Metal Gear Solid is a terrible, terrible game, so undeserving of its praise it?s unreal. I?m not even going to go into the argument on the balance between movie and gameplay, because that gameplay is so bad that it provides way more then enough material to criticize this game beyond redundancy.
An attempt is made at a design which tests the player?s skill and cunning at making and pulling off decisions, based around sneaking through enemy buildings and such while remaining undetected. Such a game needs to have an interesting set of mechanics, from basic movement to shooting and setting traps and distractions; AI and level design which force the player to use these mechanics in interesting and dynamic ways which may present a significant challenge of their skill; it must provide the player with enough information on which to make interesting and dynamic decisions (as opposed to forcing them into mindless trial and error), and it must have a interactive interface which allows the player?s skill to be tested in interesting and dynamic ways. In these basic foundations, Metal Gear fails in all areas with the possible exception of the first.
The player is provided with a fairly appetizing set of mechanics, including upright and crawling movement, the ability to wall hug and peak round corners, shooting bullets and tranquilizing darts, as well as hiding in portable cardboard boxes and laying down porn magazines to distract the guards. These seem like some decent premises for some exciting stealth action, but unfortunately, due to failings in all of the other above categories, the game fails to fully realize these premises.
Where to start? I think I?d have to say that the most crippling problem is that the player is rarely given the information required to make informed decisions; removing much of the potential skill from the game. Often the player has to pass through a door into a room with guards walking around in their set paths. The guard patrolling the area near the door may or may not be at a point in their path where they will see the player the moment they enter the room. The player will then have to run away or quickly take the guard out before calls for reinforcements. Either way, the result is very un-elegant and makes me feel very un-confident in the game?s design. If it isn?t going to give you a means of checking what?s going on behind the closed door before you pass through (which it probably shouldn?t, since peeking through with your bendy camera in games like Splinter Cell, and waiting patiently for a guard to walk away, is not fun), it should simply set a number of positions which the guards can occupy when the player enters, this way we can focus on the parts of the game which are (or could be) interesting.
A similar effect is caused by the camera (in MGS 1, 2 and the first edition of 3), which is fixed! A fixed camera in a stealth game is ridiculous unless it can come up with a clever alternate way of providing the essential information. The whole point of a stealth game is that while the enemy has greater numbers, weapons and so on, the stealthy guy has a greater awareness of his surroundings and greater ability to traverse it (though the latter is useless without the first). MGS solves this problem by providing a radar which shows the enemies position, cone of vision, and whether or not they have been alerted to your presence. This is great, but a point is made of withholding it from the player at certain times. When you are detected and on the run, the radar is ?jammed?, and cannot be used for some time. This is ridiculous; firstly, it doesn?t make any fictional sense: why would them seeing you jam the radar? Do they have some sort of ability to jam your radar? If so, why don?t they always enable it? Also, the idea that the thing I called a radar, should in fact represent a radar, doesn?t make sense, because I don?t believe there is such a radar that can detect in what direction someone is looking. I would have thought this ?radar? thingy should in fact represent Snake?s heightened awareness, which should never leave him. Or is the radar jam supposed to represent Snake panicking and thus loosing his awareness? Either way the gameplay is ruined during these periods, since the player can no longer do cool stealthy things, because he doesn?t have a bloody clue where the guards are, and so does not know which stealthy actions would be appropriate. In MGS 2, the camera is a particularly bad problem, since, in a lot of areas, the player will never have a radar until they find the area?s control point (or whatever they call it), where they can turn on the radar. Even when you do have the radar, it only shows what is happening within a few meters radius. It gets laughable when you find yourself pressing yourself up to a low object just to influence the camera, so you can see what the hell?s going on further away. You couldn?t see when you were just standing up, but now your pressed against something, you can see, is that really what they intended? These issues strip the game of any worth, since they attack the very core of what defines the stealth genre, reducing it to a game of luck and persistence. In short, they make the game crap.
Besides the heightened awareness required of a stealth guy, I also mentioned the heightened ability to traverse the environment, which comes after, since it is near useless without awareness. But during that limited time when you do have the awareness, the controls and limited abilities prevent any sort of elegance in your actions. Say you want to crawl under a conveyor belt stand: you are crouching by the opening, and a guard is walking in your direction. Fortunately there are some boxes next to you blocking the guards view. But to enter the opening, you first have to enter crawl mode by which you will lay completely stretched out on the floor, inevitably leaving your legs dangling out for the guard to see. Obviously in real life, you could be entering the opening as you lowered yourself into the flat position.
