The eight-year gap between Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid has always felt like a missed opportunity for the franchise. Kojima was busy with Snatcher and Policenauts for much of first half of the 90s and I’ve always wondered what a Metal Gear game on Super Nintendo or Genesis would have looked like.
The closest we’re ever going to get is 2000’s Metal Gear: Ghost Babel (retitled as the Google-confounding Metal Gear Solid on its Western release). This picks up the baton of the MSX games with the benefit of everything learned during Metal Gear Solid‘s development, as well as cramming an insanely detailed and complex plot into the tiny ROM of a Game Boy Color cartridge.
CODEC calls, VR missions, endless twists, multi-level bases to infiltrate, eccentric bosses with gimmicks, a wide variety of weapons – they’re all here (along with bizarre secret text drama IdeaSpy 2.5).
Solid Snake must infiltrate the fortress Galuade, revealed in the opening movie to have once been Outer Heaven. The terrorist cell Black Chamber has teamed up with anti-American rebels the GLF to seize Metal Gear and is threatening the world with nuclear annihilation if their demands aren’t met. So far, so boilerplate Metal Gear.
But the deeper you delve into the game the more it shows its true colours. The rebel’s anti-Americanism is treated smartly and intelligently (Snake quickly sympathises with their causes) and Black Chamber turn out to have a righteous bone to pick with the US government.
Along the way, there’s child murder, reanimated corpses used as puppets, and joyous self-immolation. We guess Nintendo wasn’t paying attention, but it’s okay, the cigarette has been renamed the Fogger, so the kids are going to be okay!
Having become an instant fan of the franchise after Metal Gear Solid I was there for Ghost Babel at launch and played it to death on original hardware. As this was the era of Pokemon Red and Blue, link cables were available, so I even got to sample the now-neglected multiplayer mode.
At the time the game blew me away, with its ambition eclipsing damn near everything else on the platform and scratching an itch that wouldn’t be truly satisfied until Metal Gear Solid 2 arrived the next year.
In 2022, with two decades and change behind me? Ghost Babel is still a great game and one of the best on the platform, but it’s not without its flaws. Having played a lot of Zelda over the last few years it now feels like the game is taking some cues from that franchise, with each major building equivalent to a dungeon from that series. There are long multi-level puzzles unique to this Metal Gear, likely because the 2D action could never match the depth of its 3D counterpart.
At its best they reward exploration and memory, as when you’re tracking down bombable pillars to bring down a power plant. But then there’s the incredibly tedious colored box conveyer belt stuff that essentially sees you slowly being ferried between screens as you trial and error your way through a maze. Save states help out with that, but it’s still very boring.
There is one great puzzle gag in the game though. You must figure out the correct sequence of buttons to open a series of interlocking doors. Eventually – after about 15 minutes of getting annoyed at this apparently impossible puzzle – you realise that they’re… not locked and you can just stroll through. Sigh.
Ghost Babel also does one other major thing of note. It proves that you can make a ‘proper’ Metal Gear game without Hideo Kojima’s direct involvement. He produced the game and advised on its direction, but it’s designed and directed by Shinta Nojiri and written by Tomokazu Fukushima. And honestly, if I didn’t know any of that I’d believe this was a bona fide Kojima game.
What better compliment can you play a Metal Gear spinoff than that?
Pixel Hunted 