I’ve been teasing this for well over a year, but finally, here we are! This is the introductory post to a long series of gaming logs which will chronicle what I’m dubbing Metal Gear Mania 2025. Look, I tried to think of a more original, perhaps funnier name, but in the end the inspiration just wasn’t flowing. I mean, if you’re going to plagiarize someone, who better than yourself, right?
Like the Halo Fest 2020 series I’m referring to, the year really only marks the year this is kicking off, and not any sort of commitment to when I’ll get it done. With Halo Fest, 2020 was the year when Halo Infinite was supposed to launch, and I did indeed want to play all of the mainline games before then, but then the launch date slipped and the scope of which games I wanted to cover grew, and yeah… I didn’t wrap the series up, or even review Halo Infinite, until 2023. With Metal Gear, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is set to launch in 2025, but I have absolutely zero intention of trying to play it this year. In fact, as I’ll be playing through almost every single Metal Gear game, some of which can be quite lengthy, in order of release date, there’s also zero chance of that happening unless I suddenly find myself gainfully unemployed.
“The Metal Gear D doing its thang.”
That said, compared to Halo, my history with the Metal Gear series is short and simple: I’ve never played ANY game in the Metal Gear franchise for more than 10 or 15 minutes. That means little in the way of nostalgic navel-gazing (I mean, let’s be real, this is me – there will definitely be some nostalgic navel-gazing!) nor much concern for comparing and contrasting different releases, or other massive diversions. Instead, I’ll be playing every one of these games with a fresh pair of eyes and a somewhat modern perspective.
So, that all said, we’re going to jump all the way back to the beginning with 1987’s Metal Gear. Stay tuned…
What?! Surprised it’s not a Yoji Shinkawa piece? This is from a cleaned-up version of the original Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake cover art I randomly found. Awesome!