Furthermore, if Snake was more controllable, the awareness issues might actually be fixed somewhat. We could be hiding somewhere waiting for a guard to pass, then quickly pop out and peek round another corner to check if another guard is approaching from there. If so, we can then quickly run and check the other corner. This sort of quick movement, which could add a lot of depth to the gameplay, is nigh-on impossible with the grotesquely clunky control scheme. If you want to peek round a corner, you have to first press yourself against the wall of the corner, which you achieve by walking into it. But if you miss the corner as you try to walk into it, which is easily possible with the extremely loose movement control, then you will end up walking round the corner to be spotted by the incoming guard. So you might try walking into the wall a fair distance from the corner and then edging yourself to the corner before peeking round. But you edge so damn slowly, that by the time you get to the corner; the guard will have done so too. This sort of difficulty is not necessary and I don?t believe the development team intended it. Rather, they must simply not be talented enough to design a decent control scheme.
Another crippling issue, more linked to the awareness problem, is that it is often very unclear what the guards will react to. Despite the narrative claiming that the guards have a heightened sense of sight smell and hearing, they are made, for gameplay purposes, to be extremely poorly endowed in all of these areas. The player frequently has to use these properties to their advantage, moving across their vision in such a way that any normal person would see. This is itself is very unintuitive, but it gets really messy when considering the boundaries of the guards limitations. Just how narrow is his cone of vision? How far can he see? He appears to be looking directly at me! At what ridiculously close point will they hear my footsteps behind them, or their pal being strangled just to their side? One simply has to take advantage of the guard?s poor senses in order to progress through the game, but since there is no clear way of telling when the danger becomes active, you will frequently alert them, and it feels very unfair, and indeed is.
How about the level design? There are too many corridors leading into corridors. This is similar to the door problem; you will often find yourself having to enter a corridor with multiple guards patrolling in different directions. If the design were more open, you could better asses the positions and movement of the guards, but in this case, you simply have to run to the corner where your? corridor enters the next, and press yourself against one of the walls to see if there is a guard approaching. If there is one approaching from some distance, then you are in luck because you can retreat a bit, let them pass, then sprint and hope there isn?t one coming from the other side. But when you press yourself against the wall, the camera moves to show what?s round that corner, meaning you can?t see what?s coming from the other side, even though this should simply involve letting your head turn back the way your body is facing. So badly designed! And sometimes there are cameras as well which are even harder to see without a radar. Since a camera can basically be pretty much anywhere, the only way to play successfully would be to meticulously press yourself against every corner wall and look up and round to see if there is a camera ready to give you away. And then you have the guards to worry about too, not only do you have to time your peeking for cameras around their patrol periods, but when you have spotted the cameras, you have to time your run for exactly when the camera is facing the other way and none of the patrolling guards are quite in eye-range. Finding this moment would take a good few minutes of working out the patrol patterns every time you turn a bloody corner. If this sounds good to you then it?s still not your game because not even this is possible a lot of the time for all the control and camera issues. And no you couldn?t just shoot them, because then the others would see the body, and if you tried to go pick it up and carry it out of sight then you would more then likely be caught considering how obscenely slowly Snake does everything.
MGS just about manages to work on some, and only some, of the VR training missions since, in these, they can design the levels precisely around minimizing the destruction caused by the camera and so on, but in more complex VR missions and in almost all of the main game, the core issues are exposed, and the game is ruined. Even with those few functional VR missions though, most of them are beyond boring since proficiency can only be achieved by lurking, still, in some corner, memorizing the patrol patterns.
So far I have only talked about the core gameplay, but there are other serious issues with the interactive elements of MGS. The boss battles for one; are so, so bad. They will usually involve working out how to dish out and avoid taking damage, and then actually pulling these two feats off. Both of these aspects of boss battling in MGS are made difficult for very, very bad reasons. It?s hard to work out how to dish out damage because the solutions defy any sort of reason as conveyed through the visuals. Perhaps there is someone roaming about a room, trying to kill you; no body armor or anything like that; yet shooting them has no effect. The solution is to throw grenades into their path to explode at the right times to stun them or something, at which point you can shoot them for a second or two, decreasing their health bar, before they recover and recommence the roaming and killing. Despite the gross unintuitive nature of this puzzle, pulling it off, is also made unnecessarily hard since you will always throw your grenades in the most retarded and clumsy fashion, a good second or so after you press the button, that getting it to explode at the right time as the boss passes is a feat of luck.
