Get your cardboard box ready.

One of the most briefly shown title screens ever.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/14/19 – 12/27/19
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Metal Gear Longplay

Metal Gear is one of those long beloved series in all of video games.  It didn’t really start out that way though.  It didn’t catch on until Metal Gear Solid came out on PlayStation, which in my opinion was the turning point for the series and elevated creator Hideo Kojima to auteur status.  While not normally my kind of game, I have played some of the Metal Gear Solid series.  Therefore, I came into Metal Gear on NES knowing the sensibilities of the Metal Gear series but not so much how to approach or play this particular entry.  How much of Metal Gear Solid and its ideas originated from earlier titles like this one?  I doubt I’ll be able to answer that question, but I can provide some background information and my thoughts on how this game played.

The first Metal Gear released on the MSX2 in Japan in July 1987.  It was developed and published by Konami and designed and directed by Hideo Kojima.  Metal Gear was quickly ported to Famicom for release in December 1987, and it reached the NES in North America in June 1988 and Europe in 1989.  The North American version was the first NES game Konami published under the Ultra Games label.

The overarching story of Metal Gear is already fairly well known, and the NES version does not differ much from it.  You play the role of Solid Snake, a fresh recruit of the special forces unit called FOXHOUND, who is sent on a special mission codenamed Intrude N313 by his commanding officer Big Boss.  FOXHOUND’s best agent, Gray Fox, was previously sent to a fortress near South Africa called Outer Heaven run by an evil dictator.  Gray Fox was to investigate Outer Heaven and neutralize any imminent threats found within, however, FOXHOUND lost contact of Gray Fox.  Solid Snake has been sent to find out what happened to Gray Fox.  I’m jumping ahead a bit, but a little while into the game you find out Outer Heaven is housing a weapon of mass destruction called Metal Gear, a walking tank capable of firing nuclear weapons from anywhere in the world.  Your mission then is to destroy Metal Gear.

It’s always important to have good communication.

Metal Gear, the game, is a top-down action-adventure game.  Solid Snake is controlled with the D-pad and he can move in four directions.  Press the B button to punch.  The A button fires weapons though you do not start out with any.  The Start button simply pauses the game, while the Select button brings up a selection menu.

The game begins with you being airdropped into the jungle.  Upon arriving you are immediately called via your transmitter as the word “CALL” is flashed at the bottom of the screen.  Press Select to bring up the menu, then choose “TRANS” to use your transmitter.  There you will automatically receive a message from Big Boss.  He gives you the frequency on the transmitter where you can reach him again if needed.  After the message is over you’ll hear this super-annoying horn sound.  At this time, you can tune the transmitter to help you send or receive messages.  Use Left and Right on the D-pad to scan through frequencies 120.00 through 120.99.  If someone is already trying to reach you, simply landing on the proper frequency will deliver the message automatically.  If you want to reach out yourself, tune the frequency and then press Up to switch to Send mode.  Solid Snake will call for help and in the right situation with the right frequency you will make contact and get a message back.  As you can imagine, using the transmitter is good for advancing the story and getting tips on forward progress.  When you are all done, press Select to go back to the action.

Your first task is to proceed through the jungle, moving downward through several screens.  Here you get a taste of using stealth to make your way forward without being noticed.  If you walk in front of a soldier, he sees you and puts the game into an alert state.  Firing a noisy weapon also draws attention to you.  Defeating all the enemies on screen or simply moving to the next screen is enough to escape the alert state and go back to quiet.  Until then, all enemies start moving in on you.  Soldiers have guns and aren’t afraid to use them.  If some enemies are left alone long enough, other enemies may start appearing and make things more difficult.  Of course, you can avoid alert state by staying out of line of sight.  You can punch enemies three times without them seeing you to take them out and stay quiet.  You can also wait for soldiers to leave or fall asleep, giving you an edge.  The third screen of the game introduces you to guard dogs that go alert when you get near, which always happens.  I found it is best to be as quiet as possible and avoid confrontation, but it is helpful to know how to navigate the alert state as it is hard to avoid sometimes.

