This was my first time playing through Metal Gear Solid on the new CRT. Obviously, I played it on a CRT back in February, 1999, but that was with the old RF cable on a Grundig set from the mid-eighties. This was with shielded RGB SCART on a 2006 Toshiba - about as perfect a setup as KCEJ could have imagined when they made the game. I don't know if it's just how much I was scrutinising the visuals, or if this really is the sharpest I've seen the 240p version of the game, but a bunch of visual effects stood out to me for the first time. The subtle scanlines whenever the game is showing the perspective of a digital camera, like when the Thermal or Night Vision Goggles are equipped. The use of a dithered 2D layer in front of the camera when simulating different levels of lighting, like when Snake is crawling through vents or in the wolf-dog caves. The soft-focus effect used in some cutscene shots when the camera is highlighting a subject in the background - not quite as good an effect, but I appreciate what they were attempting. There's an ambition in MGS1's presentation that's fairly unique for a PS1 game. If you look at what the team achieved with pixelart on the PC-98 release of Policenauts, you'll understand that world-class computer artists were behind Metal Gear Solid, and they would have attempted everything they could to make a polygon-based game look as good as their previous work. Even the lowest-resolution textures in the game's map have a subtle artistry to them. The fragile patches of wall on the way to Ocelot look really fantastic. There's even some subtle storytelling in the contrast of how horrible the bathroom outside Meryl and "Donald Anderson"'s cells looks compared to the pristine one beside the torture chamber - one's where Johnny shits and one's where FOXHOUND do.

The setting just works great to criticise nuclear proliferation, too. How much the US has stockpiled nuclear material in sight of maintaining its position as a dominant world power, and how little they've worried about maintaining it. Baker's talk about corroding "drums and drums of nuclear waste, stacked this high" and the emergence of an international black market to get rid of the stuff, paired with real-world footage of silos and missile launches, really is effective in getting players to worry about the sustainability of nuclear deterrence. Worse - when you're put in a room of the stuff and not allowed to fire a gun because of it. There's no chance I would have researched this stuff on my own as a kid, but there was no chance I was missing out on the new Official UK PlayStation Magazine 10/10 either.

It's interesting that before notions of "The Patriots" and GW and everything, the real villains of Metal Gear were the US government and power-hungry imperialistic forces. The story directly points to the Pentagon, and finally, the US president, as the figures behind all the underhanded subterfuge and betrayals. Metal Gear Solid really was formative in my political outlook. Prior to that, the most informed political message I got from a videogame was the notion that it was bad to trap animals in robot suits.

Metal Gear Solid 1 continues to inform, inspire and comfort me in new ways each time. I'd love to visit Alaska sometime.