I remember.  I know that doesn’t sound like much, but this was a game I played for a few weeks over a decade ago.  Cut me some slack.

The game was pretty scripted, though.  When there was a pool of oil beneath a leaking tanker truck, Headhunter went out of its way to point this out to you, and pretty much the only reasonable way to get through that point of the game was to shoot it, cause the explosion, and run like hell before the enemies realized you were there.  No other sensible options existed, beyond getting into a running fight with all of the enemies, which most of the time resulted in a quick trip to the Game Over screen.  I kept waiting for the game to turn me loose, to open up and let me use all the various tricks at my disposal to handle situations as I chose, and it just never did.  It wanted you to feel like a clever, dangerous operative, but it had very specific ideas about how to do that.  You could either follow the particular course of action the game laid out – the one correct answer to its idea of the stealth approach – or you could have gunfight after tedious, frustrating gunfight.  The gunfights were mainly tedious because they were overly ambitious.  Headhunter was a game that desperately needed two analog sticks to control the way it wanted for the kind of game it wanted to be, but it was originally designed for a system with only one stick.

Around this time, I started reading reviews for Headhunter, to see if maybe I just didn’t get it, or if the game would open up at some point.  But the reviews all pretty much indicated that it never would, and the general opinion seemed to sum it up as simply Metal Gear Lite.

At that point, I decided to bite the bullet.  If I was after a deeper experience than Headhunter was offering, it seemed like, despite my early concerns, Metal Gear Solid was going to be it.  Evidently, I must have thought it was time to go big or go home, because about a day after that, I was standing in line at the PX, buying my copies of both Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2.  A two-disc PS1 game and a fairly new PS2 games came up to about a hundred dollars, after tax, so this was something of a gamble, even given the expendable income mentioned above.

I’m really glad that worked out.

*             *             *

One of the key differences when I took this second approach to Metal Gear Solid was that I was invested, now.  I had to learn, or else I’d just wasted about an eighth of my paycheck, after tax.  While I might not have minded spending a hundred dollars in those days, I still had the sense not to want to waste that much.

Another key difference, of course, was that by this point I had the damned controller layout pretty thoroughly ingrained in me.  So I set to work.

And it was work, for a little while.  Headhunter turned out not to be such great training for a serious stealth game like Metal Gear Solid, because Headhunter wanted you to do one specific thing at every juncture, where Metal Gear Solid basically did exactly what I’d been wishing Headhunter would do the whole time, which was to turn you loose in an area and let you figure out how to get from one end of it to the other in one piece.   It required a certain amount of rethinking my approach, and some unlearning of habits which might not have been bad generally, but were of no help to me here.

Today, so much of what Metal Gear Solid did seems quaint now.  To say that enemies can track you by your footprints in the snow, or the noise you make, doesn’t sound like such a huge deal today.  At the time, though, it was unheard of for a game to behave so realistically.  We were, at that point, just a few years removed from a time when 3D graphics had been the sole province of arcade machines that might demand whole dollars for a single attempt.  Console games with 3D graphics were largely gimmicky, on top of being expensive due to the specialized chips the cartridges had in them.  You had Star Fox, which was pretty decent… but then you also had Stunt Racer FX, which was a choppy mess with an awful framerate even by the standards of the day, and which got along pretty much by virtue of its gee-whiz factor alone.  Pretty much nothing before this (that I can think of) had ever tried to simulate a realistic environment, which might reflect the passing of the player character with such mundane-seeming but subtly brilliant little details as footprints in the snow. 

This is part of what had me so stressed out on that now-long-ago Christmas morning of 1998: the realism.  I was not accustomed to this.  I was not prepared to have to think about my environment in such a granular way, to take into account the lay of the land.  I was used to enemies whose whole purpose was just to attack on sight according to the tactics with which they were programmed.  There is a sort of comforting predictability in this, because you always know what’s going to happen, and also because games made like this are usually made in such a way that you are equipped to deal with these enemies.  The question is never so broad as “What do I do?”, because what you should do is always plain: Destroy your enemies, before they destroy you.  The question in games like that is, more narrowly, “How do I destroy my enemies?”