Sneaking isn’t easy in close quarters.

Getting out of the jungle is not an easy task.  Not only is this first part of the game pretty challenging, it was also a little unclear how to get out of the jungle at all.  Go down far enough and you reach a fence locked off by a gate that you can’t open.  It turns out you need to enter a covered truck simply by approaching it from the back.  If you’re like me and didn’t know about that until the end of the section, it’s a good idea to go back and investigate the other ones you passed as some of them contain items or weapons.  When you have something usable, you can go into the menu and equip it.  There are two screens for this, one for weapon selection and the other for item selection.  The weapon selection screen shows all weapons you’ve collected as well as ammo for each.  Simply point the cursor to the weapon you want, then press Select to leave the menu and equip your new weapon.  Choosing an item from the item selection screen functions in much the same way.  Sometimes items, such as rations, must be used from this screen with the A button.  A few items are equipped permanently without you selecting it, but most items need to be selected to be used outside of the menu.  Anyway, one of the trucks in the jungle transports you in front of the first building.

Most of the game is spent inside of buildings.  These can have pretty large layouts with multiple floors, so creating a map might be helpful, or maybe you can do what I did and memorize the basic structure.  To get inside of the initial building to begin with, you need to locate and equip a keycard.  Many of the rooms inside the buildings are behind locked doors that require some keycard.  These secured rooms hold a majority of the weapons and items in the game.  More commonly you will find ammunition for your weapons or rations for restoring your health.  You can also find captured soldiers, who you can free simply by walking up to them.  They will sometimes give you advice or at the very least a thank you.  For every five captured soldiers you free, you go up in rank.  Increasing your rank increases the size of your health bar as well as letting you hold more ammo.  You can go up to four stars in rank, and you need that rank to finish the game.  If you shoot and kill a hostage, then you go down in rank, so don’t do that.

Be someone’s hero today.

There are several weapons in the game.  You can fire standard bullets with either a handgun or machine gun.  The handgun shoots straight while the machine gun fires bullets one at a time in a spread pattern.  A grenade launcher and a rocket launcher fire their respective shots.  Plastic explosives blow up on a timer, while mines explode on contact with an enemy.  There is a remote-controlled missile.  When firing this weapon, you sit still while you set the rocket’s direction with the D-pad.  You can also pick up a silencer for your handgun and machine gun so that you can use them without causing alerts.

You will acquire roughly a screen full of items of all sorts.  Many of these are the card keys, and some of them are items that open up progress in a part of the game, which makes them just like keys.  I won’t go through all of the items but a few of them have different uses.  The binoculars let you peek into an adjacent room briefly to see its layout.  A mine detector lets you see hidden enemy mines in a few screens.  Infrared goggles allow you to see invisible lasers that alert the enemy when touched.  A gas mask lets you breathe in a gas-filled room so that you don’t suffer any damage.  The antidote is good for curing poison if you get bitten by a spider.  Not everything is required to beat the game, but it’s a good idea to pick up whatever you find.

When you die, you can choose to Continue or End.  Continuing puts you at a checkpoint with all of your stuff intact.  Evidently checkpoints are determined by your rank, not by your equipment or by distance reached.  This means a one-star rank puts you back all the way at the start, which is definitely frustrating when you’ve reached deep into the building.  Choose End to see your password.  Passwords are 25 characters long consisting of all capital letters and numbers 1-6.  This is a game where the passwords store all of your information, such as weapons, items, hostages saved, and even your ammo counts.  Part of the password is a checksum just to ensure you have entered a valid password and aren’t just typing in random stuff on the password screen to try and skip ahead.  This game takes several hours to play through for the first time and so passwords are appreciated.

There are plenty of traps, some often unseen.

