[S2 E7] Episode 028 - Metal Gear Solid

Two friends are recording a podcast episode discussing their history with the game Metal Gear Solid. One of them played it as a child and enjoyed it, while the other finds it difficult to appreciate older games because of the lack of polish and responsiveness compared to modern games. They also mention the idea of doing a draft where they pick games for a console and no one else can choose them, and discuss the possibility of having a neutral party judge the drafts. They then delve into their thoughts on Metal Gear Solid, with one of them finding the dialogue and story confusing but fun, and the other feeling that the game hasn't aged well. This is James. James? What are we doing? We're recording a podcast. Okay, I'm inside the facility. Do you have your cardboard box? Oh yeah, dude. Three, two, one. Dark Lord. Yeah, I don't think I want kids, dude. I really don't. It's a real fun bit, dude. Yeah, it sounds like you're having a blast, dude. Yeah. Anyway, how have you been? Well, I'm sick, which is crazy. Which is great for what we're talking about today. Yeah. We're going to talk about Metal Gear Solid, and I think the last time we talked about a Kojima game, I was sick, too. So, that was a while ago, actually. It was. It was. That was when Death Stranding was the only other one, right? Yep. And hopefully it's the last one ever. Oh, no. I'm just joking. I don't think you would... Well, we'll see. I feel like you probably didn't enjoy this game that much, but... So, okay. You want to jump into it? I don't want to jump into it yet, because I just want to catch up. If you've got time for me, I'll have some stuff to say about it. I don't think they're as negative as you think they're going to be. Hopefully not. I mean, it's your favorite director. Yeah. But something I am curious about, I don't know where you want to put it in the record, but I want to flesh out a little episode concept. So, I've been throwing out some invites on the little draft thing I talked about, but then you had another idea. So, explain the draft to me, because I don't know if I fully understand what you want to do. I don't do the sports ball, so I have to do this from outside eyes, from the sports industry. But, like, when there's a draft every year, teams will say, I want to draft this player, right? Yeah. Once they draft a player, that player can't be used by another team during this set, right? Okay. So, keep that in mind. So, basically, they take a player in our version. It's going to be, we take a game. Nobody else can use it. So, what I want to do is get some guests on the podcast, and we'll pick, like, the Xbox 360, okay, as our console of choice. And we're going to go, we're going to decide who goes first, and all that, and then, okay, so person one says, I'm going to pick, these are going to be wrong, so I don't influence anything we do later. I'm going to pick Pokemon Yellow, and that's, if that was a 360 game, we're going to pretend it is for this example. I'm going to choose the game that was well received on the Xbox 360. I'm going to take out Pokemon Yellow. That's my first pick, okay, my first draft. Nobody else can pick that for the road. So, when we get into it, like, so if somebody picks out, like, one of the Halos that was super big, nobody else can pick that, okay? And we go in line, right, until we each have, like, I don't know, five games, four or five games, and then, at the end of it, we're going to say, okay, here's my draft, who's got the best team or list of games for, like, a Saturday night or whatever, right? So, you following me now? A little bit. But, you know, if you go and you make out your list ahead of time of, like, okay, these are the games I want to get on my list, but then I pick one of the games that you were having, you can't pick that game anymore. Well. So, you've got to be prepared to, you know, that I haven't gone that far yet. That sounds like a draft thing to do, yeah. So, that's kind of the initial, like, I thought about maybe trying to get, like, a neutral or, like, another person that wouldn't do the draft bit, but would be, like, a judge or something. Right. To maybe vote on, like, okay, well, I think this is the best, you know, James had the best draft in this round, so he won. Or if we did, like, a poll online or something, I don't know. I'd like to keep everything contained in one episode, but I don't know how to do that. So, we could have a neutral party to pick who had the best draft. I think that would be good, but, again, that's also going to be, you know, I invited a few people, but if, like, their taste could influence it, like, if somebody goes and picks however many Assassin's Creed's and I was the judge, I would think theirs was the best, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, I don't know how to manage that one. That, dude, just 360 in general is a humongous console. It is. There's so many games on there. Yeah. Okay. And then I had an idea that's more of a teamwork kind of version of that. Like, there's these classic consoles coming out. That was a tongue twister. There's these, like, classic, you know, retro consoles, the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, probably a Sega one. But I saw a video of a guy that did one for the Wii, and you pick 20 games that represent a console the best. Right. We have a discussion. So, something like the 360, obviously, I would think Halo, probably Assassin's Creed. But, you know, in some point, you're going to have to get rid of them. And then, I don't know, the Kinect was a big thing with the 360, sadly. Yeah. You know, you would want to be able to represent that, I guess, too. But, yeah, I don't know. It's more of a teamwork version of that. Right, right. Narrow it down to 20 games that represent the console. That's a good one. Thanks. I didn't come up with it. So, yeah, I want to get something together. I've got, like, a bunch of, not a bunch, I've got, like, three invites out. And everybody so far has been like, yeah, I'll come up on the show. That sounds fun. So, I'm actually kind of excited. Cool. So, okay, cool. All right, let's get into it. Welcome back to 321 Backlog, the podcast where we sit down and play games from our backlog and then talk about them. My name is Alec, and I'm joined by my pal, James. COVID James, how we doing? COVID James, we're sick again. Oh, dude. You feeling okay? I feel pretty good, yeah. I just woke up. So, at some point, like two hours, three hours from now, I'm going to start to fucking tank. So, we're getting you now. So, our next episode record might be a little strained. I'm just sleeping the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be a death-stranding episode three. Man, I really wasn't asleep for that. That's okay. All right. So, what are we talking about? We're talking about Metal Gear Solid. You know, I was going to say, so fun. And then I had to stop myself. So, my goodness. Such a game. Definitely a game. It's such a game. I've got some things to say about it. I'm glad I'm taking it off of my list of content to consume. All right. So, I'll say that much. I don't even know what that means, dude. Oh, I'm going to get into it. What was your history with Solid Snake and with Kojima with Metal Gear? Metal Gear? Okay. With Konami. Yeah. So, I played this game when it came out, rented it as a child, enjoyed it a lot as a rental. I'm going to say I got it for, like, Christmas the year after I had rented it, like, you know, six months later or whatever. Yeah. And played it a lot. Like, I used to almost speedrun the game. And so, I would skip all the cut scenes and just get through to the, you know, the end of it. And there's the game encourages multiple playthroughs, too. