Tiago Rodrigues
Member
So a little background: I started playing MGS series back when MGS2 came out. Since then i played all entries that came after it: 3, 4, Peace Walker, even including the special editions Substance and Subsistence but one entry was missing: the first entry: MGS (not counting the 2D entries). I played Twin Snakes on Gamecube so i never experienced what you guys did back in 1998 (i was 10 in 1998 and my parents didn't buy me that game back then).
Anyway...after finishing MGS3 Delta last week i remembered i had the Master Collection to play that included the first MGS which i had never tried.
Boy for a first timer to play that game in 2025 was just rough...and to tell you the truth i hated my experience at first (have in mind this was my first time playing the game ever). I felt what most people trying to play the original Tomb Raider games for the first time feel right now: i just couldn't get used to the damn camera and controls...enemies shooting at me from points of view i couldn't see them (but they could see me even if i was out of their green cones so supposedly their fields of view), sometimes there was a hidden camera right at the beginning of a map that i barely had the time to get a chaff grenade, etc...it was frustrating to say the least. But this isn't my main point for this post. I went from MGS1 straight to MGS2 without even getting up and...oh boy.
I can't even imagine what this was like to all of you back in 2001 and here's the thing...all of this happened in...3 damn years. From 1998 to 2001. Most games right now fail to reach 2018's RDR2 graphical fidelity...a game from 7 years ago.
In 3 years you went from these character models that barely had a face:
to this:
in a game that ran at 60fps (!!!). A game that had melting ice cubes just because...a game you could shoot most objects in sight from bottles to food, and the bottles actually had something liquid inside, etc. I remember being impressed by those rain effects right at the start of the game, the fact the camera gets foggy when you go inside for the first time...everything is still impressive even now in 2025.
The addition of a first person camera was a godsend and i had no idea it had only started with this entry. The soundtrack is miles ahead, AI feels like a decade more advanced, the controls are much better overall, the script is just on another level in terms of codec convos, etc...this isn't just about the graphics...it's a game that even right now feels great when you are playing it. When i started playing i just could feel the gameplay and the controls. Never felt the game was unfair to me.
I remember in MGS1 when Meryl sees Psycho Mantis's face for the first time a few days ago and says "gross" all i could think of was ..."he looks like you i think dafuq you on about?". MGS1 impressed me in a lot of ways graphically for a PSOne game but those character models even as a kid all i could think of was "where are their eyes?" since most PSOne games had character models that had at least those.
Btw i'm not trying to trash MGS1. It did A LOT for a PSOne game but you can tell Kojima was just too big for the PSOne and the game is still a product of its time and it's impossible to not see how big of a jump it is to go from that to MGS2. It feels like i'm trashing it, but i'm not. It's just that putting them together it's night and day.
I can't imagine going into this game and not being impressed by it. Imagine releasing this only 1 year after the PS2 released.
How did you take it back then? I think i had some friends that tried a demo that came out in another game and being mind blown. I think Zone of the Enders?
Anyway...after finishing MGS3 Delta last week i remembered i had the Master Collection to play that included the first MGS which i had never tried.
Boy for a first timer to play that game in 2025 was just rough...and to tell you the truth i hated my experience at first (have in mind this was my first time playing the game ever). I felt what most people trying to play the original Tomb Raider games for the first time feel right now: i just couldn't get used to the damn camera and controls...enemies shooting at me from points of view i couldn't see them (but they could see me even if i was out of their green cones so supposedly their fields of view), sometimes there was a hidden camera right at the beginning of a map that i barely had the time to get a chaff grenade, etc...it was frustrating to say the least. But this isn't my main point for this post. I went from MGS1 straight to MGS2 without even getting up and...oh boy.
I can't even imagine what this was like to all of you back in 2001 and here's the thing...all of this happened in...3 damn years. From 1998 to 2001. Most games right now fail to reach 2018's RDR2 graphical fidelity...a game from 7 years ago.
In 3 years you went from these character models that barely had a face:
to this:
in a game that ran at 60fps (!!!). A game that had melting ice cubes just because...a game you could shoot most objects in sight from bottles to food, and the bottles actually had something liquid inside, etc. I remember being impressed by those rain effects right at the start of the game, the fact the camera gets foggy when you go inside for the first time...everything is still impressive even now in 2025.
The addition of a first person camera was a godsend and i had no idea it had only started with this entry. The soundtrack is miles ahead, AI feels like a decade more advanced, the controls are much better overall, the script is just on another level in terms of codec convos, etc...this isn't just about the graphics...it's a game that even right now feels great when you are playing it. When i started playing i just could feel the gameplay and the controls. Never felt the game was unfair to me.
I remember in MGS1 when Meryl sees Psycho Mantis's face for the first time a few days ago and says "gross" all i could think of was ..."he looks like you i think dafuq you on about?". MGS1 impressed me in a lot of ways graphically for a PSOne game but those character models even as a kid all i could think of was "where are their eyes?" since most PSOne games had character models that had at least those.
Btw i'm not trying to trash MGS1. It did A LOT for a PSOne game but you can tell Kojima was just too big for the PSOne and the game is still a product of its time and it's impossible to not see how big of a jump it is to go from that to MGS2. It feels like i'm trashing it, but i'm not. It's just that putting them together it's night and day.
I can't imagine going into this game and not being impressed by it. Imagine releasing this only 1 year after the PS2 released.
How did you take it back then? I think i had some friends that tried a demo that came out in another game and being mind blown. I think Zone of the Enders?
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