The One Game I Decided To Keep After Selling Everything On Ebay!

Metal Gear Solid 3 has brought back the magic to my gaming experience. No longer do I have to guess what or how much is being taken out of gameplay during extra-long cinemas. Scaling proportions allow long gunshots, the animation is even better than Silent Hill 4's best sequences, the game is ultra-real, and the equipment, especially the camouflage, adds a lot of depth and fun to the experience later on.

Like Metal Gears before it, the game has difficulty holding interest when the character's equipment level is minimal and the kill rate is high. However, there are many astonishingly complex cinemas and the game's eventual sophistication will bring back your belief in the PS2.

When I began playing MGS 3, I was amazed by the length and detail of the beginning cinema -- several minutes, with classic David Hayter script. Well, not exactly classic. It seemed like the honchos at Konami had him recording dragged-out speech at gunpoint.

Example:

Major Tom: There's a new kind of weapon called Metal Gear.

Snake: Meeetttalllll GeeeeeEEEEEaaaaRRRRR... I SeeeeEEEEeeeeeee.

Major Tom: How do you manage to communicate in battle without being detected and caught, Snake?

Snake: Well I donnnnnNNnnnn't KNNNoooowwwwwwwWwwwww. Mayyyybeeeee just luCKy, I guesssssssssSsssssSSsssssSsssssSSSSSssssSSSrrrrrumyeahSSSSsssssssss.

After an awesome landing sequence, I got a semi-okay training sequence, being assigned to look around and retrieve my backpack first. I had the same camera nausea I got from Hitman 2, where I kept looking at my shoes while running into enemies. Switching from first to third person and back had the same smoothness as coming back suddenly from an out-of-body experience. I also had serious issues with getting caught and spotted all the time, though I learned that the motion detector would be a big help, and looking back now, I realize those vegetation-jammed first levels (where camouflage can disguise you around 85%) could have been a lot easier.

The alert system is much better than it was in MGS2; at some points in MGS2 I would just go slack and admit I would never be able to ward off infinite squads of alerted troops. I mean, seriously, how many soldiers could you pack into a deserted ship without tripping over them at the shuffleboard deck? As a more realistic alternative, and a blessing to the non-stealthy among us, MGS3 offers an upper limit to the number of troops that come swarming into the fray. Wipe out enough alerted troops and the level will go silent, allowing you to scoop loot and lope about like an urban rioter for a therapeutic few seconds before hitting the next screen, getting down on your stomach again, and resetting your odds to nigh impossible again (which I like).

Hand-to-hand stealth, presented through the CQC fighting system, is a game element that wound up being downright traumatic to me, though. Like Mark Twain said in his criticism of James Fenimoore Cooper's works, you couldn't go more than a few seconds without having a branch snap and give away a sneaking assailant. You can sneak up behind a soldier, ready to grab and interrogate him, and sometimes he will still go "Hm?" and cause an eventual alert. Though this is largely due to a minimally aged controller, the game is very unforgiving when you know you've brushed a little bit of underbrush and you have half a second to suppress a soldier's outcry. Lunges, done with the analog stick, often cause you to sail past your would-be victim, causing an inevitable alert. Punching a soldier repeatedly a split second after you alert him doesn't keep him from alerting his comrades, and you will be forced into a fight or a very long flight, considering how long it takes to wind the Alert/Evasion/Caution meters down. I have had to get by with simply shooting soldiers with a silencer, and knowing how complex and yet enjoyable the CQC was meant to be, it's been a bit of a disappointment. Still, the realism of the stealth process is to be admired.

The camouflage system, like everything else in the game but the cinemas, also started out cumbersome and crude, with a lot of effectiveness gaps from uniform to uniform, terrain to terrain, face mask to face mask, and paint to paint. As I began playing MGS3 the average concealment percentage would often plunge alarmingly when crossing from one type of ground to another, triggering alerts at the drop of a hat (for example, my cover would dip from 70% to 30%, causing some major problems if a soldier was nearby). However, as time goes on, you get some seriously sweet camouflage that lets you act out the painstakingly slow process that is concealed combat movement. One crowning moment was when Snake lay stretched out on an expanse of sunbaked earth, inching ever so slowly toward a soldier guarding a small building, with nothing between him and the soldier but fifty feet of open air. Quietly chewing on some alligator meat to steady his drifting grip (hunger, like a lot else in the game, is a very real factor), Snake dropped the enemy with a silenced gunshot to the head from fifty feet.

MGS 3 is also missing a lot of the flaws from MGS2, including a nappy sidekick with surreal overreaching ballet-like moves (I still can't get over how much playing Raiden stank) and shoddy focus on locations (like the bomb hunt). Each location doesn't look like a mere level or sublevel; it looks like natural wilderness or an entire military installation, inside and out, down to the shifting leaves and blades of grass that part when you enter first-person view crawling, or the highly detailed layout, realistic tiling and proportions, and atmospheric details of a military scene.

Classic MGS items jostle for space with quite a few new ones. The cigarette has been replaced with a cigar, a nod to Castro's era, but Snake fans can count on the standard pistol, rations, defuse-n-use Claymore mines, and yes, the joyfully fun Cardboard Box. It's just a box! In addition, there are cool new items that fill gameplay gaps almost as solidly as Magic: The Gathering hoser cards. Using up too much electricity with your battery-powered electronics? Eat one of these! Out of ammo? Throw this living creature at someone! Really, really, really getting beaten on by a boss? Take a dose of this! Pesky bugs got you down? Get a quick rubdown with this item! The list goes on.

All in all, MGS is a marked evolution above MGS: Sons Of Liberty. Once basic items are acquired, the gameplay rapidly gets deeper and deeper, to classic levels of MGS intensity, strategy, and fun. Granted, it will take some getting used to, like having to jump often between first and third person, make proper use of your camouflage, and eat like a p-- I mean, Snake.