The Arcology Garden

Metal Gear is a Gameing franchise that mixes stealth, action, and story, perhaps integrating them better than most other games. It's created and produced by roam:Hideo Kojima who more recently created Death Stranding , and its a pastiche of his favorite 80s action movies and occasionally really prescient political and social commentary.

Recently, I was thinking about how interesting I thought MGSV ended up feeling, after watching Tor and Tantin each play it, I thought about how I wanted to play it and the other games. In the past, I've played MGS2 and most of MGS1 and a bit of MGSV, and watched LPs of most of the others, but never all of them and never coherently.

My Gameing Goal for 2024 is to play these through in release order, at least the mainline/story ones, and think about them and how they work in the world.

On [2024-01-29 Mon] I played Metal Gear on the MSX as re-published on Steam by Konami.

1995: Outer Heaven Uprising

Solid Snake, a new recruit to the special forces unit FOXHOUND, is sent on his inaugural mission after receiving orders from his Commander, Big Boss, to infitrate the hostile nation of OUTER HEAVEN. The story covers what would later be referred to as the Outer Heaven uprising.

The world of Metal Gear is revealed largely through the structure of the game, with most of the coversations in the game serving as hints or tutorialization, appearing each time you enter a given room. But it's trying to be an 80s Action Movie , and in that regard Solid Snake is a decent Snake Plisskin or John Matrix. He looks like a bit of a dweeb when you pull up the radio though. Against all odds, you need to be a total fucking bad ass Super American and destroy the MacGuffin.

When it comes to being a game, this game is hard and rough. It's an 8 Bit Video Game. Like I am learning from the majority of the Jeff Gerstmann NES games rankings I've been watching latelyfn2i'm looking forward to seeing Gerstmann play the NES version, i will not, computer gaming in the 8 bit era is rough and people didnt really know what made video games good yet, especially how to tell a story. And Konami ships it on a barebones MSX emulator shipped as part of the Steam downoad which doesnt work 100% reliably on SteamDeck and would occasionally lock up.

the first 20 minutes of the game are tough as nails and you dont get to save except in elevators. So you end up having to re-do large segments of rote stealth and "pick/remember the right door or hallway or the right security card key number" against enemies who can fire diagonally at you when you cant and you have very limited health, ammo, and heals, being able to only hold three rations at a time. if you can get through the first floor of the first building, things open up a little bit, but the engine makes this game so unruly and difficult.

you can only use a single item at a time. this is fine, and typical for games of this era but when your cardkey and your gas mask are items, you might find yourself choking to death fumbling for which of the 8 card keys open the door that leads out of the gas mask room. I shouted more than once when this happened.

there are maybe five or six items that only exist to be used to pass one obstacle. and they usually require a bunch of back tracking or calling the right contact to get a hint to where you can find it. For example, you might stumble across an enemy uniform to wear, but if you equip it the enemies will still alert and shoot at you. It's used on one screen to pass one group of enemies to enter a different base building, and when you enter wearing it the enemies shoot you. And if you don't get it when you could stumble across it, you have to call everyone up on the radio and backtrack to where they tell you to go. (or read a gamefaq)

this sort of thing feels like some "babbies first game development" mechanics rules to learn that no one since 1998 has really been able to get away with. But this was 1987 so. i cant wait to experience this stuff in Metal Gear Solid 1-5.

a lot of the encounter designs are brutally unfair. for example, there is a boss which is just a bulldozer rumbling toward you in a narrow path you cant dodge, and if it touches you you just immediately die. You can flee the encounter but it reset's the dozer's health. so this encounter ends up looking like "what can i damage this with" and trying your mines or your explosives or the grenade launcher. after a half dozen deaths or a quick phone call, youll find the that the grenade launcher works, but the way it works is by showing a cross hair some paces in front of your character and the grenade goes through the air to land there and explode a few frames later. it's the only weapon that damages the bulldozer. so you have like fifteen seconds to dump 8 grenades on this guy, and if he gets to close to you either you have leave and go collecet ammo again or you die and have to spend another two minutes collecting ammo again and tracking out to it just to try to avoid getting squished again. there's no way to walk backward while holding it so if you dont stand in just the right spot when you start firing the grenades will start landing behind and you turn to run away from the dozer to turn around and try to fire again and splat.

In the late game there are trap holes that appear on the floor and immediately kill your character if it even touches one pixel of your hitbox, i sure hope that Snake learns how to jump before all this is over...

look. i tried to play this game on Original difficulty, and i tried to play without a map or guide. it's hard. I didnt last long and then i cruised through in maybe six hours. maybe with a notebook where you can draw maps and jot down card codes and points of interests it could be a lot more compelling, but i let someone else do that for me this time.

it is definitely something interesting to see some game mechanics and design mechanics and story structure which will survive all the way through to Metal Gear Solid and become genre tropes, but i enjoyed this game a lot less than I enjoyed MGS2 or the Game Boy Metal Gear gamefn1well, who can say? i havent played that all the way through since i was 15..

Metal Gear 2 is next, I hope that it has some quality of life improvements and isnt just more of the same engine. I am looking forward to not touching this software for a long time.

1999: Zanzibar Land Disturbance

This game sees Solid Snake, who last left the special forces unit known as FOX HOUND, looking to settle the score with his nemesis, Big Boss. The story covers what would later be known as the Zanzibar Land Disturbance, taking the drama of the series to all new heights as it depicts the reason for Big Boss's actions and how the soldiers had lost their sense of purpose