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.

VIDEO - Ocelot's Introduction

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.

VIDEO - Ocelot Boss Fight

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

Oh wow. Twin Snakes was my first MGS experience back in the day (I eventually played the original), but I don't think I remembered quite how redonkulus the matrix-esque antics in this game's cutscenes really are until I saw your videos and contrasted them with what happened on Metal Gear Scanlon. Man, The Twin Snakes is super weird, isn't it? Don't forget the part where this game is from the developers of Eternal Darkness, that's another odd part.

@TechnoSyndrome: Okay, I totally forgot how amazingly stupid Revolvers delayed and totally subdued reaction to losing a hand is... "WHHHHHAAAAT?"

Not only that but the delay on his heart to not pump blood until his brain realised it. The true power of nanomachines.

The weird part about the reference to "Rivermore National Labs" is that it was probably a mistranslated reference to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I can see why they took it out, as some real world organizations (like Lawrence Livermore) maybe took slight offense from being included in the all the unscrupulous arms dealings mentioned by the DARPA chief and Armstech president.

@arbitrarywater: They even put the girl from Eternal Darkness in the books you can distract guards with. I'll try to remember to take a screenshot of one at some point.

I remember the the slab kick and my reaction to it at the time - "that was too stupid".

Another good write up, and I appreciate the video links.

This may be the exact scene where I turned on Twin Snakes for several reasons:

1. The broken ass gameplay

2. The flip kick into slow mo dodge.

3. The Cyborg Ninja voice. As soon as he spoke, I think it was the last straw. Even watching the video now, I'm taken aback by the change. In the original he seemed far more primal and inhuman (those growls!) Even Ocelot had to overplay his hand chop in TS.

4. The music. It's more in line with MGS2, but seems far less dramatic. 4:33 below, specifically, it really hits home how chaotic the situation is.

This game almost seems like a parody of the original. I remember reading (i'm not sure where) that they originally intended for the cinematics to be the same but Kojima wanted to take advantage of the better tech and hired some famous japanese fight choreographer.

Taken as a parody this game seems a lot more enjoyable but I still prefer the original by quite a bit. Thanks for the write up and videos!

@boozak: It definitely feels like they're trying to ape MGS2's atmosphere, aside from the action choreography which is doing its own thing. It's a weird feeling because every other MGS has its own style, from gameplay to music to even the UI, but Twin Snakes just rips everything directly from MGS2.

@csl316: The filmmaker who directed the cutscenes was actually the same guy who originally made them much closer to the original, and then Kojima told him he brought him on the project because he wanted that crazy action style from his movies. Love it or hate it, Kojima is the one who wanted it that way.

@TechnoSyndrome: Regardless of our difference in opinion on TTS, I appreciate that you at least recognize that Kojima is responsible for all of it. I remember back when it came out, Metal Gear message boards especially were nothing but people freaking out at the people who made the game, as if they slipped it past Kojima without him looking one day. Like it or not, this it totally how he wanted this game made. As I said, I feel like this kind of makes sense, given how crazy the series is in some of the action now. Especially when you look at something like Revengeance, which is just super insane, yet still part of the same universe. The original Metal Gear Solid just feels out of place now.

As for the Ninja, I prefer the newer voice, if only because I like that it's a different actor than the DARPA chief. In terms of performance, I don't know if I have a real preference. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Though technically, with the whole series taken into account, the new voice is the more accurate one, as is the case with Naomi and Mei Ling. And say what you will, but I think every single scene with the Ninja greatly benefits from TTS. Especially later ones.

I will concede that the MGS2 gameplay makes everything super easy, though. I don't really care about challenge in games even remotely, so it never bothered me, but it's true nonetheless. Ocelot isn't even worth breaking a sweat.

I liked The Twin Snakes, Kojima should remake It for the Wii U with a Grey Fox level.

Voice actors are serious business.

When the decision to use Zimmerman's voice instead of Clarke's became public, associate producer Ryan Payton received a number of hateful messages from angry fans, including a 2,000 word short story written by a French fan (which also was translated by a friend) about his execution.

It's true, I think they discussed this on the Bombcast. You played MGS and thought you knew what Metal Gear is, but you actually figured out what the series really is in MGS 2. I just watched my buddy play through the Tanker in 2, and it's just confirmation that this sort of style is what Kojima was working towards.

And he did run Zone of the Enders, which is 100% anime, so it almost seems like the gritty tone of MGS was a fluke. Granted, we'll see how V plays out.

@TechnoSyndrome: I was thinking of doing something similar since I beat both MGS and TTS over the weekend. As a whole they dropped the ball with TTS. I played it on that Dolphin emulator on PC and it looked stunning, graphically they nailed it. The changes they made to gameplay were good, it feeling like MGS 2 lite I felt was a good thing. But they failed so hard with the cut-scenes with the over the top bullshit(and not in the good way). Not to mention the flat dialog, just everyone sounded so uninterested in what was going I had to pop back in MGS to make sure it wasn't the same. Also the soundtrack was horrid, like all they had to do was take the songs from MGS maybe remix them maybe not and then put them in, not that generic bullshit that ended up in the game. I hope they try again at doing a remake with the fox engine and you know they learned their lesson since they didn't include this in the hd rerelease a couple years ago when they could have.