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A C64 port of an NES port which is even worse!"

What's this? A review for this game? You mean someone has actually played this? you ask. Well after playing this game, I'm here to tell you how a game that was ported from another game that was ported from a top notch MSX game called Metal Gear fell into the firey pits of oblivion. If you didn't get that then what I'm saying is this game is a port of the NES game Metal Gear. Metal Gear for the NES was a port that was changed dramatically from locations to translation. This in turn made the game worse than the original on MSX. However this C64 port does have some notable improvements which I'll get into below.

Access: Now first of all let me tell you that the only place you'll ever get access to this game is downloading it off the internet and playing it on a Commodore 64 emulator. Now this game did come out on C64 disk but you will NEVER find it unless you bought it years and years ago and it's stashed in your basement under thousands and thousands of other things.

Graphics: After playing Metal Gear NES, C64's graphics for this game are soooo bad. Okay, so maybe the NES is a more powerful system but that doesn't stop me from saying how bad they are. Snake looks horrific and moves on a lean. Very Very Bad!

Sound: The music for this game was alright. It kinda sounds a bit better than the NES from where I sit. In-game there are absolutely no sound effects at all. When you bring up the menus for Equipment, weapons and transceiver then there's a sound effect for selecting one. Other than that there is none which can be frustrating because you can't hear if the enemy has spotted you.

Translation: Surprisingly the translation has been fixed up from the crappy translation the NES version had. So no more ''I feel asleep'' or ''The truch have started to move''. All the dialogue is normal and I have seen no translation errors.

Gameplay: Okay, I'm not going to go into details about the gameplay because it is pretty much all the same as the NES game of the same name. However, there have been a few tweaks in the gameplay that has improved it tremendously. The biggest improvement is the fact that in the maze zone (which people have complained about because there was no help from the game as to how to get past it) all the wrong passages have been disabled not allowing you to go in the wrong direction. So there is only one path on the screen you can go to which is the way to complete it. Very helpful.

Load times: Okay, this is the worst part of this game and I tell you it was extremely annoying! Metal Gear for C64 consists of two disks which you must alternate right throughout the game to get to different areas. That's bad enough but what's even worse is that the load times are extremely slow. Going from one screen to other IN THE SAME AREA take 10-15 seconds and going to a new area or entering a truck takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute. And I had the best C64 emulator which ran at the same speed as a real C64. Very Very bad and frustrating.

Replayability: Well I started playing this game 7 months ago and I finally finished it today. Okay, so I didn't play it all the time but it took so long because of the ultra slow load times. If you ever play this game (Ha) then be prepared for long pauses.

Overall/Final Score: 2/10
This game gets a 2 because it has fixed up translation and gameplay tweaks.
Metal Gear for C64 can be considered as the Metal Gear game that nobody knew, cared or hoped for. It is a very bad port of another Mediocre port that has very bad loading times. If you ever want to play this game, go look for the emulated disk on the internet. I recommend you play this game once to get a first hand look into the worst Metal Gear title in existance. Metal Gear fanboys (like myself) however may want to finish it to proclaim that they have finished every single Metal Gear game in existance.

Thank you for reading.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/30/02, Updated 12/30/02