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You are Solid Snake, the unseen contingency in terrorist
plans. Using stealth as your main weapon, you're to infiltrate
the seized weapons disposal facility in Alaska's Fox Archipelago.
If their demands are not met in 24 hours, they promise to use
part of the nuclear arsenal they now control. Rescue high-level
hostages and stop the terrorists before time runs out.
Metal Gear Solid for the PC includes enhanced versions of the
original Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions for
the PlayStation with better graphics and sound. It also adds a
first-person play option and the ability to save at any point
during the game. More than 30 offensive and defensive weapons,
from silenced pistols and sniper s to night-vision goggles
and mine detectors, aid your mission.
Review
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It's sort of ironic that, just as our PlayStation
brothers are getting all excited about Metal Gear Solid 2 for
PlayStation2, the Microsoft/Konami double team has finally
delivered the first game to PC owners. The PC version of Metal
Gear is just as good as you'd expect a PlayStation-to-PC port of
an awesome game to be, with few of the drawbacks. At its core,
MGS is still a great game, but if you've already played and beat
both the full game and the follow-up, VR Missions, there's not
much in this package to recommend to you. If you're one of those
hardcore "PC Only!" types that don't own a console, you'll
definitely want to shell out the 35 smackers for this baby in
order to find out just what the hell everyone was talking about
two years ago.In 1998, Metal Gear Solid turned the console world
upside down. Intense gameplay, great graphics (for the
PlayStation) and a cinematic quality previously unseen in the
console realm made it one of the most talked about and played
games of that year. Chances are that if you didn't play the game
then, you're probably not really interested in it now. We're
foreseeing three types of people buying this game: everyone who
could never make Bleem! work properly, puzzled PC gamers who want
to see what all the fuss was about and gamers who have lost,
tossed or broken their PlayStations.
Just in case you live under a rock and haven't heard of the game,
the story follows Solid Snake, an unusually named government
agent called in from the cold in order to infiltrate an Alaskan
base taken over by a terrorist group. The terrorists
turn out to be genetically altered super-soldier types, just like
our boy Snake -- in fact, several of them are actually from his
old unit. Snake begins his quest by swimming inside an old subpen
and must make his way through the base on his way towards an
ultimate confrontation with the leader of the terrorist group.
The VR Missions is a whole 'nother story. The cinematic nature of
the game is tossed out in favor of small, arcade-like missions
that are essentially stand-alone puzzles. It may sound dumb, but
the missions are somewhat addictive due to their fast-paced
nature; you'll find the refrain "Just one more try" escaping your
lips more than a few times.
Although you'll have the rtunity to lob grenades, fire
machines and launch shoulder-ed Stinger missiles, Metal
Gear Solid's gameplay is centered on stealth rather than
straight-up, s-blazin' action. The player's attention is
usually drawn to the radar screen at the top right-hand corner of
the screen, which will not only show enemy soldier and camera
movements, but will also relay to the player the line of the
enemy or camera's . The player needs to sneak around the
perimeter of the enemy view, without triggering the horrible
trumpet-blare of an alarm and swarms of suddenly alerted guards.
Of course, if the guards do close in, Snake can always break out
the hardware and snipe, blast or choke 'em into submission.
The PC version of MGS does have a few things to recommend it to
hungry gamers. This version is actually both the full version of
Metal Gear Solid and the VR Missions, which were released
separately (look at it as getting two games for the price of
one). Gamers can also sneak through the game in first-person
mode. This may sound much more attractive to us PC types than the
standard third-person view, but the truth is that the game is
actually easier to play with the camera pulled back, rather than
looking through the eyes of Solid Snake.
The biggest change to MGS comes in the game's actual
presentation. Those of us blessed with rockin' rigs can crank up
the game's resolution to 1024x768. This makes the game look much
sharper and nicer, but it also reveals that the PC porting crew
did nothing in the way of touching up the low-res PlayStation
textures. Faces are indistinct and large textures are very
blocky, simply rendered with a higher pixel count. It would have
been nice if the game's textures had been cleaned up for this PC
presentation, but this would probably be way too much to ask for
from a Japanese developer. That being said, MGS does look nicer
than many of the other console-to-PC games we've seen (anything
from Infogrames or Capcom, for instance).
The minor additions to the game -- the inclusion of the VR
Missions "expansion pack," the ability to play the whole game in
first-person mode and the ability to crank up the resolution
level to 1024x768 -- may not warrant gamers world-wide to beat
down retailers' doors to pick this game up, but if you haven't
tried MGS or have a hankerin' to relive 1998's best console game,
definitely grab this one. -- DailyRadar Review
