Genre creator.
Truly, the Metal Gear series is one of the pieces de resistance of the gaming world: Movie-like scripting and story combined with fast paced cinematic action, that’s what Metal Gear is all about. What gamer does not love this sweet combination?
Now imagine all of this being done using the NES' weak 8-bit CPU and it's 24 colors and actually making a breakthrough, fun game while you're at it. Yes, Kojima is the geniusest loser you've ever heard of!
Graphics: 7/10
Metal Gear games are usually some of the best looking games on the market and, while Metal Gear tries real hard, it's setting simply cannot be accommodated by NES-era graphics.
As you spend a great deal of your time walking through jungles or through facilities you should expect to see the same monochrome colors repeated endlessly. Yes, MG does try to diversify, by using as many shades of green combined with black and maroon as possible, but that doesn't make it look any prettier. These graphics aren't as good as Contra's no matter how hard you try to squint.
The character and vehicle models do fare a good deal better as more detail seems to be paid to the nuances of dogs, trucks, soldiers, Solid Snake and the like. Non-the less, the limited color palette detracts from the liveliness of these models as well.
Sound: 7/10
"Snake? Snake! Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!!!!" - Do you know what that is? It's only one of many sound cues that the Metal Gear series is famous for. It never appeared in the NES version.
The NES Metal Gear(s) didn't have as big of an impact on the way we perceive sound in games as they did in the gameplay department. Sure, the sounds of fists pounding on doors and the sounds of pistols discharging deadly loads of bullets were all nice, but they weren't all that memorable. Dogs and the ominous typing of the transcoder remain, along with the high pitched sound of the alarms, the only real relics that gaming ever got from Metal Gear.
The music too wasn't all that spectacular. No Wilson this time around. However, Metal Gear did have sound that was synchronized with the action on screen, so if you were attacked by dogs or soldiers the tempo of the music would quickly escalate and you'd find yourself more pressured to get out of that dangerous situation as fast as possible. Too bad that all the tunes were instantly forgettable, along with most of the soundtrack.
Gameplay: 10/10
Metal Gear created a whole new genre with its gameplay but unlike the many others before it who tried and failed, miserably, it was actually fun!
Now, consider this: We're reviewing the NES version, which was greatly inferior to the MSX version but I, along with the rest of the world, played this game for the first time on our NES not on the defunct-from-birth MSX. That being said, you should know that the MSX version is totally superior to the NES version. It has better graphics, it's longer, it has a better story, it's more difficult, etc.
Now that we gave all accolades where they are due, let's get on with the review.
Metal Gear will always stand as the first game in the action genre to bypass killing everything in favor of a more stealthy approach to the genre. The story goes something like this: You're Solid Snake, a very skilled soldier enlisted in the anti-terror organization called Foxhound. It’s 1995 and somewhere in Africa, you've been given the mission of taking out a terrorist organization, which happens to want to destroy the world using their new weapon: Metal Gear. Now you have to use stealth, in favor of emptying out round after round in the enemies ahead of you to accomplish your mission. Good luck!
If you were like me, and this was the first NES game you played that didn't involve killing everything in your sights, you were likely to be stunned. Not only was this game to originality as Oreo is to pie but it had a story which was better than that of any RPGs at the time. It may not seem much now, but the cinematic presentation and the gargantuan plot twists were never seen outside the RPG genre for the next 10 years after MG came out.
However, the way you played the actual game made all the difference in MG: You had to be sneaky. If you saw 3 dogs sleeping on the ground before you, you weren't supposed to go and try and kill each and every one of them, the goal was to go around them. To do this you got all kinds of cool gadgets to aid you like binoculars, heartbeat detectors and many others. Along with those gadgets Metal Gear also allowed you to carry healing items with you (in the form of rations) and "distraction" items, such as cigarettes. All of this, along with the usual assortment of weapons that was used to get yourself out of sticky situations and/or to fight bosses made Metal Gear one of the champions of modern gaming.
These weapons ranged from pistols, to rifles, to C4 explosive, to keys with which to open doors. Along with the weapons you also had a little transmitter with which you could communicate with your boss, "Big Boss" to get extra tips, information, or new mission objectives. You could also do a rudimentary password save using this transcoder system, a first for the NES I believe. Finally, you also increased in "rank" as the game went by. You started at one star and then as you went up you had more health and your rations healed greater wounds. All of this in the NES days was like a 4-hour erection: Very rare, but dangerously addictive.
You'll never find what makes Metal Gear such a great game on the back of it's box or on a list: It's the genial combination that only a movie director could deliver which makes this game great. During the course of the game you'll get rides in trucks, blow up doors using C4, deactivate super computers and fight HUGE tanks. You'll have to reach your objectives using stealth, not brute force. It's much better to sneak from truck to truck in this game than to just jump out in front of a brigade of soldiers and start filling them with lead.
The AI also greatly helped Metal Gear become what it is now. Walking close by a soldier that was asleep would wake him, running on hard floors would wake the dogs, lighting a cigarette would get the attention of the nearby guards, etc. All of this would, later on in the game, result in a declaration of "Alert Status" (which could be level 1 or 2 alert; the 3rd level was removed from the NES version) by the soldier in question. When alert was declared, you could either lay low or blow all of the reinforcements to hell. Just be sure to know that there was a good chance that another group of soldiers would be sent, which would probably result in your death.
Of course, the game provided you with many numerous was to escape guards. The game offered total freedom within its game word. You could go wherever you pleased; you could be stealthy or get yourself killed by using brute force. Anything, and everything went. This was, perhaps, the least restrictive game on the NES. There were virtually as many ways of getting things done later in the game as you could think of. You needed this freedom however, as the plethora of objectives included rescuing captured operatives, destroying super computers, and, of course, saving the world.
Metal Gear wasn't perfect. The NES version was a disaster and the translations, both in game and in the manual, were preposterous: The main villain in the game is a Mongolian warlord, according to the US manual. The game wasn't too hard for a NES game either, which back in the day meant that you could finish the game in 3-4 hours and would never replay it again. By today's standards though, the game isn't all that easy.
Multiplayer: N/A
None
Overall: 9/10
Metal Gear is a modern masterpiece. It can only be compared, in terms of innovation and gameplay to Civilization and Mario. It shaped the way we view games even to this very day with its winning combination of stealth, action, freedom and the ability to save in a console game.
Bravo Kojima, you are SOOOOOOOO off the loser list!