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know that. Yeah. I would say it's funny. It's funny you said you skipped cut scenes because, like, while they were long, that was probably the thing I enjoyed the most about it. Yeah, dude. Oh, man. So, anyway. Sorry. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. I had no idea what was happening, but. Really? Are you kidding me? Okay. It's jumping so far ahead. I should have taken, like, a genes counter. How many times Liquid said the word genes? Okay. When him and Snake were fighting? Yeah. I swear it was in the hundreds. Like, just from a story and dialogue standpoint, what the fuck was happening, bro? Like, it was just insane. Like, a fun insane, but it was insane. I think he is a lot of his, he has, like, a lot of the recessive traits. Or does he? Well, yeah. Yeah. But I think they're the same. Like, they're clones, right? Right. But I think that Liquid has a lot of the, like, recessive traits, so he's probably a little bit obsessed with that. Yeah. Because he's, like, he feels inferior. Oh, yeah. No, I know what they were going for, but, like, the dialogue choices for it, it was just like. Oh, yeah. Well, dude, it was 30 years ago. It's like somebody told whoever wrote the script, I'll just say it was Hideo. It's like, Hideo, have you heard of this word, genes? And then he's like, cool, I've never heard of it. I'm going to use it 100 times today. I got all of the recessive genes. Anyway, sorry. So, you wrote that as a kid. Now, this was in 1998. Denim. When it came out. Yeah. Dungarees. Dungarees, man. I got recessive dungarees. Levi's. Oh, man. So, Hideo Kojima brought us the masterpiece that is Death Stranding, right? Yes. Single player game, action, stealth, depending on how you want to play it. We'll get into that a little bit. Rated M for mature, back when ratings mattered. 9.8 on IGN out of 10, and Metacritic out of 94. How do you feel about that? You've got to think about the time it came out. Yeah, I definitely have to think about the time. And that's something I'm noticing about myself when we go back and play these older games. Yeah. Because so far, if we go back and play a game that's, like, I'd say before 2010, and I had never played it before, I end up enjoying it a lot less than I think I feel like I should. Yeah. Because it was something I missed out of, that if I had played when it had come out, or years and years ago, for a multitude of reasons, one being, like, if I had more patience and more time, I probably would have enjoyed these a lot more. But then I'm having to combat, like, emulation of an older system, where stuff isn't controlled just right, things aren't as responsive or polished as what I've been used to. I feel that. Like God of War and Spider-Man, for example. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? That are just phenomenal games. So, it's hard. I'm realizing I'm becoming really harsh in how I go at these games, or how I perceive these games, because they're from a different time. And it's something I'm trying to be better at, but I had a rough time playing this game. So, I don't think any of it had anything to do with emulation, to be honest. I feel like games run, for the most part, better emulated. I think this game just suffers a little bit from the game itself. No, true. But what I mean by emulation is, you like doing the thing I'm about to describe, and I don't. How I perceive it is, you like to tinker at stuff, like with your Steam Deck, right? I feel like if it's frustrating to you, you don't let on. But, I feel like you don't mind going and spending, you know, 20 minutes just to set up the possibility to play an old game, versus, I just want to click download, and then play the damn game. Yeah. Or if I own... I would have rather bought a PS1, a CRT television, all the cables, the controller, and hooked it up, and played that, than try to deal with the emulation version, because stuff doesn't get mapped right. I don't have 100 controllers behind me to pull from, on like, oh, this one matches, and all this stuff. Like, I happen to have a PS4 controller, but I don't want to have to do... I don't want to go through the extra hoops to play a game. I want to have everything that was supposed to be set up to play this game in its original form, and just play that. Right. I have no problem with the legal issues, or anything with emulation. I think it's an awesome tool to be able to play these games. I just don't prefer it over native hardware. I don't like the extra hoops to go through to play a game. That's just me. So that's where I was with emulation. I just want to sit down and play it. So I think, just to counteract that, just to tear you down a little bit, if you think about, if you have it all set up working, it's a lot easier if you have it set up and just running. You know, drag and drop a game into a folder, and you're done. That's all you have to do. If you already have it mapped one time, it should be mapped for the future. I mean, I get it. But there is an appeal to using everything the way that it was meant to be played. The game will look the way it was meant to look on a CRT TV, everything like that. I want a little resistance to get to the thing I want to do. That's what I want. It's odd to me that you would say, as little resistance, would include buying a CRT TV and AV cables. See, that's just me throwing money at my problem. Yeah. That sounds like resistance. That's all that is. Yeah. Well, all right. Touche. But that's the thing. We talked about playing a 360 game. I had the physical disc, and it has now somehow lost itself. I'm still figuring out what happened to it. Crazy. I still have my emulation files. All right. You mother... But that one, I have