Part 17: Snake's Revenge Part Five: Fuck it, Snake's Revenge

Snake's Revenge Part Five: Fuck it, Snake's Revenge


Last time on Snake's Revenge, Snake found the ugliest building. Look at all those lines. Or don't, it'll probably give you a headache. Who would design this?


This is just another boring building, so you don't have to look at too much of it. There are cameras in this room, though, and I think the only other place cameras have shown up in this game has been in the sidescrolling portions. They come so close to mixing it up on this one.



Also in this building, we find infrared goggles. Or, according to the menu:


Night site.


The infrared goggles let Snake see lasers, just like in Metal Gear. I don't know why the manual uses the word "help" for this, because they don't help anything, they make it possible in the first place.


Whatever, let's take this elevator and ditch this hole.




There are lasers on the roof, but thankfully we picked up the night site in the building. Dodging lasers is even more boring than dodging guards, and you can't even punch them to farm rations. Introducing them this late in the game, when you just want it to end, is just another example of poor game design.


At the end of the roof section is a gondola. We're in the mountains, by the way. You'd only know that if you read the story section of the manual and really thought about things.




To progress, you have to hop up on the gondola and ride it for a couple screens, when...

A sidescroller pops up! (This video is the entire gondola experience)

The idea of this sidescroller is that you run back and forth, dodging the looks of the guards popping out. This would probably work if there were a pattern or if you had a decent window to react, but instead it's just clumsy. Sometimes a guard pops up right under you and you're spotted straight away. The enemies that attack look kind of cool, though, I guess.




There's another laser setup on this building. Not a huge hazard, but boring. And why would you only put your motion detectors on the roof? That's the last place an intruder can be. The enemy probably gets a hundred alarms a month from guys just sneaking up on the roof to have a smoke break or birds crossing their lasers or something.



Take the elevator down, and you get to enjoy the same atrocious tileset again.


than Metal Gear 1.

Continuing on, you find an enemy officer. I'm pretty sure that Snake's "truth gas" is just LSD left over from MKUltra, because this makes no sense. What's seven times more powerful? Its weapons? Its armour? Its engines? The nukes they're loading onto it?


Also in this room, a grateful but useless POW.



A little further on, I find card 6. I don't have card 5, though, because it's found later (spoilers). This means, essentially, that card 6 replaces card 5. What purpose does this serve?


You can also see antidote here, which cures poison. In this game, it's a consumable, which makes me think that the devs understood that items running out would add to the challenge of the game, but still missed the reason for that and thought that the best way to implement them was to make sure the player has to use them all.


Elevator time!


Now we get to sneak back through the lasers and do another gondola portion.

I would forgive you if you skip over this one.

I don't know why they repeated that section. If I had to guess, I would say they were trying to break up the monotony of the gondola travel, but it would have been easier to just make it one screen (or take it out completely). It's more likely that the designers thought they'd come across some hot shit with the gondola and didn't want to waste it.






Lasers, elevator, these tiles, you get what's going on here. The layout of this room and the guards' movement patterns are actually pretty good, so I think it was either made early in the design process or just lifted wholesale from Metal Gear.


Also, our radio is being jammed. This entire building exists just to hold the solution to this problem.




These are just some of the rooms here. I think this building is laid out pretty well. The zig-zag hallways aren't spectacular, but they're at least kind of neat.


Also here: a POW. Now, the whole "what is Metal Gear?" schtick worked fine in Metal Gear because Snake (and, by extension, the player) didn't know what Metal Gear was. In this game, it's just white noise. Metal Gear isn't supposed to be a mystery anymore, it's supposed to be a threat.


Here's the antenna we need to fix our jamming problem. I told you it was lifted straight out of the first game.


Second verse, same as the first. What a pointless addition to the game.



Again with giving items two different names. By the way, am I the only one who puts extra emphasis on the first syllable of those hyphenated item names? AN-tenna, BAT-tery, ANTI-dote.


Oh well, back to the roof!

Yeah, you have to ride the gondola and do the sidescroller three times. Gameplay!

That's the last gondola section, at least. They really load the game down with sidescrollers at this point, probably because they couldn't come up with a lot of good room arrangements. It would be hard, especially if you're making a cash-in game and don't understand stealth.



At the end of the gondola line is a castle. This doesn't really fit with the whole "action movie" aesthetic that Metal Gear put forward and that Snake's Revenge copied thus far. A bunker would make more sense for that. It's probably just trying to say "hey, I'm a video game and this is the last level", whatever the consequence may be.

That's it for today, everybody. Next time, we should be finishing the game.