Part 32: Metal Gear 2 Part Thirteen: Zanzibar Land Gift Shop

Metal Gear 2 Part Thirteen: Zanzibar Land Gift Shop


Now that we've spent some time in the sauna, Natasha's brooch has become a key! For all the little things this game does, it doesn't change the item name, so it's still described as the Zanzibar Land logo.

The same logo can be seen on Kessler's headband, by the way.


See?

As far as I know, that's because he was involved in the Zanzibar Independence War and just hasn't changed his clothes since it ended two years ago. This isn't building up to him turning traitor later in the game or anything, it's just there.



I ended up getting caught a second later and reloading my save. When I did, the guard had this black circle floating around him, censoring...something?




Coming out of the sauna and bedroom, you need to sneak back over the bird floor. It's easy enough to do this just by crawling under the beds, but it's kind of funny to be a jerk, slap on the cardboard box, and just keep waking the guys up over and over while you pass through.


You remember the guard from the locker room? This guy:


Well, it turns out that the bag he was pushing was the trash. The bag he kept in his locker, with nothing else.

A prank, perhaps?



Now that we have a handy key, we can open this locker and find...



The cassette tape!

Yes, the cassette is a "secret" item, so there is no manual entry for it. As an aside, this game was developed before the decision to put technology ahead of where it should be in the Metal Gear universe, because cassettes certainly existed in 1990. In reality, they'd be fairly obsolete and hard-to-find by 1999.

The effects of the cassette tape are to play this track:

(The Zanzibar Land national anthem.)


And make soldiers do this. While you use the tape, soldiers will just stand still for a short time. This makes it easy to sneak past them/punch them to death in the hopes of getting their rations. The tape only has a few uses in it before it breaks (I guess), though, so you don't want to waste it on little rooms like I did here.


Getting the tape finishes our adventure on the fourth floor, so it's time to go back to the elevator.


There, we go down to the second floor...


And switch elevators to head down to the basement of the Zanzibar Building.


This is the first entirely new floor in a while. First thing we want to do is head north.


Where we find this man guarding two rooms, one open and one closed.



There's nothing in here except ammo, though, and I'm not hurting for ammo. It's almost always a better idea to try to punch the guards if you really want to kill them, because then they might drop rations. The last time I really needed to shoot someone was when I fought Black Color.





Here you can see me messing around with a pit trap. They just will not kill you if you keep moving when you cross them. Unless you take a screenshot in the middle, which makes the game lag for half a second, just long enough to stop registering the input and kill you.

Fun fact: this is the first real glitch I've run into while working on this thread. All three of these games, including Snake's Revenge are very well put together.


With that finished, let's head south! There's a keycard lock on the door, but it's nothing to stop us at this point.



In these first rooms, more C4 and more ammo. I think that, if I had used all 200 bullets I can currently carry, the ammo I'd be able to pick up in this basement would more than refill my stocks. The C4 is even more useless, because it should never be used for anything other than destroying walls.




In another room, though, the submachine gun!

This thing is the same type of bullet hose that showed up in Metal Gear. Unlike that game, though, it actually has a use in this one, and you'll get to see it in action in a couple of updates.



The next part of the basement has grenades. There might have been something else here, but whatever it was, it wasn't remarkable enough to merit a screenshot.

This area is clearly an armoury/arsenal. It's nice to see a coherent design, instead of a bunch of crap just laying around wherever. It was even better when they brought the concept back in MGS/MGS2, where you needed various keycards to get everything in the armoury and had to keep coming back throughout.

"Nice" in a design way, not a backtracking way.




The next portion has missiles and more ammo. We haven't had to fire a Stinger since the fight with the Hind D, and R/C missiles haven't been used at all yet. A lot of these doors have card locks, too, so I think that it might have been meant as a sort of area that you would keep returning to as you needed more and more specific hardware, and the design was just changed later on.


This is a well-designed room. The guards cover each other nicely and make it a risk to try to punch them both or to just try and run past them.



I tried to dick around with the bucket, but they both ended up standing on my sprite. That meant I was taking constant damage.


So I died like a dunce.


There are also these dastardly pit traps in the floor, just in case.




The item they were guarding was worth the hassle though: the bullet(proof) vest.

It does exactly what it says it does. This will be very important in the same place as the submachine gun. It's not the most useful item throughout the game (and is actually optional), but when it shines, it really shines.


The west side of the floor is made up of a series of rooms attached to this one. As you can see, tripwires are also making a return.


They just slow you down, and this one can't even get you caught. It's just a hassle.



On the next screen, I pop into this room. Inside are a robot mouse (useless!) and a new item.



It's an oxygen tank.

That means we're going to have to do some swimming later, I guess. I can't really get excited about that, it's just a hallway with sort of a timer attached.


As I'm coming out of the oxygen tank/robot mouse room, I run immediately into a guard! Whoops!

For some reason - probably because you would get an aneurysm trying to put together the geometry - the radar separates the rooms from the rest of the floor, so it's useless while you're inside and you sometimes run into situations like this.




After I use some ninja tricks to ditch the alert, I find these gas grenades.

Useful in one part of the game! I honestly don't even know what these do to enemies; I think they work like the poison gas you sometimes find around Zanzibar Land, but I've never used them offensively.


Tripwires actually make a noise when you run into them! Also, as you can see, the brooch changes shape back to normal after being taken out of the heat for a while.




There's a surveillance camera watching these wires, so it's a good idea to throw on the box/bucket while you break them. The guard can hear you, but he'll never get there fast enough to do anything about it.




In this room, you'll find another technically optional but handy item, the camouflage mat.

For some reason, this is classified as a weapon. Probably just a programming thing, to let you set it like a mine.


Anyway, you just equip the thing, hit the shoot button, and it shows up on the ground (it's the green rectangle in the picture). Then you can just crawl under it, and voilà! You're invisible!


Boo!

When you're done with the mat, you have to make sure you step on it again to pick it up. Don't want to leave it behind like a jackass, do you?





The guards shoot your box up a bunch before deciding that it checks out, but they'll ignore the bucket entirely. This makes the bucket a better choice when you're directly in someone's line of sight, and then you can switch to the box so that you're not making noise every time you move. Either one can be used to shut down a cheap alert like the one I would have gotten here, though.



That's all for the basement! After a quick trip to the second floor, we switch elevators and head down to the first!



Our destination this time: this big hangar door, which we can open with our new high-level keycards.


Behind them: a bunch of guard dummies.


This screen has more, but it also has one real guard. This is a good place to use the tape, as it stops him from hassling Snake.


Then you can murder him freely.




Behind that man, we finally find what we came here for! The hang glider!

Unfortunately, it is a tiny novelty hang glider. Completely useless to Solid Snake. I guess they replaced that arsenal from earlier with things from the Zanzibar Land gift shop. Huge novelty guns, tiny little hang gliders, robot mice.

Nah, I'm just messin'. This is what we need to get across that gap. Somebody on the design team must have really hated this part, though, because that's two sources calling it useless.

What does our CO say?

: Fight when you should fight. Destroy when you should destroy. Basic rules in battlefields and shoot-em-ups. ...Over.

Is he telling us to destroy the hang glider? Has he gone senile?

Roy Campbell: IS HE EVEN FIT FOR DUTY?