I’m struggling to find interesting things to say about Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. Or, at least, new things – in the ongoing debate over whether remakes should meaningfully tinker with the original or stay as faithful as possible, Delta is firmly in the latter camp. It’s MGS3, basically! It looks better and it runs worse! It’s been twenty-one years and I still mentally supplant most of the actual dialogue with Hiiimdaisy comic jokes! That one’s my fault, granted.
I am, however, liking Snake Vs Monkey, a recreation of the original’s Ape Escape crossover mode where you dash around tranquilising and capturing cartoon chimps against the clock. Partly because I never played it on PS2 – I cruelly denied Hideo Kojima his dues by only ever renting MGS3 from Blockbuster, and evidently didn’t feel sideshows were worth cutting into the two days before I had to give it back. But also because it’s a strangely compelling time attack minigame, one that took mere minutes to have me optimising ape-tranqing strategies to shave the seconds off.
I say “strangely” because the challenge is, by and large, imaginary. There are scoreboards but no time limits, your gun holds infinite darts, and even alerted apes will quickly reset to a docile state if you sod off for a moment. Get a feel for their hiding places, though, and it’s perilously easy to start planning out routes through the map, or deciding on shooting orders that will KO the most monkeys in the fewest mouse movements. Soon, they start looking less like PS2 mascots and more like corners on a racetrack; corners where you know that if you can just take one just a little quicker, the number that appears at the end will say 00:59 instead of 01:01. And that would be the best fucking feeling in the world.
I don’t claim expert knowledge of the ape un-escaping scene, you understand. But there is a tactical depth here that’s worth exploring. Even the comedy animations of a tranquilised monkey falling from a tree, bouncing off every branch on the way down, can be viewed differently from a newly opened speedrunner mind’s eye. Is that just a funny visual touch? Or is there enough downtime between the tranq dart hitting and the monkey finally landing that you could be using it to spin around and flickshot another one? Yes. Yes is the answer. I see that now, at last.
I also don’t want to sound too down on the rest of MGS Delta. The game it so reverentially recreates is, simultaneously, one of the most approachable Metal Gears (not counting excellent action spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance) and perhaps the most confident in expressing the series’ weirdness. Maybe that’s why Snake Vs Monkey doesn’t just feel like a stupid bit of Sony promotion, even with Delta’s version adding in cameos from the far more recent platformer/elaborate PlayStation marketing exercise Astro Bot. Snake dressing up in banana camo to round up lost primates kinda just sounds like something he’d do. I’m happy to oblige.