This was my first time playing through Metal Gear.  I knew about this game and read about it a lot in old gaming magazines.  I never ran into a copy back then, but then later when I got one I didn’t play it past the first few screens.  I was more intrigued by it conceptually than I was interested in actually playing it.  That was how I felt about the Metal Gear Solid games too.  However, years ago I decided to finally buy Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection on PS2 and played through all three games at that time.  I struggled through them but wanted to see them all to the finish.  I suppose that satiated me as I haven’t touched Metal Gear again until now.

Playing through Metal Gear on NES for the first time was an interesting experience.  The first stretch of the game is tough on a new player and the game doesn’t open up until you get through the jungle.  I really got into it once I reached the first building.  At that point, Metal Gear starts to feel like a dungeon crawler.  I explore the building, getting a little bit further each time and picking up new items that make future runs easier.  I caught my groove in the middle part of the game before getting hung up some toward the end.  I have the map that was included with the NES game, and I looked at it once or twice just to make sure I understood the layout of the game.  This wasn’t a spoiler free playthrough because I needed to look up the solutions to the maze zones.  It was frustrating that the game didn’t tell you anywhere what to do there, and I gave up trying to figure it out on my own.  I would say my time with the game was fun with a few annoying parts.

I was able to record a full playthrough of Metal Gear.  My first time through the game took about 8 hours or so.  The second time for my longplay was much faster at around 1 hour and 45 minutes.  The game really isn’t all that big once you know where everything is and how to navigate the buildings.  I wanted to beat the game without dying but I didn’t quite get there.  I died once to the tank by mistake in the middle of the game.  I also died a few times trying to get through the dark rooms with all the holes.  I only cleared that part once in my first playthrough and I don’t think I ever found the right strategy for it.  That section is completely skippable, so after a few deaths, I went the long way around just to get it done.  I’m not completely happy with this run but it is good enough.

Don’t get run over like I did.

It’s hard to play this game without noticing how glitchy and unpolished it is, so I want to list some things I took note of during my time playing.  The most obvious characteristic of the game is its poor English translation.  Some examples are the well-known “I feel asleep!” and “The truck have started to move.”  This lack of grammar and spelling is all over this game, some things more obvious than others.  The card system has a major flaw in that doors require a certain card and only that card can be equipped to open the door.  There’s no indication what card is needed, and there are eight cards total, so you have to go in and out of the menu over and over swapping cards until you find the right one.  It is possible to reach late game sections early in the game and that causes some weird things to happen.  I had my transmitter go off only to pull up the transceiver to nothing.  Something happened to one of the characters and I presumed them dead though you can backtrack and communicate with them as if nothing happened.  There are also hints you can only get once when you rescue prisoners.  If you speed through the text or skip it, then it’s gone, and it might have been a vital clue for what to do next.  All of these things detracted from my enjoyment of the game a little bit.

There’s one more oddball thing about Metal Gear that has nothing to do with the game itself.  I’ve mentioned screw variants before on this blog.  To quickly recap, early NES games had five screws holding both sides of the cartridge together, and sometime in late 1987 the molds changed to a three-screw design for all future licensed NES carts.  Metal Gear was released long after three-screw carts were the standard, but somehow a few copies out there are in the five-screw form factor and I happen to own two of them.  These late five-screw variants are exclusively Konami or Ultra published titles, and all of them are missing the Caution label on the back of the cart.  These carts technically should not exist, but there are a couple of theories.  One is that these are refurbished games that were sent back for repair and they were fixed using leftover five-screw shells.  Another theory is that these were sample carts used for demos or in kiosks.  Whatever the case may be, these are very hard to find, and I am not sure if every Konami game has one of these variants as some have not yet been discovered.  Variant collectors will pay a lot of money for these.  I have a few others in my collection that I’ll mention when I play those games in the future.

Metal Gear is a game that both has a lot going for it and has a lot holding it back.  The graphics are very nice with lots of detail.  Even though the color scheme is a lot of green, brown, and gray, it still looks good to me.  I am not a fan of the font with the empty lines across almost every character.  I think the music is good.  The controls function appropriately with clean design.  The gameplay is fun and engaging, and I enjoyed exploring the buildings and sneaking past the guards.  I can see why this was a popular game for its time.  All the glitches and weird inconsistencies I mentioned before break the immersion a little bit.  Snake only moves and attacks in four directions which feels limiting, though at least the enemies behave the same way.  This is a game that will grab you by its story and its exploration, and it’s safe to say it delivered for me in both those departments.

