Reyturner

The Ultimate Playthrough, Metal Gears!?

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To get ready for MGSV: The Phantom Pain (and to justify my impulse purchase of the MGS HD Collection), I've decided to go back and play all the Metal Gear games again. It's been years since I've played most of them and I've always had a soft spot for these dumb games. Do they hold up!? Probably!

 

I'm going to tackle them in original release order: 

 

  1. Metal Gear
  2. Metal Gear: Solid Snake 
  3. Metal Gear Solid
  4. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
  5. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
  6. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
  7. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
  8. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
  9. Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeros 

I aim to finish them at the rate of about one a month and I invite you to play along. It's going to be La Li Lu Le Loads of fun!

 

First on the list, Metal Gear is available with the HD version of MGS3: Snake Eater, MGS3: Subsistence on PS2 and the MSX. 

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I will be replaying the main home console series before TPP, I might join you once you hit MGS1. I decided to swap MGS1 replays for its GameCube remake many years ago because for any of its ills I prefer it, so I won't technically be playing MGS1 I guess. I bought the HD versions of MGS2 and MGS3 but haven't played them so that should be fun.

I'll need to think of how to make it challenging enough though, as I've now beaten every single one multiple times including on the hardest 'extreme' difficulty (holy shit that makes MGS3 hard). Perhaps I'll go for the dreaded 'no alerts' combined with 'neutralise all enemies'.

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I'd take Portable Ops out of there because it's complete shit and instead add Ghost Babel in there. The great cutscenes for Portables Ops are on Youtube, so if you want the story, you could just do that as they are so separate from the actual gameplay. Also did you ever play any of the Metal Gear Acids? They probably make no sense as part of this playthroughbut the second one was pretty fucking great.

 

Also I'm glad you prefer Twin Snakes Thrik, since everyone seems to hate it for all of these small differences, usually improving game design as well as cutscenes and dialogue. The only anger I get is with the matrix type acrobatics shit, but it doesn't seem out of character since more ridiculous shit happens later in the series anyway. It's definitely preferable to characters jittering their heads up and down for minutes on the Playstation one.

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Get ready for a head ache. Whether its a good or bad kind of head ache, we shall see. 

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I'd quite like to join in for the main console series too, plus maybe peace walker. I only ever played MGS4 and I enjoyed it. Ive always found the control scheme puts me off more than anything else though.

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I played through MGS1-3 plus the original Metal Gear prior to the release of 4.   It was a ton of fun.  I felt all of them held up in their own ways, particularly MGS3. 

 

I may join in when you're on Peace Walker (which I own and have never played) and MGS4, as I've been wanting to go back and replay it for awhile now. 

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I'll join you for 1, 2, 3, and V: Ground Zer0eZ. I mean, that's the ideal scenario. Will probably put MGS1 in, flake out on the second confrontation, and spend the rest of the time wiggling my snake-butt in GZ.

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I think you could get away with just playing Solid and Snake Eater and be done with it. Sons of Liberty is one of my biggest disappointments in gaming history (it was even sadder when Bungie made similar mistakes with HALO 2), and I could not bring myself to finish Guns of the Patriots. Solid and Snake Eater remain some of my all-time favorite games, however.

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Though I'd be interested to play Peace Walker, as I hear it's essentially a direct continuation of Snake Eater.

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I've wanted to do this for a while but Konami refuses to release the games on PC so I'm LOCKED OUT. ):

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MGS2's gameplay was really stellar, essentially the epitome of the corridor-style stealth that was pretty much abandoned as of MGS3 (until the late game). It took virtually everything that worked about MGS1's gameplay and improved it, while alleviating annoyances — although this is something you could say about every MGS game to date. Indeed, it was such a great evolution that when MGS1 was remade as Twin Snakes using MGS2's gameplay mechanics it was an almost perfect slot-in, although you do need to raise the difficulty so that it's as hard as MGS2.

 

And yes syntheticgerbil, I'm definitely a fan of Twin Snakes. Pretty much all criticism seems to focus on the addition of some slightly silly cutscene acrobatics, which has always bewildered me because this is Metal Gear fucking Solid. Virtually everything else in it is superior, and the game was tremendously faithful to the original. The only thing I really miss is the removal of the sad music and the REX's lair music, which were of course

 
in MGS4. Weirdly, MGS4 treats both MGS1 and Twin Snakes as canonical because it uses non-shared elements of both.

