@N7 said:

@Demoskinos said:

@N7: Twin Snakes is not awful. I still don't get the shit people gave that game. Other than people nitpicking over some of the VO changes and other tweaks. The gameplay is way better since it ropes in all the MGS2 mechanics.

Snake, backflipped off of a missile. That ruined the entire thing for me. Playing TTS and then going right into MGS2 is a big mistake because the cutscenes were so over the top and wild and incredibly more actiony than they had any right to be. Especially more so than MGS2. So if you see those cutscenes you'll probably think this is what the series is like, and while the game did get have some amazing scenes(The Liquid Snake/Solid Snake fight on top of REX for example, and then the entire Gray Fox murderspree), it's a bad representative I think.

I mean, okay, it's not a bad game, and it did a lot right. And David Hayter even gave up half his check just to make sure they could get as many of the original voice actors to come back, but if you aren't aware of what the series is and want to jump on, you may get turned off by the way the game is presented in TTS. I've seen some people interested in MGS and then they pick up TTS and got turned off because it was too much, so I'm not taking a risk.

It's probably not TTS's fault if they got turned off. Metal Gear is just a strange series in general. And there were some truly ludicrous moments even in MGS2. (Naked Raiden sequence with psycho Colonel AI, Liquid's arm, bullets being repelled by Fortune, a fat man in roller skates planting bombs and drinking daiquiris or some shit. Backflipping off a missile is nothing.

@Hailinel: Eh, those were mostly for gameplay. I'm talking about the cutscenes. TTS just never sat right with me. It felt like a bastardization of MGS1, which is sooooooo much better in terms of story and presentation. Gameplay, maybe hasn't aged so well, which is where TTS shines, but still.

@N7 said:

@Hailinel: Eh, those were mostly for gameplay. I'm talking about the cutscenes. TTS just never sat right with me. It felt like a bastardization of MGS1, which is sooooooo much better in terms of story and presentation. Gameplay, maybe hasn't aged so well, which is where TTS shines, but still.

Liquid's arm was for gameplay?

@N7 said:

@Hailinel: Eh, those were mostly for gameplay. I'm talking about the cutscenes. TTS just never sat right with me. It felt like a bastardization of MGS1, which is sooooooo much better in terms of story and presentation. Gameplay, maybe hasn't aged so well, which is where TTS shines, but still.

I agree entirely. Twin Snakes has a noticeably different style to it than the original, with that god awful techno soundtrack and the silly cutscenes. And, sure, Metal Gear Solid, but like N7's prior example, Snake backflipping over missiles is fucking ridiculous and doesn't fit that sort of character at all. Plus a lot of the voice acting isn't as well delivered, and furthermore Nastasha lost her saucy Russian accent! SERIOUS OUTRAGE.

The gameplay is of course better across the board than the original, even though the controls take a lot of getting used to. Though one thing that always annoyed me in Twin Snakes, when the gameplay is concerned, is how you can't aim properly with the weapons. For example with the SOCOM pistol, should you be aiming at something but then decide against using it, you have to unequip it using the shoulder button rather than slowly letting go of the firing button which can be cumbersome and has lead to a small share of unavoidable alerts. And the FAMAS you can't aim with at all. Soon as you press that fire button, no matter how lightly, you're off in full auto-fire.

So, yeah, I'm not the biggest supporter of Twin Snakes. It wins over the original with the gameplay, the graphics, but some of those stylistic choices concerning the story and cutscenes were awful, and for a series like MGS, criticisms concerning the story count for a lot.

@Hailinel: Fatman was a boss, in which you defeat via gameplay. Fortune is a boss with the twist that you couldn't shoot her, which was a pretty huge surprise back in the day. All gameplay. And Naked Raiden was them flipping the player on their heads by saying "No matter how you've played the game so far, now you HAVE to sneak or else you will die". Gameplay. And Liquid's arm was for Gameplay but in MGS4, where you can play as him in Metal Gear Online. Gameplay.

@Yummylee: The accents I'm okay with because Kojima never liked Mei Ling's accent. But everything else, yeah, Snake doesn't backflip off a missile, what the fuck? He's methodical and exact. He's not Dante.

