I'm glad to have the MGS games on Switch, but Konami needs to take better care of its heritage
Crying Wolf.
I can still remember the first time I met Snake. I was at university, and the person in the next room from mine had a PS1. I remember seeing loads of legendary games for the first time sitting on their couch as their PS1 sat upside down - it was one of those with the wonky laser. Snake, though? Snake was special.
I hadn't played games in a while, so bundled up with my memories of stuff like Metal Gear Solid and Tomb Raider was my confusion and delight and concern about the ways that games were embracing 3D, and possibly leaving people like me behind. MGS felt like it was leaving me behind for sure. Snake crawled out of the chill waters into Shadow Moses at the start of the game, and I saw patrolling guards, puddles on the ground, complex formations of rock and electrical equipment and it made me think: this is so realistic! This is so much more serious than the Mushroom Kingdom! Games have grown up too much!
A few minutes later I had one of those slight reorienting moments. The point where Snake is getting ready to infiltrate the base, and he has to move past two spotlights that cast their beams on the ground. You have to find the moment to slip by them both while staying in darkness. Oh, I remember thinking - there is a game here that I could maybe understand. It's not just grown-up architecture and special forces. This is almost Pac-Man.
Then, a few days later I had another of those reorienting moments. I ducked into my neighbour's room and Snake was fighting a sort of cyborg ninja who appeared to be partially invisible and was banging on about how much he liked pain. I realised: oh, this game is not the straight-up Andy McNab-fest I imagined. It's weirder. It's real but hyper-real, and also camp and funny and surprising. Oh Snake!
I've played MGS since then myself, but I've also spent a lot of time not playing, not able to play it really, for want of a version that suits me. And while I haven't been playing it the game has become this beautifully rich thing, this dark night in a strange, endless, complex and sinister place. A lone hero, friends on the radio, no idea what secrets lie ahead. One of my greatest, fondest memories of games, you might say, is not being able to play MGS so instead it just grows greater in my mind. And now it's here - on many platforms, but also on Switch, as part of a collection. I've been so excited for this.
Now. I am not Digital Foundry, and my thoughts on technical matters are not worth listening to. DF is working on its own piece which will be suitably deep and authoritative. For now, though, for this piece all you need to know is that the ports in this collection seem deeply unambitious, even to my eyes. Frame-rates and image quality on Switch are not brilliant and there's also a lot of faff dipping in and out of menus and the store to download optional stuff, like the Digital Graphic Novels which you may remember from PSP. There are reports of missing features and patches to follow, but I'll leave that to experts.
For me, it's enough to say that I played this collection and thought, throughout, that Konami should really take greater care over its own heritage. These games are brilliant and weird and problematic and ground-breaking, and they're really amongst the most dazzling stuff Konami has. And they should look after them better. The reason I say that is sort of oxymoronic - despite the sub-optimal porting, I've been having a brilliant time with these games. They're so good they survive a lack of care. And that, paradoxically, makes me wish all the more that the publisher did properly care for them.
Honestly, they are special, and that means all of them. The collection includes not just MGS 1, 2 and 3, but also Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and in these early games you see the revolutionary proposition of the series undimmed. It's an action game! Soldiers and secret bases! But you're also not supposed to shoot everybody. You're supposed to sneak around them and success comes from avoiding a kill. It's hide and seek and it feels as fresh now as it did in the 1980s. It feels as much of a challenge to so much of the rest of game design now as it did back then.
The Metal Gear Solid games are extra special, of course. MGS 1 still takes me to one of my favourite places in all of games, while MGS 3 still feels slightly beyond me - in a great way - in the degree of challenge it offers and its historical preoccupations and eccentricities. But last night, I settled in with the second game, Sons of Liberty, and was transported back to the early 2000s.
So much about this game dazzles me even now. There's the genius of having diegetic sound in the Kyle Cooper opening sequence, so that along with Harry Gregson-Williams' gorgeous score you get the sounds of boots hitting the ground, knives hitting metal, water rushing through. There's the next-gen thrill of being able to shoot individual bottles in the bar and send the saucepans in the tanker galley bouncing on their hooks.
But there's more. I love the way the George Washington Bridge is rendered as this grey-green cemetery mass of metal and stone, with the bloom of traffic headlights moving about like ghosts. I love the way the whole tanker section gives you everything you want in an MGS game, before Kojima flips things entirely.
I'd never realised until now how important the colours are in MGS2 - they're washed out greys and creams and institutional greens and blues, suggesting the world is just one big prison complex. There's that lovely cloudy PS2 movement blur, but you also get the HD sharpness of the outline of Snake, his outfit, his beak of a nose and the grim Eastwood set of his mouth.
That's the thing, I guess. MGS games are games in which the details have clearly been sweated over. They're games in which you save by calling a specific character on a codex, and games in which patrolling soldiers stretch out their weary limbs when they rest in a spot before heading back to their routes. They're games made by people who care desperately about everything within them. It's great to have them back, but I wish their custodians seemed to love them as much as a lot of other people do.