#142 – Metal Gear

Go ahead, make my day.

There’s another title screen but this is clearly the better one.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 2/8/19 – 2/23/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Dirty Harry Longplay

Dirty Harry shares something in common with Gilligan’s Island. Trust me, these are comparisons I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be making on this blog. Nevertheless, this is a trivial one at best. One of the dates on Dirty Harry’s copyright screen is 1971, the year the film came out. It is the second earliest year displayed on an NES game that I’ve seen so far, several years after Gilligan’s Island’s 1964 debut. While Gilligan’s Island is still a weird choice for an NES game, Dirty Harry was timelier at least and would seem to make for a decent game. In reality, the game is at best passable.

Clint Eastwood stars in the film Dirty Harry. It was released in 1971 and was produced and directed by Don Siegel. It follows the story of inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department as he tracks down a killer named Scorpio. The movie was both a critical and financial success and is regarded as one of the best movies of 1971. There were four Dirty Harry sequels: Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool. The final film released in 1988, which is inside the NES life span and could explain why an NES Dirty Harry game was made.

Dirty Harry on NES was released in December 1990 in North America only. It is sometimes referred to as Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs though I cannot figure out where that subtitle originated from. It is not listed in any of the packaging, manual, or screens within the game. Dirty Harry was developed by Gray Matter and published by Mindscape.

Punching thugs in the streets like a boss

The game has a unique story from any of the other Dirty Harry films, though there are scenes borrowed from some of the movies for this game. The Anaconda is a new drug kingpin hailing from Colombia who has taken out The Dealmaker, the most successful criminal in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Anaconda is also taking over all the drug gangs in the city and killing anyone else who stands in his way. Not to be deterred by the police chief, Harry Callahan sets off on a mission to find and capture the Anaconda. The game takes place over three stages: The city streets, the waterfront docks, and Alcatraz Island. If you can capture The Anaconda on Alcatraz, you win the game.

Dirty Harry is a side-scrolling platformer. The controls for this one are a little clumsy. Use the D-pad to move around as usual. Up lets you climb ladders, enter doors, and walk up alleyways. Down does the same thing under or in front of you, otherwise you use Down to crouch. The B button punches. If you hold Up and press B, you kick instead. The A button is used for your gun. First press A to hold out and aim your gun, then press A again to shoot. Firing only work if you have both feet on the ground. You can press Up and Down to adjust the angle of your gun prior to firing. To jump you have to press A and B together. It sounds bad, and it’s not the best control, but jumping is surprisingly responsive. You can either jump straight up and down or jump forward at a fixed distance.

Press Start to pause the game and bring up the inventory screen. The top row of items are selectable with Left and Right. Put the cursor over the item you want and unpause to equip that item. Some items can only be used in certain situations and you default to the gun if that item can’t be used. If you run out of bullets, you can still hold out the gun but cannot fire. The second row of items cannot be selected and are used automatically as needed. Following the items are your score, health meter, and number of lives remaining.

Cops stroll on fire escapes in alleyways all the time.

You will spend most of your time in the first level if you are playing this game. The game starts out in the city streets. The layout here is parallel city streets connected by alleyways or sometimes doorways. For example, you start on one street, then you can go down the alley to another screen, and finally go out the alleyway on the other side onto a different street. All of these sections are side scrolling and there’s no map or compass to guide you. You must also enter buildings. Inside buildings, there are doorways and hallways you move through. Sometimes you can exit a building from the opposite side onto a different street. Other times there might be side doors that lead back into an alley. There is also a sewer system. These are side-scrolling sections with several different entry points on the streets. Passageways are typically blocked off by sewer grates and you have to locate switches to open them up so you can pass. The description here doesn’t really do justice on how tough this level is to navigate.

