Tag: Metal Gear

George Miller Wants Mad Max to Take Another Ride Into Video Games

The newly released Furiosa has the world blazing with Mad Max fever. Some are celebrating the occasion by rewatching 2015’s Fury Road, if not all four movies. Others are thinking about what could’ve been, particularly as it pertains to the 2015 Mad Max game from Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios.

Spoilers of the Week: August 12th

During a recent interview with Gaming Bible at Cannes, franchise director George Miller talked about the game, which he isn’t too hot on. He was candid in calling it “not as good as I wanted it to be.” To him, it failed because the team had to “give all our material” to Avalanche instead of being involved directly, and “I’m one of those people that i’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at least try to make it at the highest level.”

If he had his way, another Mad Max game would happen, but one with Hideo Kojima at the helm. The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator has openly been a fan of Fury Road since it came out, and Miller called him the perfect guy to take on that endeavor. “I’ve just been speaking to him,” the director added. “[But] he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I would never ask him.” (Kojima, for what it’s worth, saw Furiosa at Cannes and called it a “masterpiece.”)

Avalanche’s Mad Max game launched months after the release of Fury Road, and is in fact set in between that and Beyond Thunderdome. The game got solid reviews when it launched, but the big thing that did it in was releasing on September 1, 2015… aka, the same day as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When two fairly big games go up against one another on the same day, there’s typically a loser, and in this case, it was ol’ Max Rockatansky.

Here’s where things get a little murky, though: putting Mad Max out on that date was apparently out of Avalanche’s hands. Christofer Sundberg, who co-founded the studio in 2003, revealed on X that Warner Bros. wouldn’t budge when he suggested the game shift from its September 1 release. As a result, “they blamed us for the bad sales and cancelled a bunch of awesome DLC that was just sitting there waiting to be released.” To this day, he admits that he doesn’t know why WB was so adamant about it.

Sundberg also took Miller’s thoughts on his game to task, alleging that WB tried to force Mad Max into a linear game when Avalanche’s bread and butter is big, open-world titles. A year into development, the studio was told to convert it into a non-linear game, and he chalked up Miller’s comments to “complete nonsense and [it] just shows complete arrogance. […] Mad Max was a hell of a great game, the potential was missed due to political nonsense.” And if Kojima did try a stab at making a Max game, he thinks it’d be a “completely different experience.”

In the years since its release, Mad Max has been looked back on fondly and achieved a bit of cult classic status. To date, it’s playable on both PC and consoles via backwards compatibility. Maybe with the franchise being the hot topic of the weekend, the game will see a little more love over the next few days.

Furiosa is in now in theaters.

[via PC Gamer]

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Justin Carter

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May 25, 2024
5 Disappointing Things About Konami’s Metal Gear Solid ‘Master Collection’

Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 gathers some of the best games ever made and puts them all on modern platforms in one convenient package. Unfortunately, a laundry list of weird caveats and shortcomings at launch make the new anthology hard to celebrate. Why is one of the best franchises in gaming history not pulling out all the stops?

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Out October 24 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and Windows PC, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 has been stalked by controversy for months now, with questions about subpar performance on Nintendo Switch and a lack of bells and whistles on “next-gen” platforms like PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The anthology features five main games—Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater—and includes the oddball Snake’s Revenge and the NES and Famicom ports of Metal Gear as bonuses. But now that it’s finally here, it’s hard not to be disappointed by how publisher Konami has gone about assembling it.

First up is the lack of a visual upgrade on new platforms, or parity with the original versions on Switch. As shared prior to release, Metal Gear Solid still only plays at 30fps across all versions (it was never remastered for 2011’s Metal Gear Solid HD Collection by Bluepoint Games). The Switch version of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are also locked at 30fps (MGS2 originally ran at 60fps on PlayStation 2). All three games max out at 1080p as well, with no 4K resolution options for the stronger hardware versions.

Read More: Kotaku’s Metal Gear Retrospective Series

Even without any big improvements, Konami notes that the launch versions still suffer from various bugs and performance issues it plans to patch sometime in the future. A full list of the shortcomings was provided to IGN. “Across Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3, bug fixes are also planned, specifically on MGS2,” the site noted. “Konami warned the game may significantly slow down in certain cutscenes, which sounds worrying. A patch to reduce processing load is planned.” Visual options like CRT scanlines and the ability to switch between windowed and full-screen mode in the options menu in the two MSX games are also MIA at the moment.

