An astonishing debut for the Playstation.
Being set in a nuclear warhead storage facility in Alaska terrorists have captured the base and are planning on launching a nuclear warhead somewhere in the United States, the White House has 18 hours to respond. Or so it seems. Don't let the 18 hours fool you, you can take as long as you want with this game, bring it to 17 hours and 59 minutes if you really want to please yourself, the timing is part of the story, to give you the feel of what a special agent has to go through mentally during his/her mission. Filling you in on what all this includes your comrades (although not Communist) will explain everything for you through CODEC, most likely give more explanation than needed, hence the skipping part.
But while skipping the FMV's are easy skipping the CODEC conversations will frustrate you if you do not intend on pressing the 'O' button about 30-80 times. As that would seem most of these convos. are important, let Master tell you about that when the time comes.
When you do arrive at the nuclear storage facility you will immediatly be subdued into stealth mode, which requires you to get from point A to point B without being detected, or at least arriving alive. The radar, given on Easy and Normal difficulties, will help a lot with this seeing as you can see where guards, cameras, etc. are located and which direction they are facing. Making the stealth aspect almost easier than fully unloading an ammo clip into someone. Although sneaking is the point of this game you will have encounters of fire-fights with and without bosses. And sadly the shooting is sub-par compared to today's standards. True aiming is only given to you with weapons that have scopes or homing technology, giving you a feeling of rather disappointment if you were looking forward to shooting up the place. Aiming is guided with laser sight but being in 3rd person makes it almost impossible to see where you are aiming without your enemy in close proximity to yourself, which can be extremely irritating with heavily armed bosses.
Another rather irritating feature to this game would be the graphics, released just 7 years ago it really shows age. Having its graphics being from 1995 almost draws disappointment for some wanting a replay. While for its time Metal Gear Solid was a transcendary game for the Playstation for the genre it is in looking at other games begs the question of wheather or not a third disc would have been in order for higher graphical quality, given the need, which is not needed for true gamers.
With the slight drawbacks with the shooting and graphical features Metal Gear Solid remains a classic game in the stealth action genre and one that should never be forgotten, especially considering the series has blown up and the genre has as well. Missing out on the game is unexcusable for any gamer young or old.