Metal Gear Solid makes every encounter different, because it’s triggered by you, the player, outside of scripted events.  The enemies are just patrolling, for the most part.  They’re just making their rounds.  Their default state is simply to ignore you, because until you make a mistake, they don’t even know you’re there.

It’s the “until you make a mistake” part that made the game so unique for me, so troubling at first and so fascinating once I was ready for it, because it completely changed how I thought about games.  With regular games, conflict is the whole point.  The mistakes you make in those games are in faulty fighting methods, which result in your character taking damage, or dying.  But the conflict in regular games is largely symmetrical, which is to say that it’s balanced.  You as the lone hero (or party of heroes) will be woefully outnumbered, but to compensate, the enemies are always either weaker, or lack resources available to the player, or operate according to relatively simple patterns (whereas the player can think outside the box or exploit those patterns).  So conflict is the norm; damage and death are punishments for being bad at combat.

Metal Gear Solid makes the conflict itself a punishment.  Stand-up fights are largely hopeless.  Even toward the end of the game, with your life gauge at its maximum and wearing body armor, you can take very little punishment before dying.  In an open fight against multiple enemies, you will be annihilated in short order.  Metal Gear Solid encourages you to avoid detection by enemies altogether.  Boss fights are different, of course, as are the game’s handful of scripted encounters.  In the main, what you want is to avoid your enemies seeing you, and when you do come up against them, you want to arrange it so that the conflict is asymmetrical, unbalanced, and so that you have the complete advantage.  Attack with stealth, from the shadows.  Learn the enemies’ patterns, so you can take them out with silenced weapons, one by one, preventing them from calling their allies to destroy you.

In this way, Metal Gear Solid keeps you completely engaged.  With a lot of games, you don’t have to think much about what you’re doing.  The objectives are clear, and getting from Point A to Point B can get pretty rote.  Fun, but not really making you fire on all cylinders.  You can enjoy yourself and relax.

Metal Gear Solid does not want you to relax.  It wants you to be, at all times, in all situations, constantly alert and constantly thinking, and using every single one of your relevant resources.

Check your radar for patrolling enemy soldiers.  Get a feel for their routes.  Look for the times and places where there will be blind spots.  Equip your binoculars; look into the distance.  Plan your route.  Put away your binoculars.  Doesn’t that path down the middle look suspiciously empty and unguarded?  Equip your mine detector.  Ah, okay, the central route is mined, but that little side route is clear.  Put away your mine detector.  Equip your pistol with the silencer.  Dart to the left.  Sneak under security camera.  Better to sneak under it than to use your chaff grenades, since in addition to knocking out the security camera for a bit, they’ll also knock out your own radar.

And so on, and so forth.  This is basically the entirety of the Metal Gear Solid experience, at least from the perspective of play, of mechanics.  There’s never really a moment when you can just coast along thoughtlessly.  Not even when it comes to areas you’re familiar with.  Chances are, if the game requires you to go back to an area you’ve visited before, something will have changed.

*             *             *

The underlying story for all of this is difficult to talk about.  For Metal Gear Solid specifically, it’s not too hard.  The plot for this game is a little bit delirious at times, a little bit off the rails, but still basically okay.  It’s at least internally consistent, and it does a decent job of not letting plot elements come out of left field.  You can’t always say the same for the rest of the series, which does get difficult to talk about in brief.

You can just jump into the game if you like, but there are briefing files you have the option of reading viewing.  In themselves, perhaps, they aren’t all that gripping.  They certainly don’t really constitute anything like playing a game.  Visually, they’re comprised of a series of still shots with some light, basic animation and a lot of dialogue.  Basically talking heads.

The obvious joke here is that “talking heads” comprises up to half of the overall Metal Gear Solid experience, both in this game and the series.

But this isn’t just a lot of self-indulgent nonsense.  Or, well, not just that.  It helps to lay some groundwork for the story that Metal Gear Solid tells.