There’s also the laggy pause button. Konami added the option to pause during cutscenes, a long-requested feature for the story-heavy stealth series. Footage from copies of the game that leaked early, however, showed that it can take up to 10 seconds for the game to register the pause after the button’s pressed, taking some of the shine off the new option. It’s still unclear if that’s intentional or will be patched down the road.

The Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 is, perhaps less surprisingly, encountering issues on PC as well. Initial Steam reviews are very mixed, with players complaining about unintuitive keybindings, poor UI, and a lack of aspect ratio options. “Take this with a grain of salt, the game literally just launched, but damn the video settings, button mapping, and poor UI/UX for the collection is pretty sour,” wrote one player. “I am sure it will improve over time, but yikes.”

Most galling for me personally are the games altogether missing from the physical Switch version of the collection. In North America at least, only Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and Snake’s Revenge are actually on the game card. The three Metal Gear Solid games, which are the main ones advertised on the front of the box, must be downloaded separately. As someone who treats their Switch like a physical repository for retro remasters and re-issues, it’s frustrating to have to rely on an internet connection and a temporary online storefront to have access to all-time classics. It sounds like the Japanese physical release at least also includes the first Metal Gear Solid on the game card.

Many of the initial reviews for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 have noted these shortcomings while still pointing out that at the end of the day these games still play great and remain some of the most profound meditations on geopolitics, war, and the military industrial complex the medium has ever produced. “I think it’s great that such a huge swathe of Metal Gear history is now readily available and easily playable on modern systems,” writes The Verge’s Jon Porter. “But there’s also a part of me that thinks Konami missed an opportunity to give Metal Gear Solid in particular a fresh coat of paint and update it for a modern audience.”

The video game industry is generally so bad at preserving its past I wish it would go all out when it decides to finally take the opportunity to repackage old games and sell them again. If that means charging more so be it. I’d gladly pay $100 for the definitive edition of all of these games. Maybe we’ll eventually get that one day. In the meantime I hope Konami’s planned post-launch updates give the collection some of the additional love it deserves.

Ethan Gach

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October 24, 2023
Metal Gear Solid Locked At 30FPS In Master Collection, Konami Confirms

Screenshot: Konami / Kotaku

Part of the appeal of video game remasters and remakes is the prospect of playing an old game on better hardware that can, ostensibly, run it better than your old console did back in the day. That is the hope, at least. Unfortunately, not every “remaster” is an improvement over its source material—just ask the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy collection. Now, eyes are turning toward Konami’s upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1., with fans hoping it doesn’t run into those same issues. On that front, today saw the emergence of one new slightly disappointing tidbit.

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The original 1998 PlayStation Metal Gear Solid ran at 30 frames per second, and Konami has now confirmed that will still be the case for the newly remastered edition launching in the Collection on October 24. News of this comes from a graph on the compilation’s official website, which says the first MGS adventure will run at 30fps on all platforms, while Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater will run at 60fps on all systems except for the Nintendo Switch.

To be clear, the original Metal Gear Solid ran at 30fps when it launched in 1998, but it being locked to that lower framerate across the board seems odd in 2023, especially when its sequels will apparently have some scaling depending on which platform you buy them on. (For reference, MGS2 originally ran at 60fps, while MGS3 was originally a 30fps game.)

Here’s the full rundown:

Screenshot: Konami / Kotaku

There’s been chatter about the games’ graphical resolutions as well. It’s a bummer to see that none of these games will run at 4K resolution, even on PC, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X/S. This lack of 4K support was confirmed back in August.

All of this comes ahead of Konami’s separate, upcoming Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake. That’s titled Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater, presumably so the number doesn’t scare anyone off from playing the game. MGS3 was a prequel in any case, so you didn’t need to know everything going in to understand it.

Kenneth Shepard

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September 22, 2023
Konami, Please Don’t Forget About Metal Gear Solid 4

During Wednesday’s Nintendo Direct, Konami showed off a new trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1. The upcoming collection of past Metal Gear games includes some of the earliest and biggest games from the popular stealth series. However, 2008’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots isn’t included, and I’m worried Konami isn’t going to include it in a future, theoretical Vol. 2.

