Metal Gear Solid

The Good
Usually, when the term "movielike" is applied to a game, it's not a compliment. FMV watchfests like Wing Commander III or Dragon's Lair, while good games in their own rights, just don't seem to pull you in to their plots, and there's not enough game in the experience to make you happy.

But with Metal Gear Solid, calling it movielike is a tribute to the amazing job pulled off by Hideo Kojima and Konami in making a masterpiece that furthers the argument for videogames as an art form.

The well-developed plot puts you in the role of Solid Snake, a retired ex-member of the underground government group Fox-Hound. He is called back into service when the members of Fox-Hound suddenly seize a military base in Alaska, and threaten to launch a nuclear weapon unless the government turns over the remains of legendary soldier Big Boss within 24 hours. The plot easily matches those of most RPGs for complexity and depth, and manages (most of the time) to avoid being too cheesy. And expect a few curveballs along the way.

When you get right down to the gameplay, it'll be familiar to anyone who has played the NES incarnations of Metal Gear. You operate mostly from an overhead view, though there are a few scenes where Resident Evil-style camerawork is used for dramatic effect. Your job is to go from section to section of the base, rescuing the two hostages and eventually trying to stop a nuclear launch. Stealth is emphasized heavily; you have to sneak past the guards when their backs are turned, and you can employ a variety of techniques, including tapping on the walls to lure them away, throwing chaff grenades to confuse surveillance cameras, and even hiding inside a cardboard box. Of course, you can't always stay hidden, and like all good action heroes, Snake winds up using pretty much an entire arsenal over the course of the game. With so many different playstyles possible, the gameplay doesn't get boring easily. The boss battles are each unique, and you'll have to play through them a couple of times before you figure out the "trick" to beating each boss. Top-notch gameplay.

The graphics are also choice. At its heart, the gameplay is 2D, but everything in MGS is rendered using the game's versatile 3D engine, right down to the maggots in a prison cell. The graphic design also pays insane attention to detail; you can see breath vapor in the cold outdoors, and Snake will leave footprints in the snow that become covered up over time. Some nifty effects are also used during flashbacks and whenever a mysterious Ninja appears onscreen.

The sound has to be heard to be believed. Unlike RPGs, which sometimes read like a novel, every word in MGS is spoken by top-notch voice acting that tops even the Legacy of Kain series. Konami really went nuts on the CD format here. The soundtrack is great too, with dramatic orchestral arrangements during battles, and soulful tunes during dramatic turns in the story.

All in all, never have the fun of video games and artfulness of cinema blended so well. Five stars!

The Bad
Fine, make me nitpick.

• The graphic design, as I mentioned is great, but the engine itself ain't all that hot. Low-res textures give everything a very pixelated look, and since the cut-scenes all play out using the in-game engine, the character's faces are static. Snake himself doesn't really have much of face.

• While the in-game cut scenes are almost all terrific, the Codec screen (Snake talking to his backup, usually used as a hint and summary system) is not. 2D still faces here, people, like listening to a radio play. And the Codec sequences can run a little long, and there's to real way to skip them.

• The game itself will only give you about 20 hours of play. While you are encouraged to play through it twice to get both endings, that's it. 40 hours is all ya got. Still, at $20, you get your money's worth. Definitely a better deal than spending one quarter as much to see a two-hour movie.
  
  The Bottom Line
  MGS may not have the best graphics, or the most consistent gameplay, and the delicate balance between game and movie is still a little skewed towards the movie. But folks, that movie ain't half-bad, and this is by far the most engrossing, detailed, immersive, and above all ENTERTAINING experience on the little grey box.

The Good
The graphics, cut scenes, voice acting, music are amazingly good.

The Bad
The control are a little bit slick, and the radio dialogue are unnecessarily long.

