Metal Gear Solid is a remarkably polished game for 1998. It's visually very striking: the UI design is slick, and all the menus feel really good to navigate, from the satisfying clicks of the equipment menus and the beeps and boops of the Codec. Shadow Moses Island's environments are beautifully portrayed, and for the most part feel very visually distinct from each other while still communicating the same cold, inhuman and metallic vibe. Yoji Shinkawa's character artwork is AMAZING, and it made the many long Codec calls so much better. I thought the English voice cast did an excellent job, especially for the time, though holy shit Liquid Snake’s accent is horrible (in the best way possible).

My favorite part of the game was definitely the meta-gamey real world “put your controller to your arm so Naomi can give you a massage” type shit. Of course, the most famous instance of fourth-wall breaking comes with Psycho Mantis, and he’s amazing (though MGS was the first game I played on my PS1 memory card so he didn’t have anything cool to say about my nonexistent Konami library), but I was surprised by other cool stuff like having to mash circle during the torture scene to stay alive - my last save before the torture room was at least an hour before, so it really felt like I was mashing to save something important: not just Meryl’s life, but my game data. Revolver Ocelot even reminded me that I hadn't saved in a while, and it literally made my heart sink. It was really tense, and unlike anything I’ve ever played before.

I wasn’t really blown away by MGS’s writing, and found all the stuff about genes and genomes or whatever entertaining, if not also really stupid. I think that’s all kind of the point, though: from what I gather, at least, Metal Gear Solid isn’t really meant to be a grand, emotionally resonant narrative. It does exactly what it needs to do to progress the story along and keep the player hooked. While I wasn’t exactly emotionally invested in Snake’s mission, I needed to know what insane plot beat was next. As for characters, I feel like Snake and Otacon are the clear standouts. Kojima's infamous inability to write women definitely manifested in Meryl, a character with a pretty lackluster and boring arc, as well as an extremely forced romantic relationship with Snake, but at the end of the day it didn’t really hinder my enjoyment of the game too much. At the risk of giving Kojima too much credit, it seemed like it was all an intended part of the experience.

I generally liked the moment-to-moment gameplay. This was basically my first experience with a game where stealth is a primary mechanic, and for the most part I liked it, aside from bullshit like getting spotted by security cameras out of your vision and spotted by guards off-screen. Metal Gear Solid’s polish starts to dull once you actually have to fight things, though. I’ve not done much reading about general receptions to this game, but I’m very sure that thousands of other people have lambasted the game’s clunky shooting mechanics, so I won’t continue beating on the dead horse, but man some of the boss fights sucked ass, specifically the final boss and Vulcan Raven.

I’m really looking forward to playing MGS2. If they can polish the gunplay up a bit, I could see it being one of my favorite games ever.

Game kicks ass. I tried to get into the missions and actually play the game but I couldn't really get into them, especially not when driving around and fucking with cheat codes is so much more fun. I enjoyed what little I played of the story mode but I don't think I'll ever finish it, a bit too much tedium for my liking. There's a lot of really good voice acting - I had no idea Samuel L. Jackson was in this game, the opening cutscene kinda stunned me. Rockstar got a lot of (rightful) shit for saying they'd sell GTA 6 for $100, but if the gameplay completely consisted of stealing motorcycles and doing crazy ass stunts off cliffs I'd pay $100 for it.