Metal Gear Solid, Snake? Snaaaaaake!!! Vulcan raven, decoy octopus, sniper wolf, psycho mantis, revolver ocelot, solid snake, cyborg ninja gray fox, colonel Roy Campbell, Meryl Silverberg, Naomi Hunter, Frank Jaeger, Foxound, Liquid Snake, Jim Houseman, Donald Anderson, Kenneth Baker, Mei Ling, Master Kazuhira MacDonald Miller, genome soldiers, Metal Gear Rex, Solid Snake... they are all here for everyone's favorite Metal Gear Game by Hideo Kojima... Artwork by Cool Dojo artist Charlie Fithian. GET THE ENTIRE CAST OF CHARACTERS ON YOUR STUFF!!
We just passed the 35 anniversary of “Metal Gear”’s debut. Granted I never played the original two games in America but I did play Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation back in 1997. I remember going over to my friend Danny‘s house one day probably to spend the night, and he had just bought a video game that week for the PlayStation. My brother and I had a Nintendo 64, which still had Zelda and a couple other fun titles, but MGS was literally like playing a movie. I remember the intro of the game having actual credits that played over the cut scene at the beginning, and even while you were playing that first stage on Shadow Moses. Even though now, the graphics are extremely dated, it was the coolest thing you could ever see that you could actually interact with as a video game. For the few hours that I was over at Danny‘s house, we never made it past the first stage, I don’t even think we made it to the elevator. We played the VR missions and watched the briefing tapes… even those drawings that stood in for footage were mesmerizing to me.
"METAL GEAR SOLID 4: Guns of the Patriots" Old Snake. Artist Charlie Fithian's interpretation of the Hideo Kojima game. Screaming at your mantis and gear up with this solid shirt you need 2 of for your sons of which you should take to see the liberty bell. Grey Fox or ninja cyborg? Our fortune was told on that day to vamp when we needed to be stillman. our patriots like mr. Snake and Colonels like campbell didnt pray to the god raiden. An ocelot holding a revolver would not know what to do with the solidus nature of this teepublic teeshirt from cooldojo.com artist charlie fithian other that to shop and buy one for himself or herself. Put down your videogame and turn on your sony disposition. Ray and rex need one.
It would be another four years whenever I was in high school When Danny rented “Zone of Enders”. The main reason he rented it was because it came with a demo disc of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. You played a partially finished version, in Japanese, of the tanker mission. I don’t even think you could get to Bossfight, against Olga. But the graphics alone were so amazing we they looked so real. Again it couldn’t get any better. MGS2 was one of the first games we got in 2001 when we bought a PlayStation 2. Believe me when I say, I have played through that game more than 35 times. The story never made sense and there were so many little things to discover and achieve. If you manage to collect a ton of dog tags, you could get the infinity ammo bandanna, the infinity ammo wig, and if you collected even more dog tags, you would get to use the stealth camouflage. The only way you could see the story play through again was to play through the game again. Nowadays you can just pull up damn near everything on YouTube. But if you wanted to see if you could figure out the secrets and who the patriots were you had to play through that game all the way all the time.
It wasn’t too long after MGS2 came out that MGS3: Snake Eater was released. A lot of the same mechanics were reused for 3. But that was where the similarities ended, we played as a variation of Snake which in reality was actually Big Boss on one of his earliest missions. Set in the 1960s during the Cold War. You were outside for about 90% of the game. This was the big departure from MGS2 along with not being able to use a radar system that you had used in the previous games. You had to heal yourself, feed yourself, and become a master camouflage artist. The boss-fights alone are a strong point of not just this game but the entire MGS series as a whole. The story for MGS3 in my opinion was just as convoluted and confusing and detailed as the previous games. It is widely considered as the best of the entire MGS series. But my favorite of all of the games was to come out next in 2008.
"Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater" art from Charlie Fithian. Ocelot, Eva, Volgin, the Boss, The End, The Fear, The Pain, The Sorrow, The Fury, and the first metal gear machine the Shagohod. Also featuring the Operation Snake eater team: Sigint, Para-Medic, and Major Zero. Cipher, Who are the Patriots?
“Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots” was to be the next in the series released on the next generation console… PlayStation 3. As you can probably guess we also thought this systems graphics were even better than the previous. They still hold up and still look great. But the game mechanics had slightly switched, and took a little while to get used to. But Metal Gear is known for being easy to pick up and hard to pick up at the same time. The introduction of the OCTO camo was a welcome addition. This was to be the end of the series, as they had teased that snake would die in the very end. And all of the answers to all the questions would be revealed. Who exactly were the patriots? And what was going to be the fate of all of the characters we had seen previously in Metal Gear Solid 2. More awesome mechanics, even better graphics, and somehow and even wackier story. The game did have a definitive ending and is still considered to be the final story in the Solid Snake arc.
Before MGS4 was released there was metal gear Solid Portable Ops and AFTER MGS4 came Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. MGSPO was an interesting game but very confusing story-wise and showed the limits of the PSP as well as the Full extent of what the machine could do. This story turned out to be the least impactful of the series canon, more like an inconsequential episode of a long running tv series. But it seems that after the trial run of MGSPO we got a true sequel to Big Bosses story in MGS Peace Walker. Showing the full extent of the PSP and utilizing the history of Big Boss we saw the creation of (at-the-time) Outer Heaven. The addition of Kaz, Huey and Paz would be the catalyst that would mature the evolution of the franchise.
"METAL GEAR SOLID 4: Guns of the Patriots" Old Snake. Artist Charlie Fithian's interpretation of the Hideo Kojima game. Screaming at your mantis and gear up with this solid shirt you need 2 of for your sons of which you should take to see the liberty bell. Grey Fox or ninja cyborg? Our fortune was told on that day to vamp when we needed to be stillman. our patriots like mr. Snake and Colonels like campbell didnt pray to the god raiden. An ocelot holding a revolver would not know what to do with the solidus nature of this teepublic teeshirt from cooldojo.com artist charlie fithian other that to shop and buy one for himself or herself. Put down your videogame and turn on your sony disposition. Ray and rex need one.
When Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes was revealed to the world, and then was made playable we saw what became the prologue to the actual game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The Experience of V would show the full potential of both the PS3 and PS4. An open-world Metal Gear? How was that going to be possible. Well it worked. BuildingMother-Base, upgrading weapons, tools, Fulton extracting enemies, vehicles, supplies, and sheep!! The Marking tagets was a welome additon to replace what we thought was essential in the radar system from the previous games. Yes we all know that the game was not truley completed by Kojima, but what we got was fantastic. I really doubt that even though we were given ideas that could have been used in the game it would have felt more complete than it was. Look for the actual ending online.
THE FUTURE
What is there left to do? We got Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, a complete departure from the rest of the series, but still a welcome addition. What would love to see is a remake of the original 1st two “Metal Gear” games. Use any of the engines and let us play through those stories as Big Boss / Solid Snake / Grey Fox … Why not?! How do we get the rights to make that story a reality? How do we get more Metal Gear? Fan fiction, fan movies/comics. Looks like the closest thing we are going to get is the animated version from Mitchell Hammond. Check it out.
KEEP METAL GEAR ALIVE!!