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Metal gear wants the player to fail. The rough edges of the game are part of growing difficulties of an old kind, but taken in the context of the whole Metal gear series, these challenges are also felt as horrible defense mechanisms. While Solid Snake infiltrates Outer Heaven, the player immerses in the game world. They are not welcome and if they are captured, they will be destroyed.
Released in 1987 for the MSX2 home computer in Japan, Metal gear helped lay the foundation for the stealthy genre. He created one of the most iconic protagonists of the video game and launched the career of one of the most acclaimed video game authors by the band, Hideo Kojima. the Metal gear The series has become a staple of generations of consoles. Looking at the game that started it all reveals something less glamorous. It's trainer and also tragic.
Metal gear Retrospective
This story is part of an ongoing series of analysis of the Metal gear Games.
Metal gear pepper the screen with a mixture of guards and deadly dangers designed to prevent progress. Instant death pits open without warning, tanks fire missiles from multiple screens, and important doors remain locked until you call an unnamed ally on your radio. Metal gearThe story of his mirror reflects his malicious design. At the end of the game, the leader of the Outer Heaven turns out to be the commander of Snake, Big Boss. He sent Snake on this mission, waiting for it to fail. Metal gear waiting for the player to fail as well. But Snake and the player still succeed.
Outer Heaven, a paradise for career soldiers, is defeated by a raw rookie. Metal gear, a playground for its designer, is defeated by the player. Big Boss and his descendants spend many games trying to rebuild this paradise. It's hard not to see the parallel with Hideo Kojima, playing game after game and trying to rebuild his private, player-resistant stronghold.
Viewed from this angle, the Metal gear The series as a whole concerns a creator in relation to his offspring. Solid Snake is a clone of Big Boss, although it will not be revealed before Metal Gear Solid. Snake is sent in collision with his father by the organization known as Patriots. As the series progresses, more and more games are trying to clarify Big Boss's motivations. Subsequently, his vehement need to build a soldier sanctuary is painted in a softer light; he is the victim of bureaucratic manipulation in search of a place to express himself. The snake is only the means used by the Patriots to foil these attempts.
As the goal of Big Boss in creating a paradise for soldiers, the design of Kojima Metal gear The world reflects a desire for creative freedom. Both of these efforts are thwarted by the need to design for the player. The Patriots send Snake to undermine his father. Konami sends the player to break Kojima's aspirations. It will take decades and many more Metal gear games, before father and son – or player and designer – reconcile.
In Metal gearSnake needs to rescue hostages and destroy a dangerous super-weapon called Metal Gear, a battle tank equipped with nuclear weapons. To do this, Snake must sneak through the outside sky, pick up items and pass through the base. The gameplay is about finding the easiest way to move to the next goal. If Snake is spotted, the enemy enters alert phase and attacks with overwhelming force.
There is only one criterion to be spotted Metal gear: if you crossed the line of sight of the enemy. Subsequent games introduce a host of other mitigating factors and complex systems that create a range of possibilities for concealment. Metal Gear Solidfor example, introduced a small cone of vision and the possibility for the guards to check fingerprints and sound. Metal Gear Solid 3 features camouflage clothing and tall grass to hide. Metal gear, dissimulation is a binary state: seen or not seen. The vision of the guards extends to the entire screen. Walk even one pixel at their sight and the enemies will come down like a swarm of white blood cells attacking a foreign threat.
Since detection is a binary state with view as the only contributing factor, the player depends entirely on geometry to survive. Outer Heaven is littered with massive crates and other forms of blanket that the player can move and remain invisible. The fight is expensive in health and ammunition, so the crossing Metal gear it articulates around a neat positioning. Metal Gear's tactical action feels like tactical Tetris. The snake slips easily into folded hallways and tiny corners like a puzzle piece. He navigates dangers to safe positions that prepare him for explosive success. The spatial conception of the game is transformed into a variety of paths and spaces of arrangements that are increasingly improbable. Metal gear increases the challenge of each encounter by removing geometry to hide safely, or by increasing the amount of enemies and, therefore, limiting the number of places that players can go without being spotted.
Even the slightest adjustment to the enemy's placement can seriously inhibit the player's options. As a result, it is possible to encounter coins or situations where the player is inevitably sentenced to detection. At the beginning of the game, the player meets a corridor filled with security cameras that go up and down the walls. The first camera goes up and can be avoided by hiding behind a nearby box. A second camera patrols the other side of the box; you can not move to the other side because the first camera does not move in time. Entering this screen only provides an alert phase. The solution is to hide with the help of the cardboard box, which the player might never find and that he will probably not have the first time that he will enter this screen . The game has no pity in this room. In other parts of the game, enemy patrols may change depending on where you enter, allowing players to hide. But this room never changes.
Moments like this show the heart of what Metal gear East. It's an experience intended to entertain the designer (Big Boss or Kojima). Snake, and the player, are the subject of the test in a series of miniature tests. Some are faked and others, but they all seem to serve Hideo Kojima's curiosity, not the player's needs. For example, a first game room is filled with toxic gas and requires a mask to move safely. To leave the room, the player must remove his gas mask and equip a key card to open the door. Situations like this exist to ensure that the player encounters difficulties. they are made to hurt. The series would later abandon this design framework that focuses on solving creative problems, but Metal gear, the game could not care about your comfort.