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Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 was first announced in May. The collection contains the first seven games of the series and will be released on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and 5, and (just announced earlier today) Nintendo Switch. These games aren’t being remastered and they aren’t remakes. Instead, this is a new collection of classic MGS games that will make it easier to play these older titles on newer platforms. The collection will also include screenplay books of each game and some other goodies, too.

However, not included in this collection is the PS3-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which is a shame as the game is currently only playable via emulation or on original PS3 hardware. At one point, MGS4 was available to stream via PS Now, but that is no longer the case. While most other MGS games have been ported to multiple platforms, MGS4 remains locked to the PS3. Why? What is the reason for never porting MGS4 to any other platform?

Why is Metal Gear Solid 4 only on PS3?

If you ask the internet about this, and you’ll not doubt see some of this in the comments, a popular theory that is often spouted off as if it’s a fact is that MGS4 is incapable of running on anything but a PS3. But that’s not true. You can, right now, download an emulator and play MGS4 at 60fps without much trouble.

And assistant producer of the game Ryan Payton suggests in Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2 that, at one point, MGS4 was actually running on an Xbox 360 and looked and played fine. Reportedly, that version never happened due to Microsoft’s console using DVDs and not Blurays. Konami didn’t want to spend the extra money on shipping multiple discs for the Xbox 360 version. This is more than likely the main reason MGS4 remained a PS3 exclusive and was even alluded to by former PlayStation boss Jack Tretton in 2008. Konami also said this was the reason in 2014.

Now, in 2023, most consoles use Bluray discs and all of them support digital games—which can be as large or small as you want. So that problem is solved. Yet, I’m still not convinced Konami will actually bring MGS4 to modern machines or to PC. It’s certainly not easy to port a game to new hardware, especially one that exists natively on just one platform. Plus, this whole process wouldn’t be cheap, would involve a good deal of resources, and would likely require tweaks to how the game plays as it heavily relied on the Dualshock 3/Sixaxis controller.

Reports indicate MGS4 isn’t coming to more consoles

Sadly, it seems Konami isn’t going to do the necessary work to help preserve this entry in the Metal Gear franchise. A previous report from Windows Central, which correctly revealed information about the Metal Gear Solid Collection and the MGS3 remake before release also stated that a potential Vol. 2 would not include MGS4, but instead would feature Peace Walker, Portable Ops, Metal Gear Rising: Revegance, and a few other spin-offs.

Sadly, it seems Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots—with all its long cutscenes, weird live-action bits, creepy monkey, and cool stealth camo—will remain a PS3 exclusive. Likely due to technical issues, but also, maybe Konami just forgot about it. There are a lot of games in the series. It’s easy to forget one or two of them. I get it. I forget Metal Gear Acid exists.

Still, I hope that one day, someone over at Konami remembers this game exists and that it deserves a second life on new hardware.

Zack Zwiezen

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June 21, 2023
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Will Include Five Games You Need To Play
Image: Konami
The official reveal of a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake was one of the headliners of Sony’s recent PlayStation 5 showcase, but it likely won’t be finished for some time. Fortunately, a collection of Metal Gear classics is coming to modern platforms this fall and it will actually include more games than originally expected.

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Announced alongside Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta, Konami’s Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 will come to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC by way of Steam in just a few months, and the PlayStation store page (via Eurogamer) now shows that the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 will also be a part of the package, both of which laid the groundwork for a sprawling framework of political intrigue, Cold War paranoia, and a super complex family tree of guys named Snake.

That means the entire thing will house the first give games in the espionage stealth series:

Metal Gear

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

Metal Gear Solid (Including VR Missions/Special Missions)

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (HD Collection version)

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (HD Collection version)

The first two games were on the MSX2, Solid was on PS1, and Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater were on PS2. This is essentially the 2012 Metal Gear Solid HD Collection which brought these same games (minus Peace Walker on the PSP) to PS3 and Xbox 360, but which isn’t currently accessible on modern platforms. The only game not included from Metal Gear’s initial 20 year run is Snake’s Revenge, the first follow-up to the original game that wasn’t actually directed by writer and creator Hideo Kojima.

All of these games were previously delisted from older storefronts in 2021 over issues around “licenses for select historical archive footage used in-game.” Konami says the new collection will contain the original versions of the games with “minimal edits to copyrighted contents.”

