Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence is the 2005 re-release of 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This collection consisted of three discs, "Subsistence" being a slightly re-worked Snake Eater, the "Persistence" disc has the first ever online Metal Gear game plus tons of bonus features, and "Existence," which presents most of the cutscenes from Snake Eater re-edited into a 3.5 hour movie. I picked up the Limited Edition, which adds a fourth disc, a half-hour DVD documentary on the entire Metal Gear saga to date.
It's incredible and you should already have it. If you need to know more than that, read on.
Disc 1: Subsistence
Snake Eater is largely Kojima's apology to anyone who was pissed off by Sons of Liberty.
There. Go find anybody else who will tell you that straight up.
I loved Sons of Liberty. I loved how the game expertly combined superb action sequences with a head-scratching nonsensical plot. But I'm pre-disposed to enjoy that; I like when somebody combines the super-serious with the super-ludicrous. E.G. Twin Peaks... the Doomtown card game... or any given Carl Hiaasen novel.
And the surprise switch to Raiden? So what. I enjoyed the mystery of What Happened to Snake, and I liked following him around throughout the mission. It was an interesting twist, yet Kojima was crucified over Sons of Liberty. To this day, gamers still make fun of Raiden, bitch about the plots and sub-plots and sub-sub-plots, and complain about the abundance of cutscenes and CODEC conversations.
So, for me, finding that Snake Eater was a comparatively normal action game was a bit of a drag. There's still the standard MGS weirdness: twisted super-heroes as enemy bosses, surprise "hidden" stuff, and plenty of existential dialogue. But the plot is a more-or-less on-rails espionage tale, full of double- and triple-crossing, lots of Cold War Era demogoguery... and a ton of scenes where Snake gets his ass kicked to a pulp.
Kojima has reigned himself in a bit. There's nothing in Snake Eater that rivals the Crazy Colonel sequence from Sons of Liberty. And the ending - unlike Sons' mind-bending WTF? finale - actually explains things rather than raising new questions.
As all Metal Gear fans know, series hero Solid Snake is a clone (one of three, we think) of Big Boss... Snake Eater takes us back to Big Boss's younger days as a CIA spy in 1964. So he, of course, being Snake's progenitor, looks, talks and acts just like the Snake we've grown to love. And his codename throughout the mission is, happily, "Snake." Neat trick by Kojima-san there. He gets to explore a fresh new time period while still maintaining the same visual character. Snake '64 even has his son's odd habit of incredulously repeating everything that was just said to him.
Controls are just the same as Sons of Liberty, even if the weapons are not. You still start with a tranquilizer gun, can pop out from around corners, and can hold up enemy soldiers for additional pickups. (Just no laser sights!) Snake Eater expands your reportoire of combat moves - allowing for you to wing guys around more impressively, or even interrogate them at knifepoint - but if you're like me, you're the type of coward who tranq's enemies from a distance, drags their bodies off into the tall grass, and them caps them with a silenced .45.
The biggest interface change is the HP / stamina meters, which act as one giant life bar... your HP will constantly refill, as long as your stamina bar is okay. This makes life management more complicated, since you can't refill your HP bar directly (until you find some Life Medicine, anyway.) Stamina is refilled by eating things - Snake Eater's big claim being that you have to kill and eat animals found in the wild - but that isn't going to be fast enough to help you in a boss fight. Different species of animals give you different stamina boosts and other effects, so part of the fun is eating random fauna just to see what Snake likes best. Hornet nests are an unexpected delicacy. There are mushrooms in the game, but not enough that you could keep Snake vegetarian!
Then there's Snake's emergency medical skills. Whenever you take an especially serious injury, you have to perform field medicine to heal it, or else your HP life will stay low. In a game where you're constantly taking bullets, you'd think this would easily turn into a complete game stoppage... but it only makes you heal up gun wounds after you've absorbed major fire. You will also have to apply ointment after being to close to an explosion, mend broken bones, sew up deep cuts, and even take digestion pills for a stomachache.
Which makes for a nice bullet point on the box, but it's more chore than fun. It's not like Trauma Center, where you actually have to stitch and scapel bodies. It's all handled via inventory selection inside a pause sub-menu. Need to remove an arrow? Click knife, click disinfectant, click styptic, click bandage. Not especially compelling. Plus, it is ridiculous to be inside a boss fight and then have to take a timeout to extract a single bullet from your arm.
A more useful upgrade is the camoflage system, where you have to regularly change your face paint and coveralls to more adequately blend in with your environment. A percentage tells you how invisible you are to the unsuspecting eye; maintaining a high percentage decreases your chances of being spotted. There are plenty of outfits to collect, ranging from normal to ridiculous, and it gives Snake Eater a fun collectible that fits in with the game's theme.
I think the most interesting unique feature to MGS3 is the death pill/revival pill combo. In certain situations, you can fake your death to lull enemy soldiers into your grasp... or to get them to leave you alone so you can sneak off again. The thing is, that death pill really does kill you. You get the game-ending "Snake is Dead" message and everything! But note that your item inventory button is still active... so you chomp a revival pill and you're back in the game! Very out-of-the-box, very Kojima. Easily his most bizarre and transcending moment in the game, and probably his sole concession to guys like me who enjoyed the Crazy Colonel and "Fission Mailed" elements of MGS2.