The first experiments are aimed at disturbing the player, but subsequent encounters become even more sinister. Metal gear Strikes the player directly through boss fights. Unlike the latest games, which tend to provide a deeper context for the arrival of antagonists, these fights happen almost without warning. The player enters the screen and is immediately attacked.
Almost all bosses are fighting in Metal gear future births variations. A fight against a roof helicopter turns into a Hind-D battle Metal Gear Solid. A surprise against a tank in Metal gear lays the foundation for the first battle of Vulcan Raven in Metal Gear Solid. An early fight against four soldiers gives birth to the recurring fight of a battle by match against a group of enemies: Solid Snake will face the four riders Metal Gear 2, a squad of genome soldiers to Metal Gear Solid, make a shootout against Gurlukovich special forces Metal Gear Solid 2First chapter of the team, and fight the FROG nanotechnology team Cannons of the patriots. These repetitions and remixes look like iterations on Metal gearThe first unsuccessful attempt to stop the player, as a desperate attempt to find a way, to put an end to the tyranny of the player.
Metal gearThe design philosophy of the company becomes more and more obvious compared to another series of stealth games: Wolfensteinwho preceded Metal gearIn 1987. The original Silas Warner Wolfenstein Castle (1981) and his suite Beyond Wolfenstein Castle (1984) focus on tools and stealth systems. The player can use disguises to move and choose locks to find weapons. They interact directly with the Nazi guards who ask for code phrases. If you beat Wolfenstein Castleyou can reload the game and try to complete an entirely new level configuration. Wolfenstein what you do and includes elements that create emerging game scenarios.
Metal gear is a game about where you are. He has more in common with THE legend of Zelda than Wolfenstein. Articles are a way to facilitate future exploration. They encourage backtracking and memorizing the playing space. Consider how Metal gear manages disguises in relation to Wolfenstein. In Metal gear, the player has access to a disguise whose only use is to sneak behind a guard blocking the way to building 2. If you do not have the disguise, it is necessary to back off and roam the rest of the world until you find it. In Wolfenstein, a disguise is only another tool; there may be more than one way to move forward. In Metal geardisguises depend on the context. Puzzles have only one right answer, and if you do not know what it is, you'd better understand it.
There is a scenario in Metal gear this can make the game unrecoverable. Throughout the game, while Snake saves hostages and defeats bosses, his class rank increases, measured by a number of stars at the bottom of the screen. Higher ranks provide more health and the ability to hold more ammo. In order to destroy Metal Gear, the player must detonate 16 C4 explosives on the right and left legs of the mech in a specific sequence. Before that, they meet a villain named Coward Duck who is hiding behind a hostage. Shooting on the hostage decreases the player's rank. If they manage to get to the location of Metal Gear without the necessary rank, they will not have enough C4 to destroy it. Because the door locks behind them, they can not leave to save spare hostages and increase their rank again.
They are forever trapped in this room. In a multiverse filled with unsuccessful attempts to outsmart the player, it's the only scenario where the game succeeds. It's a last-ditch, cruel and last-ditch effort to save Outer Heaven – and, by extension, the world of gambling – from destruction. This is the first time Kojima has been able to design a crash, but even this can be canceled once the player has reloaded an older backup.
Metal gear drawings for failure, but, again, it is surmountable. Because of this, there is immense satisfaction in beating the game. The player has a taste of Solid Snake, thus overcoming supposedly impossible odds. If it took intelligence and perseverance for the player to erase Metal gearThe obstacles, so Snake must possess these qualities in even greater quantities in the fictional world of the game.
Metal gear creates an intoxicating image: the solitary and hard soldier. Players share Snake's victories. They live in his body. The design of the game encourages them to feel, in a way, the same fears that Snake feels. Each victory helps them to identify with him and finally to him.
This is contrary to the theme of the game of Metal gear: design a fortress so impenetrable and stimulating that no soldier (or player) would ever come back. By working to failure, Kojima paved the way for a growing series of empowerments that players began to want as a drug.
Subsequent Metal gear the games are monuments to the first. Big Boss's failure reverberates narratively, creating dangerous echoes. The memory of Outer Heaven never fades into the fiction of the game, and players will find themselves playing through familiar sets for the entire series.
Metal gear is the frame on which every other game in the series is built, often in an extremely literal way. Its structure has been exaggerated, recontextualized, reaffirmed, mocked and parodied. He will never be completely forgotten.
Rightly or wrongly, the Metal gear The saga is inextricably linked to its creator Hideo Kojima. Metal gear marks the birth of the myth of Kojima as the supreme author; even this analysis could not help but see the creator in his creation. However, the tensions at the heart of the franchise are greater than those of a single man. These are the inevitable tensions of a genre where players are always the intruder. The player is not welcome in the outside sky; they will not be welcome anywhere. And Metal gear is the moment when this previously unexpressed feeling is finally expressed.
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