Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a special game. When it came out for PS3 in 2008, it was a cinematic epic years ahead of its time, with stellar action, subtle stealth, and a narrative steeped in years of melodramatic convolutions that I couldn't help but fall in love with. It was my first game in the series and while I rarely understood what was going on, it was so well done and so ridiculous that I didn't care.
Unfortunately, Hideo Kojima's classic has remained confined to the PS3 ever since, with the folks at Konami showing little interest in porting or remastering this saga-ending classic for modern hardware. Well, until now. The upcoming Legacy Collection will combine Guns of the Patriots and Peace Walker into one beautiful package with improved visuals, performance and several new features. For the first time in more than a decade, the final chapter of Solid Snake isn't far behind.
Even better, it retains a lot of weird features and mechanics that I was worried would be shelved purely because they would be too difficult to adapt or wouldn't make sense to today's players.
I know it sounds ridiculous to suggest that the iPod wouldn't make sense to modern gamers, but the technology simply has no place in today's climate unless you want to be particularly retro with your music habits. In case you're totally unfamiliar with them, iPods were Apple's equivalent of an MP3 player, and they were very popular in the 00s and 10s before smartphones became mainstream. They were iPhones without a phone.
Even when smartphones hit, I still noticed a lot of my friends using iPod Touches on the way to school as a teenager, while I used a used iPod Nano for years until it finally got dust. Compared to CD/cassette players, these devices allow you to easily store and play hundreds or even thousands of songs while building a robust digital library using software that is so ahead of its time.
Yes, explaining all this makes me want to turn into a pile of dust.
Smartphones would eventually phase them out and become the thing we use for everything, but I'm old enough to remember when you needed dedicated devices for music, video, and playing video games — and that includes Metal Gear Solid 4. Inside Snake's inventory, thanks to the then incredibly lucrative partnership with Apple, you could equip an iPod and use it to listen to all kinds of music and podcasts while embarking.
It was something you couldn't touch for the entire game and you'd still have the old days, but the fact that it was there and so much effort was put into custom content creation was hugely impressive. It helped the world of MGS4 feel alive, but I was worried that the remaster would rip those elements out, not only because the licensing agreements had expired, but it just makes sense.
But judging by a recent live stream of the game, features like the iPod are completely intact, as are many of the songs and podcasts players can listen to on them from the 2008 original. We haven't seen the feature used extensively in the stream itself, but its presence alone is enough to make me jump to conclusions and believe it will be faithful.
We saw similar treatment for the first three MGS games in the first collection, along with ways to access the regional variants of each release. Even without Kojima working on this duo of collections, Konami thankfully understands the enduring love we have for Metal Gear.
And you can still use Playboy to distract your enemies
Snake can once again use dirty magazines to distract patrolling enemies in Metal Gear Solid 4, proving that soldiers really can fight on the battlefield. While the previous games featured a generic trashy magazine, this time Konami teamed up with Playboy to include official models in the game that I imagined would be dropped along with the iPod.
At the time, Guns of the Patriots was a huge blockbuster that Sony and Konami saw as a huge multimedia opportunity that was perfect for product placement of all kinds. Calorie Mate was the tip of the iceberg and for years I thought those were some of the things holding the game back from being remastered. Turns out they obviously didn't want to because everything looks pristine.
The return of the iPod and Playboy in the upcoming remaster is great news, not only because they're fun gameplay features to play with, but also important in contextualizing the time and place the game was first released.
Despite being set in a fictional version of our own world full of futuristic technology, Snake still uses an iPod to listen to his tunes, while cable TV has remained constant because we haven't yet embraced streaming as a society. It's a beautiful time capsule in its own right, and abandoning any of these characteristics feels like a betrayal of its very identity.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is a weird and wonderful game, and if you play it for the first time later this year, I'm so excited that it looks like you'll have a full experience.
