The Players Club Episode 1: Metal Gear Solid (1998) - Am I My Brother’s Streaker?

Right before the Cyber Wolf, right after the cutscene where you get fired upon, Otakon pleads with you not to hurt her.

Yes.

Because he's in love with her.

She was always nice to him because he looked after the wolves and all the like genome foxhound soldiers wanted to kill them.

Right.

Which, again, always funny.

Like these guys suck.

Like they're always getting beaten up.

They see a bunch of wolves like in Alaska Alaska where it makes sense for them to be and they're like, Let's kill them.

They're kind of like an army of Fettermans.

They're sort of like maybe physically powerful,

but they're like really maladjusted and dumb and go whoa whenever they hear something.

You know, like how the boss, like in Metagross Hall of 3, it's the white flower petals with Fetterman, it's birthday balloons.

Today's marquee or AAA games have possibly the longest gestation period out of any form of media.

Even the most risk-averse and derivative cash grabs are routinely subject to five years or more of development time before they can even have something playable.

But this was not always the case.

The game that we're discussing today somehow began development, at least in the sense of commissioning artwork, designing characters and levels and coding, in 1996 and was released in 1998.

Seems impossible now in a time where bulge bracket publishers and big name studios seek to push whatever in-house or unreal engine based creation to its limits by capturing things like glass condensation and the way that the head of your penis makes a gross outline in track pants.

But Metal Gear Solid was not just conceived and birthed in less time than it takes to make a season of Bridgerton.

If anything, it's closer to the concept of Mormon ensoulment cosmology, where individual souls just linger around, waiting for the physical body they will inhabit to be born.

Of course, it had two predecessor games on the MSX and the MSX2, 1987's Metal Gear and 1990's Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake, respectively.

Snake's Revenge does not count even though Metal Gear 2 was purportedly made in response to its existence.

But Metal Gear Solid was a game waiting for the technology capable of carrying it.

Even then, it just barely did.

It was one of the few PlayStation games to require two discs to capture the entire campaign and all of its gigantic FMV sequences.

It had probably been kicking around in Hideo Kojima's mind in at least some form for quite a while, with concepts and themes visible in early 90s Kojima games like Snatcher and Police Knots.

It's no accident that a chunk of the teams that worked on those games joined Kojima for Metal Gear Solid, most notably among them Yoji Shinkawa.

the artist who has worked as the character designer and or the artistic director for everything from Metal Gear Solid onwards after getting a start as a debugger and a mech designer on on the first two Metal Gear games.

It's hard to argue that they waited too long or should have waited for another system more powerful than the PlayStation 1.

This was unlike anything that had ever come before.

It's not that there weren't any games that dealt in serious topics like nuclear proliferation or eugenics, and 3D stealth certainly existed as a genre before this.

There were even games that had clear cinematic influences and touches.

But nothing had ever been made with Metal Gear Solid's Solid's intentionality, where you actually felt that the creators wanted to change what constituted a video game, and they succeeded.

Today, we're going through the design, the gameplay elements, and the story of 1998's Metal Gear Solid, and maybe touch on Twin Snakes a bit.

Joining me today is Brenda James.

Hello, everybody.

I'm calling in from...

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Yes.

So you've replayed these games, like the first two games, a lot more frequently than I have in recent years.

And

in the lead up to this episode, I not only

played the

Metal Gear Zalt that's available on Steam as part of that collection that a lot of people have a lot of complaints about,

but I also went and

figured out the dolphin emulator to play Twin Snakes again.

And for those listening who are not familiar, Twin Snakes was a 2004 remake of the first Metal Gear Solid, which has since been reappraised by many fans as not all that great at capturing the spirit of the original and from a gameplay perspective, actually breaking several elements of the original game.

And

it was very interesting for me.

The, the only other time I've played Metal Gear Solid 1 in the last like,

yeah, 10 years is when I tried to stream it after not having played it since like before puberty.

And predictably, it was just, I've never felt more like Darkseid Phil.

I was like falling through the holes in the armory,

getting beat up by ninja.

Trying to stand up when you want to crouch and crouching when you want to stand up.

It can be a very difficult series in any of the games to kind of get back into the swing of it when you're rusty.

Yeah,

that was the

main thing.

Because

I've played a ton of Metal Gear Solid 2,

a ton of 3.

Those are both games I've replayed

probably 10 or 11 times.

And I put a shitload of hours into Metal Gear Solid V and Ground Zeros.

Same here.

And that actually hurt more than helped because, you know, as the games go on,

the player character, whether it's Solid Snake or Big Boss or the brain-damaged medic, you get more abilities.

And the thing that

I realized to my horror while playing it on stream, but also now

just being able to play it by myself, was how

this is so much closer to Metal Gear 1 and 2

than it is to any of the follow-up games.

Absolutely.

I was actually going to say this is as good a time as any to sort of, in our first episode, say a word about the MSX games and especially their relationship with Metal Gear Solid.

The MSX was a home computer system that was released in the early 80s that was the original platform of the first two Metal Gear games, Metal Gear 1 and Metal Gear 2, before the Solid series came along.

Metal Gear 1 came out in 1987 and Metal Gear 2 came out in 1990.

And the MSX games, I went back and played them recently, particularly Metal Gear 2.

And I really recommend anyone listening to this, although we will be focusing on the Solid series, to go back and play them because A, from a story, from the story component, they sort of are the centerpiece, despite being 8-bit games.

They're sort of the centerpiece that unite the one half of this saga, the saga of Solid Snake, with the other half, the saga of Big Boss.

And several important characters to the Solid series, and in fact, this game are introduced, Colonel Campbell and Gray Fox.

And in the case of Metal Gear 2 itself, the gameplay is very, very good.

There's a writer named Kat Bailey who described Metal Gear 1 as sort of more of a prototype, which I would agree with.

But Metal Gear 2 is really, apart from the 8-bit presentation, a fully formed Metal Gear game from all the way back in 1990.

You can crouch, you can crawl, you can tap walls, you get the three-stage alert system of caution and evasion.

And Metal Gear Solid will essentially, while it is genuinely pioneering, it really is, in a large way,

scaling up Metal Gear 2 with the power of a 3D console and all that Kojima wanted to do with that.

So just

for a lot of those reasons, I would recommend anyone listening who haven't touched those original games to do so.

They're available in the HD collection and the master collection, therefore.

Yeah, and most of the Marquee games in the series are retelling the story of Metal Gear 2.

Yep.

This felt like...

You know, he had to wait six years.

Kojima had to wait six years to make the exact version he wanted to make and he got to do it.

And that's so so rare in games, especially nowadays.

Yes.

Obviously Metal Gear Solid is a lot easier to play than Metal Gear 2

but you don't, there's not much more you can do as the player character.

And something else that's striking to me is that for people who don't know

The second MSX game, Metal Gear 2, never released in the United States, States.

Yet Metal Gear Solid is a direct sequel to this game that came out on an 8-bit platform eight years earlier.

I kept thinking about that.

Like, I kept thinking about how I tried to do this.

I tried to imagine how someone who, you know, how probably 98% of the people that have played this game experienced it.

At least when it came out.

For most of them, who the fuck is Big Boss?

Like, what is his relation to any of this?

Yep.

This first game in the Solid series, it introduced all these elements of the eugenics stuff, the sort of overarching, like, deep state narrative that came to define, especially like the last two games, the last two entries in the series.

Almost all of the emotional core of this game, like the relationship between

Snake and Frank Jaeger, Cyborg Ninja,

the revelation about Naomi, all of this stuff.

It does, I wouldn't say it hinges entirely on your knowledge of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, especially,

but it is sort of a testament to how well made it is that so many people went in having no idea who the fuck any of these characters were.

That like to them, you know, Solid Snake,

he's an incredibly well-designed character, but on the PSX, where no one really has a face, he looks like any mid to late 20s action hero in any third-person game.

You don't know why he sounds so like old and tired and

jaded by all of this, because to you, it's like, hey, asshole, this is your first game.

Yeah.

Act like you want to be here, you prick.

Yeah.

To your point about Snake and his character and what sells you on getting involved with any of these people, given that there's this big backstory you have to sit down and read about if you want to understand it, Yoji Shinkawa's artwork, which appears in-game, especially in the codec calls, is what gives flesh and blood to the skeleton character models in most of the game that you're that you see in the cutscenes.

Because when you go into that Kodak call for the first time, you see the beautiful Shinkawa art and the minimal animation that they use with those great kind of emerald green glowing portraits, you know, and especially if you're a kid when you're growing up with sort of polygonal games, you start to overlay that in your mind over the more primitive 3D technology.

And it goes a long way in general.

Shinkawa's art in general with the Solid series is such a huge part of the slick, just cool factor.

that makes Metal Gear Solid so distinct.

That is a great point.

And it is, this is one of the things I missed, you know, with Metal Gear Solid 3 and all these games where, you know, they did, they had the technology and the budget to animate these calls and, you know, later it was just done away with entirely.

I really missed those minimally animated Shinkawa Kodak calls.

He is the way that he depicts everyone, it both gives you kind of an idea of what they're about, what their personality is,

what their central theme is, but it also makes you desperately want to know more about them.

His art as kind of people's first introduction to these characters, it really contributes to this general feeling that these games give that is so difficult to describe.

The critics agree Metal Gear Solid is an absolute masterpiece.

Games just don't look any better than this.

The best reason yet to own a PlayStation.

Metal Gear Solid by Konami.

PlayStation.

The first game I will say as we launch into it now, it is a steel trap.

Just as a game.

Just such a confident vision from a young artist hitting his his stride.

And the ambition is one thing.

You know, this is a series where sometimes there's never a dud in this series, in my opinion, when it comes to the ambition and the scale of what they want to do.

Sometimes the execution doesn't quite add up.

But this game is one of both extraordinary ambition and extraordinary execution.

And that's what makes it legendary.

And successfully bringing together just the tension and the thrilling gameplay, the cinematic feel and presentation, the heady themes, the superb voice acting, the music, and the, as we said, the Shinkawa sheen to it all.

That's what makes it an all-timer and probably one of the best games ever made, especially on the PlayStation 1.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, so

let's just launch into it.

Yeah.

The nuclear weapons disposal facility on Shadow Moses Island in Alaska's Fox Archipelago was attacked and captured by Next Generation Special Forces, being led by members of Foxhound.

They're demanding that the government turn over the remains of Big Boss, and they say that if their demands are not met within 24 hours, they'll launch a nuclear weapon.

You'll have two mission objectives.

First, you're to rescue DARPA chief Donald Anderson and the president of Armsteck, Kenneth Baker.

Both are being held as hostages.

Secondly, you're to investigate whether or not the terrorists have the ability to make a nuclear strike.

Stop the 52.

So we start out on a nuclear submarine, the discovery.

You see the physical nuclear submarine, but this is a segment that's carried entirely, almost entirely by Shinkawa shinkawa illustrations because you see your protagonist salt snake he is um naked and he's being briefed by uh colonel roy campbell uh campbell's been brought into this on the request of uh jim housman the defense secretary Shadow Moses, this nuclear disposal facility in Alaska has been taken over by terrorists who are demanding a billion dollars and the remains of Big boss they have uh genome soldiers uh who represent the npcs that will occupy most levels who are just um dupes who signed up because of that uh lava monster commercial and they got injected i i this is always so confusing to me they they got their senses were enhanced by big boss's soldier jeans yeah is what the wikipedia says yes and i always like how does that how did that like did they

like did they drink Big Boss's semen?

