Metal Gear Scanlon: The Twin Playthroughs - Part 02 - Flip Kickin' Concrete
By TechnoSyndrome 14 Comments
PREVIOUS PART - Part 01 - Metal Gear Scanlon: The Twin Playthroughs
Welcome back to Metal Gear Scanlon: The Twin Playthroughs! In these blogs I chronicle my journey through Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, noting the differences between the remake and the PS1 original, as well as posting videos of some of the cutscenes with amusing differences. Think of it as an unofficial companion piece to Metal Gear Scanlon. If you haven't already, you can read part one by clicking here.
Following the DARPA Chief's directions, I head down to the second floor basement. Walking through the armory is a great way to appreciate one of the upgrades carried over from MGS2: the card key works without being equipped. Given the description of the card using the salts in your body in order to open doors, it never made sense that you have to have it equipped as if you were going to slide it through a card reader or something.
A couple minor differences here, the first being that once you activate a trap door it stays open. There's also a few lockers in the C4 room with additional C4 in them. This might be a trade-off for items not respawning when you leave rooms anymore, as they give you just enough to blast open all five explodable walls in the area.
Speaking of explodable walls, the gun cameras in the optional hallway are a lot easier to deal with when you can just shoot them out in first person with your SOCOM. There was a Ration in there, but I was already full up at this point.
Ah, the Ocelot fight. As Dan says in the episode, the updated mechanics in Twin Snakes ruin this boss battle. Not being able to walk through the center of the room doesn't matter when you can shoot straight through it via first person. Along with the ability to shift left and right while in first person using the shoulder buttons, and the pipes along the walls you can shoot to temporarily stun Ocelot, this goes from a challenging fight to a complete joke. If you want, you can click the link below to watch me beat Ocelot on my first attempt in roughly thirty seconds.
After the Ocelot fight the Cyborg Ninja shows up, but this time instead of just chopping off Ocelot's hand and peacing out he decides to fight Snake, in a ridiculous wire-fu fight involving flip kicking a slab of concrete, Matrix bullet dodging, and the sound of a car slamming on the breaks. Seriously, you should watch this video.
VIDEO - The Cyborg Ninja Appears
As you can hear in the video, the Cyborg Ninja got recast for the remake. Originally sharing an actor with the DARPA Chief, he is now voiced by Rob Paulsen, who you might know as classic cartoon characters like Raphael from the original Ninja Turtles cartoon, Yakko from the Animaniacs, and Pinky from Pinky and the Brain. I've got mixed feelings on the recasting, as I think he does the job better in some spots and the original actor in others.
After the Ninja is done flipping out both figuratively and literally, Snake talks with Baker about a few things. A minor detail, but in Twin Snakes Baker ends up at the bottom of the room rather than the top, which makes more sense than falling over when the C4 exploded and then crawling around to the other side of the pillar. Eventually the conversation changes to Meryl's Codec frequency. In the PS1 version Snake just swears when Baker tells him he forgot the password. His reaction in Twin Snakes though is a little bit more... dramatic.
VIDEO - Baker Forgets Meryl's Frequency
Snake you're supposed to rescue this guy, calm down! Eventually remembering the frequency is on the back of "the package", which is an odd choice of words that confused the hell out of me when I first played Twin Snakes, the rest of their conversation plays out similarly to the PS1 version. A couple differences I noticed are different FMV footage while Baker is talking about nuclear waste and MUF, and that he never mentions "Rivermore National Labs", instead just referring to "competitors".
After a boss fight in the PS1 version Snake will smoke a cigarette and the player's health bar extends, and their capacity for ammo and rations increases as well. In Twin Snakes the player starts out with a full life bar and item capacity, the latter varying depending on the difficulty selected and equivalent to Metal Gear Solid 2's.
And that's it for Part 2! Like I said last time, now that the brunt of the mechanics are out of the way these comparisons are gonna get a lot shorter. Thanks for reading!
NEXT PART - Part 03 - Arm Like a Cannon