Another disgustingly unintuitive ?puzzle?, is when you are faced with a fat man prancing about, laying bombs, on roller-blades. He is, on the whole, immune to bullets, but if you shoot him enough times in quick succession, he will fall and lay on the ground waiting for you to shoot him in his exposed head, only to take a little of his health before the process repeats. How is the player supposed to know to do this? There is no way of working this out with your brain, you could only discover it out my accident. And so, what?s the point in presenting it as a challenge at all? The puzzle can only be solved by luck, and so it is not interesting! So do not waste our time with it! But the one thing that frustrates me more then the development team thinking they can insult my intelligence with such a task, is that many of the writers for popular videogame websites and magazines pay particular praise to these boss battles. What is wrong with them?
And what of these item boxes dotted about? How can these possibly be a good idea? Start with the ration boxes. If the developers think that the player should be able to recharge there health when they have ration remaining, then just give them to the player at the beginning of each section. This way you can control precisely how many he will have, and design the difficulty of the area accordingly. Why encourage the player to search around lockers and what not for these things? If there really were some stealth guy in an enemy installation trying to save the president or something, he would not be checking lockers for ration. Besides, this is not even fun; what sado wants to spend their time checking every locker and every corner for ration when they should just be getting on with the game?
What?s worse is that there are some items that they player absolutely needs in order to progress through the game, which can only be acquired in this manner. If you get to a bridge littered with mines. How are you supposed to know that the game has been programmed to make some of them impossible to hit with your pistol? By trying many times and realizing! And then how are you supposed to know that somewhere in the pretty massive facility there is a sniper rifle which will allow you to get them? Why in god?s name would there happen to be a sniper rifle lurking in some corner or locker which you could easily miss if you weren?t obsessively collecting each and every bloody ration. Who put it there? If it was planted for you by your highers then they would have told you to look for it, or better, its exact location, or better still, the game could just ditch this and give it to you at the appropriate point so we can stop faffing about. And when you look in some walkthrough which casually instructs you to whip out your sniper rifle to destroy the mines (since this is the only way I can see that anyone would suss out that there is a sniper rifle somewhere if they got stuck at this point without having luckily stumbled across the rifle already), we then have to search, either through the whole walkthrough, or the whole oil rig, to find that dratted rifle. Excellent design eh? 9.8 anyone?
An attempt is made at a design which tests the player?s skill and cunning at making and pulling off decisions, based around sneaking through enemy buildings and such while remaining undetected. Such a game needs to have an interesting set of mechanics, from basic movement to shooting and setting traps and distractions; AI and level design which force the player to use these mechanics in interesting and dynamic ways which may present a significant challenge of their skill; it must provide the player with enough information on which to make interesting and dynamic decisions (as opposed to forcing them into mindless trial and error), and it must have a interactive interface which allows the player?s skill to be tested in interesting and dynamic ways. In these basic foundations, Metal Gear fails in all areas with the possible exception of the first.
The player is provided with a fairly appetizing set of mechanics, including upright and crawling movement, the ability to wall hug and peak round corners, shooting bullets and tranquilizing darts, as well as hiding in portable cardboard boxes and laying down porn magazines to distract the guards. These seem like some decent premises for some exciting stealth action, but unfortunately, due to failings in all of the other above categories, the game fails to fully realize these premises.
Where to start? I think I?d have to say that the most crippling problem is that the player is rarely given the information required to make informed decisions; removing much of the potential skill from the game. Often the player has to pass through a door into a room with guards walking around in their set paths. The guard patrolling the area near the door may or may not be at a point in their path where they will see the player the moment they enter the room. The player will then have to run away or quickly take the guard out before calls for reinforcements. Either way, the result is very un-elegant and makes me feel very un-confident in the game?s design. If it isn?t going to give you a means of checking what?s going on behind the closed door before you pass through (which it probably shouldn?t, since peeking through with your bendy camera in games like Splinter Cell, and waiting patiently for a guard to walk away, is not fun), it should simply set a number of positions which the guards can occupy when the player enters, this way we can focus on the parts of the game which are (or could be) interesting.
