METAL GEAR SOLID: MASTER COLLECTION Vol.1

My first honest reaction to cracking open this collection was relief, quickly followed by mild frustration. Relief, because these games had been genuinely hard to access for years - either locked to aging hardware or quietly delisted. Frustration, because Konami's effort level here is exactly what you'd expect from a company that has had a complicated relationship with its own legacy. What you're getting is the full early history of the series: the original MSX Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the NES Metal Gear and Snake's Revenge, Metal Gear Solid with its VR Missions and Integral extras, and then MGS2: Sons of Liberty and MGS3: Snake Eater in their HD Collection builds - the exact same Bluepoint-developed versions released for Xbox 360 and PS3 back in 2011. If you played the HD Collection a decade ago, you've played two-thirds of what's here. On Xbox Series, MGS2 and MGS3 run at 1080p and 60fps, which is perfectly serviceable if not exactly a showcase for modern hardware. The original Metal Gear Solid is the rough edge. It's emulated rather than remastered, which means stretched textures, no button remapping out of the box at launch, and that distinctly PS1-era polygon aesthetic that a decade and a half of memory has a habit of softening. Patches have since landed that give you image smoothing toggles and aspect ratio control, which helps, but it still looks and controls like 1998. That's not a condemnation of the game itself - the encounter design, codec conversations, and boss fights hold up with surprising dignity - it's a critique of the presentation, which could have been more ambitious. The bonus content is where the package earns back some goodwill. Per-game Screenplay Books and Master Books are genuinely worth flipping through after each run, and the two Digital Graphic Novels - the animated MGS1 and MGS2 retellings - are rare enough to feel like a real extra. The digital soundtrack is a bit thin at 20 tracks, and the whole collection being spread across five separate executables rather than a single unified launcher makes navigation more cluttered than it needs to be. Some items, including the Japanese audio tracks and graphic novels, require separate downloads, which is another layer of friction on a package that already asks you to do a bit of homework. For first-timers, this is the most convenient way to experience some of the most influential stealth-action games ever designed - Snake's crawl through Shadow Moses, Raiden's twist in Sons of Liberty, and Big Boss's origin story in Snake Eater all still land hard. Veterans returning from the MGS HD Collection will recognize almost everything here, with the Integral-edition extras for MGS1 being the main new addition. Notable omissions remain sore spots: Peace Walker is absent, MGS4 is still PS3-bound, and the fan-favourite GameCube remake Twin Snakes continues to be locked away. The Vol. 2 announcement (bringing MGS4 and Peace Walker at last) makes Vol. 1 feel more like an opening chapter than a complete statement, which is fitting but doesn't change what you're getting today. If you've never touched a Metal Gear game, this is a genuine time capsule of a franchise that changed what story-driven action games could be. If you own the HD Collection and the original MGS disc, your calculation is tighter - the convenience and bonus materials have real value, but they won't blow your mind.

Alex · Scout Team

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