Metal Gear Solid was one of the original breakthrough titles in the stealth gaming genre. It follows Solid Snake, a soldier who is infiltrating a nuclear weapons facility on a remote Alaskan island in the Fox Archipelago, codenamed Shadow Moses. Snake must rescue two hostages from FOX-HOUND, a high-tech special forces unit gone rogue, and then stop FOX-HOUND from launching a nuclear warhead.
Changes from the original release of Metal Gear Solid include
- Addition of first-person view.
- A level of difficulty for newcomers.
- Improved artificial intelligence for some enemies (including bosses) on higher difficulty settings.
- An "Alternate Round" for each difficulty, with different enemy placements.
- 300 VR Training missions on a separate disc.
Integral was planned for use in this branch from the start, because of a lengthy Liquid Snake monologue you can skip in Integral but not in the original version, as well as the added precision of analog controls; however, old PSX emulators could not play Integral. With the switch to the higher-accuracy PSXHawk, theenglishman was able to TAS this version, playing on Extreme difficulty in the Normal Round, and achieving the rank of "BIG BOSS" for his performance.
The raw improvement over the predecessor movie is around 3 minutes, but the improvement in gameplay is actually much more than that; the raw time is inflated slightly compared to the predecessor movie because of the switch to PSXHawk, which results in slightly longer (but more accurate) loading times on everything from transitions between rooms, to playing cutscenes and CODEC conversations.
The author's detailed commentary is available in the movie file and all encodes in the form of subtitles.
