There are only two situations in which I buy a present for myself when I am in absolutely no condition to afford it: Christmas and by birthday, which happen to be only a few weeks apart, so my wallet suffers greatly at my own stupid self-indulgence when I use a pagan holiday and the fact that I'm still alive to lavish myself in gifts.
So for my birthday I picked the Metal Gear HD Collection, and aside from being a sweet deal of three games for just over ten bucks each, they're also three very well done enjoyable ones (helps).
Hideo Kojima must be my nemesis. On the one hand, the aging Japanese game developer is a pompous asshole who hogs the media spotlight, and one of the worst writers in the history of writing. But he does make a damn fun stealth game. The fact is that stealth games, along with old-school point-and-click adventure games, are probably my favorites, which puts me in the extreme minority these days. And at least the Metal Gear series approaches a strong military theme with some thoughtfulness, as opposed to the 'roid-raging boyish bravado of Battlefield or Call of Duty.
Granted those thoughts are almost universally stupid, but the effort is there.
The thing that makes Metal Gear worth it is that the stealth does a number of things right, and follows a strict "do-and-don't" model which makes for a successful stealth game.
1: Constant awareness of visibility
The player in Metal Gear is always aware of how visible he or she is. The crowning game of the MG series (I think), Snake Eater, has a pretty intuitive system of swapping camo uniforms to blend in to surroundings. Granted it gets annoying needing to pause the game every two minutes and get changed because the particular brand of brown wall meshes somewhat better with Chocolate Chip as opposed to Tree Bark, but it's a small price to pay for such a functional system. There are audio cues as well, though it's somewhat unrealistic for trained soldiers to proclaim, "WHO'S THAT!? ... I KNOW I SAW SOMEONE!" every time an errant fern jiggles.
Any game with a stealth element needs to have some way of letting the player know when they're well hidden, exposed, or about to sniffed out.
2: Make stealth a core part of game play, not a "section"
Most shitty games these days try to pull the "something for everyone" maneuver, and include chunks of different game play styles all glued together piecemeal. It's pretty common for most action games to try and break the monotony by including a stealth section, where you need to sneak passed vastly superior foes instead of just shooting them like everything else. It's like the romantic subplot in Transformers: it doesn't make the movie better and more deep and interesting - it just serves to make an already crappy film more schizophrenic and an even bigger piece of shit.
Here's a hint, by the way. If you are developing an action game and life-or-death gunfights get so boring and repetitive you need to spice them up with not gun fighting, you're doing it wrong.
Anyway, Metal Gear lets the sneaking take the foreground makes it relate to everything in game play. Stealth, disguise, or just shooting the place up are always options to deal with situations and the player is never locked in to just following the game's lead from point A to point B. Another game with a good stealth element is Fallout, which is not a stealth game, but always makes sneaking an option as opposed to combat, and has no mandatory stealth levels.
3: Don't punish the player (too much) for mistakes
Most games with stealth levels will fail the player for being seen, and chances are that if your game has a mandatory stealth level, the stealth doesn't function so well and players are going to get seen a lot. Metal Gear does have an optional mode to end the game in defeat if the player is seen (paradoxically called "European Hard" on the menu, which makes my juvenile brain think British porn [this doesn't reflect well on me as a person, does it? {anyway}]) but it's not mandatory. The worst you'll face in Metal Gear is running away from some heavily armored chaps until you find a house to crawl under and wait until they lose interest, also proving that the Soviet Union collapsed due to the Russian military not being able to pay attention to something for more than five minutes. The player can stay and fight if he or she wants but there isn't much of a point and it mostly ends as a big waste of ammo.
4: Complete missions without killing anyone
The point of stealth is not to be seen, correct? So in theory, the best stealth operative would be able to complete the mission and leave the opponents unaware that anything has even happened. The absolute best example of this is an old game from the late 90s called Thief, and the title pretty much sums up the entire game. The player can sneak into and out of a rich douchebag's mansion, bag all the swag, explore the entire place and leave without a single conflict, and the game actively encourages this. Metal Gear provides the player with a silent dart gun that can stun enemies as opposed to killing them. In Snake Eater, there is a wonderfully done and very Heart of Darkness-esque boss battle where the hero must face off against the ghosts of everyone he has killed during the mission. The solution? Don't kill anyone.
Games with designated sneak levels usually just have the player kill enemies in a different way than normal, and never address the fact that the trail of dead bodies might raise some serious questions about beefing up security. Games like Thief and Snake Eater actively discourage the player from fighting or hurting anyone (beyond a dart in the neck).
Of course the real failing of Metal Gear games, that keeps them tumbling down the jagged peaks of perfection time and time again, is the writing. I am currently working through Peace Walker, where the player assumes the role of an ex-CIA agent turned rogue Colombian insurgent. The heroism is layered so thick on this dude that it is difficult to keep in mind that, in the larger narrative, you are actually playing the bad guy. It could be that the writing is so intricate and that it uses point of view so effectively that it masks any sense of wrongdoing and creates true empathy for the character. Or it could be that it's yet another of Hideo Kojima's over-written bowls of rat pee and is so much of a literary eyesore that the player simply has no idea what the fuck is going on.
I'm gonna go with door number two.
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