Like, I never got, that was one of the things that never made sense, and they never tried to explain it.

Well, which is

the

genetics in this game are a little dodgy.

But yeah, yeah, you get the dossier.

There's this foxhound, which if you had played the MSX games, you know, is Solid Snake's old, old outfit, or he served in it.

And they've gone rogue.

And you have, in this case, this is keeping it in the tradition of the MSX games.

You have Decoy Octopus, and these Shikawa sketches are great.

He's the master of disguise.

You've got Psychomantis, maybe the most iconic villain or boss fight in this game, who's the freaky psychic who can make your controller do rumble.

And then you've got Vulcan Raven, the, what does Campbell call him?

A giant and shaman?

Yeah, it's, yeah,

like colossal shaman.

Yeah.

Like,

no, nothing in between those.

Then Sniper Wolf, the sexy sniper who falls in love with her targets for as long as they're alive so that she can never take her eyes off them.

A curd and a benzoad.

She's a curd.

Yeah, they work that in.

And then Liquid Snake at the top of the pile, who we don't know this yet, but is directly related somehow to...

Solid Snake and they don't quite understand why he looks just like him, but that becomes clear.

Yeah.

And you're also introduced to your team.

And

this is a big thing in

not all the Metal Gear games because they don't always, you don't always have this setup that you're ostensibly acting on behalf of like, you know, the U.S.

or the Anglo-American order as in three or whatever.

But I always think that this is a very Metal Gear Solid-y thing.

And it's, I kind of miss it in the games that don't have it.

You get

Roy Campbell, obviously, there.

I think you're introduced first to Dr.

Naomi Hunter, who injects a uh naked solid snake with

what she says are nano machines, yes, end up like restricting some of his behavior later, not behavior, but actions, I would say, later on.

And that it's a hint to something that will become a huge part of the series and even uh non-canon entries like Metal Gear Rising.

But keep that in mind: that

what?

You don't like Needles scene where she laughs.

That's important.

You get Natasha Romanenko, who is a Ukrainian-American weapons specialist.

Every character, even if they're only on your codec, gets like an origin, gets a reason that they do the thing they do.

For Natasha Romanenko, it's that she grew up kind of in,

you know, she had family members that were afflicted with horrible illnesses due to Chernobyl.

Romanenko becomes a weirdly important character.

And Metal Gear Solid 2, her writing is a huge lore dump.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And her, and, and, um, one of my favorite characters who, like, gets like two lines in the entire series, uh, Richard Ames.

I loved Ames because he is like,

the, the Shinkawa design is so strong with him because he's supposed to be like a stand-in for like a man of the deep states.

And as I got older and would read about like Gladio and stuff, I would always imagine everyone as Ames.

Yeah.

He's just so good in that role.

Brother to Mark Ames.

And they went, they went.

They took opposite directions in life, obviously.

It's, yeah, it's so weird.

I mean, that was the reason that Mark went over to Russia in the first place.

He was trying to get the story from Natasha and put it in the exile.

Yeah.

And

also Mei Ling, the

strangely thick accented Chinese lady, even though she grew up in America.

But Snake immediately hits on her.

I think he hits on pretty much every woman.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He was kind of smooth.

He was kind of smooth, though.

Like he,

you get the sense that he studied under one of those pickup artists who wears like a big fuzzy hat and he just figured out the most efficient efficient way to have sex and he just did it for the experience.

But yeah,

we get introduced to the concept of,

you know, on-site procurement.

You're going in with nothing.

State gets inserted with.

I love Metal Gear Solid 3 does this too, where you get to use like a concept vehicle from like the latter Cold War that didn't, no one really used.

In this case, it's a swimmer delivery vehicle, which maybe I don't know as much about aquatic stuff.

So maybe that exists.

Uh, you know, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a cool little like stealth single man, like drone-looking thing that he that he takes for uh underwater insertion.

Well, two F-16s are going to create a distraction so he can get to the docks.

And uh, you are right, you are given control as Snake is surfacing in the water.

Yep.

And right away, when you step onto the cold, hard floor of this facility, immediately, the tones, the color of the game, it's these really steely blues and silver and steel.

And you've got these icy synthesizers and these cold pulses underneath.

It's just

such an excellent confluence of stuff to get this atmosphere.

into your veins right away.

This is a lonely, menacing, and cold cage you're in at Shadow Moses.

And then of course, you know, you have to crawl through these guys in the first element of gameplay, which I do like the

sort of trademark goofiness of this series where these are genome soldiers who have been injected with super soldier DNA.

But even then, they're kind of presented as goofs.

Like they're yawning.

They're kind of like, what?

What was that?

Whose footprints are these?

What was that noise?

But one thing I love about this game, and I think with this game, you really have to think heavily about the time that it was conceived of, written, and made and released in.

1996 to 1998, this game is so much about determinism, and determinism is a big element in two also.

But I think it's so interesting that these games that were made in a very unipolar world

are so much, there's so much about this idea of everyone operating exactly according to what their programming dictates and that no change, no aberrant nature can be shaken out of it.

And then as the world becomes more chaotic and degenerated, these games become more about like the chaotic outcomes

that

are created through information warfare or

I think about how in all these, you know, Metal Gear one and two in this game, uh, the Metal Gear itself is this super weapon, this like world-changing thing.

And by the time you get to two,

any game that takes place chronologically after one,

everyone has a fucking Metal Gear.

Yep.

Everyone, everyone in the world, like Hale says NGOs have metal gear.

He says every NGO and dot com has a metal gear.

Pets.com had a fucking Metal Gear.

Yeah.

Well, the other thing is, this is not unique to Metal Gear by any means.

Like a lot of media in the 90s, it's not comfortable with the idea of the end of history.

And Solid Snake says to, I believe, President Baker, he says, the nuclear age ended with the Cold War.

But the president is like, no, it didn't.

And then he starts telling you about Metal Gear.

And it's this sort of

nagging feeling

on the part of the creators of the game that we can't all possibly believe that it's a unipolar world now, like for good.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's, there's a lot of talk about like Kojima predicting the future in some sense.

And I think in this game, it wasn't necessarily like a crazy out of nowhere prediction to

hint as Kojima does with the Gerlukovich soldiers that are, you find out about way, way later in the game as a representative of Russia and then explicitly talking about the

rise of a new Russia.

It wasn't crazy to talk about that in 1996 because there were obviously world events that suggested that maybe

people in Russia maybe were a little bitter about having their life expectancy like cut by fucking decades and having their country looted.

And there was still nuclear power and there was obviously, you know, NATO's intervention in the Balkans too, flared things up.

But there is a lot of suggestions in that game.

You know, as close to you can get as like an authorial voice reaching through and saying this: that no,

this is not all figured out.

We have no idea what the fuck is coming, but it's not just going to, it's not just going to be George H.W.

Bush's infamous New World Order forever.

So, um, this dock segment is great and it's a great introduction for

figuring out kind of the core gameplay loop, which is observing the patterns of guards.

And

depending on player choice,

there's a very funny neck snapping animation you can do if you're able to

sneak up behind them.

But for the most part, you're going to be doing a lot of avoiding.

You're going to be avoiding most guards that is how you are going to progress the game and this segment is great because it introduces both that and the hazards like cameras which because you cannot aim in first person you either have to employ chaff grenades which you obviously don't have just coming out of the water or figure out a way to um you know wait till they move all the way to their other you know uh 180 degrees to the other side of their you know field of view and hug hug the wall.

And

there's, I think that there, there are more than like six guards in this entire segment

split up between different, you know, screens on the isometric view.

But it just, they really introduce you to like the main types of things that you're going to be experiencing in this very,

you know, short segment.

And I think it's especially important for the themes that are around both snakes in this game.

Solid snake, until I think about a scene right before you change discs, if you were playing on PSX or GameCube,

he is an animal.

He is

an animal who just doesn't have the motives or I get unknowingly at this time, doesn't have the means to reproduce.

But he just survives out of instinct because that's all he knows how to do.

For him, surviving oftentimes means killing dozens and dozens of people and internalizing, internalizing it in a way that does not hamper his future ability to kill and survive.

He doesn't even really know why he's surviving.

You know, when directly asked, he's not really close to anyone.

The only thing he seems to enjoy is mushing, the thing where you make dogs pull you on a sled.

And he's sort of like an animal that becomes ensouled, becomes a man by the end of the game.

With Liquid, he's an interesting

foil for the reason that he's not killing to survive and he knows that he can't pass on his chains genetic information.

With Liquid,

it's hard to figure out his motive save for like, he's trying to figure out like the best way to go out in a blaze of glory.

How can I take billions with me?

Well, he's the ideas guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Snake is the artist where he's a, he's a, he's a great professional killer.

It hadn't occurred to me quite this way until you just said that, Felix, that, you know, spoiler to people, both of these characters are clones of Big Boss, who is the perfect soldier

in

MSX, in the MSX games.

He's the villain.

But Solid Snake is sort of the half of Big Boss, if you like, that is...

in touch with that animalistic instinct gut level

hunter-killer soldier stuff.

And he has no higher operating

function than that.

He doesn't care about values or code or whatever.

And his life is rather empty besides his physical abilities.

Liquid is the side of Big Boss who's scheming, who's thinking about the ways to

create utopia, at least his own twisted idea of utopia, and his

master plan, which is also a huge part of Big Boss.

But neither one has the other side of Big Boss's persona, which is why they're in such contradiction to each other.

Yeah, Big Boss had this charismatic mat, not mask.

I mean, we get to know him a lot better, but he had, there was something about him that made people want to follow him.

And there was a genuine humanity to him that, you know, Solid Stake eventually kind of grows, he goes in the opposite direction of Big Boss.

Big Boss always had this humanity and charisma while attaining these skills.

And eventually the humanity gave way to his,

you know, his, I think ultimately, if we're going by the final retconning, his desire for revenge, and he ends up doing horrible fucking things.

Liquid is, I think like the most emblematic line of liquid to me.

is when he's talking to Ocelot, which by the way, I never got how all these people just happily decided to work for the version of Ocelot and wanted to, because it's like,

hey, you know, that guy who like his accent is just scheming, who's always hissing.

He literally twirls a mustache as he's

talking to you.

Yeah.

That, that should be my number two in this terrorist operation.

Yeah.

But, but Liquid goes.

And this line is captured so much better in the original than fucking Twin Snakes.

There was magic in this original recording, even though you, according to some people in the PSX, you could hear cars passing by in some lines, but there was still fucking magic in those voice lines.

We're not going anywhere.

We're going to dig in here.

We can still escape.

We've got the most powerful weapon ever made, and we're about to ally with Golukovich's forces.

Are you going to fight the whole world?

What's wrong with that?

When he goes, what's wrong with fighting the entire world?

And it's genuine.

He's like, yeah, he's, I'm trying to recreate Big Boss's vision.

No, he wants to go out.

He wants to like suicide by cop, but in a way that kills like everyone on the planet.