A similar effect is caused by the camera (in MGS 1, 2 and the first edition of 3), which is fixed! A fixed camera in a stealth game is ridiculous unless it can come up with a clever alternate way of providing the essential information. The whole point of a stealth game is that while the enemy has greater numbers, weapons and so on, the stealthy guy has a greater awareness of his surroundings and greater ability to traverse it (though the latter is useless without the first). MGS solves this problem by providing a radar which shows the enemies position, cone of vision, and whether or not they have been alerted to your presence. This is great, but a point is made of withholding it from the player at certain times. When you are detected and on the run, the radar is ?jammed?, and cannot be used for some time. This is ridiculous; firstly, it doesn?t make any fictional sense: why would them seeing you jam the radar? Do they have some sort of ability to jam your radar? If so, why don?t they always enable it? Also, the idea that the thing I called a radar, should in fact represent a radar, doesn?t make sense, because I don?t believe there is such a radar that can detect in what direction someone is looking. I would have thought this ?radar? thingy should in fact represent Snake?s heightened awareness, which should never leave him. Or is the radar jam supposed to represent Snake panicking and thus loosing his awareness? Either way the gameplay is ruined during these periods, since the player can no longer do cool stealthy things, because he doesn?t have a bloody clue where the guards are, and so does not know which stealthy actions would be appropriate. In MGS 2, the camera is a particularly bad problem, since, in a lot of areas, the player will never have a radar until they find the area?s control point (or whatever they call it), where they can turn on the radar. Even when you do have the radar, it only shows what is happening within a few meters radius. It gets laughable when you find yourself pressing yourself up to a low object just to influence the camera, so you can see what the hell?s going on further away. You couldn?t see when you were just standing up, but now your pressed against something, you can see, is that really what they intended? These issues strip the game of any worth, since they attack the very core of what defines the stealth genre, reducing it to a game of luck and persistence. In short, they make the game crap.
Besides the heightened awareness required of a stealth guy, I also mentioned the heightened ability to traverse the environment, which comes after, since it is near useless without awareness. But during that limited time when you do have the awareness, the controls and limited abilities prevent any sort of elegance in your actions. Say you want to crawl under a conveyor belt stand: you are crouching by the opening, and a guard is walking in your direction. Fortunately there are some boxes next to you blocking the guards view. But to enter the opening, you first have to enter crawl mode by which you will lay completely stretched out on the floor, inevitably leaving your legs dangling out for the guard to see. Obviously in real life, you could be entering the opening as you lowered yourself into the flat position.
Furthermore, if Snake was more controllable, the awareness issues might actually be fixed somewhat. We could be hiding somewhere waiting for a guard to pass, then quickly pop out and peek round another corner to check if another guard is approaching from there. If so, we can then quickly run and check the other corner. This sort of quick movement, which could add a lot of depth to the gameplay, is nigh-on impossible with the grotesquely clunky control scheme. If you want to peek round a corner, you have to first press yourself against the wall of the corner, which you achieve by walking into it. But if you miss the corner as you try to walk into it, which is easily possible with the extremely loose movement control, then you will end up walking round the corner to be spotted by the incoming guard. So you might try walking into the wall a fair distance from the corner and then edging yourself to the corner before peeking round. But you edge so damn slowly, that by the time you get to the corner; the guard will have done so too. This sort of difficulty is not necessary and I don?t believe the development team intended it. Rather, they must simply not be talented enough to design a decent control scheme.
Another crippling issue, more linked to the awareness problem, is that it is often very unclear what the guards will react to. Despite the narrative claiming that the guards have a heightened sense of sight smell and hearing, they are made, for gameplay purposes, to be extremely poorly endowed in all of these areas. The player frequently has to use these properties to their advantage, moving across their vision in such a way that any normal person would see. This is itself is very unintuitive, but it gets really messy when considering the boundaries of the guards limitations. Just how narrow is his cone of vision? How far can he see? He appears to be looking directly at me! At what ridiculously close point will they hear my footsteps behind them, or their pal being strangled just to their side? One simply has to take advantage of the guard?s poor senses in order to progress through the game, but since there is no clear way of telling when the danger becomes active, you will frequently alert them, and it feels very unfair, and indeed is.