We start off with Solid Snake (this is, of course, a codename; his real name isn’t given).  The hero of two previous missions, Snake has gone into seclusion – you wouldn’t call it hiding necessarily, but that’s not too far off the mark – out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska.  The optional dialogues make it clear that he doesn’t do this so much because he enjoys it, but more because it gives him something to do besides soldiering.  Soldiering is perhaps the one thing he’s good at – certainly, we find, it’s the thing he was quite literally made for – but it’s also the thing he wants least to do, as it seems to lack purpose.  He’s found no good cause for his skills, just a lot of causes willing to use him as a tool.

But it seems that he’s not hidden or secluded well enough, because his old commander, Col. Roy Campbell, comes knocking with a new mission for him, and it isn’t exactly a request.  Well, it sort of is and isn’t.

Campbell seems genuinely reluctant to drag Snake into this, but at the same time, he’s uncomfortably close to the situation, and Snake is the only one he knows he can count on to get the job done. 

In a nutshell, there is a nuclear disposal facility in the fictional Fox Archipelago (specifically, the equally fictional Shadow Moses Island) which has been taken over by a group of Next Generation Special Forces soldiers gone rogue.  These soldiers have all had extensive genetic modification, the basis of which being the legendary soldier codenamed Big Boss (incidentally, but not at all coincidentally, the man from whom Snake was cloned).  Among their demands, they require that the corpse of Big Boss be turned over to them, so that they can fix errors in the genetic modification.  Being a nuclear disposal facility, their threats to launch a nuclear weapon don’t necessarily ring hollow, though how they’ll launch a nuke is a bit of a mystery at first.

Unfortunately, the mystery doesn’t last long.  It turns out that the whole “nuclear disposal facility” bit is a smokescreen.  What Shadow Moses really is, is the manufacturing and testing site for a project with which Snake is intimately familiar: the titular Metal Gear.

For those of you perhaps not in the know, Metal Gear is a bipedal battle tank, capable of launching a nuclear warhead theoretically from anywhere, and therefore to anywhere.

I’m going to leave it there, though, as for as describing the story.  If I don’t, we’ll be here all night.  Suffice it to say that the reveal of the Metal Gear is only the first in a long line of twists and turns the story takes, and that nothing is quite what it seems by the end.  Or even by the halfway point, for that matter.

*             *             *

For a lot of us in the U.S., Metal Gear Solid was our introduction to the series.  Sure, there was Metal Gear for the NES (this version being a port of the original 1987 Metal Gear on the MSX2, a Japanese console that never saw the light of day in the U.S.), but that version was pretty stripped down, and lacking in comparison to the MSX2 original.  Which is sort of comical, when you stop to think about it.  The whole reason the original Metal Gear was designed as a stealth game in the first place was to work around  the limitations of the MSX2, which supposedly couldn’t handle the screen scrolling and the number and complexity of sprites and animation necessary for a more standard run-and-gun affair.

I don’t know a lot of people who played the original Metal Gear, and no one in the U.S. played Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (though perhaps some played, and even were capable of enjoying, the weird, jokey “sequel” cooked up by Ultra Games for the U.S. called Snake’s Revenge, which has since been disowned by series director Hideo Kojima).  Metal Gear 2 was a Japan-only affair, also for the MSX2.

Metal Gear Solid, by contrast, was damn near inescapable.  If you played games at all, you heard about it.  If by some freakishly rare circumstance you somehow didn’t, you still felt its influence.  Metal Gear Solid and its emphasis on stealth revolutionized video games.  In the way of such runaway success stories, it inspired imitators (such as the aforementioned and sadly sort of shallow Headhunter), and it likewise inspired the directors of already-successful and established franchises to insert stealth segments into their games.  Sometimes this worked.  A lot of times it didn’t.

From a broader perspective, Metal Gear Solid was one of the game that helped make the original PlayStation the tremendous success that it was.  It’s true that, by this point, the Sega Saturn was dead, and the Nintendo 64 was, though not dead, a very, very distant second to the PlayStation.  But even so, alongside games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy VII, it was a system-seller, and it helped to highlight the PlayStation as the bleeding edge of the evolution of gaming as a medium for entertainment and storytelling.

So even as it’s tempting to deride the series (and by extension, the original Metal Gear Solid) for its weird, campy characters, and its surreal and sometimes ridiculous plot, and its overall phenomenal excesses, it has an undeniable legacy.

That’s pretty hard to make fun of.