The original Metal Gear Solid is an oddity; with Sons of Liberty arguably setting the
mechanical (and perhaps visual) foundation for the games going forward, as well as each
game since the first receiving its fair share of port jobs and upgrades.
Outside of a re-release of an emulation on the PS3, however, the original remains a blocky,
somewhat obtuse anomaly; feeling like it has more in common with the borderline adventure
game puzzles of its MSX predecessors than the progressively more action-oriented gameplay
displayed by its sequels.
Rooms are puzzles with a start and end point.
Despite being able to access them from your inventory at any time, weapons often have
one main use and can then largely be disregarded; much like other adventure games, you essentially
rub a bunch of different items together on any given scenario before you found the one
that fits for some strange reason.
You backtrack to get the sniper rifle, you backtrack to get to the control tower, you
backtrack then… front-track (?) multiple times in order to turn a card hot and cold.
It’s a different breed from future titles.
That said, a modernisation of the game is rumoured to be Blue Point’s next project,
given their previous experience with the series in the form of the HD collection.
On top of that, Konami’s recent shutdown of a fan attempt at an update has only gotten
more people talking about the concept.
It seems like people are truly ready for a Metal Gear Solid remake.
It’s just that, well, it seems like many people have forgotten that we already have
a remake of Metal Gear Solid.
Released in 2004, The Twin Snakes was a complete remake from the ground up; a surprisingly
massive collaborative effort from a number of different forces.
While helmed by third-party developer Silicon Knights due to Kojima’s team being hard
at work developing Snake Eater, the director did lend his overseeing eye to proceedings,
along with Shigeru Miyamoto.
Its core philosophy was that of having you experience MGS1’s story with MGS2’s expanded
mechanical framework; first person aiming, hanging over railings, interacting with lockers,
etc.
On top of that you had Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura directing all-new cinematics
for every cutscene in the game, and, in a frankly unbelievable feat of logistics on
the part of voiceover director Kris Zimmerman, the return of the entire voice cast re-reading
the enormous script over again.
As the back of the box says, this is the way Metal Gear Solid was meant to be played.
And at a glance, it’s seemingly everything one could possibly want from a remake of such
a classic – one that modernises both graphically and mechanically, that introduces quality-of-life
improvements that keep the story going at the expense of backtracking, that heightens
the original game’s visual bombast to a level that far surpasses what was possible
just six years before; to the appropriate level of anime nonsense you suspect Kojima
wanted in the first place.
However, as I fought Revolver Ocelot, formerly an incredibly tense game of cat-and-mouse,
and ended it here in a matter of seconds with a few tranq darts to the head, it’s hard
to imagine the packaging’s bold claim as anything other than fluff.
I’d go as far as to say that MGS2’s systems applied here fundamentally break The Twin
Snakes.
As my good friend Lambhoot pointed out in a recent video, the challenge of the original
largely came from the fact that you could rarely affect anything outwith the space of
the screen.
You had two choices – the top-down camera that limited your view, or the static first-person
perspective that allowed you no further actions.
Your only real control of said camera came from physically manipulating yourself by running
up to a wall.
It meant that even though the number of active threats in any given room was worryingly low
and their blue vision cones made them seem uncannily daft, it’s not like you were ever
at any particular advantage; honestly, your sight wasn’t much better.
In short, you were made to be vulnerable.
With the addition of first-person aiming, however, all of that changes.
Enemies can be seen and picked off from a distance silently and non-lethally with the
addition of MGS2’s tranquiliser rounds.
Surveillance cameras bear almost literally no threat anymore as they can be as easily
taken out.
It completely changes the dynamic of boss fights.
The idea that you can non-lethally take down the tank, for example, is novel and the battle
now takes advantage of the verticality afforded by being able to aim up; it’s an actual
fight rather than a puzzle whose simple answer is “grenades”.
That said, it’s an encounter outweighed by the numerous times where fights that previously
required a similar level of strategy have that robbed from them thanks to increased
damage afforded by headshots, for example.
Take this fight with Vulcan Raven where the cutscenes surrounding the fight absolutely
dwarfed the encounter itself where I spent a few seconds tanking the hits and steadfastly
piling tranquilisers into his face.
Given the developer’s experience with more meta approaches to design in games like Eternal
Darkness, I honestly read it as a joke when it happened in the aforementioned Ocelot fight;
a kind of wink-and-nudge as to how specifically designed these encounters were in the first
place that even a slight systemic tweak can completely upset their balance.
