For variety, a video game review

So, apparently Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best thing in the world, or maybe the second best after Dark Knight (which I haven't seen yet). But I don't own a Playstation 3 and I hadn't played MGS 1-3. I decided to be patient and wait for the next price drop to remedy the first problem; in the mean time, I went out and bought a boxed set to fix the second.

These are actually games 3-5 in the Metal Gear series. The first two games (Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2) are old 2D 8-bit games with very primitive graphics, and would probably be too painful to play for most of today's gamers including myself. I did miss a bit of back-story by skipping them, unfortunately; I've read summaries which were a little on the thin side.

MGS 1 is a Playstation 1 game. For the technology era it came from it's pretty impressive, but that's a very relative judgement. It was kind of hard to play, so I went through it quickly on easy mode following a gamefaqs walkthrough. There's also a Gamecube version with better graphics (but worse voice acting), but I didn't know about it at the time I bought the boxed set.

MGS 2 actually felt like the most polished of the series. Since it's a PS2 game, the graphics were much improved, and the gameplay was smoother. Like the first game, it did not have a player-controlled camera, but the "active radar" (a 2D minimap representation of the playfield) mostly makes up for the frustration you'd expect from that.

MGS 3 took a very different approach to gameplay and graphics. It has a player-controlled camera (in the Subsistence version, which I played) but doesn't have the active radar. The graphics are much grittier in contrast to the cleaner environments of MGS 2; I don't think that works especially well in the low-resolution environment of a non-HD console game.

All three games are very plot-intensive. You spend about as much time watching cut sequences as you do playing the game; think Xenosaga, if you've ever played that. The gameplay is mostly stealth, although in MGS 3 you can pretty much ignore the stealth gameplay and brute force your way through the enemies, which I did. Every so often there's a boss combat, which hinges on figuring out how to control your character well enough to dodge the enemy attacks and land some of your own. The control system can be frustrating at times; for instance, in the third game I was constantly failing to stand up from a crouch when I wanted to and instead switching to a crawl on my stomach, wasting precious time. The final boss battle of the third game was simply too hard for me; on my best try, I managed to get to the point of needing just one more shot with three minutes remaining on the timer, and just couldn't land it. So I youtubed the ending and declared myself done.

That said, the gameplay is also amusingly quirky and full of interesting gadgets. In MGS 1 you can acquire a selection of cardboard boxes; one of the shortcuts for getting around the play area is to climb into a truck, hide in one of the boxes, and get yourself delivered to the destination written on the box. In MGS 2, if you crawl through an area infested with insects, they will start eating the rations you are carrying, and you have to "shake them off" using the item selection control. There's stuff like that all over all three games.

Of course, my goal was to experience the stories, which are interesting if not masterful. They are over-the-top and sometimes cross the line into pointless drama. The characters, friendly and unfriendly, are very colorful. MGS 1 boasts one of the best enemy mid-bosses of any game, Psycho Mantis. Frequently the plot digresses into the philosophy of global conflict in the nuclear age, sometimes using real-world footage, in an odd contrast with the fantastical nature of the story arc. I think the storytelling quality improved a bit in MGS 3, and I'm hoping that the story of MGS 4 lives up to the hype.