Let me start off by saying that every game reviewed must be reviewed in the proper perspective. For example, if you don’t like RPG’s, then that fact should be included if you review one. You don’t review normal games as if they were supposed to be the greatest title ever in the genre.
However, I played this game expecting at least an average level of enjoyment, though I personally admitted it would most likely be somewhat sub-par. Yet, I was shocked by just how awful this game was. Period.
This game itself is a paradox. ULTRA Games and the ULTRA Software Corporation are not actual independent companies. They are a bunch of Konami people that formed a “separate” company that published, ported, and other menial tasks to get around a certain Nintendo rule in the 80s stating that a company could release only so many NES and Famicom titles each year. Konami published games in Japan , and then used ULTRA to publish English ports.
Yet this is a Commodore 64 game. What was ULTRA doing with that?
The other paradox is that the copyright states “1990.” Metal Gear was released for the MSX on July 7, 1987 , and was re-released by ULTRA in a watered down port for the NES and Famicom later that year. By 1990, Kojima hadn’t thought of a sequel for Metal Gear . Then, someone at Konami asked him if they could make a sequel for NES using ULTRA. The resulting game is now known as the infamous Snake’s Revenge.
Now, that game and this port came out in the same year. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kojima was so shocked by these two, that he developed Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and released it late in 1990 just to keep the series from becoming a total laughingstock.
So why is this all a paradox? Well, if a port of a game comes out 3 years after the original release, then some sort of improvement is expected, not everything being downgraded so much that “taken down a notch” is redefined.
This won’t end well.
Yup, apparently 340k is too much for one Commodore 64 disk, so why not divide it into two 170k disks that you have to switch at seemingly random intervals?
Next we have:
Hey, at least there aren’t four random guys in blue.
As you can plainly see from our C64 screenshot section, the Commodore 64 was, graphically speaking, a bizarre combination between a GameBoy and GameBoy Color, resulting in a low-res, washed out mess of utter crap. But it gets worse.
Years of smoking stunt Snake’s growth and make his hair fall out.
Solid Snake was busy getting drunk during this game, so ULTRA hired El Serpiente, a Mexican midget wrestler, to take his place. This game is his attempt to ruin Snake’s reputation, and he tries with all possible might.
Why call him a midget?
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The giant guards eventually notice Snake, shuffling and slow firing of pixels commences.
It’s either that or the guards all have some horrible pituitary disorder. This disorder also brings about intelligence that unless Snake is 100% lined up with their eyes, they cannot acknowledge his existence. When they do notice him, they obviously can’t do much about it, as they only move .01% percent faster, (most likely from the weight of their tremendous ham-muscles), while no Alert music plays. They also can fire bullets without recoil or stopping, and these bullets can come from any part of their body. Once, I saw a guard shoot a “bullet” (in actuality black pixels) out of his left kidney and straight through a wall.
These bullets have other strange laws of physics that they follow, including the breaking of Newton ‘s First Law of Motion and the General Theory of Gravity by stopping in mid-air for no reason. I witnessed this happen myself on one occasion.
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Find the magic bullet, win a cookie!
Look at that screenshot. Look in front of El Serpiente for a small black square out of place. It’s the bullet. Quite possibly the same bullet that assassinated Kennedy. Kojima and his crazy conspiracy theories.
Then, there’s the fact that the sound of the music is the NES soundtrack (except for the Alert music, of course) only taken out back and shot in the head. It wakes up 3 years later after being in a coma and having lost a good deal of its brain. It begins to mutter a few beeping noises. ULTRA walks into its room, the “soundtrack” is recorded on the worst tape recorder ever, and then turned into a horrible MIDI , then raped, then burned, then the salvaged recordings are assembled with spit, and then thrown off a mountain, then the mountain explodes, then the fragments are reassembled by someone crapping and spreading it over the fragments. This entire thing is then sent to Hell, where Satan assigns a legion of Demonlords the task of making it as evil as possible. 30,000 years later, (which is irrelevant to space-time as we know it on the mortal plane), the committee, which is now Hell’s largest doomproject, hands in the final version. Satan’s head explodes, and his mangled body gives the OK before rematerializing. Just to make sure, it is sent to God, who sends it back saying that it is the worst thing in the multiverse and the first thing in eternity to actually hurt Him since Sin itself. The recording is sent back to ULTRA in a giant fireball, and the sound is applied.
A sample: The sound of the text on the transceiver in the NES version is that of high-pitched, quick beeps. The MSX version: slower, deeper, beeps. The C64 version, a tape recording underwater of a dog trying to bark while choking on an entire chalk quarry shoved down its throat, and attempting to commit suicide via slamming its head against an exploding typewriter.
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The sound would be almost bearable if there wasn’t such suspense.
Really Big Boss? What is it? And what’s with that dog in the background? Sounds like it’s in some pain.
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The man they called “The Greatest Idiot of the 20th Century.”
Oh. So, you’ve killed me. Thanks.
Just had to throw that part in.
Anyway, this is all bearable (debatable, but still) if it weren’t for one thing. Well, two things, that like the Wonder Twins, join their Rings of Crap to form a huge piece of crap and something more like a puddle of vomit.
1. There are loading times for everything . Going into another room. Opening the transceiver. Opening any menu at all and waiting 3 minutes for it to load.
2. Any button except for up-down-left-right, and shoot (which I have yet to figure out) and punch is opening the menu for Weapons, Items, or Transceiver. You can’t exit the menu. You have to select one. Then wait 3 minutes for it to load, and then exit, and then pray to God that you don’t press the wrong button at the wrong time.
Yes, taking screenshots for this was the biggest bitch ever in the history of bitches.
Good: ……Uh……Wait…..There’s some better English than in the NES version. But you still need to be tortured in order to read it.
Bad: Gameplay, controls, graphics, characters, physics, story, glitches, basic idea conceived by ULTRA.
Graphics: Take an original GameBoy. Take some washed out tan, green, and pink paint, as washed out as possible, then splash it on the GameBoy’s screen. Wait 5 years for the paint to become cracked and decrepit. Make the screen explode onto a wall. You have replicated the graphics found in this game.
Gameplay: This isn’t “gameplay.” No. Not at all. This is pure hatred and evil in button-pressing form.
Presentation: ULTRA masterfully presents: The Fact That ULTRA Has No Talent: and That the Commodore 64 Sucked Ass . Will be released in Hell, where it will be available to the evilest men in history for all eternity.
Sound: I already explained this in the lightest terms possible.
Replay Value: The aforementioned evil men will be forced to replay it for eternity while they beg for their eyes to be gouged out and genital twisted by razors instead. For the rest of you, it has no “value” at all, except as a tool of humanity’s destruction.
Final Score: 1 e -100 /10 (1 e -100 = 1 x (10 to the negative 100 th power, or -1 with 101 zeros behind it)
Closing Comments: No, seriously, this game is that bad. Game = bad = evil = mortal incarnation of Satan combined with the Anti-Christ and all evil ever, past, present, and future. DO NOT PLAY. EVER . DO NOT USE IT I SHOULD SAY. “PLAY” INDICATES FUN, WHICH THIS GAME IS THE ANTITHESIS OF.
by Crushed of Metal Gear Source, who should be paid money in amounts unheard of by mortal men, or yea, even the gods themselves, in compensation for doing this holy self-sacrificing deed. I’m dead serious. This was torture. The review is not an exaggeration.
Author’s Note: This article is a part of a much bigger initiative by myself to collect all the Metal Gear related articles on the internet and bring them together on one web page. You can check it out on my blog, Metal Gear Scholar, at the Meta Database.