Additionally, giving bodies a sense of permanence, allowing them to be found, introducing the
short period of time between being spotted and having an enemy call in an alert…
it all makes sense, it’s less game-y than before.
It’s just that there’s something terrifying about slightly messing up and in a split second
having guards appear from seemingly nowhere to gun you down.
Waiting under a tank having no idea what’s going on in that scenario is a lot tenser
when you can’t just tranq whoever walks past.
Future games in the series worked in this regard because they were designed specifically
for heightened player freedom.
A boss battle like Vamp had you dealing with him moving incredibly quickly on multiple
levels, testing you on your ability to aim in first person at high speeds.
Hell, for all of the original’s pacing issues in terms of backtracking, it started you out
with very little health and after every boss fight had you gain a little more, increasing
ammo capacity, marking your move from vulnerability to badass as you became more comfortable with
the systems, leading nicely towards the game’s more action-focused second half.
Twin Snakes lacks this subtlety; giving you that power in an enclosed, horizontal environment
or against limited enemies that the systems weren’t designed for, turning the player
into an untouchable badass from the start, in which the world is a playground and enemies
are toys; completely anathema to the tense stealth experience of the original.
But perhaps that was the point of this remake.
Rather than this being the way Metal Gear Solid was meant to be played, it might be
more accurate to say that this is the way Kojima intended the game to look.
The challenge and quirks may be gone, but not having to warm or cool cards, for example,
proves incredibly successful at railroading you to the all-new and far more explosive
cutscenes.
Kitamura originally intended to identically recreate each scene, until Kojima encouraged
him to get buckwild with it, mirroring both the former’s personal style as well as the
trend towards impossibly ostentatious bullet-time action you saw in the early-2000s.
In that sense, Snake doesn’t just encounter the Ninja; he backflips to avoid a big rock
kicked towards him.
He doesn’t just shoot a rocket at the Hind, he rides a missile aimed at him before jumping
off it and slo-mo taking a shot at eye level as the previous rocket dramatically detonates
behind him.
Even a regular conversation about genetics can’t go two seconds without characters
needlessly backflipping around.
Always backflipping.
It perhaps all fits with the decidedly anime nature of the game’s story.
Here we have a game enamoured with The Matrix, whose visual direction has aged about as gracefully
as, well, any other media aping The Matrix, making for something that I might have found
cool in my early teens, but now is amazing for its sheer camp.
That said, in the process of intensifying these cutscenes, it’s hard not to feel like
something is lost in the grandeur.
The original game had its fair share of dramatic shots, Snake was still tough, but it balanced
this out with relative quiet time that, whether a result of technical limitations or otherwise,
conveyed so much tension with static characters, slow-moving camera perspectives and an eerily
minimal soundtrack, establishing a murky, fish-out-of-water atmosphere in which those
characters tried to make sense of the chaos around them.
Twin Snakes is so comparatively loud that it’s hard to distinguish anything resembling
that level of tension.
Instead the game is so aware of its own legacy in the canon of video game culture that lines
like “love blooming on a battlefield” and “Japanese animes” are delivered slower
and with slightly more oomph just so you hear it properly; that the uncanny nature of, say,
Ocelot warning Snake about using autofire buttons, is undermined by having Ocelot just
straight up point at the camera as if to say “yeah, we get it, this is a meme now.”
It might seem like I’m being harsh here, and perhaps I am because honestly, I had a
great time with Twin Snakes, and I think most fans of the series would too, but perhaps
not for the reasons intended by the developers.
It ended up bringing to mind so many questions about the nature of any rumoured remake in
the future.
The Twin Snakes is fascinating as a museum piece, a heavily-guided rollercoaster through
the early-2000s’ obsession with gloriously dated Matrix-inspired action and an intriguing
view of how a piece of media can become altered by its own cultural legacy.
It’s just that, as a remake, all it proves is that the original’s environments and
their mechanics, however archaic, were married so closely that to modernise one facet of
the game’s design without completely overhauling the other to match, is to do both old fans
and those curious about the game a disservice, by robbing the original of its incredibly
unique identity within the series.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on The Twin Snakes.
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Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Nico Bleackley, Rob, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Spike Jones, TheNamelessGuy, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett,
Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon
Robinson, Justins Holderness, Peter, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic, Nicolas Ross and Charlie
Yang.
And with that, I’m Hamish and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.