And the voice actor, I can't remember his name.

It's

Kim Clark is very good at evoking this.

He's just kind of a bratty wannabe and imitator.

Yes.

Oh my god.

Yeah, we haven't even gotten inside yet.

We make it into the vents where we are first contacted by Master Miller,

a survival specialist affiliated with Foxhound, who

he was in Metal Gear 2.

And was he in Metal Gear 1?

No, I think he shows up in Metal Gear 2 for the first time.

And this is a super retcon character later on.

Oh, yeah.

Maybe the most of any of them.

But in this game, he's just kind of that same character of call me if you need advice on, you know, a specific topic.

Yeah.

And he is not officially officially like, he's not with the Discovery crew.

He just, his, what he says is, I heard about this mission, so I'd be from Campbell.

So I decided to, which is like, is that how fucking black ops were?

Like, oh,

I heard you're doing a black ops mission against it about a nuclear weapon that cannot be revealed to the world.

This shameful genetic thing.

Can I come?

What's the move, dude?

Yeah.

He invites himself to this, apparently.

Although, you know, we can maybe later realize why it's a little strange that this is how he...

Another very funny joke in that revelation that I want to

talk about.

But anyway, yeah, you could call him with tips, which are either counterintuitive or just really like, why would you give this tip to...

Not just like a super soldier fucking psychotic black ops killer, but like anyone.

Like his tips, his good tips are like

Don't just sit there and be killed.

Look at what your enemy does and figure out a way.

Like straight, it's like, okay, thanks, man.

But yeah, you follow the rats through the vents.

You finally end up inside in the tank hanger.

And this is a

there's some verticality.

This is where like more verticality is introduced inside Shadow Moses.

There's a lot of backtracking in this game.

And every time you backtrack,

as your life bar increases and you have more items and you are more adept at the game, they beef up the security.

But this time, there's only like two sentries, and they're below you, and you, you kind of learn about how running on certain floors will attract them and how you can use that to your advantage.

You know, maybe you grabbed the SOCOM on the docks, maybe you didn't, but you, you make it through, you take the elevator down.

There's some more vet stuff

that base must have some kind of ventilation system to recirculate the air.

There should should be air ducts around there somewhere.

I really love crawling, like any game that has crawling in vents as a big thing.

You go through the vents, and this is when you meet Donald Anderson.

Yes, this is one of the hostages, the high-value hostages.

We're here to rescue the DARPA chief, Donald Anderson, DARPA being the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

We come down and meet Anderson.

Anderson is alluding to

a bunch of questions that Snake has not thought about and are kind of weird to ask.

Like,

does the White House know about this?

He alludes to maybe his superiors knowing more.

He explains

how there are three PAL cards that can disable the launch.

The card keys.

Card keys.

They were designed by Armstead, the system developers, as an emergency override.

Even without the passwords, you can just insert the card keys and engage the safety lock.

And if I do that, yes.

You can stop the launch.

We see a female soldier in the next

cell over who notices this conversation.

And this part is so funny.

This is a great the genome soldier suck thing where Snake and Anderson are talking at like normal volume and it would presumably echo in this very empty cell and the guard walks by and goes hey shut up in there and it's like what do you think he's doing you fucking idiot keep it down in there everybody but just when we think we're about to rescue this high value hostage who just then is getting a little cagey about the details of whether or not everything is going to the terrorists plan he has what appears to be a very 1998 cutscene cardiac arrest and dies right in front of us and we have no idea why so the plot is thickening so does the white house plan to give in to the terrorists demands that's their problem it has nothing to do with my orders but what about the Pentagon?

Pentagon.

What is it?

Dead.

Yeah.

And

Meryl, Meryl, the female soldier in the other cell, who we should note, the colonel is personally asking us to rescue because she is his niece.

Yeah.

She's also in the mix.

Somehow, Meryl tricks a guard and beats the shit out of him.

I don't know how she, you know, with his great genetics and all, but she

goes,

are you liquid?

Which is kind of a weird thing for the player if they don't know what's going on.

And then sees the DARPA chief, Donald Anderson, is dead and goes, you killed, you killed the DARPA chief, you bastard.

And Snake, I mean, this is their meat-cute.

It's a big misunderstanding.

But before we know it, we are swarmed by three genome soldiers.

And

this is after, you know, Meryl had been holding Snake up at Snake.

One of my favorite interactions in this entire game when he goes, is this the first time you ever pointed a gun at a person?

Your hands are shaking.

Can you shoot me, rookie?

Careful.

I'm no rookie.

Liar.

You haven't even taken the safety off, rookie.

I told you I'm no rookie.

You're not one of them, are you

open that door you've got a card don't you why so we can get the hell out of here looks like we'll be a little delayed

what are you doing don't think shoot

right when the soldiers come in she points her famas at them and hopefully you have the usp at this point hopefully or the silcom hopefully you picked it up and snake goes don't think, just shoot.

And this is, this part of the game is so, this is to me, the big reason why Twin Snakes isn't as good.

One of many reasons.

Playing this on the original version, where you cannot aim in first person and you have to sort of aim snake using the left analog snake, when you're killing, you end up killing like nine, 10, 11, 12 soldiers in the scene.

And it's not that it's super difficult because Snake has like kevlar skin even on some higher difficulties but it's just it doesn't feel good yeah it's not that it sucks to play but the the the actual gameplay things that you have to do in order to kill one guy much less oh several waves of guys the difference between doing this with first-person aiming and doing it in how it was in the original is the difference between like setting up a shot from 2000 meters away, calculating the Coriolis effect and landing a perfect shot that instantly kills him, you know, takes off its brainstem.

It was silenced.

No one saw you.

You're out of the same.

And then going up to a guy and just bashing his face in with a hammer.

Exactly.

It feels so crude when you're doing it.

And as you say, it's not like, oh, this game isn't fun, but this.

this particular act or just spraying guys, it's not what's fun about this game.

It's not satisfying.

Yeah.

And this is a really brutal scene because in between waves, Meryl doesn't shoot for one of them.

And Snake goes, what are you waiting for?

Shoot!

Don't talk to me like a rookie.

I'm telling you, shoot!

And she, this is probably her first time ever shooting anyone.

She just freaks out and she just like...

massacres these guys, but she's crying and she's emptying the mag into their body.

We see as best as the PSX could depict this, like their guts flying out.

They're crying.

It's really horrific.

It's really fucking horrific.

Well, to that very point, as we make our way to our next set piece, we meet a few characters, but one that really introduces the idea to me that in a lot of ways, this game is a horror game.

Absolutely.

We meet him in the middle of doing battle with the first boss of the game, the first member of this evil Foxhound unit that we meet, Revolver Ocelot, who is one of the most important characters in this series and

the first official boss of the game.

I've been waiting for you, solid snake.

Now we'll see if the man can live up to the legend.

Just as we defeat Revolver Ocelot in the boss fight, this cybernetic, faceless ninja drops from the ceiling and slices off Ocelot's arm.

And he screams and runs away.

But he disappears.

And then we speak to the president of Armstech, who's been this hostage of Revolver Ocelot, who's been tortured by him.

And he explains that, deja vu for Snake, there's another Metal Gear, another walking, undetectable, nuclear, capable robot dinosaur.

that the government has been building here at Shadow Moses.

This raises the stakes and adds a new layer of danger to all this because it's not just that they have a nuke, it's that they have a technology that Snake is well aware of, which allows you to, you know, have a greater ability and capacity to start nuclear exchanges through a mobile metal dinosaur, basically, at any time you want.

And it's capable.

The big thing with Metal Gear Rex, too, is...

They don't go into a ton of detail, but basically the nukes it launches, they are sort of like low observability, like stealth intercontinental ballistic missiles which is like guaranteed for a strike i i i just wanted to point out that um right this baker scene right before the meryl thing this is the first time that snake is sort of getting antagonistic with the colonel and going

what's going on like the the darpit chief just died he's asking me all these weird fucking questions what's up here this is a bit like

This is not just like a normal terrorist cell like we're used to.

What are you not telling me and colonel kind of sad colonel campbell kind of sadly goes if i knew more i'd tell you

so we're on the move because president baker of armstech his heart also exploded And before he died, though, he told us to seek out a scientist that was working for him and one of the other major characters that will become a huge part of this series, Hal Emmerick, also known as Otacon, who is being loomed over ominously by the cyborg ninja.

And here's where we fight the cyborg ninja.

After Otacon wets his pants, which will become a slightly bizarre trademark of that family in this series

that everyone in the family does every time they're discovered in a locker.

And despite that moment of bizarre comedy, this is one of those horror moments.

The moment right before this is one of those horror sequences I was talking about.

We make our way toward this discovery of Otakon in a hallway just strewn with the corpses of these genome soldiers with blood smeared on the walls, uh, pools of blood on the floor, and their mangled bodies everywhere.

And there's just classic horror ambiance, and it's it's spooky.

Um, I mean, I want to point out, we've been making fun of the genome soldiers.

Uh,

it's so important to see the way in which they were massacred and their piled up bodies leading up to this, because

that scene with Meryl where she actually does shoot back.

And if you don't fire, she does, she

will like, at least on normal difficulty, like kill a bunch or all of them.

That's how you get past it in like a Fox rank or a boss rank is you need to just position yourself so that she does most of the work.

Yeah.

But most of the time when you are

out in levels and getting discovered, and especially when those like riot shield guys come out,

the evasion meter in this game is very generous compared to uh follow-ups but if you're just trapped in there especially in the uh nuke the uh nuke building which is the author of many continue screens

you do you you do get up when there are like four or five or six of these guys and meanwhile this guy has not only massacred these guys, he's doing it with a sword, a high-frequency Brit blade, my favorite made-up weapon in this entire series.

So fucking cool.

This is an early look at the kind of futuristic, you know, nonsense technology that would increasingly work its way into the series.

Yeah.

To good and ill effect.

The explanation for the high frequency blade, by the way, is that a high-frequency current runs through.

It's a normal sword with

a high-frequency hilt that makes, it does something to like their ions where they can cut through like anything.

And it doesn't, it doesn't make any.

I don't know anything about physics, but I could tell you that does not make sense.

Like, if that, if that exists, if you could do that, they would have done that for like industrial processes.

But it's so, it just, it sounds real enough where you're like, that's so fucking cool.

I think that's what that guy, Eric Weinstein's physics paper, was about the ion sword being real, and trying to figure that out.

He tried to prove it.

Maybe he did.

I don't know.

Yeah.

This fight with Ninja

with Cyborg Ninja is, I

found it super difficult when I was playing on stream, but playing it now, it's very, all the fist fights in this game, there's a very simple way of just like

timing it so you exactly fuck up their animations.

Yeah, you loop them, you get them

in a loop.

Yeah.

But it's again, this is a great example of something I've talked about previously that I think is an important

prism to look at games

from

the late 90s and early 2000s and into games, more contemporary games.

This idea of synecity versus simulation.

Synecity, or just like

the idea of a very simple, small, singular thing representing a more complex procedure.

That's kind of

what I, the term I use to explain this thing in games where, you know, because of technological limitations and, you know, how many animations there already were, they couldn't have boutique animations for like, you know, CQC sequences.

They couldn't make like a fighting game within this game.

