Snake's mission required him to stop the Metal Gear battle mech itself, though the NES port of the game (that is, the version that came to America) cut this encounter entirely. By the time a rescued hostage revealed the truth of the situation – Big Boss was also the commander of the enemy forces and the mind behind both Outer Heaven and Metal Gear – it didn't exactly come as a surprise. Eventually, he wasn't simply failing to offer key advice – he was actively misleading and discouraging Snake. The further you advanced into Outer Heaven, though, the more erratic Big Boss' help became. Initially presented as Snake's commander, Big Boss would call to relay advice to his subordinate via radio phone. He was every inch the brave detective.Īnd Big Boss was every bit the plot-twisting villain.
Snake's mission involved the sort of complications you'd expect from a role-playing game, not a shooter: He sought allies, made impromptu alliances with local resistance groups, rescued soldiers and civilians alike, and unraveled the mystery of the Metal Gear program as he went. Where most games of the era were doing well to goad you into action with a few sentences of backstory at the beginning, and maybe a terse CONGRATULATION upon completion, Metal Gear unleashed a comparatively byzantine story upon players. For a military action game designed in 1987, Metal Gear offered so much narrative it practically felt like an extravagance. In fairness, that was quite a lot at the time. Designed to fit within the cramped confines of a tiny MSX/2 cartridge – a format whose maximum data capacity was many times smaller than the file size of any single image in this article – Metal Gear necessarily featured minimal plot and terse dialogue. In the original Metal Gear, Big Boss was more caricature than character, like everyone else in the game.
Players took the role of an untested (yet somehow elite) soldier codenamed Solid Snake, crept into the military fortress Outer Heaven, and put a stop to the terrifying Metal Gear nuclear first-strike program – and in the process, he also took down his own commander, the treacherous Big Boss. It all seemed so straightforward 25 years ago.
0 kommentar(er)
