Metal Gear Solid is an action-adventure stealth game produced by Konami and released for the PlayStation on September 3, 1998. It is the sequel to Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. It is often seen as the game which helped popularize the stealth genre. The commercial success of the game spawned numerous sequels, prequels and spin-offs, a radio drama, comics, novels and a remake, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the GameCube (which is a great remake and should be a standard as to how to do a good remake). It is critically acclaimed and many regard it as one of best games for the PS1 ever.

Pros:

This game takes place in the not so distant future and the goal of this game is to “sneak around and save the world” . the semi sci-fi tech/feel/environment of this whole game is really well done and becomes quickly immersive. It’s a steal video game so you have to spend most of your time hiding away from enemies, which sounds pretty boring, but they really found a good balance for it. It rarely feels too laborious or annoying. It can be inadvertently quite challenging because they have created several creative, varied and unorthodox problems settings you have to work through. One of which I think is unparalleled in maybe all of video game history, the awesome boss battle with Psycho Mantis. Now all the “bosses” is this game are pretty awesome and how you beat each completely changes from boss to boss, but what the creators did with Psycho Mantis was pure genius. Psycho Mantis (to prove how powerful of a psychic he is), measures various stats in your gameplay and comments accordingly. He then goes into your memory card and reads off what other Konami games you like to play (I had an interesting experience with Azure Dreams of all games), and finally moves the player’s physical controller by using its vibrate feature. Furthermore, since he can “predict your moves”, the only way to beat him is to chance your control from the player 1 slot to 2. Wait, one of the greatest fourth wall break in human history in is this little old video game!? yeah. Now pushing a games graphics or creating a new playable feature in a game is always fun, but I have found it to become almost cliche and a shallow solution in the modern gaming market. I feel what Metal Gear Solid did with Psycho Matis was a perfect way of being creative with the limitations you have and thinking outside the box, quite literally.

Here is a video that brakes down the story line super fast (with a painfully catchy song). It was between this video and Metal Gear Awesome, but the later, though funny, can get annoying. *spoiler alert.

Cons:

However since nearly every stage and boss in this game has a creative problem that you have to solve in a different way, you can really get lost and/or stuck in this game. If it’s your first time through, you will almost certainly have multiple “what do I do now?” moments. Running around in circles, calling everyone on the codec and finally searching it up on the internet, (which was not really a good option back in the day). jumping through lasers with your cigaret smoke, blow up a random part of a wall, and killing a rat for a key card are literally ways you progress in this game, so I get the frustrations. My only issue with this game is that the beginning half is so damn creative that I personally feel like it kind of plateau and actually ends kind of weak. I have played the first half-ish of this game like 6 times and then just losing interest. I mean Rex is cool and all, but after the insanely dynamic beginning, firing 100 missiles at a helicopter or avoiding machine gun mounted security cameras just feels taxing. Maybe the problem with this game is that it is just too damn good to start, that its hard for it to keep the pace up.