10 Problems With The Metal Gear Series Nobody Wants To Admit

9. Those Early Games Are Terrible...

It took a good decade or so for Solid Snake to even get to that place in the hearts and minds of his audience. Kojima and Konami were labouring with the Metal Gear series years before the Playstation even existed, with Metal Gear Solid's release in 1998 coming a good ten years after the character made his debut in 1987's MSX2 release, the simply titled Metal Gear. Which was not a good game. Admittedly, it was a lot worse in the form most people played it: the gaming computer MSX2 didn't make it very far out of its native Japan, and the NES port of that first Metal Gear game was heavily altered and produced without Kojima's involvement which, believe it or not, made it a lot worse. When it was translated into English it was riddled with infamous mistakes (like the guard proclaiming €œI FEEL ASLEEP€), and it generally played like an MGS game without the proper technology to make it work. So sneaking was all but impossible, telling the environment apart from guards was similarly Demon Souls-on-crack levels of difficult, and the sequel had much the same problem. The controls didn't help matters much with either, with the games feeling more like one of those retro remakes where a fan developer has tried to port the Metal Gear Solid mechanics to much worse hardware and it's not fun to play.