The buildings are where you find most of the items in this game. Once you enter through a hallway door, the rooms within are purely side-scrolling with no depth or other exits aside from the opposite end of the room. Some rooms have boxes in the background or on the floor. Kick the boxes in the background to break them and collect their contents. You can open boxes on the floor by jumping on top of them. There are also safes that can only be busted by blowing them up with explosives.

There are many items to collect. You can find bullets for your gun, either a small pack of 10 bullets or a large pack of 25 bullets, which is the max Dirty Harry can hold. Plastic explosives blow up safes. Select the explosive and then press A to set one up that explodes shortly after. You can also hurt enemies with these. Chili dogs restore half of your health meter and you get a little eating animation to go with it. The harpoon gun and missile launcher are powerful firing weapons that have limited ammo. Grappling hooks are used for swinging over treacherous areas. Bulletproof vests absorb enemy bullets for a while. The gas mask lets you survive in poisonous rooms. The flashlight lets you see while exploring the sewers. Crowbars are used to open locked doors within the buildings. You can find money bags or stashes of drugs that you confiscate for points. You can also find badges for extra lives that are sure to come in handy.

Sewers are merely door mazes with poison, shocks, and death water.

With all the ways you can go, the first stage is one gigantic maze. The city streets often have large walls that are too high to jump over. Sometimes you can do some platforming across ledges high enough where you can cross over the walls. There is some honest-to-goodness level design here where you need to plan out your movements so that you don’t fall. Since jump distance is fixed, you can get a feel for what you can do and it will always be consistent. The problem is there are some sections of forced high ground traversal where if you fall, you have to backtrack through the city to get back to where you were. It’s laughably easy to get lost when everything kind of looks the same.

There are many enemies in this game and they are all out to get you. Gang members run the streets and roam the halls. Some bad guys hang out on the rooftops and throw out grenades, bricks, or nets that trap you. Some just go straight to shooting. Enemies pour out of windows and bash you with punches or pipes. There can only be I think two enemies on the ground at once, but when you defeat them they will keep appearing. Buildings have huge snakes that guard drugs and money. You can jump on them to either stun them or kill them; the outcome seems to be random. Some rooms have lasers sliding across the floor. The sewers also have traps such as dripping sewer sludge, electric shocks, giant rats and cockroaches, and even remote-controlled cars. Falling into sewer water is instant death. All of these dangers are just in the first stage alone, though you will see other similar threats in the other two stages.

Dirty Harry faces several bosses in this game. Many of them are really large people that pack a lot of firepower. Usually you need to use your best weapons to take them out most effectively. Some of them require different tactics where you need to either trap them somehow or figure out how to pierce their defenses. There can be more than one boss in a level, so you can’t really tell from those encounters that you are at the end of the level. A good thing is that many defeated bosses give you three lives for winning.

This is one large guy!

Levels 2 and 3 are, thankfully, more straightforward affairs. There’s little exploration but more challenging enemies and tricky platforming. In the first level, you get nearly all your items from inside the buildings. After that, you don’t go into buildings any more, so sometimes defeated enemies will give you items. The item drops appear to be scripted and sometimes you can use that to your advantage.

Dirty Harry includes a password feature and continues. The passwords are five characters long A-Z. In this game you only receive two passwords that are simple words that are easy to remember. There is a third password I’ve found online that I believe gives you unlimited lives. I didn’t use it, but I found it easily just by doing some basic research on this game. If you’re not into passwords, some continues might help. The system in this game is a little weird. In the first stage only, you can continue up to three times with a fresh set of lives. You continue exactly from where you died if you ran out of health. In the other two levels, you are only given one continue. It doesn’t matter if you survive the first level with all continues intact or use them all up. Continues do refresh your gun ammo back to the maximum.

This was my first time playing Dirty Harry. Surprise, surprise, I haven’t seen any of the movies either. I’m sure I would like them if I ever gave them the chance. This is not an expensive game but is not commonly found either. It costs around $6-$8. I believe my collection copy is the only one I’ve owned, though I have seen it in stores on occasion.

