The List!
Full Impressions
13. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 14 Hours
And so begins my journey through the Metal Gear series! Having played the majority of them only once over the course of the past 15 years it seemed like a fun idea to run through them all in chronological order to see for myself how the story fits together. With Snake Eater being the fan favorite of the series, it's hard to view it with an objective eye. But I have to say, maybe I'm just shit at the game, but I find the gameplay remarkably uneven. Some of the mechanics involving soft or hard presses of the face buttons feel like an anachronism of a fortunately bygone era. Specifically, keeping an enemy in a hold without accidentally slicing his throat felt like an impossibility. The bigger offense , however, is that the camo index is entirely unintuitive for the jungle areas. What's the difference between 70 or 80 or 95% camouflage? It's impossible to tell whether an enemy will actually see you or not until it's too late. And after being spotted in a patch of grass, there's really nothing to be done at that point except shoot it out or run away, neither of which is satisfying in a game that enforces stealth like this one does. Being aware of the Sorrow encounter, shooting my way out of situations was a non-starter in my mind. So that left me with alternatively scrambling for a crawl space to hide under, and subsequently twiddling my thumbs for upwards of 90 seconds until the alert dissipated (leading me to reach for my smart phone to browse GAF until it did) or run out in the open and let the enemies shoot me down so I could start back at the most recent checkpoint, which ALSO takes longer than it should. Snake is built like a tank and can take dozens of bullets before going down, so if one were so inclined you could probably sprint through a majority of the game with little worry. Simply put, this feels like a failure of game and/or level design. Oh how I longed for a simple "Restart Checkpoint" option to save myself equal parts time and frustration! Fortunately, this became less and less of a problem as the game went on and removed itself from forest scenery. Sneaking around the Shagohod base was the highlight of the game and I had little trouble maintaining stealth there in spite of the increased enemy count. In contrast to the uneven gameplay, the story throughout is a delight. Starting from the excellent title sequence and theme song, I loved how the game was styled as a classic James Bond movie. Eva as the Bond girl, Boss as the personal antagonist, all framed against a US vs Russia political intrigue backdrop. The balance of the narrative breaks in between sections of gameplay is nothing short of masterful, never getting bogged down in verbosity or delusions of grandeur like MGS4 so frequently does. It's a testament to the story and the 2nd half of the game that by the climax my frustrations in the early game felt like a distant memory. Still, those frustrations exist and while Snake Eater is unequivocally an excellent game, it is not the flawless masterpiece that I remembered it as.
Full Impressions
13. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 14 Hours
And so begins my journey through the Metal Gear series! Having played the majority of them only once over the course of the past 15 years it seemed like a fun idea to run through them all in chronological order to see for myself how the story fits together. With Snake Eater being the fan favorite of the series, it's hard to view it with an objective eye. But I have to say, maybe I'm just shit at the game, but I find the gameplay remarkably uneven. Some of the mechanics involving soft or hard presses of the face buttons feel like an anachronism of a fortunately bygone era. Specifically, keeping an enemy in a hold without accidentally slicing his throat felt like an impossibility. The bigger offense , however, is that the camo index is entirely unintuitive for the jungle areas. What's the difference between 70 or 80 or 95% camouflage? It's impossible to tell whether an enemy will actually see you or not until it's too late. And after being spotted in a patch of grass, there's really nothing to be done at that point except shoot it out or run away, neither of which is satisfying in a game that enforces stealth like this one does. Being aware of the Sorrow encounter, shooting my way out of situations was a non-starter in my mind. So that left me with alternatively scrambling for a crawl space to hide under, and subsequently twiddling my thumbs for upwards of 90 seconds until the alert dissipated (leading me to reach for my smart phone to browse GAF until it did) or run out in the open and let the enemies shoot me down so I could start back at the most recent checkpoint, which ALSO takes longer than it should. Snake is built like a tank and can take dozens of bullets before going down, so if one were so inclined you could probably sprint through a majority of the game with little worry. Simply put, this feels like a failure of game and/or level design. Oh how I longed for a simple "Restart Checkpoint" option to save myself equal parts time and frustration! Fortunately, this became less and less of a problem as the game went on and removed itself from forest scenery. Sneaking around the Shagohod base was the highlight of the game and I had little trouble maintaining stealth there in spite of the increased enemy count. In contrast to the uneven gameplay, the story throughout is a delight. Starting from the excellent title sequence and theme song, I loved how the game was styled as a classic James Bond movie. Eva as the Bond girl, Boss as the personal antagonist, all framed against a US vs Russia political intrigue backdrop. The balance of the narrative breaks in between sections of gameplay is nothing short of masterful, never getting bogged down in verbosity or delusions of grandeur like MGS4 so frequently does. It's a testament to the story and the 2nd half of the game that by the climax my frustrations in the early game felt like a distant memory. Still, those frustrations exist and while Snake Eater is unequivocally an excellent game, it is not the flawless masterpiece that I remembered it as.
Vanquish is phenomenal if you don't play it like a bog standard TPS and mess around with the mechanics to see how far you can push yourself and the systems. Catherine is pretty good too if you enjoy puzzle games and can relate to the mature themes of the story.
ycourse PC - 1 hour 27 minutes 6/52
