{"id":63400,"date":"2023-10-23T20:06:01","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T10:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/?p=63400"},"modified":"2023-10-23T20:06:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-23T10:06:01","slug":"review-metal-gear-solid-master-collection-vol-1-sony-playstation-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/2023\/10\/review-metal-gear-solid-master-collection-vol-1-sony-playstation-5.html","title":{"rendered":"Review: Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 (Sony PlayStation 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember that time Sony\u2019s head suit, Jim Ryan, got up and said<\/a> \u201c\u2026the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” The Metal Gear Solid Collection shows just how genuinely shallow<\/span> and unintelligent that statement was. You should want<\/em> to play the Metal Gear Solid games again. They look ancient, sure, but not in a bad<\/span> way, and much<\/span> more importantly is that they\u2019re all works of art by Hideo Kojima, one of the strongest arguments for auteur<\/span> theory applying to video games.<\/p>\n

Indeed, these games are, if anything, more relevant today than they have ever been.<\/span> As noted by Sebasti\u00e1n Sanhueza Rodr\u00edguez in his essay Metal Gear Solid and the Flow of Malinformation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Patriots are not presented as a malevolent agency or ideology <\/em>which<\/em><\/span> operates out of self-interest: neither are they primarily inclined to bend people\u2019s will or to rewrite reality\u2014and hence, truth\u2014in a way fitting to their own selfish objectives<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the extent that the digital age opens a door to an informational \u201coverload\u201d that potentially compromises the stability of our individual and collective systems of belief, the Patriots are thereby set up as a tool to filter or modulate what is otherwise an unmanageable amount of information.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAs illustrated by treatments of delicate issues like war and the pandemic in politics and the media, there is constant pressure to monitor and censor informational <\/em>channels,<\/em><\/span> even to the point of criminalizing information that is regarded <\/em>as either untrue<\/em><\/span> or inconvenient.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, Konami didn\u2019t time the release of the collection with world events, but<\/span> the last week or so has demonstrated with real clarity just how prescient Kojima tends to be with his observations of the world. Trying to find reliable and truthful coverage of what is going<\/span> on in Palestine and Israel makes every single theme around militarism, patriotism, information and propaganda that plays out in the Metal Gear Solid games so utterly insightful and accurate.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Unlike t<\/span>he real-world conflicts, the Metal Gear games do all of that<\/span> with a firm sense of humour and dry surrealism. Bitter, perhaps, at the state of it all, but darkly humourous nonetheless.<\/span> People love to comment on the over-long cut scenes and the idea that Kojima is being indulgent, but really he\u2019s laughing along with you, with the overwrought narrative itself a comment on the bombastic nature of war stories and the way that is used by the military to package up and deliver the<\/span> propaganda. Kojima was using<\/span> the very form of his stories as a commentary and criticism of the broader storytelling approach, and that<\/span> too is becoming more relevant with every<\/span> year as the Call of Duties of the world become even more earnest in their ridiculous over-the-top production values to sell the flag waving.<\/p>\n

So it doesn\u2019t really matter how the Metal Gear titles look<\/em>, since they each remain a valuable and pertinent observation on the world that, if people were inclined to take video games seriously as art works, more people would be paying<\/span> attention to.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, instead of analysis of these themes and acknowledgment of what the Metal Gear games are telling<\/span> us, we get quotes in reviews like \u201cKonami has done the bare minimum here, offering up a lazy bundle for <\/em>far<\/em><\/span> too <\/em>much.<\/em><\/span> There were far better <\/em>\u2014 far<\/em><\/span> more consumer-friendly \u2014 ways to make these titles available to fans who\u2019ve likely purchased them before.\u201d <\/em>If only games criticism were more inspired by art criticism…<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

I digress. Back to the quality of this collection as a nostalgic itch<\/span> scratcher. It\u2019s not that the Metal Gear Solid titles actually look or play poorly, anyway.<\/span> The three \u201cmain\u201d Metal Gear titles in this collection are all stealth-heavy strategic action games, challenging players to make their way around enclosed spaces while staying out of the sight range of the various enemies,<\/span> cameras, and the like. You, playing as Snake, eventually amass some pretty impressive tools to help you do overcome<\/span> these puzzles, though<\/span> never quite enough that you\u2019ll feel comfortable \u2013 you\u2019ll still need to be resourceful and have an impeccable sense of timing to get by.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been good<\/span> at stealth games, and even<\/span> when I do know the pathway<\/span> through an area in a Metal Gear game I have a habit of slipping<\/span> up anyway. What I do enjoy<\/span> is the playful creativity that each game has regarding level design and<\/span> how there are often multiple solutions to each stealth problem, so players are encouraged to be creative, too. The action sequences are less impressive \u2013 though by<\/span> Metal Gear Solid 3 they were at least workable \u2013 but outside of the bosses in these games if you ended up in a gunfight the chances are that you were in some real trouble.<\/p>\n

All three games look good<\/span> in terms of the art direction, whatever you might think of the level of technical detail in them.<\/span> All feature one of the all-time iconic voice acting roles, with David Hayter voicing Snake. Konami\u2019s also done a decent job of packaging<\/span> the games up with additional material, including screenplays and the like. It\u2019s not quite as impressive as a digital museum effort as the Atari 50 (which I suspect will remain the benchmark for quite some time), but there is nonetheless a lot in there.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

You even get the first couple of Metal Gear games before \u201cSolid\u201d was added to the title. The MSX2<\/span> Metal Gear was instrumental in defining the stealth genre that Kojima would later go on to redefine, and while these things are more curiosities than the essential works of art that the \u201cSolid\u201d games are, there are boundary-pushing qualities in them (including one of the earliest examples of fourth-wall-breaking narrative in video games), and it is a nice way to round out a high-quality collection.<\/p>\n

Konami could have done more, for sure. There are several titles that really could have been included in this collection for the sake of completion \u2013 Metal Gear Solid 4 remains locked to the PlayStation 3, while MGS Acid and Twin Snakes look pretty set to be lost to time at this point. Sure, MGS V remains a viable product in its own right, but Konami really could have filled us in on the rest.<\/p>\n

With that being said, the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy isn\u2019t just a trio of great<\/span> games that people have strong nostalgia<\/span> for. They\u2019re genuine masterpieces and deserve to be preserved into perpetuity.<\/span> This collection is a perfectly adequate way of preserving them for this hardware cycle.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Support<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember that time Sony\u2019s head suit, Jim Ryan, got up and said \u201c\u2026the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” The Metal Gear Solid Collection shows just how genuinely shallow and unintelligent that statement was. You should want to play the Metal Gear Solid games again. They look ancient, sure, but not in a bad way, and much more importantly is that they\u2019re all works of art by Hideo Kojima, one of the strongest arguments for auteur theory applying to video games. Indeed, these games are, if anything, more relevant today than they<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":63405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1268,5456,136,49,17],"tags":[13736,15305,12783,12994,12864,12764,12897,13657],"coauthors":[12758],"class_list":["post-63400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-konami","category-metal-gear-solid","category-playstation-5","category-retro","category-reviews","tag-konami","tag-metal-gear-solid","tag-playstation-5","tag-ps5-review","tag-retro","tag-reviews","tag-shooter","tag-stealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63400"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63407,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63400\/revisions\/63407"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63400"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=63400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}