PREVIOUS PART - Part 02 - Flip Kickin' Concrete

Welcome back to Metal Gear Scanlon: The Twin Playthroughs! In these blogs I chronicle my journey through Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, noting the differences between the remake and the PS1 original, as well as posting videos of some of the cutscenes with amusing differences. Think of it as an unofficial companion piece to Metal Gear Scanlon. If this is your first time joining us, you can start back at part one by clicking here.

Right off the bat Twin Snakes gives us a little time saver by making the door in the room Baker was in Level 2, allowing me to exit through it with my Level 2 card rather than backtracking through the little hallway. It's a nice gesture, though I thought the door being a higher level than we had in the PS1 version was a nice world building touch, not having every door we come across be accessible right away.

Like the PS1 version guards have now been dispatched to the armory, though they're pretty easy to deal with. I hold one up for his dog tags and then tranq the other from across the room.

The dog tags are probably the best example of a mechanic incorporated into Twin Snakes just because it was in 2. While in MGS2 collecting enemy dog tags unlocked special cheat items, in Twin Snakes collecting dog tags... gets you nothing. Even if you were to hold up every guard on every difficulty level to collect their dog tags you get absolutely nothing for it. Not only is it pointless, the dog tag mechanic actually detracts from the game in a few spots which I'll show later on.

I head into the room with the FAMAS, which curiously now also houses the first cardboard box as well. The room is a bit differently designed, on the PS1 there were both vertical and horizontal lasers while in Twin Snakes there are just horizontal. The room itself also has some more static objects scattered around it.

After clearing out the armory I head back to the first floor and contact Meryl. Most of the Codec scenes play out the same way they did on the PS1, just with the redone acting and new translation.

While waiting for Meryl to open the door I go to collect the items I can now grab with my Level 2 card. The first thing I do is knock out the guard on the bottom floor. While running to the room with the SOCOM suppressor in it I hear a guard over the radio asking why someone is late with their status report. Like in MGS2, certain guards have to radio in to command at set intervals to let them know nothing is wrong, and if they miss a report guards are sent to the area to check up on them. It doesn't trigger an alert or even a caution, but they'll come in the room and wake up any sleeping guards they find. (Or trigger a caution if they find a corpse instead).

While the commander is calling guards in I head for the suppressor room. Drew noted in the video that he was the easiest guard to deal with since he never turns to face the door, so I went in feeling confident he wouldn't be any trouble. I jump up onto a box with an item on top of it, and as I jump down the guard turns around and spots me. Turns out his patrol pattern is different in Twin Snakes. This is the kind of change I actually like in a remake, mixing things up so a player who goes in expecting to be able to breeze through with their knowledge of the original screws up because of that confidence and knowledge from the original.

In the PS1 version a guard seeing you would instantly trigger an alert, but in MGS2 (and thus by extension Twin Snakes) guards have to pull out their radio and tell the commander they found an intruder. If you can knock out or kill the guard before he can pull out his radio you're saved from consequences entirely, and if you incapacitate them after they pull out the radio but before they finish their sentence guards will be sent to check up on him. Even if you don't get him until the last syllable of his message, the commander will have no idea what he was talking about and send a search team. Since the room was isolated from the rest of the hangar I have a pretty easy time dealing with him, but as I leave the room I find the guard I'd knocked out earlier have woken up. On top of that the search team is coming down the stairs, leaving me with not a lot of options.

I avoid the search team but end up getting spotted by the guard, but knock him out. The search team doesn't notice but a guard on the walkway above hears our scuffle, and comes down to see what's going on. I really screw things up and let him wake up the other guard, and then get spotted by both of them. I can't get them both before one calls in an alert, and end up running up stairs to hide in the room on the left. There's a pile of crates with a little gap for Snake to squeeze into, so I hide in there as the alert drops down into an evasion.

Evasions are a mechanic added to MGS2, set between alert and caution. Rather than the enemy going from knowing exactly where you are to just looking around a bit more than normal, in evasion enemies will breach and search a room for Snake. The guards are programmed to enter and search the room in a specific way, so there are usually some specific hiding spots in each room that are "safe" to use. This is one of the additions I really like in Twin Snakes. In the original if you got spotted you just had to find a spot far enough out of the way that the alert timer would run out before guards caught up with you, and they would suddenly forget they were chasing you. Unfortunately because the normal stealth is such a cake walk in Twin Snakes you rarely see Evasion Mode in action.

VIDEO - Evasion Mode - Clearing a Room

Once the guards leave the room the evasion drops down to a caution and I wait out the timer, taking a chance at one point to peak my head out the door and shoot out the camera near the stairs with my newly suppressed SOCOM. I play a lot more cautiously at this point and don't run into any more trouble. Once I've grabbed the Mine Detector, I drop down from the railing and enter the cargo door, which was opened at some point during my earlier shenanigans. In addition to the lasers moving much slower than on the PS1, the developers added a couple of features to make this area easier. First off there's a fire extinguisher on the far wall, and shooting it will cause its expellant to spray all over the room and reveal the infrared lasers. The second addition are control boxes placed next to each laser gate, which you can shoot to deactivate that laser gate.

I run out into the Canyon and talk with Deepthroat, and then use the Mine Detector to collect the mines. A couple extra mines have been placed along the path on the right of the right boulder, another addition to trick players who have the PS1 version memorized. After collecting the mines and healing up with a Ration so I can collect the one to the left, I walk forward and trigger the introduction to Raven and his tank, which oddly enough is one of the few cutscenes that tries to make Snake less cool. Rather than jumping out of the way of the tank blast, it knocks Snake straight backwards into the cargo door. I have to imagine this was an intentional joke about how every other cutscene makes Snake into a bullet dodging badass, so the one ridiculous instance in the original they use to knock him flat on his ass.

VIDEO - Vulcan Raven's Introduction

The Tank fight doesn't change as much as some of the other boss fights, though you can shoot the gunner in first person. The tank constantly moving around makes this a bit hard, so grenades are still your best bet. This is also a good spot to mention the addition of the stamina bar to bosses in addition to their health. In MGS2 bosses could be "knocked out" by using non-lethal weapons to take out their stamina, so the boss fight wouldn't count as a kill in you final rankings. This is present in Twin Snakes as well, so if you want to take out the gunners non-lethally your best bet is with stun grenades. A crevice has been added to the center of the canyon, which you can drop down into to hide as well as to find a couple of items. I ended up using a chaff grenade so I could get up to the tank, and then used claymores to take out its treads and slow it down significantly. After that I just lobbed stun grenades into the gunner seat and fell back on my M9 when I ran out of those.

Originally I was only going to post the Ocelot fight, but I figured since I'm recording them all there's no reason not to include every boss fight. If you want to watch me fight the tank for about four minutes, you can click the video below. If not, I'd still recommend you click on the video beneath that one, in which Snake shows off his pitching arm and punches a dude who's on fire right in the face.

VIDEO - Tank Boss Fight

VIDEO - Snake Finishes off the Tank

What a badass. Missed the chance for a rad one-liner like "chill out" though. Well, that's it for Part 3! It's looking like I'll be caught up with the videos by the end of the week, at which point I'll try to get a new blog out a day or two after each new episode of Metal Gear Scanlon gets posted. Thanks for reading again!