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In honor of Solid Snake’s upcoming retirement from the battlefield, I’ll be taking a look back at the Playstation incarnations to get you all fired up for the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Today we’ll be looking at the prequel to all of Snake’s adventures, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

2004 was a year of dramatic highs and lows. The Boston Red Sox came back from the brink of elimination to defeat the Yankees and went on to win the World Series. George W. Bush won the presidential election, thereby screwing us for another four years. Lance Armstrong won his record sixth Tour de France. The world lost Marlon Brando, Christopher Reeves, Ray Charles, “Dimebag” Darrell and Ronald Regan. There was another horrible disaster that overshadowed all of that when a tsunami struck many islands in the Indian Ocean resulting in over 180,000 deaths. Of course, one week before the biggest MMO to grace the PC (World of Warcraft) hit store shelves, Konami released Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Admittedly, I missed playing MGS3 when it first hit shelves. I blame college. I managed to grab a copy almost a year later, and was hooked by Kojima again. Instead of continuing on the story of Solid Snake and Raiden, Kojima took us back to the Cold War and revealed for the first time the origin of Naked Snake aka Big Boss. I could think of no better way to wash the taste of MGS2 out of my brain than by playing through my favorite MGS one more time.

Many of the gameplay elements from MGS2 made it into this version. Enemy AI was actually a little sharper than in previous installments, looking just a little harder for you when they were alerted. The game was still unfortunately played with a fixed camera (until the Subsistence special edition 2 years later), but still allowed for first person combat. Kojima even improved the hand-to-hand combat by introducing “CQC” (close quarters combat) to the fold. With this gameplay improvement, Snake now had many more options when fighting other than the standard punch, punch, kick combo. To this day I can never get the thing to work properly, and just spent the time shooting people instead of engaging them up close. This then led to me getting more beat up than I should’ve been, and having to mess around with the new injury system Kojima introduced. If you were shot, you had to remove bullets and treat the wound properly otherwise you wouldn’t heal properly and actually lose health permanently on your health bar.

Truly setting this game apart from the others in the series were the outdoor locales. Most of the game takes place in a remote Russian jungle, which looked fantastic. Placing the game in the jungle offered players the chance to use camouflage instead of only relying on the shadows. There were of course all manner of options you could use, including alligator heads and disguises. Of course, the good-looking setting did take its toll on the frame rate. MGS2 ran at a crisp 60fps, while MGS3 ran at half that. I couldn’t tell the difference back when the game first came out, but after having just played through MGS2 I did take notice the animations weren’t as smooth. None of that really bothered me though, as the rest of the game is so well done.

The story this time around boiled down to not only an origin of the Snake legacy, but an origin of the Metal Gear as well. Along the way, he had to confront his defected mentor, Boss, and the soldiers of her elite Cobra Unit. The bosses in this game more than rival those of the previous two installments. In fact, the sniper fight with The End is one of the most challenging boss fights I’ve ever had. Of course, this time through instead of trying to kill him, I used only the tranquilizer gun so I could say I finally did that. It’s pretty f’n hard to sneak up on that bastard. You also meet up with series staple Ocelot, and find out he’s the offspring of your mentor. Naked Snake then eventually turns his back on the US (as seen in MGS: Portable Ops), thus leading to his evolution into Big Boss in the very first Metal Gear on Nintendo. Okay, so parts of the history are sort of convoluted, but this is still probably the most coherent of all the Metal Gear games so far.

Playing through this game again solidified this franchise as one of my all-time favorites. Hopefully Kojima can deliver the goods with this supposed final chapter in the life of Snake. My expectations aren’t nearly as high as some fans, but I do hope this game is as fun to play as its predecessors. I guess we’ll all find out come Thursday.

Related Articles:

Metal Gear Solid Retrospective Part I

Metal Gear Solid Retrospective Part II

Metal Gear Solid 4 Must Sell A Million Copies On Launch Day 

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