There are some weird takes on the new Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 and that somehow Konami hasn’t done right by these games. That’s just plain wrong.
The main complaint seems to be that the HD remasters of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 don’t support high enough resolutions on PC. Furthermore, when you mod the games to force higher resolutions, things start to break.
The HD remasters were originally done by Bluepoint, who really know their stuff when it comes to remaking classic games. Especially those that were released on the PlayStation 2.
The latter is a key point, as the PlayStation 2 era of Metal Gear Solid used all manner of artistic trickery to get more out of the hardware. However, these graphical workarounds weren’t intended to be scaled up at a later date.
That means instead of changing a great deal of the backend to get something similar but probably not as good, these HD ports capped the resolution to retain most of the graphical gimmicks.
So keeping these games intact is actually the right approach here, otherwise trying to make strange and pretty bespoke hacks to work on modern PCs would likely break more than it fixed.
This is often a trade off in development and Bluepoint made the right call to keep these games as close to how they were intended.
Finally, one additional gripe is that these games don’t work well with mouse and keyboard. That may be true, but again they were never meant to be played on a mouse and keyboard.
There are plenty of excellent PC pads available, with the recent wireless 8BitDo effort coming highly recommended at only $69.99.
Protecting our collective gaming history is crucially important, but that also means that some games need to remain a certain way even on modern hardware.
Inconvenient as that may be, that’s how these games will work best. Personally, I am just glad we have Metal Gear Solid: Integral finally released outside of Japan, but that may just be me.
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 is now available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PC and Switch.
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