Launching pad for one of gaming's most popular characters, but the game was really fairly flawed and at times confusing.
While it laid the framework for one of the most marketable characters to ever be created, this game was flawed in many, many ways. I think the nostalgic aspects of "Solid Snake" and his relation with the "Big Boss" often cloud people remembrance of just how clunky this game actually was.
First off, you get dropped in the middle of a jungle (with three comrades minds you who never show up in the game, maybe they get taken prisoner and have all the weapons you were supposed to be supplied with at your drop), where you have to punch your way through pack after pack of attack dogs, only to come onto the most iconic aspect of this series enemies, the ever present drowsy guard who announces to you that he is pretty damn tired after patrolling his 20 to 30 feet stretch in the middle of nowhere. By the way, none of this was in the PC version of this game, none of it…
Most people also do not know that this game was a port, and a terrible port at that, of a Japanese computer game. They hacked it up, disjointed some of the continuity and changed the ending. Thus the true reason why you end the game without ever having to have a final battle with "The Metal Gear"…it is also the true reason why after the first time you have been captured, the "alarm" is never reset regardless of if you picked up the silencer or not. Meaning after you give yourself up to capture and the mini-boss battle with the "Shotgunner", all stealth mode play is now done and gone, and you basically run and gun the rest of the time, rendering the ever iconic "cardboard box" disguise useless from then on out, such a shame
This port was also made without Hideo Kojima's permission, thus one of the first true cases of gaming software piracy occurred when his source code was given out by Konami executives to Ultra for development onto the NES. He didn't complain, but he did express disappoint in how they butchered for the American consumer.
Campy-ness in the action genre is the signature of this series. Throw in the constant "Engrish" flubs in translation such as the ever iconic "The truck have started to move" and "I fell asleep".
Well if you managed to slug it out through all of the different base levels and actually get to the end, you find out that the final battle is against and ever ominous, entirely terrifying…
…super computer surrounded by 4 standard guards. If like me, you had an NES advantage set to rapid fire you walked into any room and shot out the 4 or 5 shots from the door way that happened to have an invincible glitch that wiped out all of the enemies that came charging at you cause the alert was up. The kicker of this final battle though, if you didn't "talk" to the computers programmers and have him tell you that you need to detonate C4 to destroy it, you simply could not destroy it…
…ever…
…really, it would not die….
...even if you used 25 C4 packes instead of the required 18. Why so many you ask? No idea, it just stood there and took the beating, I wish my home PC was that resilient.
…but no matter, this final boss battle was glitched anyways, by simply making a u-turn right back out of the room you somehow ended up on the other side of the door the evil, stationary ominous and terrifying looking super computer was allegedly keeping you out of and could then just camp and fire remote guided missiles at the traitor Big Boss, how could he have turned on "FOXHOUNd" like that…????
…perhaps it was because half of the time you got a save code from the game, took the several minutes to enter it into that silly shortwave radio, it failed to reload your progress…that is how.
Regardless though, this game set the stage for some of the most anticipated releases on the next gen systems. While the game was broken, it was done so in a beautifully magical way. Find an emulator if you can, kick the tires and see what Snakes birth was all about.