Tyler Winegarner Associate Producer, GameSpot Live

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Crazy Talk Solid 3: Snake Oil!

There's a tradition around here that's about as old as the salt in the earth, and that's the Metal Gear Solid speculation column. Well folks, if you haven't seen it yet, there's a new trailer out, and in true Hideo Kojima style, it's playing out the role of leaving us with two new questions for every one that it answers, and the answers are highly questionable to say the least. When you're in the position of working at a gaming publication such as GameSpot, these moments come with a heavy responsibility. We solemnly shoulder the responsibility of taking as many of these disconnected tidbits of information and weaving a web as harebrained and loosely tied as possible in order to make sense of what we just saw and to rush it out to the people as quickly as possible. It is with this prefacing that I present to you the GameSpot Metal Gear Solid Speculation Column Gaiden 157 Gundams plus Alpha.

OK, did you watch the trailer yet? Great. Let's get started. The linchpin of this trailer is the plot about this woman, named "The Boss," (who we shall refer to as Bruce Springsteen for the duration of this column) who is a renowned US Army veteran that has defected to the Soviet Union. We hear Snake's briefing in a little bit greater depth this time around, and it seems that he needs to be told to remain unheard and unseen. Perhaps this Snake is a bit more green than we've been led to believe? We see a rocket sled that resembles a D-12 drone fired from an SR-71 Blackbird, dropping a face-painted Snake into the jungle under the cover of nightfall. That's a big difference from the gruff, bearded Snake making the Halo jump into the jungle by daylight. We see a couple of new characters here and there, such as the electricity-spewing Colonel, who is apparently named Volgin. We see a notably whiny Ocelot, a bit more of the hapless scientist Sokolov, and some more footage of the primitive Metal Gear, which seems to be able to give a pretty good chase on smooth, solid Tarmac. Speaking of chase scenes, we see Snake hanging out in the sidecar of a motorcycle, which gives me my own personal hope that there's some gameplay tied to that, making Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater perhaps the first game in history to allow you, as the player, to monkey around on a sidehack.

Is it just me, or have we seen all this before?

Anyhow, let's tie this all together, shall we? If you've played through Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, then you'll know that one of the subplots of that game is the creation of the perfect soldier through the VR re-creation of the events of Shadow Moses, or Metal Gear Solid for the original PlayStation. Then I started realizing that there are a lot of connections between the plot (as we know it) of MGS 3: Snake Eater and the events of the original 8-bit Metal Gear for the NES. Let's draw parallels. You're dropped into the jungle by aircraft in both games. You have to make your way through the jungle, negotiating guards and wildlife, ultimately to infiltrate a fortress and rescue the scientist who is being forced to work on a war machine called "Metal Gear." The plot of both games pivots around a major ally defecting to the side of the enemy. What does this all mean? We already know that Solid Snake is the genetic clone of the legendary soldier Big Boss, and we can pretty much take it as a given that the character you will play as in the 1964-era Metal Gear Solid 3 is none other the grandaddy supersoldier himself.

My theory is this: The game you played in the original Metal Gear (if you played it, that is) was a confabulated military simulation of the events you will play through in MGS 3 Snake Eater, in an effort to turn the inexperienced Solid Snake into the ultimate soldier he turned out to be. It seems that by the time MGS 2 came out, the directors of Fox Hound had figured out that there's more to the ultimate soldier than just nature; there are elements of the psyche that have to be nurtured through training. However, there's nothing to say that they hadn't figured that out sooner, and the VR training was just a way to cheapen the process with technology. However, if the character we'll be playing in MGS 3: Snake Eater is indeed Big Boss, then it's likely that this is the mission that will solidify his role as one of the greatest soldiers of all time, inspiring the preservation of his genes, as well as mapping out the mission and re-creating it later for the next generation.

A bird and a cat--why can't all stories be this simple?

The whole problem with developing theories on limited information is that you often have a lot of loose ends to tie up, and this is no exception. There's still plenty to speculate about why "The Boss" refers to Big Boss as "Jack" while tossing him off of the bridge--if indeed that is Big Boss she's talking to at the time. There is the big question as to if this story is going to discuss the origins of Raiden, and perhaps his parenting. Could it be that the female supersoldier, "The Boss," is his mother? If so, who is his father? Big Boss? Ocelot? The Raiden look-alike we saw in the E3 2004 trailer? And what's the deal with the two different jungle insertions? The Halo jump is what kicked off the demo version featured at E3 2004, so perhaps there are two different missions to be played over the course of the game. Two different time periods perhaps? Maybe we'll be replaying portions of the original Metal Gear as Solid Snake? Is there anything we should be wondering about this Volgin character, other than just assuming he's another insane character from the mind of Mr. Kojima? There's only one way to know for sure, and that won't come to fruition until November of this year. Until then, keep those eyes peeled and keep cranking on that speculation machine.