I want to get into the MGS franchise for a few weeks now too, while I'm pretty occupied I plan to get the HD collection for my Vita, get MGS4 eventually for PS3 and read the rest in the wiki. I guess that should do :)

buy the HD collection then play 4

@Hailinel: Fatman was a boss, in which you defeat via gameplay. Fortune is a boss with the twist that you couldn't shoot her, which was a pretty huge surprise back in the day. All gameplay. And Naked Raiden was them flipping the player on their heads by saying "No matter how you've played the game so far, now you HAVE to sneak or else you will die". Gameplay. And Liquid's arm was for Gameplay but in MGS4, where you can play as him in Metal Gear Online. Gameplay.

@Yummylee: The accents I'm okay with because Kojima never liked Mei Ling's accent. But everything else, yeah, Snake doesn't backflip off a missile, what the fuck? He's methodical and exact. He's not Dante.

@Jack268 said:

You own a PS3? Get MGS1 from PSN, get the HD collection, and get MGS4. Total cost is like $60 or so. It shouldn't take more than two or three weeks of casual play to finish them all.

And trust me, you really want to play the games, not read about the story online. It doesn't make any sense at all when you read it like that.

Do this. And if past releases are any indication of when Ground Zeroes will come out, you have a few years after the game is announced before it actually gets released, so you should have the time.

@Hailinel: It's really not that crazy once you understand that Metal Gear is loaded with the supernatural. Ocelot is the son of The Sorrow(And The Boss, but that's not so important right now), a talented medium who could talk to dead soldiers on the battlefield. His ability passed down to Ocelot which enabled him to be possessed by the spirit of Liquid.

http://chipandironicus.com/games/games.html

That is the next best thing aside from playing the games yourself. The playthroughs of 2-4 are quality stuff. I never watched the first game, but one of the guys is replaced by someone else, so that one might not be as good.

@N7

@Hailinel: Fatman was a boss, in which you defeat via gameplay. Fortune is a boss with the twist that you couldn't shoot her, which was a pretty huge surprise back in the day. All gameplay. And Naked Raiden was them flipping the player on their heads by saying "No matter how you've played the game so far, now you HAVE to sneak or else you will die". Gameplay. And Liquid's arm was for Gameplay but in MGS4, where you can play as him in Metal Gear Online. Gameplay.

@Yummylee: The accents I'm okay with because Kojima never liked Mei Ling's accent. But everything else, yeah, Snake doesn't backflip off a missile, what the fuck? He's methodical and exact. He's not Dante.

Liquid's arm was a ridiculous plot point long before it was worked into gameplay. Don't try to get a free pass on it.

I've played all of the major releases, not the handheld games, and I'm still not sure I understand what's going. With that said, you might be better off just going in fresh. Maybe play MGS 3, that one and MGS were my favorites anyway. 2 is where the story started getting weird, but 3 reigned things in a smidge. 4 was so confusing that I didn't make it past the second act and just watched the cutscenes online.

@Demoskinos said:

@Hailinel

@N7

@Hailinel: Fatman was a boss, in which you defeat via gameplay. Fortune is a boss with the twist that you couldn't shoot her, which was a pretty huge surprise back in the day. All gameplay. And Naked Raiden was them flipping the player on their heads by saying "No matter how you've played the game so far, now you HAVE to sneak or else you will die". Gameplay. And Liquid's arm was for Gameplay but in MGS4, where you can play as him in Metal Gear Online. Gameplay.

@Yummylee: The accents I'm okay with because Kojima never liked Mei Ling's accent. But everything else, yeah, Snake doesn't backflip off a missile, what the fuck? He's methodical and exact. He's not Dante.

Liquid's arm was a ridiculous plot point long before it was worked into gameplay. Don't try to get a free pass on it.

Oh lets not even forget MGS4 with Raiden fighting off people with NO ARMS and a sword in his mouth. Or any of the other stupid stuff in the series. Make no mistake Im a huge fan but Metal Gear Solid has always been super dumb.

That's also one of many reasons why I'm not such a huge fan of MGS4, and why the original MGS and MGS3 are my two favourites. I really like MGS2 as well, but I much preferred the more 'grounded' (so to speak, given that MGS1 & MGS3 are pretty weird, too) tone of the other aforementioned MGS'. With that said, I'm also really into MGS: Special Missions as well, but only because the creative absurdity is out of a story context and for the sake of weird VR missions.

Regardless of that, Solid Snake is a well defined character, and while he's of course an unrealistically capable soldier, he was never jumping off of rockets or being able to effortlessly throw a grenade through a tank turret or doing all of those crazy flips and shit like during Twin Snakes.

