Metal Gear Sold Master Collection
Metal Gear Solid is one of the most storied franchises in gaming, but it’s now held captive by Konami, a company that’s a shell of its former self, with the brain behind MGS, Hideo Kojima, long departed and working on other projects.
So in theory, while something like a Metal Gear Solid Master Collection should be cause for celebration, you may expect that Konami would screw it up somehow. And yeah, they did in a lot of ways. Alas.
The port of these old Metal Gear Solid games to new platforms really did not go out of ways to offer many improvements from the original releases, at least not compared to what emulators have done and continue to do for the same games. The collection is 720p even on PC, causing fans to instantly build and release 4K mods for the game. The UI is ancient, bugs and graphical issues abound, performance is poor, you can’t change the aspect ratio. My favorite thing has to be that PC support is so non-existent that you cannot use a mouse at all, you have to move with WASD and shoot with U:
The whole thing is really just…a .iso file with few modifications. A cash-in, which is about all we can expect from Konami. There is of course another volume in the works with more Metal Gear Solid games, and because they are newer, perhaps it will all feel a bit better. But you simply cannot expect Konami to do any more than the bare minimum here, given what we’re seeing with Volume 1. If there’s anything good about this it’s that these are still good games at baseline. And sure it’s cool to play them on say, Nintendo Switch.
If anything, the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection makes a great case for emulation, as if the owners of the original IP are going to try to squeeze cash out of big fans with the minimum amount of effort, they should understand that there is a superior product out there for free. This is something Nintendo has also failed to learn with its restrictive access to old games, leading to endless emulation of their titles.
We have seen many, many classic series find great success with ports, remakes and remasters of old games, but we have seen plenty phoned in as well. It’s extremely easy to see which camp this falls into, and it’s not surprising when you look who’s behind it. It’s hard to hold out any hope for the future of the Metal Gear franchise without Kojima and with Konami forever trying to squeeze money out of its glory days.
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