You're just doing the punch, punch, kick combo over and over again, or like rolling into him as a gag.

Yes.

But, you know.

You are so into this environment and these characters that you, to you it represents the things that you see them do in the cutscenes yes yes which is and and maybe here's a moment for a twin snakes sort of direct comparison

snake it's showtime okay i'm ready to go

metarugia surito tat twin snakes one of the large failures of the twin snakes by most people's estimate i i would have to agree with it yeah for people who don't know um Twin Snakes was directed not by Kojima, but by the celebrated Japanese director Ryohei Kitimura.

And it has a lot more of that kind of bullet time,

acrobatic backflips off of a missile type of stuff, which you get a little bit of that kind of thing in Metal Gear Solid 2, but even then, the context is different and it's...

It's hardly, hardly anywhere near as much as Twin Snakes injects into the story.

And it makes way more sense for Raiden to do that.

That's what I mean.

Yeah, that Raiden's doing it.

Yeah.

And then in Metal Gear Solid 4, even more so.

But as you said, kind of what I was trying to say visually with Shinkawa's art, in the cutscenes, Snake is still doing stuff.

He's doing stuff that's a little cooler than what we can do in the engine of the PS1 or the game.

But you still believe you're that same character.

And what totally breaks that is in Twin Snakes, when you're watching your character do like a series of

physical feats that you never have any opportunity to do.

Yeah, you can't even fucking jump.

Yeah, you don't even have a jump button.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I

hated it the most in the back half of the game, what they do with

the liquid versus solid fight.

And you made a great point about how much the colors kind of act as emotional and gameplay cues.

I always think about that doxing because there's so so much harsh light.

And obviously, this is, this is before like shadows could become a big part of stealth games.

Splitter cell was obviously the big pioneer there.

But in a sense, you are kind of looking for shadows, even though they are the gameplay element.

You're just, you're trying to find anywhere that isn't drenched in light.

Yeah.

It doesn't have a billion

lamps above you.

Yeah.

And then I think about the thing I think about the most with the liquid fight on top of Rex and the escape and that entire part of the game, the entire like last, I would say, like third of the game, I think about how much like

angry reds there are.

Yep.

But it really, you know, it's the feeling of all this being burst open.

And it's the feeling of like the man bursting through the

shell, the...

psychopathic killer shell of snake and it's so good uh

the other thing this is a great point, too, about the acrobatics.

Like, I think that sort of stuff is great in the right, like a devil may cry type game, perfect.

But

in this, it's so discordant because you're constantly getting like Snake is like a lonely, sad sociopathic killer, and the only thing he enjoys is warfare.

And it's like, you look like you're having a blast.

You're doing backflips,

like taekwondo bullshit.

Like

I'm a old

killer.

Anyway, time to do three backflips on top of a missile.

Yeah.

And do a thumbs up.

Yeah.

You seem like a really happy, go-lucky guy.

We can talk about Twin Snakes maybe at the end a little bit more, but the other thing I'd say is the music is also way off.

It's like a guy running on stage, bumping his fist, you know, going like, are you ready to take it to the extreme?

Yeah.

That is, I mean,

I don't want to like sound like I am completely like dumping on every part of it and like dumping on the people that made it because it is like, it is a bitch of a task.

And if you think about it, like they were asked to do do a remake of a game that came out four years ago which is insane it is insane like obviously there are huge there was a huge technological leap between that generation of consoles and uh the next one but it it's there are just so many more ways where you can fuck it up and get everyone mad at you than there are ways to nail it i i i i don't i i barely know of any outside of the resident evil remakes where people are like this is you nailed it like people people hate a lot of stuff about the Bluepoint remake of Demon Souls, even though they like barely, the only way they touch gameplay is to like make a couple things like not soul-crushingly inconvenient because they hate the art style, which is a fair criticism.

It just,

it, it is, it seems like the shittiest task in gaming.

But I think that title card sequence and the choreography and everything is,

they all point to something, which is,

goes back to the the the arrogance, not of the studio, but of the people that at Konami that were just trying to squeeze as much cash out as possible, which is that there is an arrogance to Twin Snakes, which is like,

yes, this is like the best technology will ever be.

So this is the perfect capture of it.

And

it's like, you know, in three years, there will be something way better.

Like if you were going to do this, you should have done it then with the PS3 or 360 generation, but, you know, whatever.

And so, yeah, the end of the fist fight is...

Gray Fox keeps, or Cyborg Ninja, as we know now, keeps saying these things like, good, good, you

finally, someone who can push me.

And then he just freaks out, and then the optical camo goes on, and he's, he's gone.

And Snake pretty early on says, I think that might have been Gray Fox.

And Campbell goes, No, there's no way he was killed in Zanzibar, Metal Gear 2.

And you get a character introduction with Hal Emmerich out of Khan.

Three generations of Emerich men.

We must have the curse of nuclear weapons written into our DNA.

And I really love the voice acting,

the performance through all the games of Christopher Randolph.

The character could so easily be annoying and cloying, which he is as a character, but there's just this sort of sweetness to him that does not grate on you.

At least it never did on me.

No, you never.

He really is a kind of gentle soul, which is what makes it so interesting the way that the series will go on to depict his father, who looks, as it often happens, looks just like him and is voiced by the same actor,

is such a different character.

But Otakon here is

really

our new best friend in the series.

Yeah.

And this is the thing, going back to it, the thing that

I ended up thinking about way more than I ever did was how much of this game is about Otacon's, not only his development as a character, but he's another dyad that exists in the game because we alluded to these sort of central jokes and

the central jokes that exist within the themes and how for this game the theme is genetics and determinism and

for

you know he him he and solid snake are they're a dyad in themselves in this way For the idea of genetics and family history being destiny, when Snake, he doesn't think about his past.

He's, it seems like he's avoiding it.

He doesn't think about why he exists.

Anakon, on the other hand, is sort of paralyzed by his origins and his, as he calls it, familial curse of his family being involved in the creation of the atomic bomb and making weapons.

And of course, the tragedy is he ends up making the metal gear.

The central joke there is, okay, so you wanted to break from your family's curse and you were like i know defense contracting yeah and they don't like this is another thing i think that is deliberate because a lot there's so many moments with otakon throughout this game uh where you're like can you just open the door for me can you just do the can you make the elevator work they They do that a lot in the second half.

And Otacon, who is able to traverse Shadow Moses because of optical camo, he says something very interesting, a couple things that are very interesting.

Like, I can't do that.

I'm not a soldier.

I just use this, the optical camo.

I pretend that I'm not there,

and so I feel safe.

And it's so, it's so interesting because his response to the family curse, passivity, and like self-pity, and just being mired in

tragedy and just being paralyzed by it.

And so the next story beat is that after meeting Ottakon, we try to contact Meryl and discover she's in danger and we have to go find her.

Otakon gives us

another pass card,

a level up, so we're able to enter a new part of the nuclear complex, which is the office section.

And this is where Meryl, we now know, in order to keep safe, has disguised herself as one of the guards.

And you have to determine which one she is because she's going to walk differently than the male guards.

And then, of course, follow her into the bathroom when she begins to walk that way.

And

just

walk right in.

You lean up against a pillar on the women's bathroom that's on the right side of this room and you you um follow her into the bathroom which is what you should do with any girl that talks to you

and it is here that we meet maybe the most maybe the most iconic villain of the first game in the solid series psychomantis the telepathic gas mask wearing demon Why is he so iconic?

Because it's the first game's, probably the first game's most overwhelming set piece in which all these tricks are played on you.

He reads your memory card like he's reading your mind.

He is seemingly unstoppable until you figure out a way to literally game your system.

And he even appears to black out your TV in an attempt to get the better of you.

Now I'll read more deeply into your soul.

I can see into your mind.

You like Castlevania, don't you?

You enjoy role-playing games.

There's so many things in this game that they were copied in later games.

When you were talking about how, hell, his character is clawing, but he is like you're you as a player and someone experiencing this narrative, you don't feel that you don't feel annoyed with him.

That made me realize how many

otticons there are in contemporary games that try to do that, but just annoy the out of you and the latest trend is to make them a sassy ai which is just like

kill me uh this

with this with with uh psychovanthus there's tons of fourth wall stuff i mean he reads your memory card uh he comments on your play style if you have been sneaking through a lot of levels and uh

have been saving a lot he says that you're very meticulous if you've just been playing like a psycho and gunning people down, he says that you don't care.

You kill, uh, you know, but then he makes you put your controller on the floor and he moves it using the rumble of the at the time dual shock one.

Uh, and you know, these are, this is a fun thing to talk about now, but no one did anything even close to this at the time.

And of course, the other aspect of the bot, because it's a fun boss fight, um, apart from the theater of of it.

But the other part of the theater is in the middle of the fight, he will suddenly scream blackout.

And the screen in the olden days where you would normally, if things were disconnected, see video in the green font says Hideo.

I was watching a documentary,

YouTube documentary about the making of this game.

And apparently, I never knew this.

Kojima was nervous about making a game this length

with like full voice acting in FMVs for cutscenes because he didn't feel his script writing was good enough to carry that length of the game.

And it's so, I think what people interpret now as like, you know, self-referential art I amazing for like breaking the expectation of the game, it's sort of like in the same way that there are, there are like, you know, these big stealth tests and then levels with like one guard or none as sort of a tension breaker.

I think that's Kojima sort of saying to the audience, like,

okay, this is my first time.

I get, I, I, too, think this game is kind of silly.

And games are inherently kind of silly, I know, but I'm also, I'm still trying to talk about these serious things, but it's not, it's the opposite.

Again, and this is a thing that greatly influenced other games,

some to their detriment, this sort of like a fourth wall, like self-referentialness, but also

this sort of mix of like extreme drama and tension and horror with

comedy.

There's a games guy on YouTube who I really like, Tess Snaker.

He coined this amazing term for this phenomenon that is in so many contemporary games.

He was talking about like the last Dead Rising game that came out.

He called it red-faced seriousness, which it describes when a game is

just bombarding you with like shitty joke after shitty joke, like topical late, uh, late

2010s type shit.

Then

there's still a narrative like in any game, and they'll get serious for like a minute, and then they're so they're so embarrassed to be committing to something that they they increase the rate of shitty jokes by a factor of like three or four times.

And it's maybe I'm just clouded by how much I love this series and

how much I love Kojima and

Shikawa and everyone, everyone who worked on this.

But it just with this, it feels so human.

And it's actually interesting and especially at the time novel.

But with you know, the sort of shitty contemporary example, it just feels like sort of with like that Taika Watiti style of like constant riffs okay well do you give a shit or not why am i supposed to spend time and money on this if you fundamentally think this is stupid and you're the creator it's a great point about the humor of this game which which it is strange like i said the the uh endless pissing of the otacon family uh was something that the the nature of the humor where it is goofy and it is in many ways strangely lighthearted against these very dark themes they're also trying to juggle i won't say it always i mean mean, like you, I'm clouded by how much I love the series, but there are moments where I can say, like, this didn't really work for me or this or that.

It's never, as you say, it's never winking and going, like, oh, great, a nuclear bomb said no one ever.

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, it's never doing this lazy

shrug to say, like,

don't worry, we think this is lame too.

Do you think this is lame?

Exactly.