As you could imagine, I spent most of my time figuring out the first stage. It is truly a nightmarish level. There are loops in the map that I had to take several times before I realized I was just retracing my steps. It’s not clear right away that you have to do platforming without falling on some streets to reach new areas. The sewer system is confusing and complicated with all the traps and switches you need to find. I couldn’t figure out one of the bosses and had to look up the solution online. I normally hate doing that but I’m glad I did here. I spent maybe a week and a half of playing before I learned how to clear the level. Things proceeded much more quickly after that. I beat the second level in about 30 minutes. The last level was pretty challenging but I beat it in a couple of days anyway.

Other levels are straightforward, except for this part.

There are some really bad design choices in the first level alone that are sure to turn people off of the game. Some people will hate the forced platforming sections, but I like them. I think it is one of the few elements of the game that has real design to it. They are a lot like jumping puzzles and you have to reason your way through the jumps. What I don’t like is falling down and having to backtrack because those sections always lock you away so that you just can’t go back directly and retry. You also get to cope with enemies that are trying to knock you down. A particularly egregious example of this is at the end of the first stage. There is a large expanse you must cross by hand-walking your way across a power line. Enemies are shooting at you and one bullet knocks you down. For a large portion of that section, if you fall the only way out is through the sewers. There you are led down into a one-way section that puts you all the way back to the start of the level. It takes at least five minutes of real time to backtrack to where you can try again, plus you will likely lose several lives along the way. It’s complete trash, but not as trash as the “ha ha ha” room. One building contains a room with the words “ha ha ha” written on the side. The room doesn’t contain an exit door so once you go in you are stuck. The only way out is to reset the console and start over. This room is deep in the level too. I can’t tell if maybe this was a default room and the developers neglected to link the door to an actual room, or if the developers left this in as a dumb joke. I tend to believe the latter, but who knows?

I ended up beating Dirty Harry four times. I realize this is way too many times to beat this game, but I have my reasons. The first time was playing normally, and right after that I beat the game from the start just to see how I would fare in a complete run. I started doing a little research and discovered a claim about a secret ending that was eluded to in both this FAQ and the game manual. From what I gathered, the idea is that if you recover all the items in the game, you will receive a special medal from the police chief at the end. I haven’t found any further evidence and didn’t find a video of said ending, but I had to give it a try for myself. My third time through the game was a failed attempt at the best ending. I used a map I found to make sure I didn’t miss any of the buildings in the first stage, which did lead to some rooms I missed on my own, but it wasn’t enough. I even tried poking at the game on an emulator with a debugger to see if I could discover anything and got nowhere. Chalk this one up to a rumor I suppose. The fourth time through was for finally recording a proper longplay video. I thought I would try cutting straight to the chase in the first level and that was a bad idea. I skipped a bunch of items and lives, and then due to some bad mistakes in the run I ran out of lives. I needed to start the final level over a few times before I could beat it with the password. It’s not my best effort, but it’s a documented completion at least which is always my goal.

I’m sure the Dirty Harry movies are great, but this game is not very good. The graphics are passable with a lot of samey-looking buildings. Some of the building residents are interesting looking, and I dig the security lasers in the buildings, so it’s not all bad. The music has some decent depth to it, though the base sounds are so low that I barely heard them while playing with a relatively low volume. The controls work okay. I’m not a fan of two-button jumping but it works fine. I found the controls a little bit sluggish at times, like when pointing and firing weapons. The gameplay is challenging but not in a good way. The forced backtracking when making mistakes is bad, you can easily get trapped between two enemies and get knocked around, and the navigation around the city is both confusing and frustrating. I sort of appreciate the jumping puzzles centered around Dirty Harry’s fixed jump length, but I reckon it is more of an inconvenience for many players. For all the warts this game has, the ending is unique and was one of the neatest parts of the entire game. Even then, it’s not exactly a suitable award for putting up with the difficulties of playing Dirty Harry.

#114 – Dirty Harry