I always come out of PAX feeling exceptionally geeky. I want to just throw myself into the depths of my nerdy pasttimes and say goodbye forever to trying to find a balance in my life. Case and point: this article was originally going to be about the strange career path of Kid Cudi, but instead I feel like talking about the video games that I’m currently playing.
I don’t really know what happened between myself and the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Prior to the purchase of my original PlayStation I was really just a platformer and fighting game kid. These were the days before achievements but I had managed to pretty much 100% most of the Marios, Sonics and Castlevanias around at the time. I had a decent handle of Street Fighter and could hold my own in Mortal Kombat (and shout out to Eternal Champions).
That changed drastically when I got the PlayStation. Final Fantasy 7 got me into RPGS, Twisted Metal got me into car combat (albeit that was basically a whole new genre), Wipeout got me into racing and Metal Gear Solid got me into stealth games (I put a lot of time into Tenchu and even Syphon Filter due to Metal Gear Solid). I played MGS multiple times, got the bandana, the invisibility suit, hell, I even beat the game in a sweet tuxedo. If you told me that there were going to be 4 or 5 critically acclaimed sequels to MGS by 2016, I probably would have thought I would have played them all by now. My past self would be wrong though.
If I recall correctly, my brother picked up Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty when it came out. This was 2001 so we both no longer lived with my parents, so we each had PS2s. I remember watching him play it and seeing Raiden and being pretty “wtf is this” about the whole thing. Add to that the general outcry at the time that you spend about the first 20% of the game as Snake and the rest as some skinny blonde dude and I just never really gave it a chance. I decided not to play it. Then I stopped playing the entire series.
Despite the accolades that pretty much the entire series received over the years (even 2 seems to have grown on people) and the fact that the games don’t even occur in chronological order I just never went back to Metal Gear. I’ve played every single Twisted Metal game that has come out and have now played probably 10 or more of the Final Fantasy series, but somehow, Metal Gear Solid was the only Metal Gear I have ever played. At some point in time, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for the VITA popped up for either cheap or free on PlayStation Plus. The set has both MGS 2 and 3 remastered in glorious HD and was now playable on portable. It’s always easier to head back to older games when it’s not actually cutting into your “main console” time.
Long story short, over 14 years later after its initial release, I was going to go back to Metal Gear Solid. So how does it hold up? ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