And I think this is a great moment when you reach this point with Psychomantis

where

it's just having fun with it.

So he's throwing stuff around the room.

And it's really the biggest wall-breaking moment of it is that you have to think.

And I don't know if you did at the time.

I played these games in my 20s, not when I was young.

You have to realize to unplug your controller.

Is there a hint?

Maybe the colonel tells you.

Yeah, yeah.

The colonel tells you, and that's actually, at least for the emulated version, you have to wait for the colonel to do that.

And also the annoyingness of like going, like figuring out how to switch a controller port and emulation was a whole thing.

Yeah.

In the master collection, you have to hit the pause screen and go to a strangely in any other context, unnecessary menu to say, oh, I'd like to be playing from controller slot two, please.

But it's just so that this can still work, which is fine.

I mean, you got to make it work somehow.

But yeah, I mean, and then Psychomantis doesn't know how to fuck with you because you've you've changed your controller port.

And then you get a little sad, little sad moment with Psycho as he dies, in which foreshadowing things that

will come up in later games, you hear a little bit of his own story as a, I think he's from Russia, right?

And he had a

strange telepathic gift, yeah.

The first thoughts he heard, because he killed his

didn't kill her.

His mother died in childbirth.

I think that's on him.

You can say.

Yeah, yeah, he knew what he was doing.

But his father obviously

resented him and he was so disgusted by this.

Yeah, he burnt his village down.

And when

Snake is kind of disgusted and goes, you burnt your village, village down to bury your past.

And then Mandis says, you've suffered the same fate.

You killed your father, big boss.

After he does, after he says, you're even worse than me to snake,

there's a great scene that gets followed up on during the canonical ending where Meryl goes, do you have a name?

And he goes, names aren't important on the battlefield.

How old are you?

Old enough to know what death looks like.

Do you have anyone you care about?

I don't really care to get close to anyone.

And she goes, you're a sad, lonely man.

And then

you have to spend the rest of the day with her.

Reminds me of a lot of

of IKEA trips I've taken in my life.

You know, the hinge prompts should just be those questions.

And I think you'll get a good idea of who you're connecting with.

So by now we are aware of where Metal Gear Rex is being held and that is is the MacGuffin that we're after and we need our key cards to successfully disable it.

And it lies by the communication towers or through them.

So we see this communication tower in the distance and head toward it through a stretch of quiet land that belongs to the wolves.

You can hear them all around you.

And you need to watch out because I guess even despite snakes work with huskies, these are half dog, half wolf, and they don't like you and they will fuck you up if you aren't careful.

But if you let one piss on you, then you're fine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're a psycho and you like press attack around Meryl, they will fucking maul you.

Yeah.

They love Meryl.

Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting how they love Meryl.

But maybe they're used to their master who is the next boss.

You fight sniper wolf and they're more comfortable around ladies.

And this is like a two-part fight because you go into it with a just kind of corridor sniper battle.

It's primitive compared to the future sniper battles this series will really run away with.

Meryl is wounded, and you have to do a big backtracking section.

I don't mind backtracking.

I love backtracking.

I'm a Resident Evil guy.

I love my backtracking.

I find that Shadow Moses

is even more...

rewarding to kind of dwell in and revisit sections of when the game makes you do that.

And it really makes you do that here because Sniper Wolf snipes Meryl and she is lying bleeding, maybe dying on the ground.

And you have to run back against the clock, I believe, to find in an area way back a sniper rifle.

Well,

I love.

everything about this sequence.

And this is sort of the last, this is the last big thing you do before you change discs.

And

they're not split entirely evenly the second disc contains i'd say like last like 25 of the game but you

you you know hopefully you have been paying attention to key cards during other backtracking segments and have stocked up on pentazimim the drug that sniper wolf is weirdly addicted to it's a strange benzo to get addicted to but whatever um

it truly does because it was the only way i could get past these segments oh no i can't imagine just

free scoping her with none of the drugs.

I'm sure there's some psycho who has a clip of him doing that in like two seconds somehow.

Oh, definitely.

But I love the backtracking segments because, again, they beef up security or they add like

some sets of variables to these levels you've been through that reflect your growing aptitude to this game.

It doesn't just,

you know, vary up the gameplay, but it goes a long way towards like making the world you're in feel responsive to make it feel like they are responding to like whatever security breaches or fuck ups in the guard routine.

Exactly.

Well, also for the player, and again, this is, this is revisited in the second one, but it also really makes you feel like you're on an assignment where you're just stuck on this fucking base and you start to really know it.

You start to really just know every inch of it because you're trapped here for 18 hours.

And

if it were so linear that you just leave every section behind, I think that would actually take away the feeling of authentic immersion

as an agent, as Solid Snake.

And I agree entirely on how

what a detriment to this game it would be if it wasn't if you just are breezing through because it's like,

you know, it's kind of the same idea with the cutscenes in Twin Snakes.

It's like, well, this doesn't seem like that much of a fucking suicide mission if I'm just blazing through everything.

But

when Meryl gets shot, the conversation that you have on the codec with Naomi and

Campbell is this is a crucial moment in Snake becoming a fully realized person.

Naomi, Dr.

Hunter, says to him, when he says, I'm going to save Meryl.

I have to do it.

And it is the most conviction that Snake has ever had about anything at this point.

And she goes, you don't have the make, You don't have the genetic makeup of a savior.

You're a killer.

And that there's some extra weight to that later on that you find out.

And Campbell is,

you know, you get the sense that

maybe

she's the next step over from niece.

The other thing.

You'll need a sniper rifle, Colonel.

Take it easy.

I'm gonna save Meryl no matter what it takes.

Okay.

Thanks.

What's wrong, Naomi?

Nothing.

I'm just surprised you're willing to sacrifice yourself.

You got the genes of a soldier, not a savior.

You trying to say that I'm only interested in saving my own skin?

I wouldn't go that far, but.

I don't know what the hell my genes look like, and I don't care.

I operate on instinct.

Like an animal?

I'm going to save Meryl.

I don't need an excuse.

Okay.

And so we backtrack to many, many levels previous in Shadow Moses and get the sniper rifle.

Against the clock, we run back, do battle in the corridor on the way to the communications tower and take out Sniper Wolf.

But as we're about to enter the building, we are ambushed and captured and wake up chained to a slab, ready to be tortured.

by revolver ocelot.

By the way,

the scene of the snake getting captured is another twin snakes.

They don't totally fuck this scene up, but it's silly when Twin Snakes does it because it's like, I've seen him like run on missiles and like karate kick 50 guys.

And now

she's like, a woman sneaks up behind him and he goes, whoa, and then he's fucked.

There's just no way he'll get out of this one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To make it fit with the Twin Snakes cutscenes characterization, they should have like the Gerlukovich soldiers should have come in there should have been a thousand guys and even then i'm not sure but yeah you wake up being tortured and um

ocelot is is torturing you and by the way we were talking about why do these guys keep hiring ocelot ocelot has already killed one guy in the course of torturing him yep and liquid all liquid says is like don't let it happen again

he obviously killed him on purpose because he's fucking triple agent and which we don't know yet but we don't know yet.

We'll find out.

Stay tuned.

Yeah.

Again, he's giving the most untrustworthy guy in the world the, you know, his juiciest target.

For Liquid's personal stakes, his juiciest target.

And as that target here, we, as the player, are warned by Ocelot breaking the fourth wall in a way that this game does very cheekily, as we've seen.

If you don't survive this torture section by button mashing effectively, you're fucked.

You got to go back to your last save.

And he gives you an option a button to press if you want to just submit but that will change the ending of the game if you select that snake it's been a long time since you saved your game yeah so what if your body can't survive the torture it'll be game over you really want to travel down that long road again come on i won't tell why don't you just give up there is you have to press um on playstation i think it's uh circle uh you to press Circle repeatedly against the Electroshocks that Ocelot is giving you, and it's pretty easy to pass.

If you die, it isn't that you failed the torture.

You just get sent back and have to do

all this, depending on where you save, backtracking.

It's your last save, right?

Yeah.

And

you can press select to submit to the torture.

And this locks you into the bad ending.

Where you're stuck

with a man pressing his body against you instead of a woman.

Yeah, you have to go and fuck Ottacon in the cabin.

Yeah.

It's the bad end.

Well, I'm going to fuck someone at the end of this.

Well, you know,

as Denzel once said, I'm leaving here with something.

Yeah.

But depending on the difficulty, there are many torture sessions that you have to pass.

I think the higher the difficulty, the more you have to endure.

But in in between the Electroshock sessions, you go to a jail cell.

And the first couple of times, you're just sitting there waiting to be tortured again.

But eventually, when you're back in that jail cell, is it with the dead real DARPA chief, right?

Yes.

Yes.

The real Donald Anderson's corpse is there.

And lo and behold, the guard outside of your cell, you start to hear his tummy rumble, and he gets really uncomfortable and he runs out of the room because he has diarrhea.

The guard and there and then in prequels, he has ancestors who also had diarrhea that you meet

in.

It's one of my favorite parts about Snake Eater.

It's great.

But this is the moment, I think, the first run-through.

I was having a great time, but this is when I really realized how much I love this game.

Otacon comes in with his Invisigear while this guard is out of the room, because if you try to do anything while the guard is in the room, he'll spot you and he'll say, you know, this guy's trying to escape.

Ottacon comes in and says, take this ketchup.

And what you can do with it once he leaves and before the guard gets back in is spread it on the ground and lie down in it.

So it looks like you've either been maimed somehow or you've killed yourself.

And the guard will come in and suspiciously look at you.

And then you got to jump up and take him out.

You can also alternatively hide under the bed.

and he thinks you've escaped.

Either way, you have to make sure the guard is not in the room.

And he will periodically get the runs.

So it'll allow for you to do this.

This is a really, really tense segment because

it's not super difficult to knock out a guard

either in Twin Snakes or in the original version.

You know, you have your punch, punch, kick.

You can kind of,

there's a weird like throw thing.

But in this one, it's just so tense because you really feel like, holy shit, I have one try at this.

Or you get sent back to Austin.

Yeah, exactly.

It's famously kind of fucky to get, to get someone in a chokehold sometimes, especially when they're like alert.

They know, you know, they're in a combat state.

He slipped out and I had to follow him into the other room.

And thankfully it didn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This was actually probably one of the trickier parts of my Fox Rank run I did last year.

Because you really have to thread the needle with the primitive chokeout mechanic.

You do it too much and you'll kill the guy guy and spoil your non-lethal run.

But if you don't get the rhythm right, he'll break free and then he'll turn around and score an alert on you and then you've also ruined your run.

So it's a very delicate matter.

So you grab your satchel, you get your gear back on, you're back in action, and in fact you're ready to confront, at least on the harder difficulties, one of the more intense parts of the game, which is running up the communications tower, a seemingly endless staircase in which seemingly every Shadow Moses genome soldier is on your ass.

But once you do that, probably through the use of well-timed stun grenades, you get to the top of the tower and you're ready for one of the best boss fights in my opinion, which is the Hein-D helicopter attack being piloted by Liquid, who's starting to tell you more,

who's doing the very Metal Gear thing of sassily teasing you during your boss fight in which you're fighting to the death with little quips about lore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is when you get that, you know, he calls you brother and you go, why are you calling me?

