Part 10: Metal Gear Part Ten: Tunnels and Backtracking

Metal Gear Part Ten: Tunnels and Backtracking


This time, we're back in the basement of building two.


Schneider calls Snake, but this call didn't get through before because our communications were jammed.

Too bad for Scheider, though, because I'm pretty sure I needed card 6 to get to the antenna, which means I needed to go through the maze here, not to mention that a POW told Snake that Pettrovich was here, which means I already know there's fucking gas in there.

Scheider, you are literally the worst.



Now we're back in this maze, which led us to Fire Trooper last time. It's neat that the wall we blew up to progress last time is still blown up.


Running back to Fire Trooper's boss room, we can call Diane for this. I guess this means that Snake is supposed to have lines that we don't see, and also that he is still the same womaniser as in the later games?

As well as I think this game has aged, I would really have liked to see the characterisation of Snake as a rookie.



Doop de doop, now we're getting somewhere. This dark room is where we need to go.


The flashlight solves the problem of the dark for Snake.


There are no enemies in these tunnels.



But there are pit traps! There's more than enough room to manoeuvre around these, so they're an annoyance more than anything. This game gets pretty lax with the whole "sneaking" thing towards the end.



I think I died here a bunch of times when I first played the game, because sometimes the only way through is to trigger the trap and then just book it and hope you make it past.



At the end of the tunnel, there are dogs. Dogs are like guards in that they take one bullet to kill, but unlike guards in that they can't trigger an alert or attack from range. Basically, dogs are about as much of a threat as the crates and tables sitting around.


The other thing at the end of the tunnel is this room, where somebody yells for help. There's nobody here, though, so they must be on the other side of the wall. You know what this means? It means Outer Heaven built two walls into existing cells to keep hostages. Schneider was the architect of Outer Heaven.

Fuck you, Schneider.



I blow a hole in the wall, nothing new. What's on the other side?


A tied-up woman. Outer Heaven puts key scientists behind regular card-locked doors, but this woman merits her own custom-built cell.


Father is forced to make Metal Gear. Please help him soon.

This is Elen Pettrovich, who Dr. Pettrovich sent us to find. She has three lines in the whole game and appears in all of one scene. I just wanted to point that out, everybody. Try to remember it, would you?


Why did they capture Pettrovich's daughter? They already had him, they could just point a gun at his head to make him build Metal Gear.

Maybe they're just really big fans of ballet?


Whatever, Snake can chat up ladies later. We've got shit to do.


Who even builds a maze in a basement? It's not like it's going to really help if the enemy is already this far into your fortress.

Eat shit and die, Schneider.


With my fancy new keycards, I can open a door in the maze and find the body armour.


Body armour is a pretty useful item, but it would have been even more useful if I'd picked it up five updates ago, which I could have done. Of course, it isn't very useful against bosses and you shouldn't be getting into firefights anywhere else.





Back to building 2! You can also take the desert path to get back, but this way is quicker and has no sneaking portions. What I'm saying is that you should never take the desert path.


Well, we've rescued his daughter, so let's go to the second floor and see what Pettrovich has to say.


Through the magic of editing, we're there already. Before we talk to Pettrovich, though:


So the Arnolds are in the same production series as Metal Gear, I guess. Also, TX-55 is a lot less impressive name than Rex. Plus, it looks like the Outer Heaven diet plan for scientists is mostly food deprivation. Guy's pretty thin.


of building 3, 20km north of this building. The way to destroy Metal Gear is one. Set Plastic Bombs to the thinly armored legs. The sequence is R, R, L, R, L, L, R, L, L, R, R, L, R, L, R... Oops, I forgot the rest! Anyway set 16.

Pettrovich is a wordy fucker, we're only partway through this conversation. Hope you have a notepad handy, or you can't win the game. Pettrovich tells Snake the order for 15 of the 16 bombs.  The last one is R. 

It strikes me as a real feat to build something that needs 16 blocks of C4 planted on it in a specific order to blow up. Let's see what else Pettrovich has to say:


They can be destroyed with a Rocket Launcher. Good luck...

Whoops, I made part of Pettrovich's speech useless last update. Technically, killing the Arnolds is sequence breaking, I suppose, but this game only sort of hints at sequence and it's easy to go off the rails, even though it tends to only affect little things like the order you get items in.

You may also have noticed that this update alone has as much dialogue as pretty much the rest of the game. What little story Metal Gear has is packed quite tight into the back half of the game. It's nowhere near as as other games in the series, but it is a pretty big change.

The story weight is also called out by the fact that the endgame contains very little actual sneaking.


To cap off the update, I just wanted to show you what Big Boss has to say now that Snake's completed two of his three stated mission objectives.