The Subsistence version of Snake Eater adds a user-directable third-person camera (more like Halo or Tomb Raider), so you're no longer stuck to the overhead viewpoint typical to a Metal Gear game. I found myself using the third-person cam almost exclusively, but sometimes it is useful to cycle between the two, because you can often see more of the surrounding environment from the old style camera.
The fun of Metal Gear Solid is in the discovery. The game has tons of content that rewards thinking out of the box... and complete pedantic exploration. Calling certain people at certain times will yield bizarre, one-time-only conversations. Putting certain NPCs to sleep with the tranq gun will trigger hilarious unconscious mumblings. Sure, the level structure is linear... but no two players are going to play this game the same way.
I went through almost the entire game without holding up any guards, simply because I forgot you could do that. I never found the famous crocodile hat. I only found one secret radio station. But I did reveal EVA's hoi polloi dinner selections, got The Sorrow's secret camo outfit, and heard the hilarious conversation between Snake and Major Zero regarding the Raikov mask. That was my Snake Eater experience. Yours will be much different.
Disc 2: Persistence
Online play. This is a big deal these days, but not something to which I find myself particularly drawn. If I was playing only with/against friends, it would be a different matter. However, I do know enough to see when a game does online play well... which was undoubtably a challenge, seeing how the multiplayer mode had to retain that "Metal Gear" feeling. Which it does. Any dev team can toss out a new FPS game, but adapting Metal Gear Solid to online play is a whole 'nother matter.
What is key is that the controls are the same. You still have your usual third-person view and you can switch to the first-person view for precise targeting. You can toy with all the fun props, like claymore mines and Snake's huge porn collection. It looks, feels, and plays better than SOCOM, in my casual-shooter opinion. (But keep in mind, I only played the first SOCOM and then bailed due to boredom and a fear of ugly graphics.)
The point is: they had no option to screw this game up, because fans expect quality from Metal Gear. And they didn't. Unfortunately, tacking this on as a bonus feature on a re-release means Konami has already cut the potential audience in pieces. Even if the whole Subsistence collection only sells for $30, which is a great deal if you managed to avoid picking up Snake Eater by itself (for $50!) a year ago. On every night I played, I saw only about 1000 players populating three out of twenty game lobbies. That's not a very lively community for a game that's only a few months old. Hazarding a guess borne by continual sniper headshots, I would say the player pool sits entirely at two extremes: the hardcore nuts who have already invested enough time to qualify for health insurance, and the casual newbies like me who exist as nothing more than statistical victims. So good luck.
I had more fun with the retro collection: the first two Metal Gear games (Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) in their original MSX forms. I beat the first one in under four hours, but lacked the endurance to venture much into the sequel. Regardless, it is fascinating to see how these two games (from 1987 and 1990, respectively) evolved into the modern-generation MGS experience. There are so many elements that were first seen in these little 8 bit adventures, from gameplay all the way up to art direction. The Metal Gear Solid series is completely endebted to its retro roots, moreso than I would have imagined. Just be warned, like most old school games, they can get tedious.
Then there's Snake vs. Monkey, where you return to various Snake Eater environments to hunt the loosed simians from the Ape Escape series. Honestly! Even if you're steadfastly against this sort of thing (hey, why is that?), you have to boot this up just for the opening movie - which is the single funniest CODEC conversation ever - and for the grotesquely funny combination of Metal Gear and Ape Escape worldviews. You cannot beat seeing grumpy ol' Snake doing an end-of-level cheer in a motion capture animation stolen directly from the heroes of Ape Escape.
Duel Mode pits you against the bosses of Snake Eater in time trials. (By the way, the first Metal Gear has this too!) The Secret Theater contains blooper-style cutscenes. And did I mention you can download new camoflage types for use back in the regular game?
Seriously, there is almost too much to do here.
Disc 3: Existence
Everyone should do this. The Existence disc turns the Snake Eater cutscenes into one cohesive 3.5 hour movie. Yes, it makes sense! They included some actual gameplay scenes to cover any obvious holes in the plot, or where you would otherwise have spent ten minutes staring at radio dialogue.
So yes, it is a real movie... something you can watch and understand without having played the game. Now, it's not a great movie, unfortunately. There are far too many dry points, the kind of stuff that would have been edited out in a real movie production.
The crazy thing is that I noticed some game cutscenes that they skipped... so this thing could have been even longer! I still watched and loved the whole thing, and if I had one wish to point toward the gaming industry, I would ask that more developers consider including bonuses like this. If G4 didn't recently decide to become an even more worthless version of Spike, they should have negotiated a re-editing deal years ago. Imagine seeing a three hour Kingdom Hearts movie some Friday night at 8pm on G4. Or Resident Evil. Fatal Frame. Ratchet and Clank. Metroid Prime. GTA. Eternal Darkness. Start treating our hobby like the artform that it is, instead of as a self-defeating masturbation of violence and male egos, and maybe we'll start getting some respect out there.
Oh, and don't try using the PS2 remote to control it like a normal film DVD. Stick with the Dual Shock. It may look like a movie, but it still thinks like a game.