I read up on the Metal Gear Solid database on PSN. There were a couple games in the series I didn't finish all the way through, and it helped out quite a bit.

@TrafalgarLaw said:

You can pretty much sum up the story of MGS like this;

You see, there once was the Big Boss. He was a legendary soldier and he had a brother (now if he owned a brothel, that would be really weird right?). Revolver Ocelot did something, became Liquid (not the kind you will have to mop up later). Something something, a giant metal gear loaded with warheads. Solid Snake comes into play. Raiden is some kind of zombie corpse revived from a FOX-unit as a cyborg ninja. FOX-unit is some secret military ops. FOX-die is some kind of virus to eliminate them. Everyone is a clone of Big Boss, everyone. Because Snake is a clone, he ages very rapidly, see Molly the sheep for explanation.

Nanobots can cure/stop cancer (well duh) and give you immortal life, that's how everyone ever in the MGS-plotline was able to make a cameo in MGS4. Some female scientist made a vampire named Vamp. Vamp gets to fight Raiden, zombie on vampire action if you're into that thing. A lot of cows strolling by while they're fighting. Meryll has the hots for Snake ever since he has seen her in her undies. Now she can bust a cap in everyone's ass. Something about PMC and militias. I don't know what Zero has to do with anything but he's in there. I think he was a communist. Cold wars being fought, apparently the japanese have to step in to save the world from communism. The Cuban missile crisis was done by the Patriots. The Patriots are the illuminati. Something about the Big Boss still being alive, probably nanobots again. Forgot about Metal Gear, I guess that shows up now and then.

I don't know, you're better off learning the anatomy of every living thing that has ever existed in every single languages ever conceived. You never play a MGS for the story. I'm hesitant to call it a story because it plays out like a 72-hour lasting acid trip. Ask yourself this after every line of dialogue, can this be explained by nanobots? If the answer is Yes, you're playing a MGS game and you should accept it as the truth.

I laughed. Loudly.

@Spoonman671 said:

Replay MGS4 (now has trophies!) and download the Metal Gear Solid database application from the PSN store. Whenever a piece of terminology turns up that you don't understand, make a note of it and when you're done playing that session, look it up in the database. You may also want to look up some of the main characters in the database before starting to replay.

This

I think after MGS1 and the tanker of 2 the story just becomes too many levels of ridiculous. And it was already pretty ridiculous.

@Demoskinos said:

@Hailinel

@N7

@Hailinel: Fatman was a boss, in which you defeat via gameplay. Fortune is a boss with the twist that you couldn't shoot her, which was a pretty huge surprise back in the day. All gameplay. And Naked Raiden was them flipping the player on their heads by saying "No matter how you've played the game so far, now you HAVE to sneak or else you will die". Gameplay. And Liquid's arm was for Gameplay but in MGS4, where you can play as him in Metal Gear Online. Gameplay.

@Yummylee: The accents I'm okay with because Kojima never liked Mei Ling's accent. But everything else, yeah, Snake doesn't backflip off a missile, what the fuck? He's methodical and exact. He's not Dante.

Liquid's arm was a ridiculous plot point long before it was worked into gameplay. Don't try to get a free pass on it.

Oh lets not even forget MGS4 with Raiden fighting off people with NO ARMS and a sword in his mouth. Or any of the other stupid stuff in the series. Make no mistake Im a huge fan but Metal Gear Solid has always been super dumb.

How about Raiden stopping a giant tanker/ship (Outer Haven?) without any arms/hands? He might as well german suplex'd it while he was at it. Or crawling through a giant microwave and being just rare cooked. I like medium though. Or...I'm Raiden...I'm lightning...I swear I thought I was watching a One Piece episode at one point.

Play 1 - 4. They released 2 and 3 in HD, so it shouldn't be that hard to catch up.

Get the HD collection

@falserelic: Could someone explain what is so convoluted. Never seemed too confusing to me, just follow the story, don't skip entries in the series, play in order and it should be fine. Just like any other series but i guess video games need different standards.

War has changed. War never changes.

Done.

@Hailinel: But phsyco mantis and dominant "genes" are ok. Sure whatever. Oh yeah Volgin. The Fear Pain every other boss that is much more ridiculous than a arm.

Choke yourself long enough and it will all make sense.