In either case, it’s a lot of Metal Gear, and if it’s on par with Konami’s other classic collections, will hopefully be a decent tribute to and preservation of the franchise. We don’t have an exact price or a specific release date yet, but it should keep fans occupied until the Snake Eater remake, for better or worse, finally arrives.

Correction 5/26/2023 6:03 p.m. ET: Fixed the original platform for the first and second Metal Gear.
Ethan Gach

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May 26, 2023
Kojima: MGS2 ‘Seemed Impossible To Release’ After 9/11, Nearly Quit

Photo: Neilson Barnard (Getty Images)

Those well-versed in their Metal Gear Solid trivia will know that the original ending for Metal Gear Solid 2 was changed before release. Scenes involving a massive ship crashing into Manhattan island were a bit too much in a very young post-9/11 world, with images and videos of planes striking the World Trade Center a constant in the media. In a recent interview, director Hideo Kojima talked about the complicated nature of releasing such a game after a world changing event and how it nearly drove him to quit Konami.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty released in November of 2001 to much anticipation. As a series focused on “Tactical Espionage Action,” the games have never shied away from political themes, be they a part of the fictional story or commentaries on world events and history. While it’s been known for some time now that elements of the game were changed at the last minute due to the September 11 attacks, recent comments reveal that the stress and challenge of handling such a release were enough to push Hideo Kojima to quit Konami at the time. A conversation with Konami’s chairman, Kagemasa Kozuki was what convinced Kojima to stay back then.

Read More: Metal Gear Solid 2 Retrospective: Be Careful What You Wish For

Speaking with Shuka Yamada for IGN, Hideo Kojima described an awkward and tough situation after Metal Gear Solid 2, due to release in the Fall of 2001, contained images of the World Trade Center and other sites that were attacked on 9/11.

9/11 took place in 2001 right before the release of Metal Gear Solid 2. We’d just sent off the master, but the game featured both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It seemed impossible to release the game. I was called to the board of directors and they all turned pale when I explained the situation. Nobody would tell me what to do, with the exception of Mr. Kozuki, who tackled the issue.

As I thought about what to do, I went to speak with Mr. Kozuki about possibly quitting the company. That’s when he told me: ‘When this game comes out and society has their say about it, they’ll be talking about you, its creator, and me, the person who sold it. I doubt they’ll say anything about anyone else. What will you do? I’m ready for whatever happens.’

When I heard how far he was willing to go, I made the firm decision that we’d release it together. The rest is history.

MGS2 would go on to receive critical acclaim. The game’s tactical stealth gameplay was a dramatic evolution of what came before it and its meta-narrative filled with postmodern themes about digital information, virtual realities, among many others, is still relevant and widely discussed.

After MGS2 shipped, Kojima found himself in dire need of recovery. “I became completely exhausted, and I always end up in an awful state when I finish making a game,” he said. “After the first Metal Gear Solid, even after it was done I wasn’t recovering at all and ended up being passed from one hospital to the next.”

9/11 and the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 weren’t the only time Kojima would face the need to alter his work. As we found out during The Game Awards this year, Kojima rewrote the original story for the sequel to the narrative-driven, post-apocalyptic delivery-service simulator, Death Stranding; the game’s themes of loneliness, isolation, and world-altering events were too close to what we all went through (and are still struggling with). The Covid-19 pandemic followed Death Stranding’s 2019 release by only a few months.

“Fiction changes when something that big happens,” Kojima told IGN. He continued:

That’s why I completely rewrote [Death Stranding 2]. You can’t pretend that something this big never happened. While the games themselves are based on characters who are not bound by our reality, the players themselves have gone through the pandemic, and a story written before that experience just wouldn’t resonate with them in the same way, whether it was a fantasy story or a sci-fi one.

Kojima Productions is currently working on Death Stranding 2. The company is also working on an unnamed game with Microsoft, a project Kojima says other publishers turned down; though he pitched the idea to a few places, he describes the game as requiring “infrastructure that was never needed before.” Other companies seemed to not be as into the idea, “they really seemed to think I was mad.”

Whatever that new game is, let’s hope he’s not predicting an awful future for us yet again.

Claire Jackson

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December 28, 2022