The Bottom Line
"Stealth"

The Good
Metal Gear Solid is a belated installment in an old series originating with an interesting game that attempted to focus on stealth a bit more rigorously than the sub-genre's granddad Castle Wolfenstein (with mixed results). Often hailed for what it decidedly never was (a serious game with a rich story), Metal Gear Solid drew the ire of some hardcore players, who dismissed it as a typical representation of console gaming with its cheap effects and shallow content.

The above evaluation is, in fact, quite accurate: the game is, in essence, a glossy 3D recreation of a decade-old title, translating its once-intriguing gameplay ideas into the new technology with the addition of unbearable, monstrously overbloated soap opera interpolations.

That is not to say there is no fun to be had here. The gameplay is unabashedly gimmicky, yet some of the setpieces are entertaining. The boss battles, for example, are all completely different, and the action can get quite tense sometimes. At one point you'll have to deactivate lasers (there are three different solutions to this problem); in another place you'll guide a remote-controlled missile through narrow corridors to blast security system; yet another part requires you to blow up walls to find a secret opening. Even though most of the locations look pretty similar to each other, there is enough variety to ensure a smooth ride.

The Bad
You don't need to be a sharp-witted intellectual in order to realize how bad the story is. As always in those cases, it's not really the story itself, but the way it is told and presented. With infantile pretentiousness the game tries to turn its corny B-movie-like plot into some sort of a grand philosophical-political commentary, failing miserably. Cheesy, inappropriate, overwritten dialogue and lame attempts at humor utterly ruin supposedly dramatic moments. At the same time, the story takes itself way too seriously, trying to inject genuine emotions into interactions between anime freaks with zero credibility.

The lack of any stylistic coherence has something to do with Hideo Kojima's general approach to narrative, which he often simply abuses for throwing in bit after bit of boring and clueless moralizing or "educational" material. Ridiculously long-winded expositions and tacky, bombastic scenes loaded with fake sentimentality abound. This is truly Japanese storytelling at its worst.

Much of the dialogue is embarrassingly bad. Often characters would stop talking with each other and instead start addressing the player. Typically for Japanese games, the characters have the stupid and annoying habit of repeating the last word or phrase they have just heard. You've undoubtedly heard and seen it in many other games, but Metal Gear Solid almost breaks a record here. Also quite typically, the dialogue is crammed with overused "scientific" mumbo-jumbo.

But who cares for the story - it's the gameplay that matters, right? Indeed, if the weak story just took a backseat, restricting itself to a few remarks here and there and perhaps a couple of skippable cutscenes, there would be no problem. Instead, the story, suffering from delusions of grandeur, interferes constantly with the already clunky, segmented gameplay portions. After every few rooms, the narrative jerks you out of the gameplay and forces you to sit through inane cutscenes or radio conversations. This would have been a serious flaw even if those were actually good. Coupled with the actual quality of those scenes, the constant jarring interruptions are positively infuriating.

What remains are short, linear, and rather disjointed portions of old arcade-style gameplay that fails to exhibit a coherent concept, yet alone realism. The whole "tactical espionage action" label leads you to believe that we are dealing with dedicated stealth gameplay, while in reality it's just a modification of an utterly unrealistic style of its simplistic top-down arcade-like progenitor. Furthermore, the all too faithful transition to 3D revealed many more weaknesses and inconsistencies we readily overlooked in the old 8-bit days but cannot quite ignore in a supposedly much more advanced title. The top-down view, totally unsuitable for the much closer perspective, turns much of the game into blind radar-reliant crawling, occasionally exploiting the dubious AI and the many limitations of the engine. Comparing this game to Thief can only confirm the gap between serious entertainment and a collection of reflex-based minigames interspersed with trashy narrative.

The Bottom Line
Ultimately, Metal Gear Solid collapses under the aspirations of its author, who preferred to choke gimmicky, outdated, but at least somewhat nostalgically sympathetic gameplay with a blatantly intrusive, overblown mess of a story. Throw a quick glance at the impressive visuals and go play Thief if stealth is indeed your game.