Although Snake Eater is a game with more than 14 years on the market, we believe it is necessary to warn that this text contains spoilers about the story. We do not want frights or anger afterwards.
“After the end of the Second World War the world was divided in two, east and west. This gave rise to the beginning of the so-called Cold War ”.
With this phrase, the voice of David Hayter , who was the voice of practically all the Snakes during most of the Metal Gear Solid saga, introduces us fully into the game; giving way to a presentation sequence worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster like ‘ Mission Impossible ‘ or any of the last installments of 007.
In 1964 , two years after the Cuban missile crisis and in the middle of the Cold War, agent Naked Snake , a member of the FOX unit ( belonging to the CIA) has the mission of infiltrating Pakistan to rescue a scientist Russian : Sokolov, who wants to defect to American soil. As in any good spy story, at some point the plan has to go wrong and, when everything seems to indicate that Snake has succeeded in his mission, his mentor The Boss appears to derail the operation and go over to the Russian side . To further complicate the situation, Volgin (leader of the Russian unit that The Boss will join after defecting) uses a mini nuclear warhead to destroy the Sokolov research facility.
Snake manages to escape with great difficulty and to prove that the United States was not collaborating with The Boss , he will have to accept the mission of infiltrating the Soviet Union to finish off her and Volgin and to destroy the nuclear-capable weapon in which he was working. Russian scientist Sokolov, the Shagohod . Operation Snake Eater that gives its name to the game began.
With these ideas, Hideo Kojima was able to create a plot that is possibly one of the best we can see in a video game , also shaping several of the most charismatic characters that we have been able to find in any franchise in the world.
To date, we had only known the one who would be Big Boss as a villain and a traitor , being the enemy to beat in the first two parts of the Metal Gear saga (or only in one of them … Venom Snake , is that you? ) . With this installment, Kojima shapes the character, stops being just another villain and allows us to see his evolution: how he goes from being an exemplary soldier and having absolute loyalty to his country and how he ends up realizing that his government betrays and manipulates at will for your own benefit. This makes him leave the CIA and the FOX unit to become a mercenary without a country or flag , an enemy of the system that in the future will be a threat and the central axis on which all the installments of the saga will revolve .
All this evolution of the character comes mainly from The Boss , his mentor. Hideo Kojima frequently mixes the Metal Gear Solid saga with real events and, in this case, he made this character a legend within the game. Kojima made her a linchpin in victory in WWII, the first human in space, and practically the creator of the American Special Forces . His betrayal and desertion were part of a mission orchestrated by the American government to gain Volgin’s trust and regain the Legacy of the Philosophers (a fortune amassed together in the early 20th century by China, America, and Russia). But when he used a nuclear warhead on Russian soil, the American government had to pretend not to know anything about it, sending Snake to finish it off and thus avoid a nuclear confrontation on a global level . Once Snake discovers that he had been tricked into assassinating his mentor into believing that she was a traitor and had deserted, he unleashed a feeling of hatred towards his government that would lead him to become the enemy we have already mentioned.
Many other characters that appear in the game could be mentioned and they will do so frequently with greater or lesser importance within the saga such as Revolver Ocelot , Eva or Zero ; but those that we cannot leave aside are the members of the COBRA unit ( The Pain, The Fear, The Fury, The Sorrow and The End ), those in charge of preventing Naked Snake from fulfilling its mission. They are considered by many to be the best bosses in the series and we have to highlight two of them above all.
The End is a 100-year-old man in a wheelchair who is always sleeping , saving what little life he has left for combat. Great stories aren’t the only thing that good Hideo does well, as creating bomb-proof gameplay that gives the player the freedom to tackle situations in a variety of ways is another of his abilities. And with The End it shows us. One of the options we have to avoid combat is to eliminate him before we even meet him on the battlefield since, after a cinematic, we can easily shoot him from a distance. The other option is to save the game, turn off the console, and stop playing for a week (or change the date on the console). When we return to the game, the poor man will have died of old age waiting for us to return to combat.
The combat with The Sorrow is the perfect example of how Metal Gear encourages us not to eliminate enemies and that in addition to realism, we also have a supernatural touch in the saga. The Sorrow is a spirit that, during our confrontation with him, will make us walk along a river in which we will find the ghosts of all the soldiers we have killed so far. The difficulty of the combat will have been defined by us, because the more enemies eliminated, the greater the concentration of spirits in the river and the more difficult they will be to dodge and we will be less likely to overcome the confrontation. If, on the other hand, we have not eliminated any enemy during the game, we will find the river empty, being able to overcome the combat without problems.
These types of elements, in addition to the hundreds of secrets that Kojima always includes in his games, are what make you love or hate his titles. We could put examples of all the secrets that you can find in Snake Eater , but in this video of almost an hour you can see all the crazy things that have been included in the game :
In addition to knowing how to create great stories and characters , Kojima has a habit of making the most of the resources available to him. The game first appeared on PS2 in 2004 , becoming one of the games that would best squeeze the hardware out of the console. The previous installments of the saga had been developed in closed environments and this was going to be developed with the jungle as a setting , so part of the code of the collision engine of Metal Gear Solid 2 had to be thrown away and developed again from scratch. .
This new location also opened the possibility of creating a survival and camouflage system that would directly affect the gameplay. During the game you take damage and, depending on the severity of it, you will have wounds or fractures that you will need to heal yourself . As if this were not enough, you always have to watch the resistance, which will decrease if you do not eat frequently and will make your aim worse, your guts blow, leaving you in evidence against enemy units or making you recover life more slowly . And we cannot forget the camouflage system that allowed us, depending on the suit we were wearing, to be more or less visible to our enemies. The downside of increasing the size of the game was that this took a toll on performance: its prequel, Metal Gear solid 2 , ran at a fairly stable 60 FPS that went down in Snake Eater to a valid but less showy 30 FPS .
Part of the aforementioned resources went to create the game’s intro sequence and the soundtrack (Hideo is a big movie fan, he always says it and continually demonstrates it on his Twitter profile). For the first, he had Kyle Cooper , creator of credits for films such as ‘ Seven ‘, ‘ Iron Man ‘ or ‘ Sherlock Holmes ‘; accompanied by a song that could well be used in any of the credit titles of a James Bond movie ( Snake Eater – Norihiko Hibino / Cynthia Harrell). For the latter, he had a regular since Metal Gear Solid 2 : Harry Gregson Williams , composer of the OST of films like ‘ Armageddon ‘, ‘ Déjà vu ‘ or ‘ The Martian ‘.
Once the game was on the market ( November 17, 2004 ), work began on an extended version of it, Subsistence ( December 22, 2005 ), with a change to highlight above all else that would be the basis of the following installments of the saga as is the free camera . With the passage of time the game would receive versions on more platforms such as Nintendo 3DS or the remastered versions on Xbox 360 and PS3.
In December 2015, KONAMI , owner of the IP, caused Kojima to leave the studio at the same time that it decided to drastically reduce its investment in video games. The company focused on its other branches of the business, such as gyms or pachinko machines . And it is in this type of slot machines where Snake Eater has received its latest version.
Degraded from being one of the best espionage and infiltration games in history to a simple cinematic sequence and with the aggravation of being recreated with the Fox Engine , it makes the followers of this saga saddened seeing that what could have been a great remake for next -generation consoles, with truly heart-stopping graphics, stay in a simple game of chance of little balls .
“Kuwabara kuwabara” (桑 原 桑 原)