set up to all I need to do. I have an Xbox One that's back compatible, and I tested the damn disc. It's back compatible. All I've got to do is plug it in and change the TV input. That's the only bit of resistance I want to do. I don't want to be like, oh, did I set up this emulation folder and file six months ago on my Steam Deck? Is it updated? I just want to be like, hey, I didn't forget to do a thing or have a file set up. I can just play. Right. Again, I think emulation is an amazing tool to have for archival games. In a lot of ways, it's the only tool to have for that because companies don't make their stuff accessible. Yes, and that's a whole other topic. That's a whole podcast right there. I don't want to say I don't want emulation to exist. It's just like when I just want to relax and sit down for a game, I don't want to have to deal with it is all I'm saying. Where did we get off track here? I apologize. I don't know, dude. I feel like that was my ranting. What's your history with this franchise? My history, actually, to get myself to stop talking, but I'm going to continue, is I remember vividly enough to remember it. I believe I would just watch you play this game. Yes, probably when I would speed run through it. If the story isn't remotely familiar to you, then that's the reason. I remember bits and pieces. I remember at one point looking over your shoulder while you were going through the outdoor cave that had wolves. Yeah. Right before you fought the one chick with the jacket. That was her name. Yeah, the chick with the jacket. Oh, I don't remember any fucking names except Naomi, because we were going to do a bit, and I was going to call you J-O-M-E. Like while we did the codec. Like the codec with the J-O-M-E. J-O-M-E. We're recording. Codec. Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Colonel. Why do you spell it that way? I don't know. Oh my goodness. So I picked this game because I wanted you to play it. I wanted to. You got something to do with that. Well, I wanted to also, I did too. I wanted to see how it held up, because I have pretty fond memories of this game when I was a kid. Yeah. Those are altered now a little bit, but I wanted to see how it held up graphically and gameplay-wise and stuff, because I still do feel like this game was way ahead of its time as far as gameplay goes. I mean, think back to what else was coming out at this time, if there were any other games like this. Just the sheer size of this game was crazy. Yeah. It was, what, 1998? We were like in Pokemon times. We were ten years old, right? Yeah. Like ten years old. Think about that. Yeah. Very true. As anybody has gathered, Alec played this one on the Steam Deck emulation. I did as well. I have a legitimate copy of it, because I'm not a piece of shit, but I'm not hooking up my system to play it. I actually have multiple copies, so we could just say I lent one to Alec. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I have a copy on PS1. I've got the PlayStation 3 remasters as well. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, graphics and art, what do you think? Fuck me, dude. So, I mean, okay, and again, what I mentioned earlier is I think I'm being more harsh after coming off of games like in the PS5, Xbox Series X and S era. Yeah. Right? It's real hard to go back and look at some of these, especially when I didn't. I'm really bad at putting myself in like, oh, okay, it was in this time frame with this game and this game. I didn't look any of this up, so why would I have that off the top of my head? But it was, oh, I mean, could cylinders not be made? Only fucking tubes, like square tubes? Yeah. That's just, man, they were good at shading. I mean, you could give, I mean, Meryl got the whole, like, Laura Croft boob situation, but they shaded it just right to give her, you know. So, character models are always tough. They're always the worst part of any game. Even now, they don't look as good as the rest of the game does. True. But the environments of this game, right? Yes, I think the, yes, the maps and environment was much better. Leaps and bounds better than the character models. 36 years ago, dude. Oh, God. Somehow that sounds like longer than 30. Yeah. I'm looking up specifically one area I wanted to share with you. So, you played this on handheld only, or did you play it on a TV? Handheld. Sorry, I'm eating. That's all right. Yeah. I played it on the TV and a little bit on handheld, but the majority of it, I played it in two sittings. You know, I've got experience with the game. Good God. Well, I mean, dude, I can run right through it. I could tell the story. I know quotes. I'm setting a picture right now. This environment, dude, was so good. This is the Vulcan Raven fight, the second one, where he's chasing you with a minigun. Right. It just looked so good, dude. It captured, like, you can feel that it's cold there. Yeah. The bullet holes all over everything that you would expect to see from a guy shooting a minigun everywhere. It's shipping containers. It just was, I mean, this is a pretty bland area, but, like, this game has such a, like, cold, depressing Alaska feel to it. Yeah. So, I don't know. It's just, it's important, I think. No, it was definitely one of the, I decided it wasn't a memorable fight compared to the rest of them. I guess it was, I think. I think they're all pretty memorable, and that's one of the things that makes it good. Yeah, they were all fairly unique from each other, which was nice. For one reason or another, they were all very memorable. Psycho Mantis being, like, you know, the weird fourth wall breaks. That, I think, was my favorite. So, the character models were bad, but at the same time, I feel like they were good enough. You know, they didn't try to make the characters' mouths move. They just moved their heads to signify that they were talking. Right. They were very polygon heavy, but what wasn't at that time? And if you take the character and they zoom out and it's in the playing field, they look amazing because they're zoomed out a little bit. Right, they do look a lot better. They look like, dude, I mean, when I was a kid, it was real life, you know? Oh, for sure. Yeah. So, yeah, I get you put oof as the graphics and art, and I understand why. What did you think about sound quality? I mean. I will say real quick, when you were in the codec, it gave more detailed representations of your characters. Those were great. So, they had actual artists behind these, and I'm sure the cover art, the box art was really good. I didn't look at it, but I can only assume it was decent. But it was just translating that to that older hardware was where it just kind of showed his age in this case. Sound quality, it was fine. I got the same, you know, just burst of anxiety every time you heard yourself getting spotted. Yes, dude. Yeah. Insert right here. Like, that just sends a fucking chill down your spine. Yeah, if you're falling asleep, welcome back. