Website and all contents thereof property of Maren Wasser
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Been a bit. Just about done with decorating the new place. My bedroom decked out with a CRT tv, old movie posters, a neon fox, and a lava lamp is giving a pleasently retro cyberpunk vibe, and we worked out the TV projecter situation in the common area so that both can be used simultaniously. Not much in my life has really changed other than that. Started month 3 of HRT. Lot of changes and few of them visible, but I can assure you they are occurring. My roommate and my cat Atticus is being quite playful distracting me from writing my blog. Good to see him settling in even if we have to work harder to keep him occupied and not ripping up the carpet for our attention.
Also been having more time to engage with my hobbies. After getting it on sale I've been playing the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol.1. I've been a huge fan of MGS for over a decade but I've hesitated buying the master collection until recently due to its reputation. Fans have lambasted this release for… well that's the rub. I’m not entirely sure what it's done to earn such ire. The Master Collection was pitched and advertised as rereleases of all the Metal Gear games up to and including Metal Gear Solid 3 with some bonus content including regional variations of each game, scripts for each game, and documents containing lore and trivia about the series for each game. That's what it is. Each game plays just as good as they did upon release (better in the cases of MGS 2&3) right out of the box on modern hardware. Yet, people complain that MGS1 is limited to the original resolution and 4x3 aspect ratio, that MGS 2&3 don't run at 4k, you can't remap controller inputs, and… that's it? Look, to me this sounds like going out and buying a Blu ray of Wizard of Oz and then complaining that you can see the film grain and the painted backdrops look fake. Like sure, film grain and flat painted backdrops were limitations of films made in 1939 and today we could replace the backdrops with CGI and smooth out the grain and the movie look like 1000% more realistic, but then that's not the same movie. These games, like all pieces of art were made with the limitations of the materials available to the artists of the time, and to obscure that with modern enhancements fundamentally alters the piece of art. These are and were marketed as re-releases not remasters. Perhaps the confusion is with the term “Master Collection”. Well “Master Collection” means just as much as Borderlands’s “Handsome Collection” or Portal’s “Companion Collection”. There's nothing actually Handsome about Borderlands's collection or especially companionable about Portal’s collection. It's a largely meaningless name to draw attention and probably refers primarily to this collection’s completeness as it collects all regional variants and relevantly different ports (such as MGS Integral, the NES port of MG1, and Snake's Revenge). At the end of the day this is about presenting the Metal Gear games in such a way that they are accessible to modern gamers, and this collection does that perfectly. In fact my only real gripe is that they used the HD collection ports of MGS 2&3 which are very slightly different from the original PS2 releases. I would have appreciated emulated PS2 versions in addition to the HD collection ports. So basically I want even less modern versions of these games made available.
The closest thing I've heard as a legitimate complaint is the price. That people expect enhanced versions of these games for the $60 the collection retailed for. But like WHY!? Look, this collection has 7 count ‘em seven complete games:
That comes out to about $8.60 a game. Even if you bundle the pre-“solid” games into two separate groups (so the 2 msx games and the 2 nes games as the collection does) you're still left with $12 a game. Seems like a good price to me, and that's not even accounting for the bonus content. There's the digital soundtrack, the MGS 1&2 motion comics, the scripts, and lore books.
On a personal note I can't help but see the critical Metal Gear fan as grossly entitled. I'm a big Silent Hill fan and if Metal Gear fans only knew what the average Silent Hill fan would do to get a similar “Master Collection” for the Silent Hill franchise… Those games are devilishly hard to get ahold of in a state one tenth as good as the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection. Silent Hill one is still basically only available on the PS1 and on PS3 via the PlayStation store, and Silent Hill 2&3? Well you better buy yourself a PS2 and spend about $300 on a used copy cause that HD collection that came out for PS3 and 360 makes the “Master Collection” look as polished and modern as a Nightdive release. At least you can get a good copy of 4 on PC from GOG that works without effort.
OH and my birthday is coming up soon. 5 days to be precise. Thats exciting. Do I feel old yet? Well now that the aches and pains from lifting heavy stuff and moving are gone thankfully no. To be honest I kinda feel like I'm still in my twenties. At least trying to keep that youthful energy about me. Anyway that about wraps up this blog post. I might add somthing to essay section later. I have this big long thing about Metal Gear Solid 1&2 that feels more like an essay than a blog post. Maybe and this is a huge maybe it might serve as a first draft of somthing more.