Or Snake goes, why are you calling me that?

Well, he also says father.

He also says,

I'll send you to hell to meet our father.

Yeah.

And this is actually an interesting lore point because there's some debate online.

There's a pretty good blog called The Snake Soup about all these debated points of lore.

And there's a snatch of dialogue in one of the codec calls.

I can't remember exactly when it comes up, but it's a ways into the game, where Snake says to the colonel that Big Boss once called him his son.

And that does not actually happen in the MSX games.

That is a retcon that Big Boss suggested this to Snake.

But Snake sort of dismisses it almost as if it was a way that Big Boss was trying to psych him out or confuse him.

So at this moment, Snake does not have an awareness that he is in any true sense related to Big Boss.

So that's why it matters that Liquid is increasingly using words like brother and father in referencing him and the deceased Big Boss at this point, as he's whirling around this helicopter firing at you.

So the Snake's finally come out from his poem.

Are you ready now, my brother?

Why are you calling me brother?

Who the hell are you?

I'm you.

I'm your shadow.

What?

Ask the father that you killed!

I'll send you to hell to feed him!

And I love the hind boss fight is incredible for all the reasons you described.

And it's also a great example of something they do incredibly well throughout the entire series, which is they introduce a mechanic to you

through a boss fight or through a gameplay segment without tutorializing it.

Like you, this is when you learn how to use the

Stinger missile.

The trajectory and the speed of the missile, how long it takes to lock on, there's something very, there's a great tension in how scary it is to stand still and aim this thing against a gunship.

It's an absolutely incredible fight.

Oh, I had to take out that helicopter.

Helicopter?

That's incredible, snake.

Listen, I just want to make sure again, this is the way to get to where Metal Gear is being stored.

Yeah,

the entrance to the underground maintenance base is towards the back of the snowfield ahead.

Also, want to put

a great copied directly from Metal Gear 2 segment that precedes this is when you're in the elevator.

And during this time, there's more Otacon character development with him.

He's alluding to how there were five stealth camos

and four of them are missing.

And there was something wrong with the elevator.

It said it was over the weight limit, but I, Otacon, only weigh 135 pounds.

I always wonder about the heights of these characters, but anyway,

you're on the elevator, and it turns out there are four not regular Jagoff genome soldiers, but some of the tougher ones are in stealth camo and they've surrounded you.

And this is

another tough, like

you know, figure out the most efficient way to DPS these guys before they DPS you fight.

And it is taken directly from a thing in Metal Gear 2.

Yes.

As is, we should add the Hein D fight.

Yeah.

And yeah, I love that moment in the elevator.

I think that's where Otacon's

Shinkawa sprite profile

gets real clutched up against it.

Snake, get out of there.

That is such a good.

I need to go back and like screen cap that.

It would take at least five people to go over that limit.

Look out, Snake!

The guys who stole my stealth prototypes are in there with you!

Too late, Snake!

Now die!

And then, yeah, you have to, you know, you can throw them, you can run around, but

you gotta think fast.

Snake, are you okay?

Otacon, were there any other stealth prototypes?

No, there were only five.

So, this is the stealth camouflage then.

What are you talking about?

Someone's aiming at me in the middle of this blizzard.

It's her!

Wolf?

Sniper wolf?

Yes, it's her.

It's definitely her.

Otacon, you sound like you're happy.

No, I'm not.

So then what is it?

Snake, please don't kill her are you insane please she's a good person you'd know that if you talked to her listen to me kid she's a merciless killer i can see you perfectly from here

i told you i'd never quit the hunt now you're mine right before the sniper wool right after the cutscene where you get fired upon um otakon pleads with you not to hurt her yes because he's in love with her.

She was always nice to him because he looked after the wolves, and all the like genome foxhound soldiers wanted to kill them, which again always funny to be like these guys suck.

Like, they're always getting beaten up.

They see a bunch of wolves like in Alaska where it makes sense for them to be, and they're like, let's kill them.

They're kind of like an army of Fettermans.

They're sort of like maybe physically powerful,

but they're like really maladjusted and dumb and go whoa whenever they hear something

and want to kill animals and people.

When they see it, they see a guy in like a sneaking suit and Kevlar and a bandana and they go, I dress you somewhere.

There's something over there.

I'm going to check it out.

Oh, never mind.

Oh, no, he's choking my neck.

I feel way less bad about like the ones that I fucked up and killed now.

No, if you picture that, like I would love, oh my God, dude, how great would a Yoji Shinkawa Fetterman be like?

Holy

shit.

I mean, we have Fat Man from Middle Grasala too, but I think it would be like even more grotesque.

Yeah, oh man.

If I, I don't know what would have happened for me to have become a billionaire,

but this is the type of stuff I would be doing.

I would be, you know, I would say maim your price.

Well, you got the RKX nephew contract.

It's a little easier to hire our

nephew than Shinkawa.

Well, we don't know.

Maybe Shinkawa's a real Fetterman head.

I also love picturing him as a Metal Gear Revengeance boss as well.

Oh my God.

Cyborg Fetterman.

There is a Revengeance boss that does kind of look like.

Oh, you're right.

Sundowner, right?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I mean...

But I like the idea of Fetterman as a boss.

Like, he looks like Sundowner.

He looks super, like, meched up and he's scary, but kind of like the Sorrow, like, like it's a gimmick boss fight, and you think you're gonna fight him.

You think you're gonna fight him, and then he's just like, oh fuck, I don't even give a shit.

He just like walks off.

He jumps off the building, he kills himself, he jumps off the building.

Oh my god, or a Fetterman sorrow fight where you think it's gonna be all the people you killed and all the wrongs you committed, but just him complain.

Like you have to walk through like his wife.

I was gonna say, it, you know, you know, like how the boss, like in Metagross Hello 3, it's the white flower petals with Fetterman.

It's birthday balloons.

This is hopefully appealing to

the niche audience that wants Metal Gear and John Fetterman

crossover content.

I mean, Kojima is easily inspired.

If we could just get him a supercut of our Federman stuff.

Oh my God.

With Dustrating 2, he's clearly into the idea of making Metal Gear with it not being Metal Gear.

So he

Fetterman's Sorrow, where it's just like like he's, it

using like AI pathing and stuff, you could literally make it go on forever.

You could listen to it.

Will you just program a figure eight?

Yeah.

You have to walk in a river that's a figure eight and you have to confront like uh Adam Gentleson.

Yeah.

Let's let's just say that the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4 would have gone down very differently if Fetterman was the protagonist.

Big boss shows up to stop him.

He's like, oh, he killed himself.

He's actually, he did it.

But yeah, okay, we have to, we'll get lost in this forever if we keep thinking about it.

So, yes.

And Cyperwolf has a great depth scene where she talks about big Boss.

And I like this scene because it's like

until like Peacewalker really, there was this confusion of how Big Boss, like how he goes from this, like much more virginal than Snake and much more, there's

a lot more initial human elements than Solid Snake.

And then you wonder how he became so villainous.

And I actually do think that for as much as Phantom Pain got fucked up, I think we got a satisfactory answer, basically.

We should save that because I have my thoughts on that too.

Yeah.

I've been rethinking it lately, and I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

That'll be like a nine-hour episode.

Can't wait to edit that one.

She talks.

I'll use AI to edit that episode.

I don't care what my beliefs are.

So

she talks about being a Kurd, and like her village was massacred, uh presumably by a nato ally turkey um and she was rescued by big boss who she she calls saladin uh which i always thought was was cool saladin famous curd a lot of people don't know that it's interesting a because it's sort of like a humanizing side to big boss that i think sort of hits that there's more to this story.

Yeah.

There's more to this character, even though they, you know, they obviously didn't think out his entire arc at this point.

Well, also the character of Cyborg Ninja.

Cyborg Ninja, in case you haven't figured it out yet, folks, is a man from Snake's past who in the MSX games, in the first MSX game, is a comrade of Snakes who's helping to overthrow Big Boss in Outer Heaven, but is left mangled by the end of that game.

And in the second MSX game, Metal Gear 2, he is your nemesis.

just under serving Big Boss because Big Boss found him at the end of the Outer Heaven Uprising and uh took him in so he does do this even to former enemies it's a little less defensible when it's children then he trains them to be killers but he does have some kind of paternal genuinely paternal feeling toward even former enemies that he can uh absorb into his unit yeah and i i think there's again you can

i think the general idea what i mean by satisfactory i think the general idea that like all these all these instincts that got, they got twisted through the prism of just mindless revenge.

We've had we had a good humanizing death scene.

Not humanizing, but like sort of looking at the, looking directly into the horrors with Psychomanthus.

With Cyber Wolf, it's much sadder

because it's...

Again, there's some determinism here.

What other life could this woman have had?

Like, Jesus Christ, She was just like this sad drug addict with great aim who liked animals.

And

this was just her shitty life.

And whose only relationship her entire life have been the men, maybe also and women who she's been assigned to kill.

That's the intimacy she's experienced is watching them and stalking them in order to kill them.

And once they're dead, obviously she forgets about them.

And then for the first time, she has a relationship with someone that isn't, you know, a paternal commanding officer or a target in hell or in Huey.

In hell.

Oh, in hell.

Yeah.

Oh, right, right, right.

I fucked those up.

So I probably fucked those up like 10 times this episode.

No, no, no.

I think we've been good.

Ottokon is who we mean, folks.

Yeah.

I am a curd.

I have always dreamed of a peaceful place like this.

A curd?

So that's why you're called wolf.

I was born on the battlefield.

Raised on the battlefield.

Gunfire sirens and screams.

They were my lullabies.

Hunted like dogs day after day.

was my life

and so that's that's a very famous scene as the the cry of the wolves are heard because they're mourning.

It's really heart-wrenching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very, I mean, again, on this PS1 engine,

the level to which, and we haven't really shouted them out individually yet, but the voice acting cast.

Holy shit.

I mean, it really cannot be overstated how much they brought this to life, especially with a game like this, just like that fan inside the console is working overtime.

Thank God.

Yeah.

So we're inching very close to Metal Gear Rex.

We've entered after that snowfield and the fight with Sniper Wolf, we've entered into this underground facility where we know it's being kept.

And we pass through a furnace and then a very cold and

atmospheric underground network into a freezer.

Hmm, what's with all these different temperatures?

Rooms with different temperatures.

I wonder how that'll come up again.

And we meet our next member of Foxhound, who is none other than Vulcan Raven.

Welcome, Cossack.

This is the end of the road for you.

Right, my friends?

Listen, they agree.

Ravens aren't scavengers like most people think.

They're simply returning to the natural world.

That which is no longer needed.

Sometimes they even attack wounded foxes.

You were the one in the M1 tank?

Must have been a tight fit for a big boy like you.

Who we didn't mention earlier, but taunts us a little bit earlier in the game when we're crossing from one stretch of the complex to the other.

But now it's time for his boss fight.

And it's a really good fight.

He's got a big chain gun strapped on him, and you have to navigate through this maze of blocks in this freezer where you can try to get the drop on him.

You know, you have the more iconic Psychomantis fight and and the Hein D fight and the more emotionally charged

Sniper Wolf fight.

But I really like the Vulcan Raven fight.