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay. So, for those who don't know, Solid Snake either has or is just about to be added into Fortnite. I didn't know that. And you can emote, and I believe it puts a red exclamation point above his head, and it plays that sound. That's pretty cool. And my son. I love little crossovers like that. My son, we were looking at the Fortnite store, and he saw it, and he goes, oh, that makes the sound from YouTube. Oh, wow. Like, YouTubers and stuff will use that exclamation point sound for just random sound effects because they're playing off of people of our generation that know what that's from. But now his generation is hearing it just thinking it's a random sound effect. He has no concept for what that is. I was like, James is going to love this. Oh, my goodness. Put him down. Put him down. He's done. Okay. Jesus. But the sound quality overall was good, right? I think the quality was fine. There was nothing glaring that was like, oh, this sucks, or like, oh, man, that's really good. I mean, I think it was on par with everything else. I don't have anything negative or amazing to say about it. Say something negative about the voice acting for me, please. The voice acting? Again, see, I think it was, what's the term, campy? Yeah. I don't understand. Or cheesy. I don't know why it's called campy. I don't know either. Campy dialogue. I'm going to look this up right now. Campy, camp is a style of production and performance where everything is over the top and theatrical, often but not always in a self-conscious way. All right. That's just one Reddit comment. I don't know if that's accurate. So it was, my God. Campy is the correct terminology for it. It might not be. But it was. I feel like hokey. So. It was written very strangely, I guess. It was. And I don't, dude, it's crazy because I think when I was a kid, I didn't realize how corny it was. How corny and horny. I'm going to put a clip right here for, like, snakes. The moment you playing a snake talk to any female character. He says this. Nice to meet you, Snake. It's an honor to speak to a living legend like yourself. What's wrong? Nothing. I just didn't expect a world-class designer of military technology to be so cute. You're just flattering me. Corny games for horny, corny James. It was so ridiculous. And it's like in the first two minutes of the game, dude. This game taught me everything I know about how to talk to women, dude, okay? Don't bash it, all right? Oh, my God. Yeah, again, I don't think I noticed any of that when I was a kid. But I was 10 years old when this game came out, which is kind of crazy. Yeah, very true. I feel like the dialogue definitely did not age well. Is it this day and age? Yeah, it's so sick. If they put that in, oh, my God, it would just boycott it for days. It would just go away. It's crazy. I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but it wouldn't be able to last in 2024. Yeah. Dude, it's funny because every female in the game is, like, immediately attracted to Snake, too. Yeah. You've got main character energy all day. Oh, man. So, yeah, the voice acting, I think I say this every time. The people that were in the booths were fine. That guy is, like, a legend, dude, David Hare. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's, like, he's done Snake for every game and even, like, Big Boss and the other ones. So, yeah, the voice acting is good. The writing is odd. The writing was fucking insane. Yeah, and maybe, dude, it is a Japanese game, I guess. So, maybe that is a big thing. You know, I feel like the way people talk in anime is not the way we talk at all at work. So, maybe there's something with that. I feel like I've seen voice actors talk about this where it's, like, they, I don't know how they translate it over. But I think a lot of stuff is in the translation where, and I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm thinking that I remember hearing something of someone being interviewed. I could be completely wrong. So, but I think it's, like, it's during the translation from Japanese to English, like, sentence structures don't match up. And then they don't go through the process of, like, oh, let's go ahead and change that around and make it make sense. But then also you're going to do a dub and you've got to match the cadence of this person. That's probably a big part of it. That's moving their mouth at that time. So, they need to fit it within that amount of space of when the character's model is moving. And I think that's, yeah, I think that's part of it. You know, there was, did you play any of Ghost of Tsushima? You mean, no. Yeah. So, there was a game mode where you could play with, it's, oh, it's some director that would do, like, the old Japanese samurai movies with, like, black and white and splashes of red and everything's in Japanese, of course. It was a very specific style. Anyway, you could play the entire game in that style and all the dialogue would be in Japanese, or where were they? I think they were in Japan, in Japanese with English subtitles, right? But they didn't make the character models change from English to Japanese. So, you had Japanese dialogue, English subtitles, but then the mouths on the models were speaking English. I see that in a lot of games in general. All right, back to Kojima 101 mechanics. And I've got two that I want to talk about. The rest of the game, I think, once you get down, like, the shooting and how that functions, I think it's fine. Do I think it's the best? No. Do I think it probably got improved throughout the series once, like, controls got standardized? Yes. But this was in the early days of, like, they don't quite know how to really do shooters. Resident Evil had the same issue with, like, tank controls. It's like, they don't really know what they're doing yet because we don't have a hundred different shooter games to pull from. But now everything's kind of been standardized. So, this is, like, early days. It's not quite there yet. So, I think that's... That actually is a really good comparison to bring up other games at the time and how they played. Tank controls on Resident Evil 2 or 3, in comparison to the way this game plays, is fucking crazy that this game doesn't play so stiff. Right. There was a lot of fluidity in your movements. I didn't like the static camera position and how it would change when you would go into, like, different rooms or different areas. Like, you go into, like, a broom closet and then the camera changes for a