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My plan is to play all of them, even the "bad" ones (I've always liked MGS2).

Just getting into Metal Gear and it's interesting to see how early a lot of Metal Gear-isms were introduced. I've found a gun in the back of a truck, I've blown up a panel with an RC rocket and I've back-tracked to open previously locked doors with a new key.

The codec is here too, with Big Boss giving me orders and tips, though he gets kind of shitty when you ask him about the pistol you find; "you know how to use that... right?".

Coming up playing video games, I remember "Big Boss" basically being synonymous with "bad guy", though Metal Gear was never a game I or my friends ever played, not even the NES version. Maybe because of NARC?

"Spoilers", Big Boss is the villain. Would his name have given that away in the 1980's?

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Wow, looks like a lot of progress has been made with successfully emulating Twin Snakes. When I looked into it a few years ago the game was a complete mess when emulated, but it seems like a number of people can get it running pretty well now. There are still some issues, but I'm now very pleased because it seems there are enough people determined to get it 100% working that it'll happen sooner or later. That means I'll be able to enjoy a HD version of every home console game thus far, which is really awesome — I'd kind of become convinced that Nintendo would never release the game from its GameCube tomb and the emulation would never work.

 

The emulated version looks pretty comparable to the HD versions of MGS2 and MGS3:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z004Dp8Pe8

 

As much as I loved MGS1, I just can't get into the following when I have the above as an option:

 

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I've wanted to do this for a while but Konami refuses to release the games on PC so I'm LOCKED OUT. ):

 

Erroneous! Your natively supported options are:

  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Enjoy! :)

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The original Metal Gear Solid also has a PC release which I think also includes the VR Missions. Did I already say that in this thread?

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You've convinced me. Fuck MGS1, in digging out my GC and hitting eBay for Twin snakes. (Or I might just emulate it).

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I love Twin Snakes.  The only real problem with it is that they tried too hard to emulate the controls for MGS2 even though the gamecube had one less button.  They really should have just come up with their own thing.  If I recall correctly, it took three different button presses at the same time to put your gun away without shooting anyone if you'd already drawn it.  Just weird stuff.  It would have been nice if they took advantage of those clicky triggers the cube controller had, but they instead used those for equipment selection just like the PSX version did.

 

I did a playthrough like this before MGS4 came out and that was a lot of fun, though I never finished.  Heck, I only beat the first metal gear and half of MG2.  But still!  A fun adventure.  This might be a good opportunity to right what once went wrong in my life.  I'm really hoping this psnow service has some metal gear games on it, though, so I don't have to hook up an old system to play them.

 

Also, I'll second whoever mentioned Ghost Babel.  That game was great.

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If you plan on playing the bad ones, you should also go out of your way to play the good ones. Metal Gear Acid 1 and 2 are super dope and I know a ton of other people here agree from prior discussions.

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I'll see if I can track down Acid 1. I think I might actually have 2 somewhere...

 

I would need to emulate Ghost Babel, but doable. 

 

I'm just going to stick to the PSX version of MGS though. 

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If I recall correctly, it took three different button presses at the same time to put your gun away without shooting anyone if you'd already drawn it.

Oh god that was so hard to not screw up everytime. I also hate the pressure sensitive crap on MGS3 where if you push too hard on the right stick (I think?) you slit the guy's throat during CQC.

 

Oh Reyturner, I don't know if you are trying to do a "canon" playthrough or not, but Ghost Babel is an alternate universe that splits after the first Metal Gear (so Metal Gear 2 never took place). Also the Acid games are a split universe after the evens of Metal Gear 2. Headache.

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I've found our missing Grey Fox and blasted Shotmaker. Sneaked around in a cardboard box. Smoked to see lasers. 

 

The only really frustrating thing so far is that I never have any idea if I'm going to be seen by a guard. Sometimes they see me from across the screen, other times I'm 5 tiles directly in front of them and they don't aggro. 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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So how's the play-through going?

 

I recently picked up MGS 1 for my vita and man is that game tough! I've made it further than I ever got before and I'm really enjoying it. Unfortunately I had to use a guide at one point (getting the sniper rifle). I totally get metal gear solid games now though, took a while for it to click for me, but it just did.

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