Part 34: Metal Gear 2 Part Fifteen: Stairs

Metal Gear 2 Part Fifteen: Stairs


Here we are, back on the first floor of the Tower Building after Grey Fox sent Ultra Box after Snake and then crashed the elevator.

We need to get to the twentieth floor so that we can hang glide across the crevasse, because Grey Fox blew up the bridge Snake was going to use.

Grey Fox is a dick.



Back around the spiral to this elevator.


It goes up to the tenth floor. Why can't we just use the hang glider from the roof?


Anyhow, this is the tenth floor. You might recall my last visit here, when I found some items and blew up some walls, then headed off to rescue Holly.


What I have to do this time is just plant some C4 on the west wall...


...then forget which button sets off the bomb and which one plants more bombs...


...and voilà! A perfectly safe controlled demolition.


There are sensors here. Now, I didn't realise this before, because it's completely silly, but these are described in the manual:

The red lines that come off the sensors aren't lasers like I originally assumed, they're sonar waves. Apparently. Anyway, these are heartbeat sensors.


And that means they can't be beaten with my usual box-based shenanigans.


They can be beaten by just running past them when the lines aren't out, though. That hasn't stopped working.


Through that door is a guard. He spots me instantly, and he can't be fooled by box tricks, either.

This brings us to the meat of today's update.





The stairs.

Stairs soundtrack (I think):







We have to go up ten floors. Every floor is four screens. Guards are chasing Snake constantly. Thankfully, Snake runs fast enough that they often can't hit him.





Both the fight against Ultra Box and this stair sequence are reprised in Metal Gear Solid. I don't think many people care for either one.







There are tripwires on the thirteenth floor landings, which slow Snake down enough to give guards time to catch up and shoot him a few times. It's a good idea, but not vital, to wear your bulletproof vest on the stairs.





When this happens in Metal Gear Solid, guards come at you from both sides, and they're not deterred by screen transitions in the same way. It makes for a tenser sequence, but it's still not very exciting to play.

We're halfway there.





A lot of other things from this game, and from Metal Gear, show up again in Metal Gear Solid. Underwater insertion, a minefield where an anonymous "fan" calls to warn you, a fight against a tank, a fight against a Hind, changing temperatures of something to use it as a key.





The seventeenth floor tosses some ammo at Snake, but it's a bad idea to stop and shoot people here.

Metal Gear Solid was, supposedly, a representation of the original vision, which couldn't be realised in the way Kojima wanted on the MSX. It's interesting to see how far things came in 8 years - there were no Metal Gear releases between this game in 1990 and Metal Gear Solid in 1998.






The landings between seventeen and eighteen have pitfalls.

It's even more shocking to think about the difference between Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2 - those two were three years apart, like Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2. Metal Gear Solid was the real breakthrough for the series' popularity as well as contributing to the explosion of stealth elements in action games.





This is the nineteenth floor. Only one more to go.

This game has a heavier action emphasis than Metal Gear had, obviously. It's a much faster game, and the bosses are more involved than in the original. You can see in this game, more than in Metal Gear, the setting of the stage for the fast and loose sneaking in MGS and MGS2, as well as the specialised and gimmicky bosses that show up throughout the Solid series.





After a long chase, we're finally there. The twentieth floor. All we have to do is go through this door.


But, doors can be finicky in this game! I was something like three pixels out of the "door open" zone, so I thought I had to kill some guards to move on. The alert never runs out in this area. You can see in the screen that I've already used 20 of my 200 bullets.



I tried the door again, and this time I got it. You can see that this looks like the place where we fought Red Blaster. The internal consistency is nice to see. Just try not to think about the fact that the room behind that door would have to be bigger on the inside.

We're on the twentieth floor, but this update is getting pretty full and I don't want to put the pre-jump content with what follows it immediately, so I'll probably put it in a mini-update that goes up later tonight.