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.
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