Thursday 26 June 2008

Solid GOLD!

It’s the year 1998 and the Sony Playstation has been around for a few years. With the new CD-Rom support, game developers got the opportunity to vastly increase the multimedia elements of their games and amongst them was also Hideo Kojima who had heard a lot of good things about Sony’s first console. It is not surprising that he decided to continue his most popular franchise on the new console, enriching the game world with a new adventure of Solid Snake dubbed Metal Gear Solid. On September 3, 1998 Kojima’s newest masterpiece finally hit the shelves and became an instant hit selling over 6 million copies worldwide.

The story continues Snake’s adventures several years after the incidents at Outer Heaven. Once again the soldier is recruited by his former chief Roy Campbell, to infiltrate a facility on Shadow Moses Island that has fallen into the hands of terrorists. This time the villains are none other than members of Foxhound, the special unit that Snake was a member of himself when he was still in active duty. He has to rescue several hostages, amongst them Meryl the niece of Campbell, and stop the terrorists from launching a nuclear strike against the US. Everything works according to plan until one of the hostages dies of a heart attack. As Snake proceeds to the ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker he faces Revolver Ocelot in a challenging gunfight. However their duel is cut short when a ninja in a strange exoskeleton appears out of nowhere and cuts off Ocelot’s hand. Snake’s opponent runs for cover and the ninja also disappears using high-tech stealth camouflage. After telling Snake that the facility is only a cover for a new Metal Gear, Baker also dies of sudden heart failure.

On his search for a way to disable the powerful walking weapon Snake runs into Hal "Otacon" Emmerich, the scientist behind the new Metal Gear called Rex. Once again the ninja makes an appearance and divulges that he is in fact Gray Fox, who was supposed dead after the Zanzibarland incident. Snake defeats him in an honorable fistfight and makes his way to the holding facility of Metal Gear. On his way he defeats most of the other members of Foxhound until he finally faces of with their leader, Liquid Snake. Liquid reveals that he is in fact Snake’s twin brother and that they are both the result of a cloning project in which a group of scientists tried to replicate the legendary soldier Big Boss. He jumps into the cockpit of Rex and tries to kill his brother, only to have his precious weapon sabotaged by Gray Fox. Fox disables the tank’s radar but gets crushed in the ensuing battle. After destroying Rex Snake and Liquid have a face-off on top of the burning carcass of the tank and ultimately Snake emerges victorious. He frees Meryl and tries to leave the facility but moments before they could escape Liquid reappears and just as he tries to kill them, he falls to his knees and dies of a heart attack. It turns out that Snake is carrying a virus that was programmed to eliminate the terrorists and everybody who knew too much about the Metal Gear project. Ultimately the virus should also kill Snake, but the programming was changed last minute.

Metal Gear Solid had such a huge success that it was remade for the Gamecube in 2004. The game was called Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and retold the events of Shadow Moses with updated graphics and more impressive cut scenes.

I have left out several characters and key plot parts about this recap, since I don’t want to spoil too much of the games for you. I have also decided to stop my recap session here, since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is way too vast to summarize in such a short blog entry. However I will post several links, where you can brush up on your Metal Gear history in my next post, so keep your eyes open.

Last time I posted the first of GameTrailers.com’s recaps. The others, can be found here: MGS recap

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