How about the level design? There are too many corridors leading into corridors. This is similar to the door problem; you will often find yourself having to enter a corridor with multiple guards patrolling in different directions. If the design were more open, you could better asses the positions and movement of the guards, but in this case, you simply have to run to the corner where your? corridor enters the next, and press yourself against one of the walls to see if there is a guard approaching. If there is one approaching from some distance, then you are in luck because you can retreat a bit, let them pass, then sprint and hope there isn?t one coming from the other side. But when you press yourself against the wall, the camera moves to show what?s round that corner, meaning you can?t see what?s coming from the other side, even though this should simply involve letting your head turn back the way your body is facing. So badly designed! And sometimes there are cameras as well which are even harder to see without a radar. Since a camera can basically be pretty much anywhere, the only way to play successfully would be to meticulously press yourself against every corner wall and look up and round to see if there is a camera ready to give you away. And then you have the guards to worry about too, not only do you have to time your peeking for cameras around their patrol periods, but when you have spotted the cameras, you have to time your run for exactly when the camera is facing the other way and none of the patrolling guards are quite in eye-range. Finding this moment would take a good few minutes of working out the patrol patterns every time you turn a bloody corner. If this sounds good to you then it?s still not your game because not even this is possible a lot of the time for all the control and camera issues. And no you couldn?t just shoot them, because then the others would see the body, and if you tried to go pick it up and carry it out of sight then you would more then likely be caught considering how obscenely slowly Snake does everything.
MGS just about manages to work on some, and only some, of the VR training missions since, in these, they can design the levels precisely around minimizing the destruction caused by the camera and so on, but in more complex VR missions and in almost all of the main game, the core issues are exposed, and the game is ruined. Even with those few functional VR missions though, most of them are beyond boring since proficiency can only be achieved by lurking, still, in some corner, memorizing the patrol patterns.
So far I have only talked about the core gameplay, but there are other serious issues with the interactive elements of MGS. The boss battles for one; are so, so bad. They will usually involve working out how to dish out and avoid taking damage, and then actually pulling these two feats off. Both of these aspects of boss battling in MGS are made difficult for very, very bad reasons. It?s hard to work out how to dish out damage because the solutions defy any sort of reason as conveyed through the visuals. Perhaps there is someone roaming about a room, trying to kill you; no body armor or anything like that; yet shooting them has no effect. The solution is to throw grenades into their path to explode at the right times to stun them or something, at which point you can shoot them for a second or two, decreasing their health bar, before they recover and recommence the roaming and killing. Despite the gross unintuitive nature of this puzzle, pulling it off, is also made unnecessarily hard since you will always throw your grenades in the most retarded and clumsy fashion, a good second or so after you press the button, that getting it to explode at the right time as the boss passes is a feat of luck.
Another disgustingly unintuitive ?puzzle?, is when you are faced with a fat man prancing about, laying bombs, on roller-blades. He is, on the whole, immune to bullets, but if you shoot him enough times in quick succession, he will fall and lay on the ground waiting for you to shoot him in his exposed head, only to take a little of his health before the process repeats. How is the player supposed to know to do this? There is no way of working this out with your brain, you could only discover it out my accident. And so, what?s the point in presenting it as a challenge at all? The puzzle can only be solved by luck, and so it is not interesting! So do not waste our time with it! But the one thing that frustrates me more then the development team thinking they can insult my intelligence with such a task, is that many of the writers for popular videogame websites and magazines pay particular praise to these boss battles. What is wrong with them?
And what of these item boxes dotted about? How can these possibly be a good idea? Start with the ration boxes. If the developers think that the player should be able to recharge there health when they have ration remaining, then just give them to the player at the beginning of each section. This way you can control precisely how many he will have, and design the difficulty of the area accordingly. Why encourage the player to search around lockers and what not for these things? If there really were some stealth guy in an enemy installation trying to save the president or something, he would not be checking lockers for ration. Besides, this is not even fun; what sado wants to spend their time checking every locker and every corner for ration when they should just be getting on with the game?
What?s worse is that there are some items that they player absolutely needs in order to progress through the game, which can only be acquired in this manner. If you get to a bridge littered with mines. How are you supposed to know that the game has been programmed to make some of them impossible to hit with your pistol? By trying many times and realizing! And then how are you supposed to know that somewhere in the pretty massive facility there is a sniper rifle which will allow you to get them? Why in god?s name would there happen to be a sniper rifle lurking in some corner or locker which you could easily miss if you weren?t obsessively collecting each and every bloody ration. Who put it there? If it was planted for you by your highers then they would have told you to look for it, or better, its exact location, or better still, the game could just ditch this and give it to you at the appropriate point so we can stop faffing about. And when you look in some walkthrough which casually instructs you to whip out your sniper rifle to destroy the mines (since this is the only way I can see that anyone would suss out that there is a sniper rifle somewhere if they got stuck at this point without having luckily stumbled across the rifle already), we then have to search, either through the whole walkthrough, or the whole oil rig, to find that dratted rifle. Excellent design eh? 9.8 anyone?