Yeah.

And

it is interesting the way that they make it work with all their characters.

With Sniper Wolf,

it's the tragedy.

I think it's great that with Ocelot, it's inconclusive.

Yeah, he's more of a piece of shit.

Yeah, he runs away

to fight another day.

And so he doesn't die.

He also says you're lucky after that.

Yeah.

with

yeah you're lucky my girlfriend's here you know basically but uh yeah great gray fox was holding him back and going this is not you yeah uh but we you know down the line there will be an ultimate confrontation with him and he may surprise us there too uh so and then um raven gives us a little bit of wisdom and then crows eat him and uh we get further along and this is a big um i think some people have a problem with this section of the of the pal card temperature stuff I'm sorry.

I know, like, I've said I love backtracking, but the cards themselves piss me off so much.

Yo, you can jump, you can, like, vault over a pipe in twin snicks, at least.

And you shoot, you shoot one tube.

I don't know why they did this.

There's one tube that's like, you know,

heat, and then a liquid nitrogen tube right next to it.

Okay.

So the idea here, listeners, if you're either not at this part of the game yet, in which case go play it, or if you're a sicko who just likes to hear us talk about these games without playing them, we've entered the hangar of Metal Gear Rex.

It's very majestic.

It's very intimidating, but it's not operational yet.

And we have this assignment to put the POW keys together to stop its activation.

But it turns out there's only one POW key.

And the trick is to heat it up for its second terminal and to cool it down for its third terminal.

So you have to go, you have to leave the the hangar and go back to the furnace several levels back and wait for it to heat up in the furnace and then go forward again and plug it in.

Then go back to the freezer where you fought Vulcan Raven, wait for it to get cold, and then go forward again and use that one.

And then you'll have done it.

And I believe in Twin Snakes, they invented this thing, Felix, you're talking about with the pipes to make it a shortcut because people didn't like it.

Snake, it's about Naomi Hunter.

Now, around this time, we've been getting calls from Master Miller, our sort of field expert, who has been sowing doubt about the loyalties of Dr.

Naomi Hunter, who, with Colonel Campbell, sent us out on this mission.

She gave us our cocktail of drugs that'll help us through the mission and nano machines.

And Master Miller appears to be correct because the Colonel tells us she's been removed from the mission.

It turns out she had an agenda.

She hates Solid Snake because she secretly, this whole time, has known he is responsible for crippling and almost killing her adoptive brother, Frank Jaeger, aka Gray Fox, aka the cyborg ninja, whom we've been fighting this entire game.

How has she gotten revenge?

Well, basically, we learn of the Fox Die virus and what it is.

In short, it is a genetically engineered virus, kills you through cardiac arrest, that recognizes certain people's DNA, not anybody, certain people's DNA.

And when a carrier gets close, it infects the targets with the virus.

The Pentagon, we learn, through Naomi Hunter, just needed Solid Snake, not even to kill anybody in this mission, but get close enough to them that they would all catch Foxty.

And that's why we've seen so many people keel over.

The main targets were the Foxhound unit, but it was also the hostages, apparently.

And as an added twist, and there will be even more added twists to come in the final moments here, Naomi infected Snake directly with Foxtai as well, as revenge.

So Liquid is not only trying to get Metal Gear operational, but he's also now demanding the government hand over a vaccine for Foxtai.

Pal code entry complete.

Detonation code activated.

No, why?

Red for launch.

I deactivated.

So we do what we're supposed to do.

We pop in these keys,

but surprise twist, that actually activates Metal Gear Rex.

And we get a call from Master Miller, the guy who was there to call if we needed any tips.

And he reveals we've been played the whole time.

This is something I did not notice until this playthrough.

So Master Miller, he's, we talked about how he's giving you either like bullshit, like, well, duh, advice, or like completely counterintuitive stuff.

Like, he tells Snake that there's a special way to walk

where no one will hear you.

And Snake's like, I don't think that makes sense.

But there's other, he gives you more psychological tips that are supposed to be counterintuitive.

And I think they're so funny because yes, they're supposed to be fucking snake up, but they're all things that Liquid Snake himself does.

I wrote down two that like really made me laugh when I thought about them.

One is it's early on and he says, well, like the odds are against you, but sometimes you just have to fight a losing battle.

Sometimes that's all you can do.

Like meant to demoralize him, but that's also like what he thinks.

Sure.

That's what he's doing.

And then

my favorite one,

if you are, if you're in a tough battle, just think about like the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

Think about something terrible.

And that will motivate you and acclimate your mind to war.

And that's all he does is just think about about all the worst things that have ever happened to him.

Because, yes, Master Miller, in this call, as he as he walks through seemingly the entire inner workings of the terrorist plan, finally reveals by ripping off his sunglasses and swishing his hair back that you have been talking to Liquid Snake, posing as Master Miller the entire time.

And I'm just going to let him speak for himself here.

Without the detonation codes, we had to find some other way.

That's when we decided

might prove useful, Snake.

What?

First, I thought we might get the information from you, Snake.

So I had decoy octopus disguise himself as the DARPA chief.

Unfortunately, octopus didn't survive the encounter, thanks to Foxty.

You mean you had this plan from the beginning?

Just to get me to input the detonation code?

Huh?

You didn't think you made it this far by yourself, did you?

Who the hell are you?

In any case, the launch preparations are complete.

Once the world glimpses the power of this weapon, the White House will have no choice but to surrender the Foxty vaccine.

To me, their ace in the hole is useless now.

Ace in the hole?

The Pentagon's plan to use you was already successful in the torture room.

Snake, you're the only one who doesn't know.

Ah, poor fool.

Who are you anyway?

I'll tell you everything you want to know.

If you come where I am, that is.

Where are you?

Very close by.

Snake, that's not Master Miller.

Campbell, you're too late.

Master Miller's body was just discovered at his home.

He's been dead for at least three days.

I I didn't know because my codec link with Master was cut off.

But Mei Ling said his transmission signal was coming from inside the base.

So who is it?

Snake, you've been talking to

me,

dear brother.

So long story short, Liquid Snake jumps into the cockpit of the now operational Metal Gear Rex, and this is the big

set-piece battle of the finale.

Going back back and playing this,

I was shocked at how simple it kind of is.

I mean, again, like 1998, they were, they were, they probably could physically not fit anymore in.

But it's a huge, it's a huge model in that sense.

Giants.

And I don't, I really don't think it's supposed to be like your ultimate test of skills.

You have to use the stinger to specifically hit the radome during the first part.

And it roars like a dinosaur.

This is a very,

this is one of the most clear-cut sort of inspirations, Cojima.

It's a lot like RoboCop, the Ed 209

in RoboCop, which moves and sounds like an animal, which is a brilliant, it's a brilliant way in that film.

And then therefore through Metal Gear to make these mechs kind of have a little bit more kind of flavor and character to them.

One of my favorite things about the Metal Gears is that they have a big PA system.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah, that's how Liquid can

cut it up with you during your fight.

Well, I think those

maybe my favorite Liquid lines are screamed through the Metal Gear PA.

Yeah, he's starting to lose it.

I'll crush you into dust.

That's the coolest one.

Or the ones where he says,

in the Middle East, we hunt foxes.

By the way, if I could get any Metal Gear prequel game, it would be Liquid in the Middle East.

Oh, sure.

It was a Gulf War.

Is that where he fought?

But he was there before the Gulf War as like a 14-year-old, too.

Well, we'll learn a little bit more about Liquid in another entry in his younger days.

So we do some damage to Rex, and then appears Cyborg Ninja, aka Gray Fox, aka Naomi's adoptive brother, Frank Jaeger, teaming up with Snake because really this whole time, he's been getting back in touch with his humanity fighting Snake.

and remembering who he was and what he believes in.

And he knows that if he's on anybody's side, he's on Snake's side, certainly not Liquids.

Gray Fox, both with his high-frequency blade and his like blaster arm thing,

he

pretty much sacrifices his life to destroy it.

In the process, he gets crushed by the metal gear.

There's a scene where he's pushed up against the jaw of Rex.

And you as the player, you're aiming the stinger.

And if you press shoot, Snake just repeatedly goes, I can't do it.

I can't, because it's, if you fire it, it's so close to Rex's cockpit.

If you fire it, you will blow up Gray Fox.

And Liquid mercilessly stomps on Gray Fox, kills him.

But before he does,

Fox says,

I always fought for what I believed in, even if fighting was the only thing I knew how to do.

and implores Snake to remember that they are not tools of the government or anyone else, which, you know, is a classic

almost Stephen Seagal, early Stephen Seagal level trope of a soldier realizing he's just a pawn in the game of geopolitics.

But in a video game in 1998,

it's definitely with all these other themes flying around as well.

It was a bit of a richer tapestry of motivations going on here.

I would say this is like, this is that scene is the one I think about the most in this game.

And I think it's

sort of an important

rejoinder to the idea that some people have that

this game is just single-mindedly

or this series is single-mindedly or simplistically anti-violence, which again, just in the way that it isn't simply anti-deterministic or pro-deterministic, it is

that's not really what it's saying.

It is not fundamentally saying that like all violence is inherently bad, clearly, or

that we have no control or that we have total control over our fates.

This scene in particular, I think, is the biggest rejoinder to that just single-mindedly anti-violence idea.

These games are kind of about the affirmative choices that you must make regardless of the situation that you are thrust into.

And for some characters, that actually does mean doing, you know, taking part in violent acts.

Whereas for others, it means electing not to do that.

That's a great exchange at the end.

But the game is not over because there's about three more finales that we'll run through here.

Okay, yeah.

So

the next sequence after this, Liquid making, I think, the best Liquid speech on top of the Rex, where he talks about the selfish gene, why he's doing this.

He explicitly talks about how he can't pro, like they, the clones, can't procreate.

Everything about les enfants terrible is revealed to you.

It's all incredibly interesting.

But

Liquid is shirtless in the scene.

You can see how he would have lost his trench coat.

Solid Snake is also shirtless in the scene.

So

Liquid was clearly awake before him.

And he also says,

but

did Liquid take off Solid Snake's clothes?

Why did he do that?

He was asleep and he's like, all right, it would be fucked up to take off everything,

but let's just take off the top.

Like, what?

So we're both kind of naked.

It's so weird.

It doesn't make any sense that just this top would come off during the explosion.

Yeah.

I mean,

you have to unzip it.

and like take it off.

Yeah, it's a very elaborate suit.

It's not just like you pull it up off of your shoulders.

Like, um, you know, Felix, I have to say, I never thought about that before.

I'm almost proud to say.

Uh, I guess it's supposed to just be like, uh, they got burned off or something.

But he puts it on later.

I know.

And when it's on the floor, I know.

There's so much evidence that Liquid took it off.

Yeah.

The game is telling us this.

Yeah,

I think Liquid, yeah, he's a theatrical guy.

I think he's like, this will play better if we're half nude.

And then Snake wakes up and he's like, why am I, why is my shirt off?

But like, I think it, you know, and it's effective.

It certainly makes it a little bit more.

It elevates the scene.

Liquid was right.

Yes, he was, he's, he's a, he's, he's got the pizzazz.

He knows what he's doing.

To take off the top, but not the bandana.

Like, the bandana would be the first thing that gets like burned off or knocked off.

