Metal Gear Solid is the game that has been sending chills down the back of this industry for over two years. Konami leaked bits of information about it here and there, but there was no hiding the notion that Metal Gear Solid would be an adventure of epic proportions. Now, all the waiting has ceased, and the game is finally upon us. But does Metal Gear Solid live up to the years of hype? That really depends on your perspective.
At its core, Metal Gear Solid is truly a lesson in stealth. Forget about running into rooms with your gun blazing, leaving nothing alive but an occasional rat. Here, living by the gun readily equates into dying by the gun. Why bother fighting the guards when you can just sneak around behind their backs, crawl along walls just out of the sight range of surveillance cameras, and hide behind boxes?
Unlike most other games, Metal Gear Solid really knows how to tell a story. You, as retired supersneaky agent Solid Snake, must infiltrate a base that has been overrun by terrorists. These terrorists, however, are members of your old unit, a top secret organization known as Fox Hound. The hounders are sitting on a supersecret new weapon and enough nuclear warheads to send the planet back to the Ice Age. Your mission (no choice here - you're forced to accept) is to infiltrate the base carrying nothing but a pair of binoculars and a pack of smokes, check up on a couple hostages, find out if Fox Hound even has the ability to carry out its apocalyptic threats, and if it does, stop it. The storyline unfolds in a seemingly never-ending collection of cutscenes, all extremely well rendered using the game engine. The game doesn't need FMV to clog up the process (given the amount of time spent watching cutscenes, FMV probably would have made MGS a three- or four-disc game), although it does use video in a few isolated cases and uses it reasonably well.
When you first start playing the game, you truly do feel like you're constantly in danger. There are so many ways that guards can be alerted to your presence. The most dangerous, of course, is sight. If you enter the line of sight of a guard or a camera, you've got a fight on your hands. Luckily, their lines of sight are represented by big cones on your radar. Simply stay away from the cones, and you'll never get spotted. If you stomp through a puddle of water or across a metal catwalk, fire off a weapon, or knock on a wall (great for luring the dummies to their doom), nearby guards will hear the noise and check it out. They'll even follow footprints in the snow. If you're spotted, a bunch of guards come out of nowhere and start playing target practice with you. This also starts a two-part timer. The first part of the timer is the danger timer. During this time, guards are extremely alert, and they scurry around, hoping to find you. If you can manage to stay out of sight, the second timer starts. During this time the guards don't look for you quite as actively. If you can stay hidden during that time, the guards stupidly assume that you must have run away, and simply return to their posts. No increased patrols, no manhunts. They just forget they ever saw you and continue to wander aimlessly. While it's understandable that this had to be done for gameplay purposes (getting spotted once and playing the rest of the game with tons of guards on your tail wouldn't exactly be fair), it comes across as more than a little silly. Plus, all of these guards are badly in need of some corrective eyewear, because they can only see about 20 or so feet in front of them. Heck, you can even shoot a guard in the back of the head (it takes multiple shots to kill), and he'll just look around, not see anyone, and go back to standing there like an idiot. -- Jeff Gerstmann
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