Now that we’ve covered the basics of the Metal Gear franchise let’s now begin with its games and specifically with its very first game. The game was simply called Metal Gear and was released for the MSX2 back in July of 1987. The game would be remade and rereleased for different platforms including the NES, Gamecube, Virtual Console, Xbox 360, Playstations 2 and 3 but with its 2D and sprite based gameplay and not in a 3D incarnation. The story takes place innocently enough in 1995 at the fictional country of Galzburg in South Africa. It seems that a place called Outer Heaven is producing some kind of massive weapon and FOXHOUND sends Gray Fox to investigate the situation.
Gray Fox is apparently caught and his last transmission is only the words “Metal Gear” FOXHOUND’s leader Big Boss sends Solid Snake to investigate this even further. His main objective was to locate and identify this Metal Gear and rescue Gray Fox if he was still alive though. Snake meets up with several of the local resistance members named Diane, Jennifer and Schneider. Snake learns that Metal Gear is a giant walking tank armed with a variety of destructive weapons capable of military tactics. It’s up to snake now to destroy Metal Gear.
Snake treks the base armed with the soldiers of Outer Heaven. He also manages to rescue a wounded Gray Fox from one of the areas. Now Snake confronts Metal Gear and successfully destroys is. The twist in the end is that Big Boss is actually the brains of the operation and offers Snake to join him. Snake refuses and exits right before the self-destruct sequence is finish and Big Boss states that they will meet again. The gameplay as we have established is a stealth oriented game. Snake starts off with no weapons but can pick up tons of them along the way. It’s a good idea to shoot your enemies but your ammo is limited plus it makes the game harder.
It’s harder because once you are seen by enemies they will swarm in your location making it really hard to defeat an endless horde of them. This is why you are encouraged to hide and not trigger the alarm. If you only have one exclamation point, then it’s best to take out all the enemies in the room. Two marks means that enemies from different areas will flank you and the only way to remove the marks is to enter another room. Stealth and puzzle segments are what make the game with some mild action on the side. There are also the unavoidable boss battles but they won’t trigger any exclamation marks. You just need to take them out to proceed.
We’ll continue to the sequel to Metal Gear next time.
