Here's my endgame stats for MGS3:

"Shark" is probably just a mistranslation of "Suck." I mean, look at that. I bled 65 life bars' worth of damage and had to continue 44 times. I believe "seriously injured" means every wound I had to fix with field surgery... it's hard to imagine I applied that much disinfectant.

One of the bonus features on the Subsistence package is the original Metal Gear game, which I bravely tackled this past weekend. Cool world; it has stats as well.

I killed more people in the 1987 Metal Gear than I did in the 2004 Metal Gear. That's hilarious. And in a far shorter time!

You don't have to go to far to find somebody who enjoys screaming about how great video games used to be, how they're too easy these days, too story-driven, too derivative. Well, after having sampled the classics of yesteryear - Metal Gear, Metroid, Legend of Zelda - I think that's an awfully rosey worldview. Yes, they were more difficult, but only because of bad design, not because of any amazing forgotten gameplay secrets. Here's what leads me to say that: when you get lost in these games, you get lost. Especially in the original Metroid, which is absolutely tedious without any kind of in-game mapping or quest directory. And in Metal Gear, there are several times where some POW's random two sentence conversation will be your only clue as to where you should head next. Click too fast and you'll never see it again. Or, more egregiously, several doors can only be unlocked by radioing one of your buddies. So with eight keycards (none of which visually indicate the type of door they open, by the way) and the radio frequency, that's a lot of time cycling through your inventory trying to walk through a damn door.

I don't mean this as a derogatory complaint, however. "State of the Art" is always changing. Game designers learned that Games Without Maps Suck, and Games With No Second Chances Suck. At the time, the exploration and plot and domino-style fetch-questing was pretty mind-blowing... given that we're weren't even ten years away from Space Invaders yet. It's just that raising retro games above modern games is like raising silent movies over modern cinema. Both sides have their own unique charms.

That said, the original Metal Gear contains a surprising amount of elements that have survived into the current iterations. My intro to the series was Sons of Liberty (followed by Twin Snakes, and now Snake Eater), so it was great to see the little 8 bit germ that grew into those verifiable classics. Hiding in a box, radio-controlled missiles, the CODEC, the final bit of plot that rolls after the credits finish... all debuted in 1987. There's even some similar art direction in the landscapes, which floored me when I recognized it. (In fact, that might be a clue into the virtual fakery plotline of Sons of Liberty... the rooftops in Metal Gear 1 have the same color and features as the rooftops of the Big Shell in MGS2.) I honestly had no idea that Kojima's modern masterpieces were so connected to their lo-fi progenitors.