Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (GameCube)

This was way bigger than your typical current-gen video game re-make.  Most companies get away with a fresh new coat of paint, slap “HD” on the end of it, and that’s it.  The Twin Snakes not only had revamped graphics, but altered cutscenes, slight changes to improve game play, and completely re-recorded dialogue by almost all original voice actors.

I wasn’t necessarily feeling down in the dumps about the car accident, but I definitely didn’t feel comfortable enough to get behind the wheel again for quite a while afterwards.  I felt somewhat restricted as to what I could do that summer; hanging out with friends and going out for a night at the movies just wasn’t as easy to do, anymore.  It gnawed at my consciousness all summer long.

Later that month, I went on the yearly family trip to Connecticut to see my aunt and uncle, and also to see a NASCAR race in Long Pond, Pennsylvania.  For the long drives there and back, reading material was pretty much exclusively EGM, Official PlayStation Magazine and some other gaming magazines.  The main articles in all of them focused on the E3 held earlier that year, showcasing the upcoming Xbox and GameCube consoles.  The PS2 had its own ace in the hole with Metal Gear Solid 2, a sequel to a game I’d often heard about, but knew almost nothing of.  MGS2 looked so damn lovely, I had to give the first one a try.

Finally, a couple weeks before my fresh new start at Saint Thomas University, I rented it.  That same day, I had a meeting with folks at The Brunswickan, a campus newspaper I was interested in contributing to.  I’d be tasked with doing reviews of music CD’s, and I’d actually get to keep the ones I reviewed!  That was a great deal, and reviewing video games had the exact same perk!

Some guy with a cool German accent had dibs on reviewing MGS2, however.  Lucky guy.

After the meeting, my friend John could probably tell I still wasn’t completely myself.  He suggested one last hangout at his place with the old high school crew, just to play games and joke around all night before we all made the “official” move into life as post-secondary education students.

When I got home that night, I popped Metal Gear Solid into my PS2.  To say the least, I was hooked pretty much right away, and I couldn’t wait to show it off to my friends that weekend.

There’s one specific change made to The Twin Snakes that smoothes out one painful quirk the PS1 version had; the addition of a first-person view for firing your weapon.  In the middle of a boss battle, you could easily get a bit disoriented if you ran around enough.  With the GameCube re-make, pressing the Z-button gave you what Solid Snake saw from his own eyes, and you could whip out your weapon for a quick and precise shot if you needed to.