second and then doesn't move while you move around. And then you go out into a bigger area and then the camera follows you. I didn't like those cuts. Right, yeah. That... It was... In most situations, it was fine. But when combat was involved in any capacity, I didn't like that. And not, like, oh, it forced combat. I'm saying, like, I didn't know that guard was there. Oops, now I'm fucked. And the camera angle would throw me off. Yeah, well, you have the radar, too, but... Yeah, which, also, I wanted to call that out, as well. I think I looked at the radar more than the actual play field for most of the time I was moving around. Higher difficulties, you can turn the radar off. Oh, that sounds fucking terrible. Yeah. Oh. It does. Okay. But it makes sense. Okay, well, the only thing I have for gameplay mechanics, the setting was really good. I know that's not really necessarily gameplay, but I feel like we don't have a place to put that, usually, the setting of the game. I thought, graphically, I thought it looked really good. I thought it played really well, considering there was the issue. Like, you even texted me about, like, can you not choke people out in this game? So it's weird. You have to, like, grab them first and hold them and then do it. But if you just try and do it, like, quickly, you end up flipping them every time. Yeah. So, yeah, there were some weird things, but that's also a limitation. In newer games, like, there's pressure-sensitive buttons, I think, in the newer games, so you don't always end up killing them. No, that's definitely true. I didn't choke a single person out. I always flipped them by accident, and I tried over and over and over again, and then I just gave up. You have to not be moving. You have to actually let go of the joystick and then hold square and then hit square a bunch of times to actually do the neck break. Well, so the last thing in mechanics I want to talk about is more of, like, kind of like a fourth wall break kind of thing. I, one, loved this thing, and I want to see it more. So in the Psycho Mantis fight, you had to do a controller swap, and there was a controller swap, but there was also, I'll explain that better in a moment, but there was a moment where he was showing off, this enemy was showing off his psychic powers, so he told you to put your controller down, and he was going to make it move because he was going to enable the vibration. That is so amazing, and I'm thinking about this from the lens of a 10-year-old kid when I would have been playing this. That's, like, crazy. Okay, so I want to piggy off that a little bit. Remember, in your game, I guarantee you he said your memory is clean. He says that. Right, okay. So what he's doing is reading your memory card. Oh, I've heard of that. But he'll tell you shit like, I see you've been playing Jak and Daxter or something like that. He'll say, like, you don't save often or you do save often. But, yeah, he's reading your memory card, and he'll tell you other games you play. Oh, that's so cool. That would be such an easy thing nowadays. You know, as I say that, I could see people saying, that's like a breach of privacy and all that shenanigans. You've been playing Splash Girls 12, you know, like. Oh, God. So in this game, they would have had to do voice lines. Yeah, that's true. But now you could easily have, like, an AI just read it off to you, and you wouldn't know it wasn't a person. True, true, true. Unless you knew. But, yeah, it was cool. I liked that. And then also in the Mantis fight, like, how it makes it look like you went to the wrong video input. Yes. But it says Hideo, not video. Yeah. Yeah. Shit like that, I don't know, it's clever. They do a lot more of that in the second game. Like, it really, like, we will play it because that game, I think, is a much better game, and I think it holds up 10 out of 10. But the second game, it starts to fall apart while you're playing it, literally. It's, yeah, and it gets pretty crazy. But, yeah, there's some really cool shit that they, that's a very Hideo Kojima thing to do. And lastly, in the same vein, it was, I forget what the story context was, but I think it was Naomi or one of the gaggle of women that were around Snake in an audio sense, was they set up, like, an injection for him to give himself. So they, yeah, they instructed the player to put the controller to their arm so it would vibrate to simulate him getting a shot or something. Which, again, the same, like, fourth wall break to put, like, to literally make the player, you know, a bunch of 10-year-olds in our case, be the player of the game, be the character of the game, and we can, like, literally be involved with it in a physical sense. And I thought that was so cool. Yeah, now there's so much more to try to immerse you in a game. We're not even going to have to get into VR. But, yeah, like, the vibration is a big thing. Like, the game will, I know in some games, like, if something's walking, the controller vibrates like the way Jurassic Park does. You know, there's a lot, too. But back then, that's how they would do it. Yeah, I just thought it was really cool. Oh, I'm glad you thought so because I know it's, that's pretty lame. I'm glad it's cool, like, to see it through those lenses. It could be considered a little lame. But, I mean, if done right, I think it would be okay. But this was structured. They were saying, like, oh, we can send vibration inputs to our controllers. What about this? And they were thinking outside of the box, in a sense, literally outside of the game, and thinking how can we immerse this player with the tech we already have. That's great. Oh, the fight with the gun guy that had the best revolver or whatever. The guy you were saving, could it remember the codec frequency of someone? I forget who. He was like, oh, I forgot. Oh, wait, it's on the CD. Yeah, how did you get that? You can Google it. Okay, so, but you understand it was actually on the back of the game case. I think I heard of that before if I didn't, like, other podcasts or something. So I think if I hadn't heard that. I had her frequency. It's 140.15. That, I think, is another thing that's going to go away, like a fully, is. Yeah, well, dude, imagine how fucked up that would be. I don't remember how I figured it out. I remember struggling with it. First of all, I didn't even have the CD case when I first played this game. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And there was no Internet, right? Like, there wasn't Internet, Googling, whatever. But you have a CD. He gives you, like, a disc before that. And I remember, like, looking at it, opening it over and over again and being, like, what the fuck? Why won't this, like, how do I get her codec? I think I spent, like, two hours, like, running. Maybe not, but there's some way. I think maybe she ends up calling you eventually. Yeah, while you look it up. While you look it up. I just, again, they were taking what resources they already had for other parts of just gaming in general. They took the logistics of getting this game physically to people's hands through disc distribution. It was like, oh, we can use that, too, for the playing experience. Yeah. That, I don't think, it may, I wouldn't say it hasn't happened since then, but I think from, like, this point on, I would be flabbergasted to see somebody do that in 2024 or not. No one's going to do that. We're not going to get physical stuff anyway anymore. But it's just such a genius thing to do to get you in the game. I love it. So, in the newer games, her frequency is on a cardboard box in the game because they don't have the same CD case, like, the remakes of it. But that disc, so this must be it. I guess if you have the disc that the guy gives you and you equip it and call the colonel, he'll, like, tell you, I think. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it just adds her in if you do that. If you equip the disc he gives you, call the colonel one time, it automatically adds her frequency. So that must have been how I did it back in the day. Weird shit. It's so cool. It's cool, too, because the little short that I just watched actually shows what the CD case looks like, and it just says Meryl, dot, dot, dot, with her frequency and her face. So it's, like, blatantly put there to, like, do that. That's cool. Game cases and books and stuff used to have so much more than they do now. So, yeah, we talked about that. The Ocelot fight, he's a huge, like, he is, like, the villain of the series. The gun guy? What do you think? Weird fucking names. So when I was a kid, I really liked that type of gun. The revolver? Like, not necessarily. Yeah, the revolver, yeah. I don't know, some of the stuff he says about how it's, like, it's a true, like, a real gun, you know. I don't know. It's really the worst gun to use. Yeah. Like, the only way you can kill him is because he stops a reload. Right. Because it takes so long. Clearly a flaw. And I don't know. Clearly a flaw in his plan is using the only six bullets at a time. Yeah. Well, dude, if we ever play Snake Eater, the one that takes place when that guy is a kid, Ocelot is a kid, it is kind of cool to see his origin story about how he becomes obsessed with that gun. Okay. Because he has it and he's not good with it and he meets Big Boss, who is, like, the guy that everybody's cloned to be, and he teaches him how to be better with it. Nice. So it's kind of interesting. So one thing I'll say, and I need your confirmation or your help, is for a lot of these characters, the bad guys in particular, were these carryover characters from earlier games in the franchise? Because Metal Gear Solid is the first Metal Gear Solid game, but there were other games, like in Nintendo. Metal Gear 2, I think the main antagonist is Gray Fox. Okay. So some and or all or some of these characters were callbacks to other games. Yeah. Okay. Some of them. Because that definitely felt like so many. Okay. I have so many thoughts I want to get through, and it's just too much. One, how many bad guys did we have to deal with? We had Ocelot, Gray Fox, Raven Man times two. We had Sniper Tiff and your Liquid. That's five? I feel like there was more. Well, two of them you fight twice. Okay. So it's five people over six times. Gray Fox, Sniper, Raven, Ocelot, Liquid. That's five. But then you fight two of them twice. Okay. So seven. Well, and the Hind D. So that's Liquid. You fight Liquid more than once, too. Right. Okay. So a bunch of fights in this game. Yeah. A bunch of characters to fight and give story reasons in which to do so over a sub 10-hour game. Right. That's a lot. It is. There's also, if you go in the menu before you play the game, well, also the booklet explains every single character. But then if you go in the menu before you hit start, play game, whatever, there's audio logs, tons of them, of conversations briefing the main character about all these things. Interesting. Extensive shit. Probably hours. There's VR missions you can do. There's VR missions that teach you how to play the game before you play it. Were these in the emulation versions? They're in every version. And they even made a VR game after this that's just, like, the expanded collection. You can play as the ninja. It's crazy. Okay. It was, like, over 300 individual missions to, like, help you learn how to sneak. What? Help you learn how to use every single gun. Yeah, VR missions. Look it up. I have a copy of it. Well, okay. So. I actually played the fuck out of that, too. All right. I'll say what I was thinking, and then I'm going to backtrack immediately. So bear with me. It was way too many people to keep track of and understand what the fuck was going on. Like, I watched all of it and saw the cut scenes, and I'm still, like, what? You know, I'm realizing now, like, okay. Dude, imagine being fucking 10. Like, the only person you really need to worry about, there's some you can write off. Like, all the ones that died, who gives a fuck? But you've got your Liquid, probably going to make an appearance again. Mero will probably make an appearance in some of the other ones. And then all your codec people. And what was your helper? It was from your top five list. Otoman? Otacon. Otacon, yeah. And he'll probably come back at some point in some of these games, I assume. So those you can kind of tell while you're playing who you really need to pay attention to. But it just seemed like it was a lot of information. And you went into some of these encounters where it felt like you should have gotten some prior knowledge. Now, backtracking, it's really cool that if they've actually got these VR missions and, like, debriefings to make you feel like you're an espionage agent, that's actually really cool, and I missed that. And, again, it's playing on, like, they were really trying to immerse you into this game. Let's give you a debriefing at the front. So I missed it, but it is really cool that it was there. And just in typical fashion, I'm pretty sure during all of the debriefing, Solid Snake is butt naked. Like, he's just sitting there, if I remember correctly, because I watched them one time. But I think he's, like, sitting leaned forward, and there's, like, shadowing over, like, anything that you would see. So, yeah, that's Otacon. Like, he's in all the games. He helps you through everything. So that's, like, I think PS3, maybe. Sorry, did you look up the graphical difference between this one and the remastered Metal Gear Solid for, like, PS3? What a difference. No, I didn't. So they remade this game on GameCube as well. I forget which one I saw, but, like, they redid it, and they were able to make actual, like, round objects. So Merrill was done properly. But, like, my God, the difference. It wasn't amazing, but it was a lot crisper. I actually went back and watched a few cut scenes in the newer style. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. It makes it look a little weird. So, yeah, well, then, yeah, it's confusing because they remade the game on GameCube, which would be the PS2 equivalent, using the same kind of engine as Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, and it didn't play the same at all because there was, like, features in it. Like, you could hold people up. There were, like, a lot of features in the game that didn't make sense with the environment. I don't know. It's not even worth talking about. But, yeah, dude, graphics improving is a real thing. Yeah, for sure. So, all right. I forget if I mentioned already, but storyline-wise, I just wanted to mention a few other things. I mean, again, back to the campiness that I'm assuming, if we're using that properly, the horniness of this game. I mean, Merrill's ass could have been its own character. It was. I mean, it had its own codec frequency. Yeah, it was like, all right, I mean, again, you can't do that in the games nowadays, which is sad because it's kind of like, okay, it's all in good fun, right? But, you know, that ain't going to fly with games today. No, it wouldn't. I don't know. Maybe it would. Like, think of Death Stranding. They didn't have that. I guess they didn't have that type of thing. Yeah, but if Sam was, like, looking at Fragile's butt and was like, oh, you got some good, you got a good butt on you. Yeah, it's like Snake actually was like, oh, something, something, you're memorable or whatever. It's like, oh, what is it? I'm like, no, you got a good butt. He just says, you got a good butt. I never forget a good butt or something like that. Like, it's just, you know, it's funny and ridiculous. But, anyway, the only other thing I got from the story is just, like, I was saying they overused the word genes earlier. The game was just like nukes. We got nukes. Let's go get nukes. And we got to fix the nukes and save the nukes and stop the nukes. Like, that was the story. Insert, like, colorful character, go save the nukes or stop the nukes. It was save the nukes. And they had a ton of, like, I forget, probably World War II, like, footage. Like nuking footage and stuff. Yeah. Like, to a propagandist level amount of stuff. And, again, you know, we would have been 10 years old when we played this the first time. You're just like, what the fuck is going on? What is this? I mean, it was rated M back in 1998. So, a 10-year-old probably shouldn't have been playing it. But the reality is we were. Dude, this game taught me how to break necks, okay? My God. Anyway. This game taught me to throw a right hook, a left hook, and then kick them in the face every time. Every fucking time. Like, who was the fight on the elevators? Like, it was just, uh, uh, uh, run over, uh, uh, uh, run over, uh, uh, uh. It was just the same fucking sound bite over and over. So, I do have an issue there. But I'm sure there was a file size limit. Oh, dude, the ninja fight. Yes. In the office. It's like, uh, uh, uh. Every time. Over and over again. Yeah. Well, dude, also, I mean, if we're going to talk about that, we have to mention the Ocelot fight with Baker in the middle. And he's just like, like on a five-second loop. Do it again. It didn't come through. He's just like, he's sitting there tied up in the middle, presumably having stress. But he's just like, over and over, down a five-second loop, just over and over again. My wife looked at me, and she was like, it's just the same sound. That's all she said. So, I want to touch on one thing that I hated, um, Sniper Wolf part after Psycho Manus. Meryl gets gunned down, and then you have to run for 30 minutes or whatever to go get a sniper rifle. That was unacceptable. It is bullshit. It was so stressful when it happened. Like, it was like, we're not a Metroidvania game. We're not like, oh, we have areas to go back to. Like, let's keep a linear progression here. Okay? Yeah, dude. It seemed like such an unreasonable solution to that problem. To go get a sniper rifle, like. I 100% agree. From, like, the building next door, literally. Like, go, you're at Walmart, and you need to go. That's a bad analogy. You're at Publix, and you need to go get a sniper rifle from Walmart next door. That's more accurate. And then bring it back to Publix so you can get through the deli aisle. It was just such a, like, weird solution. I don't know. It was bad. Not realistic at all. You would not do that. I don't know how you would handle that situation. You got a meat shield on the floor in front of you. Just use that. Yeah, pick her up, dude. But, like, ridiculous. And then, yeah, so you get the sniper rifle. You get tortured. How did you feel? Did you, what happened with you and getting tortured? I think I just kept spamming the be okay button. And did you survive? Yeah. So at the end of the game, who goes with you? Meryl. There's other options? Yes. Oh. If you submit or you don't survive the torture segment, Otacon meets you at the end because Meryl died. What? And that's not the true ending of the game, obviously, because both of those characters are in the other thing. But Meryl gives you her bandana, which gives you infinite ammo on your next play through. And if you lose it, you get stealth camouflage. Oh, shit. Which was the ending I got when I was a kid. Much sadder ending, obviously, because Meryl dies. But, yeah, kind of a cool thing, and then that encourages another play through of the game. So you can get both items on your third play through. Oh. And then you can also get, like, other shit, like the ninja changes his suit. You can also have Snake wearing a tuxedo. I think that's also just weird shit. That's also something that I don't see as often in games nowadays, and I may not be playing the right games for this, but, one, multiple endings. We've played a few, but it's not something I see very often. And also games that intentionally put stuff at the end to encourage you to go play again. Encourage another play through. Yeah, I think God of War had a new game plus, but in this game, the game didn't get harder. It actually gets easier. But it allows you to play in a weirder way, like wearing actual stealth camouflage like the ninja and Otacon have. It's a lot different. I feel like new game plus is just them manufacturing that from just a general system thing. I feel like new game plus is vastly different