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 Metal Gear
Solid was probably the most highly regarded game ever upon its
release on the Playstation a few years back. Having an almost
perfect combination of graphics, story, levels, well
everything about it really. The only real criticism was its
longevity, or rather lack of. After all this time the
Playstation classic has finally made it to the PC. Still, with
nearly 3 years since the Playstation release (Depending on
what country you live in) has the game managed to stand up to
the test of time ? Read on.
Story
Metal
Gear Solid starts out with a fairly simple plot. Rescue the 2
hostages, find out whether or not the terrorists can launch
nukes. Although as you proceed through the game the story
unfolds into something on a much grander scale. It also makes
quite a few nice “reality” links in it, such as to the
Gulf War & Nuclear weapons too, although many will
probably get a bit tired of the whole anti-nuke thing after a
while.
Still,
all in all Metal Gear Solid has a totally riveting
storyline/plot which takes nice twists here & there &
even makes a link or 2 back to previous Metal Gear games. The
ending also has a rather excellent, unexpected twist to it
too. While the game lasts you will enjoy seeing what unfolds
next.
Basically
this is probably the best game storyline in the year
2000 besides Deus Ex’s.
Graphics
Before
I start this section I should probably mentioned that I setup
the games setting as shown in our Metal
Gear Solid tweak guide.
Metal
Gear Solid was a stunning game to see when it was first
released, although things have changed a lot since then. The
games graphics have clearly suffered over time. The textures
while sufficient most of the time tend to appear fairly badly
banded at times, although this is down to the fact they are
8-bit it would appear. All human models (well, most
noticeably) suffer from this overwhelming lack of texture
detail. Up close you can barely recognise any sort of
features, such as eyes. Given that the camera is up close a
lot of the time (particularly in cut scenes), this issue will
probably annoy many of you. Also, mouths (Assuming you can
tell where the mouth is on the characters) aren’t animated
to speech. This is a fairly minor thing, but well, ever since
Half-Life & Deus Ex this is something we all expect
to see.
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