One of my goals this year is to finally play through the entire mainline Metal Gear Solid series (that is, no MG1 or 2, no Acids, definitely no Survive lol), which means starting with a replay of Metal Gear Solid 1! Played on ePSXe on PC after taking a crack at the PS3 port and getting mad every time I died and had to rewatch a 10 minute cutscene.
I think the original Metal Gear Solid still holds up pretty well! The thing I appreciate most in all of Kojima's games is just the degree of clever and unique design in them, and MGS1 is no different. The boss battles mostly feel surprisingly open-ended and memorable, there's a lot of pretty clever stuff that's not even particularly explained (cigarettes detecting lasers, and box-based fast travel, for example), and Shadow Moses is generally a fun space to explore, with just the right amount of backtracking.
It's not perfect, though. The controls, even mapped to a Series X controller as I was doing, are pretty finicky, with the first-person controls (specifically sniping) being both necessary at points and pretty awful. Snake proves to be a little bit shoogly to control, which can lead to some irritating situations where one step goes a bit wonky, setting off alarms and potentially requiring a reload (much more tolerable with save states, to be fair).
And, oh god, 24 years later, I don't know if this is controversial to say, but this writing is pretty rough. I think a lot of Kojima's later works, up to and including Death Stranding, present some interesting philosophical ideas and unique characters, despite still being pretty overbearing in the script, but wow everything MGS1 is trying to do just really doesn't work. The themes here are a mess (war is bad, I guess is the most consistent point here, which, good for you?), the character work deserves props for beating the dead horse of "now that I'm dying, here's why I'm not actually the bad guy" almost a decade before Assassin's Creed, and basically anything involving Otacon is just absolutely embarassing. The final speech Snake gives before the end credits borders on parody, but honestly its timing is so bizarre that I think it doesn't work no matter if it was intended to be funny or not.
Still, though! Good game! Probably my least favorite MGS, but that's like being my least favorite steak or least favorite $20 I Found In Some Jeans I Washed: still really good!