Metal Gear NES Review

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Back in the late 1980s, Konami realized that most of the North American population would never experience all of their games on the MSX system; so they decided to take some of the better ones and port them to the Nintendo, the reining champion at the time. Metal Gear was the game they chose to do this with, and Ultra was assigned the job to port it to the NES. The team worked zealously, but it's hard to port games to weaker systems, but they did what they could, and the end result is Metal Gear; not the MSX version, but a great game anyway.

Deep in South Africa, an armed fortress called Outer Heaven is becoming a more and more imminent threat. FOX-HOUND, an anti-terrorist organization, sends their best man, Gray Fox, to infiltrate Outer Heaven and find out what the terrorists are capable of. A few days after his departure, he sends one message: “Metal Gear…” before losing contact, and, presumably, being captured. In a surprise move, FOX-HOUND Commander Big Boss selects the newest member of FOX-HOUND, Solid Snake, for Operation N1313; where Snake must infiltrate Outer Heaven, contact Gray Fox, and find out what “Metal Gear” is.

After starting a new game, you see Snake parachuting out of a plane and landing into a dense jungle, a whole new section that wasn't in the MSX version. The first sound you'll hear is the irritating Codec call, and Big Boss will give you the details of the mission. When he's finished, Snake uses his two sprite run to get to the next screen, where an enemy yells aloud, “I feel asleep”, before dozing off. Well, I guess for a South African mercenary his English isn't terrible, right?

But wait, it seems that every member of FOX-HOUND is also a South African immigrant. Far too often will you hear Snake mutter, “Uh oh, the truck have started to move!” It seems that the Ultra team not only had to cut out portions of dialogue, but also directly translated it; meaning that we have memorable lines such as “Find our missing Gray Fox” and “I feel asleep”.

So after you run up to the soldier and beat him up, you're bound to wonder why you don't have any weapons available. Well, Snake is a real man, and real men find their own weapons; which is exactly what you need to do; wander around the jungle until you find some items and a truck that you can hide in the back of. I can easily say that I didn't know where I was going about ninety percent of the time; most of the time I found out where to go by accident, stumbling upon a new weapon, a boss, or an entrance that I hadn't known about before. And combine not knowing what's going on with some of Big Boss' confusing Codec message, and you're in for a treat. Luckily, there are passwords, which include the famous **** ME password, which is, from what I hear, why Konami didn't use vowels in their passwords after that.

Besides Gray Fox, there are a number of other hostages who are littered around Outer Heaven. As you rescue more and more of them, your rank increases, which allows you to carry more ammunition and also increases your life gauge. Also, a few of the hostages can actually help you out during battles after you save them, giving you hints about a bosses weakness.

Metal Gear does honor it's MSX predecessor gameplay-wise, the entire stealth aspect is still intact; avoiding enemies rather than fighting them. And since you're not fighting very much, the game isn't very difficult, but fear not, for the length of the game as well as the boss battles make up for it. The boss battles are difficult mostly because you usually need an item that's hidden somewhere. The only bad thing about the bosses is that you don't actually fight the Metal Gear; instead, you battle a Super Computer.

Graphically, the game is fairly competent; it resembles the MSX version pretty well. Snake's running animation, which is reminiscent of Simon Belmont's, is actually pretty cool after you get used to how awkward it is, it's so bad it's good. Outer Heaven's fortress looks exactly how I imagined it would, the jungle looks like a moss lawn with a dirt path in it. I really did enjoy the visuals, moss jungle and all.

Unlike the graphics, though, Ultra did nothing to emulate the music in Metal Gear; instead they decided to make entirely new tunes. And while the MSX version's music was amazing, this soundtrack is nothing to scoff at. I particularly enjoyed the fortress tune and the enemy alert theme. The only thing I really hated sound-wise was the Codec; everything about it was irritating; the call sound and the tune played while you're finding a frequency.

When compared to the MSX version, Metal Gear seems pathetic, but it's really only because the NES isn't as powerful as the MSX was. Nonetheless, Metal Gear manages to keep Hideo Kojima's image of a game so realistic that it could be a movie true. It's an amazing game that's easily worth the ten or so dollars it sells for nowadays, and it's also a lot easier to find than the original Metal Gear. Simply put, it's not the MSX version, but Metal Gear is one hell of a game that no one should pass up.