than what Metal Gear Solid did and how you just described it. Yeah, I agree. I see them as two separate things, and I wish that I don't want new game plus to just be the standard. I want the game developers to say, oh, we're not going to do new game plus. We're going to say, if they want you to replay a game, they do it similar to how this did. We can give you specific items, you can unlock stuff, and go that route than just a blanket, oh, yeah, you just keep what you had and just do it again. Nothing else changes. Right. I would prefer the Metal Gear option while saying that if I roll credits on a game, the chances of me picking that game back up are as close as you could possibly get to 0%. Yeah, and I get that. So should we wrap this one up? Yeah, I just want to say, I want to bring up one more thing. We talked about kind of the ending of it, the different endings you can get. The big plot twist with Liquid and Miller was a big thing. Yeah. And then, yeah, you also find out, like, the DARPA chief that you spoke to was Decoy Octopus. So later on you find the DARPA chief again. He's, like, in a holding cell with you or something, and he has, like, a lot more decay than what would have happened in that time period. Yeah, that's right. And that's when you find out the DARPA chief that you spoke to, they weren't able to actually get the code from him. He died. So they made Decoy Octopus tell, like, pretend to be the DARPA chief to tell Snake that he did get the code to then trick him into doing the stupid key code thing with the hot-cold ritual game. That was stupid. But, yeah, so that's what they end up doing. What a stupid fucking villain, Decoy Octopus. You know, and stupid naming conventions. I'm just now realizing this. Whilst recording the podcast, why are they all fucking animal names? Snake, Ocelot, with two snakes. Gray Wolf. Octopus. Fucking Octopus, come on. Mantis. Who is the sniper? Raven. Wolf. Wolf and Gray Fox. What's with all the fucking animals? Is it just the Japanese thing? Like Dragon Ball Z, every, like, I don't know how they break up those stories, but, like, every saga, I think, or every time they introduce, like, a new family, their family names are themed? Dude, for some reason, I thought it was, like, if you took all of their names, it doesn't. But I thought it would be, like, an acronym if you took all their names. But I think it was, like, just code names, like, Sniper, Wolf, Vulcan, Raven. Like, Solid Snake. They all have, like, a noun and an animal or something. Right, okay. I thought maybe it was, like, a DBZ thing. I mean, it's pretty Japanese, dude. Okay. There's also, you get, at the end of the game, you get a, you get your own code name. Oh, do you? Yeah, when you beat the game, you get, Oh, yeah. I didn't look at it. Let's just say I got Big Boss. Let's just say I got Big Boss. But that is the best rank you can get at the end of the game. I think when I first played it, it's crazy, too, because in order to get the best rank, you have to be discovered, like, less than one time or something and kill very few people. Zero. Well, there are times where you get discovered, but, yeah, that's what I meant. But, yeah, and then there's, like, you, some of the only people you actually have to kill are the people in the elevator. Yep, yep. The fight with Meryl, you basically hide behind her and let her kill everybody. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's weird. That's how you get the Big Boss rank, which I've never done. So I think that kind of, that's pretty much everything that we could talk about with it, right? Did you enjoy it? Like, do you like the series? Would you want to ever see things in the future from it? Yes. Okay, cool. I'm not going to write this game off. Good. It was an early iteration of a game that I think is only going to get better. So I've checked it off my list. And then it gets worse, but, yeah. It's definitely a bell curve. I think two and three are the pinnacle of this series, and then it goes worse. I can finally say I'm in the loop with Metal Gear Solid and that feels good. So I'm glad we played it. Cool. I'm glad you did too. I'm glad that you didn't hate it because I was a little, I was convinced you'd like it, and then when I started playing it, I was like, oh, what have I done? See, that's the thing. Everything I disliked was how it played, not the content in playing, right? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah. Like, I like bowling, but I don't like swinging the ball down the thing. I don't get it. So, yeah, I liked the game. I didn't like how it played. The story was fucking all over the place, and I don't know if I fully got it. I think you didn't because there were things that I definitely brought up that you didn't quite get. Yeah, it was so, I thought Death Stranding was bad. Death Stranding gave you a lot of information over a long time to try and figure it out. Metal Gear Solid gave you a lot of stuff, but just a tiny amount of time to digest it. Yeah, they've improved storytelling a lot over the years for this type of game. Okay, yeah. Awesome. What you got next, bro? You want to talk about that? Finally done with the James season of games. Fuck you. Fucking God. So we are going to be playing next Firewatch. Yeah. Back to Alec. Back to me. We're going to get this shit going. So, no, from what I've looked at, it's a little walking simulator kind of game. You know, low stakes, looks relaxing, so I think we're going to give that a go. Hopefully make something. Hopefully make space for bigger games later on. So very, very excited. But, yeah, we're going to do Firewatch next. I think that's going to do it for us. Should we sign out? Yeah, man. Yeah, that sounds good. Just thanks for listening, everybody. Don't forget to check us out on Instagram and shit, TikTok, X, Patreon. There was a little live stream last night I saw. Oh, my God. I was playing around with it just to see if it would work. I'm pretty sure for the first 30 minutes of the 45 minutes I streamed, my mic wasn't actually enabled and the game audio wasn't coming through. Perfect. You see, as well as you could imagine a first-time stream on Twitch going, it was even worse than that. So it was great. It was great. I'm glad it went well. I got one viewer at one point, and I'm pretty sure it was you because I texted you. So good, good stuff. So, yeah, check us out on the stuff. That's it for us, guys. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Anyway, how did you recognize me in disguise? I never forget a lady. So there's something you like about me, huh? Yeah, you've got a great butt. Butt? Oh, I see. First, it's my eyes. Now, it's my butt. What's next? On the battlefield, you never think about what's next.