Part 5: Metal Gear Part Five: Mazes and Machineguns

Metal Gear Part Five: Mazes and Machineguns

The first part of this portion of the game takes place in Outer Heaven's basement, where this song plays (I believe):


Fact: There are nine songs on this game's soundtrack, including a little piece of game over music.

Also a fact: All the tracks blur together after a while, except for the siren at the start of the alert music.


Outside of the room where Solid Snake killed Shoot Gunner, there's a maze. The only enemies in the maze are dogs. Dogs are a pain in the ass because they can detect Snake even through the cardboard box and I have never managed to spend any appreciable amount of time with one that hasn't chased me. They cannot, however, trigger alerts, which is nice.

Dog fact: Dogs will chase you from screen to screen, but always from behind (as far as I've seen), so they will sometimes come from directions they shouldn't be able to.

Dog fact: Nothing is faster than a dog.


Calling Schneider, he tells Snake this, which is the most helpful thing he's said all game.

Schneider can be helpful if you have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to be doing, but he generally sucks, especially since you can just grab a walkthrough for the game. Also, he has a predilection to being vague.


Getting through the basement maze requires blasting through (visually unremarkable) sections of walls, though, so he gets a point here.


Explode enough walls and shoot enough dogs, and you'll find this, the Bomb Blast Suit.

This is an item in the adventure game puzzle solution vein. Everything in this game is pretty grounded, though. I think Metal Gear 2 was the bullshit puzzle king of the series.


Explode the wall just north of where Shoot Gunner's fight let out and you'll find an enemy uniform. This is another item that the manual has nothing on, except for a picture:



The uniform and the bomb blast suit are the only items to be found in the basement for now, so I hop on the elevator and go to the second floor.


If you don't know about the box, this is the way to sneak past these cameras. It is not particularly difficult.


This screen is still bullshit, though, and I still hate it.


With card 3, you can open the door those assholes are guarding. This doesn't pay off immediately.


But it does lead to another rolling pin room. I'm not sure how these things roll constantly, but I'm also not an engineer.



This section struck me as particularly tedious, and I don't know why. This game really isn't all that exciting to play once you're sufficiently skilled. The sneaking certainly isn't as finicky or as interesting as it is in later games. It's generally just waiting.


In one of the rooms is a landmine on a table, guarded by three sleeping guards. If you are an idiot/don't have the silencer, you could wake the guards up, I suppose, but they're generally just a bit of a slowdown.

Landmines are landmines, there's nothing exciting to be said here. You do have to be a little more careful than in other games, though, because you can't pick them up by crawling. Solid Snake can't crawl in this game.

The landmine is also our second-last weapon. There's not much to be had in this game.


Parachute dive from the rooftop.

This guy is across the hall from the landmines/naptime room. Outer Heaven's design staff did some very interesting things with the place. Just another reason why Schneider is the worst.


On the south end of the second floor is this screen. The darker part of the screen is an electric floor.


Get the guard's attention and he activates it.


Sneaking by is made much more difficult by the fact that this guard can see behind him. I think he also has a wider field of vision than normal. In my experience, this man right here is the most effective guard in the entire Metal Gear series.


The item he's guarding, the item that is so important that it requires this whole tedious section of gameplay, is infrared goggles.





They let you see where the lasers are in screens with lasers. They're useful, but I'll be damned if they feel like they're worth the effort it takes to get them.


This guy is in the room past the second set of lasers, and rescuing raises Snake's class to three stars. Only one level to get (five more POWs). He also tells us why we need to get to the courtyard, so it seems like he really should have come before the guy telling us about Outer Heaven's awful design?


One more room over is another boss arena, this time featuring Machinegun Kid.


Machinegun Kid video.

Well, if it's a boss fight, let's try Diane again.


“He has a machinegun, you have a missile launcher. Figure it out, fuckass.”

Now that we finally get through to her, Diane gives us the first clear, unambiguously useful support in the game.

Her profile:
I guess Diane sexes the enemy up (and subsequently back down) to get information for Snake. No matter how she does it, she is the most useful contact we have so far.

Music fact: according to Wikipedia, “positive punk” was just another name for gothic rock.



Anyway, Diane was right. The trick to beating Machinegun Kid is to stand behind cover and steer R/C missiles into his face. Four hits and he explodes.

Poor guy didn't even get two text boxes in the whole game.


The room he was guarding holds the parachute.



Well, Snake's prepared to parachute off the roof into the courtyard (real shoddy design, just total crap), so let's head up there now.