alright gonna see what all the fuss is about

My previous experience with this series, in chronological order:
Revengeance
The first half of MGSV
About five hours of MGS2, cut short by a scratched disc

Reading the built-in synopsis of the MSX games and it's still failing to convince me that "WHAT IF TANK BUT LEGS" is really that much of a mind-blowingly terrifying world-altering weapon

I mean nukes are extremely frightening but Nuke With Legs is kind of an infinity+1 scenario tbh

finally an apolitical videogame

21 years late to this take but yooo this animation is incredible?

also uh maybe a good thing I found a copy of this game that still had the manual because instead of a tutorial I got a phone call that literally said "push the Crouch Button to crouch" and then got shot to death by the first guard in the game

oh sick coming soon

the manual has an entire page of instructions on how to operate elevators I am so hype rn

Also while I'm here: appreciation post for how good this case design is

No catchy character art, just a super slick logo in metallic red on white

Actual question how much does stealth actually matter in this game?

Murdering your way through everything is bad for thematic reasons obv but I can't tell if it affects anything mechanical or plot-related

there was a cutscene where some guards mentioned being aware of an intruder, which I would imagine wouldn't have happened if I hadn't set off a dozen alarms running past people lol

was that just flavor or should I actually be worried about maintaining perfect stealth?

let the memes begin

I'm extremely in love with how this game handles faces

It's not that they COULDN'T animate eyes, it's that they'd be too tiny/sharp and look weird and distracting. Just bury them in shadow and spend your effort on composition instead for FAR stronger results

Artists put an absolutely superhuman effort into maintaining consistent texel density and overall detail frequency EVERYWHERE

Every shot looks perfectly natural despite the tech limitations, bc compositionally nothing calls attention to itself by being too sharp or too smooth

Plus, even though It's jaggy and low-res, the size of a texel is usually about the size of a screen pixel, and with dithering on top it SUGGESTS a level of detail far beyond what you're actually seeing

Like, this doesn't look like "bad graphics" where low-res textures are stretched haphazardly across too-large surfaces; it looks like a fully-detailed render scaled town to a low resolution

there aren't many pixels but every one of them is doing WORK

Compare: Twice the resolution, orders of magnitude higher poly budget and texture res, but the detail's all over the place

the softness of the stretched textures fighting the sharp polygon boundaries, the ultra-detailed brick wall pulling the eye away...

Before you @ me, yes linear vs nearest-neighbor texture filtering is a factor here, but games like FFXII clearly demonstrate that this is fundamentally an art skill. Keeping tight compositional control over detail is
- Extremely hard
- Entirely possible regardless of hardware

Curious to see if this game ever does larger outdoor areas eventually. Keeping everything inside smallish rooms/hallways makes this stuff a lot more manageable (though no less impressive)

WAIT WHAT SNAKE'S FIFTY HUSKIES ISN'T A SHITPOST IT'S LITERALLY IN THE GAME

I am losing it rn I legit though Snake Owns Fifty Huskies was like an old SA meme that I didn't understand or something I can't believe this is real

PUT SNAKE'S FIFTY HUSKIES IN SMASH

stealth action game where you play as one dude surrounded by 50 very excited huskies trying to sneak around secret military bases

so the first boss fight is super hard and requires really seriously learning how the weird aiming works, and still takes forever even once you've figured it out

second boss fight is.. throw two grenades?

oh boy I'm sure this will control like a dream

kind of endearing how Keycards used to be just an absolutely unquestioned pillar of game design, on the same level as like Attack or Jump verbs

Meryl apparently storing an entire Elder Scrolls inventory in her bra

THERE'S A PUPPY

HEY KIDS I'M CRACK STUNTMAN
VOICE OF GUNSHAVER

man this is a very good game with a lot of very bad boss fights

"okay so for this fight you shoot homing rockets at a helicopter"
"cool how many hits does it take"
"like 35"

aw yeahh

Please insert DISC 1 into the top of the & Knuckles cartridge

Loving how the plot treats Snake as this Legendary Soldier when in fact he's got the dexterity of an Oblivion NPC and keeps getting caught because every time he tries to push an elevator button he accidentally does a 180 and takes cover against the elevator button instead

Legendary special-forces operative Solid Snake perished while heroically trying to remember how to stop crouching and then equip a gun and then hold down the Aim Weapon Button and then rotate towards the enemy, while being shot by four people

SANEK

As expected of Konmai

Forget tank with legs, the real world-altering superweapon is a gun turret mounted ten feet up a wall, and thus invulnerable to all weapons because humans can only aim horizontally

same

still can't get over how good this game looks

The subtle hue shifts you get from indexed color are super underrated IMO. Look at the gradient on that satellite dish; newer rendering tech won't do that since it's technically an artifact, but it looks so GOOD aesthetically

Like a pretty fundamental piece of advice in painting is to ALWAYS make sure your shadows/midtones/highlights are different hues, and generally try to work new colors into the boundaries between them

Modern engines don't exactly do this, but palettized rendering did it for free

(more precisely, the painting advice is an exaggeration of a LOT of physical effects, mainly indirect lighting, SSS, and the myriad weird ways the eye locally adapts to color. Renderers try to simulate the same physics, but it's v hard to explicitly control the result that way)

[whispering to date]
That's Metal Gear

The Metal Gear Solid OST, or, MIDI Program 54 Voice Oohs [10 hour ver.]

wow the REX fight absolutely sucks

what is this mounted gun sequence lmao your aim has no perceivable connection to whether you hit anything

I finished the videogame it was v good

super love how the setting is just THOROUGHLY the 90s

All the paranoia about genetic engineering, cloning, the idea that completing the Human Genome Project would lead to wild scientific advances outpacing ethics..

I'm JUST old enough to play it and remember like "oh yeah, this is what we used to worry about before The War on Terror"

Apparently there're two possible endings and I got the Better one and it was... kinda cheesy tbh lol

all the twisty backstabbing political-thriller stuff is extremely rad but the character arcs feel like a pretty one-dimensional collection of movie cliches imo

the character stuff being weak isn't a big problem since it's not really a focus for most of the game anyway. Maybe not the best decision to go all-in on it at the very end though

gameplay-wise I'm really impressed. I was expecting to put up with a great deal of PS1 Jank but it's honestly still really good even by modern standards (excepting some occasionally awkward controls and a few REALLY insufferable boss battles)

also aesthetically it's incredible

Hot take: Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation is a good videogame

hnnggghhColonel
I'm trying to sneak around, but I'm a musher
and the baying of my fifty huskies keeps alerting the guards