That's true.

Yeah, wow.

Okay.

That's a revelation to me, actually.

I mean, the fact that you put it on later is i've made my point but you have you have i think it's a sound argument yeah so you have you have um

you have the like true monoimato fist fight with liquid well and then we should say but this is after he he goes on his big speech about about the program which if listeners are getting into this it's just that he explains the les enfanterie blue the les enfanterie project is a cloning project that was started by some characters we'll maybe meet later in which Big Boss,

his genes were, they're engineered into children, the two successful clones of which, so far as we know right now, are liquid and solid.

And

to liquid, they represent to him

the idea that he needs to be worthy, I guess, of these genes.

Liquid is really into this idea of predestination and genes.

I thought the thing he says during the speech about how there were like six or eight, like not i forget the exact number but like non-viable embryos i think he says they breed eight and then six were killed because

yeah and he said even as like a clump of cells we began by killing our competition taking the inferior ones we were we were destined in the stars forever to be murderers And he talked about this a bit before, too, right before the Rex

fight, about his relationship with Big Boss and why he has such a hard-on for Solid.

In part, he feels that Solid robbed him of revenge by killing their father, Big Boss.

But also, he has this,

he's seeking to implement his twisted version of Big Boss's vision.

Look behind you.

I'm not sure.

She was alive a few hours ago.

Poor girl kept calling your name.

Meryl.

Stupid woman.

Falling in love with a man who doesn't even have a name.

I have a name.

No!

We have no past, no future.

And even if we did, it wouldn't be truly ours.

You and I are just copies of our father, big boss.

Let Meryl go.

As soon as we've finished our business.

The finale is going hyper-finale mode now, because not only are we about to fight Liquid to the death to determine in Liquid's mind who the true successor to Big Boss is, Meryl is unconscious and Snake's unable to help her until he defeats Liquid.

And Colonel Campbell calls in and reveals to us that the Secretary of Defense, despite the fact that Metal Gear has been disarmed, is going to send tactical nuclear bombers to destroy any evidence of this entire operation simply because he wants to cover it up and doesn't want to have to explain anything that might leak out from it.

So now we're up against the clock before bombers get here to also handle Liquid and then escape from Shadow Moses.

So we go toe-to-toe with Liquid and you fight

on the top of the Rex and

it's one of the most frustrating parts of the game.

Oh my God.

But in the cutscenes, it's very dramatic and you eventually best him.

And he, does he fall off of Rex?

Is that what happens?

Yes, he falls off of Rokes.

I mean, we should learn with Liquid at this point that falling from heights just does not, he does not take full damage.

Liquid is seemingly dispatched, but we get a ring from the Secretary of Defenseman by Jim Hausman.

The evil goateed Secretary of Defense.

The Rumsfeld of Metal Year Solid One.

Well, yeah, because this takes place in 2004.

I never thought about that.

Think about Pete Hagseth in the Houseman role.

The codec is just silent because he's fallen asleep next to it with a giant handle of whiskey.

yeah he does god he he instantly gets me too'd by natasha

she cuts in yeah yeah like they're they're arrested they're arresting naomi and he's like hold on yeah you ever been with a stupid guy we're renaming metal gear harvey milk

this is now metal gear nathan bedford forest but a different nathan bedford forest who's actually a black guy they fought in the create a war so you can't get mad at me

how do you plan on explaining a nuclear attack on Alaska to the media?

Don't worry.

We've prepared a convincing cover story.

We'll simply say that the terrorists exploded a nuclear device.

Smart.

Yeah, there's a great moment after the Hausman thing where

you have to get out of Shadow Moses.

And by the way,

this entire backup, this is...

Everything has that great like orange and reds.

All the blues and

greens are gone.

It's sort of, it's sort of like the rage of liquid has overpowered everything, which I love.

His trench coat came off, his shirt came off, and now

your shirt's off.

But this is, this is the scene I was talking about, uh, where they have that spark, and there's like for once, like sort of this like cute dialogue between them.

And then Meryl goes, stake, it's really cold.

You should put on some clothes.

And you go and pick up the top to your staking suit.

And it's sort of like a silly, like cute scene where she goes, you look great.

But also it's

there is some significance to it because he's putting it back on.

He's putting back on his uniform.

Now actually having fought for something besides what he has just been told to fight for.

And now actually

having,

you know, taken the risk of growing attached to people, developing a moral code.

And this is also when Meryl goes, what about Otacon?

And Snake goes, right now, he's fighting for something.

In fact, Otacon is key to you escaping.

What are you going to do?

Me?

I...

I'll stay here.

Are you crazy?

I need a little more time to take care of your escape route.

But unlocking the security doors is difficult work.

Only I can do it.

Otacon.

Don't worry.

I'm staying here.

It's my own decision.

Otacon.

This is a hardened shelter, but they're going to use a surface-piercing nuclear bomb.

It won't hold.

I'm through regretting the past.

Life isn't all about loss, you know.

The guy who wouldn't even beat up the weakest guard on Shadow Moses, now he's like,

okay, if the airstrike comes, it comes, but I have to...

I actually have to risk something to meaningfully fight against my legacy and what I have actually done in my life.

Meanwhile, as he's hacking into the mainframe, you are in a race.

You're in a race to beat the bombers.

And you, I, I really like this section.

It's one last bit of, you know, action for the game because I think they knew like that liquid fight ain't going to cut it.

Yeah, yeah.

I love this sequence.

This sequence is awesome.

You burst out of the underground lair and you run into this garage.

So you can commandeer a car and get the hell out of here.

But while Meryl is trying to, whatever, get the keys into one of the vehicles,

all these genome soldiers, maybe unaware that their leader has perished, they burst in and they start shooting at you.

And you hop on the back, you take the

chain gun that's on the back of the Jeep and you just start blowing them away.

And it's very arcade style.

Meryl's driving, you're on rails, but it's very fun.

It's a very fun action sequence.

It's very, it's very tense feeling, too.

It is.

Like there's some real fucking,

I mean, I imagine it's more so an extreme obviously but you genuinely do feel like oh holy shit i have to get these guys out of the way i have to get every single one of these guys as quickly as possible and there's some barrels that you can blow up and that helps but just when you think we have done all the finales and the final set pieces you're speeding through and all of a sudden you hear liquid's voice

not yet snake

it's not over yet

Liquid.

Surges up behind you in his own car and yells, what does he say?

It's not over yet.

It's not over.

It's not over yet, snake.

So

the two lines that they always have Liquid repeat throughout the series, it's not over.

I'm not like you.

I'm not like you.

That's right.

I love that.

Yeah, it's great.

It's great.

Those are great lines for him to be.

They're not like us.

So then you have to have this one last firefight with Liquid, which again, it's fun in an arcade way burst through the tunnel out of shadow moses uh which is a lot like resident evil 4 at the end of resident evil 4 oh yeah yeah yeah it really yeah it really is but this is the actual final battle and the final moments because you burst out into the sunlight and it's you know daylight you've spent your whole night in shadow moses but of course liquid snake still not dead staggers towards you apparently suffering from the effects of Foxty starting to hit his system, and he attempts to shoot you one last time, but the virus destroys his heart, and he cries out and falls into the snow, finally dead.

Yeah, it's like you said, a steel trap of the game.

And by the way, this is this last scene, the last scene where Liquid comes out of his Jeep and collapses.

That is the one scene that I like the Twin Snakes version better because there's a little moment where right after, in the original, he just, he's trudging forward to you and then collapses and then gasps you know grasps out while he's prone and then dies in twin snakes right after that he wills himself up and makes a few more steps and then there's a more horrifying scream and he falls and i like that because it's like

just in the same way that we felt like we were we were cooking in the flames of his hatred

His hatred is so strong that unlike all these other losers who just were like, oh my heart, he physically he like willed himself a couple more

just another pump of blood just to try to get that much closer closer to strangling

Campbell makes contact with us and reveals that the evil Donald Rumsfeld-style Secretary of Defense Jim Hausman has been arrested because Campbell made contact with the president

who had no idea any of this was even going on.

It was Jim Hausman's personal project, this entire assignment.

And in the future, we will learn a little bit more about the president and his relationship to these events.

But at the moment, there will be no bombing of Shadow Moses, and our heroes will not face the nuclear payload.

They can relax.

But it's not an unambiguously happy ending because Snake realizes if Liquid just keeled over because of Foxty,

he knows that he himself has Foxty thanks to Naomi Hunter.

But Naomi herself rings in

and she

says, I'm sorry about the whole...

Sorry about the whole death virus I gave you.

But hey, think of it this way.

Dance like no one's watching.

Yeah, hey, hey, equal.

She says a piece of advice that we end on because there's no telling when death will come for him or how it'll come for him.

And he should simply now just live.

That's Metal Gear Solid 1.

So I think here is where,

you know, any kind of final thoughts or,

you know, assessments.

Three out of 10.

That's my rating after all this.

Three out of 10.

It could be a lot better.

Twin Snakes, meanwhile, 9.5.

Yeah, obviously.

Felix, what are your feelings upon revisiting the game and then talking through it here about this entry of the series?

We talked a bit about the MSX games, but for the purpose of this mini-series, this is really the first step.

Yeah.

And what would you feel about it?

So going into this,

Metal Gear, the first Metal Gear Solid, it's actually the game out of the series that I've spent the least amount of time with.

You know, I got into these games

right when two was out.

And

two was my first one.

And this was this one was always lingering.

And I had played it before, but I just really had not.

I had not like exhaustively gone through it in the same way I did with the other ones.

Now having, I think, spent the proper amount of time that I should have spent years ago and actually doing the thing where you play the PSX version and Twin Snakes back to back,

my previous conception of Twin Snakes and the PSX version was, oh, it was such a jump in capabilities from one generation to the next.

And

I guess I'd always, I had the self-conception of

this game as like fundamentally like jankier

or or just you know not as put together as the other ones.

Because that's typically how it goes.

The first game in a series in a series, I mean, this is the first in the solid series, has the lowest budget.

It's usually they...

quite often with great games like this,

they take longer than the publisher initially anticipated.

That was kind of the story with Demon Souls and Dark Souls.

And later on, when they have commercial success,

they get a longer leash and they don't have those problems.

But going back now and giving it adequate time, that is really not the case.

This is, as you said, a steel trap of a game.

An enormous amount of thought and attention and care.

It seems like it went into every itch of the surface area of the physical game, every bit of pacing,

every bit of like breathing room between set pieces.

It's

even if you don't play a lot of like older games like this, this is 100% worth going back to.

It's worth the frustration of learning how to play something that is from so long ago and

you know, just is bereft of so many of

you know abilities and quality of life things that we are used to.

It is, if you are interested at all in how games are designed,

the kind of thought and narrative through gameplay things that are possible on a fundamental level, it is 100% worth spending a week or you could finish this in a day.

It's a pretty short game, but I would recommend it for anyone.

To look back and just see it cut like a diamond back in 1998.

Very few titles can claim that, as you mentioned, Felix, in their first entry.

Yeah.

And this one is one of the greatest of all time.

So that about does it for our first episode of this series about Metal Gear Solid 1.

We will see you next time because unfortunately, podcasting is just one of those things that gets easier the more you do it.