DESCRIPTION
Clean out your hard drive and dust off your gamepad for Metal Gear
Solid 2: Substance, which you could easily tell originated on consoles
if you didn't know it already. In fact, this game bears the dubious
distinction of not just being a port of a console game, but a port
of a port of a console game. Originally, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of
Liberty, a critically acclaimed espionage thriller for the PlayStation
2, was released in 2001, and it was then ported to the Xbox last year
with a new name and some new features. Now the Xbox version is
available for the PC, and it requires a DVD-ROM drive along with a
whopping 3.9GB of hard disk space, and that's for the minimum install.
Plus, the default keyboard-and-mouse controls are practically unusable,
so a gamepad with at least 10 buttons is more or less required. And no
one bothered to remove the specific references to the Xbox control
scheme from the game or the manual. So it's fair to say that MGS2:
Substance could have been ported over a lot more gracefully. Yet this
is such an unusual, intriguing, and shocking game that despite the
rough translation, it still makes for a one-of-a-kind experience on the
PC.
In 2001, the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was
gaming's equivalent of the premiere of a huge Hollywood blockbuster.
Anticipation for the game had grown extraordinarily high, both because
it was a sequel to what's regarded as one of the best PlayStation games
ever made, and also because a number of dazzlingly produced teaser
trailers did an incredible job of whetting gamers' appetites for Metal
Gear Solid 2's story and gameplay. People just couldn't wait to once
again reprise the role of secret agent Solid Snake and infiltrate
heavily defended enemy compounds using a combination of stealth and
force, uncovering untold military secrets in the process. Upon the
game's release, it met with glowing reviews from critics and was hailed
as a superlative successor to its namesake--and yet players were
shocked to find that Metal Gear Solid 2 turned out to have a huge
twist: The main character in fact wasn't the coolheaded Solid Snake,
but an entirely new character, an inexperienced young soldier called
Raiden--a Luke Skywalker to Solid Snake's Han Solo.
This later caused a backlash among legions of Metal Gear fans,
many of whom felt like MGS2 was a big slap in the face. So, at any
rate, MGS2: Substance lets you experience one of the most talked-about
video games ever made, since the core of the game is a straight port of
the PlayStation 2 release. It assumes you have some experience with the
original Metal Gear Solid (which was ported to the PC in 2000), though
the storyline promises to bewilder you no matter how familiar with the
characters and setting you are. Substance also throws in a number of
additional features, most notably a series of no fewer than 500
so-called VR training missions that let you explore the nuances of
MGS2's first-person and third-person action without all the cinematic
trappings. For a single-player-only game, it packs in a lot of value.
The core game consists of two parts, the first being a relatively
short sequence in which you play as Solid Snake, and the second being
the main portion, in which you play as Raiden. Very story-driven and
mostly linear, MGS2 is by all means a cinematic game, one that you
simply sit back and watch almost as often as you actually play. Much of
the story unfolds via one-on-one conversations between the game's main
characters using a communications device called a codec. Here you just
see a green-tinted screen with close-ups of the speaking characters'
faces, and you listen to (or read) what they have to say. At other
times, Metal Gear Solid 2 presents some extremely impressive
noninteractive cutscenes using the game's 3D engine, which look like
something out of a big-budget action movie, only with video game
characters instead of real people. These of course are much more
interesting than the codec sequences, although the game's story does
remain engaging if you're willing to keep up with it through a few very
strange plot twists and put up with some occasionally bad and always
long-winded dialogue.
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