I’m currently playing Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence on the PS2 (the new chase camera is wonderful), and also started a new MGS4 run in parallel. I just wanted to make sure that I’m not a victim of nostalgia with my opinion that MGS3 is the better game. To make a long story short: MGS4 lost again. This time I played MGS4 “old-school”, no rifles, just the knife and the tranquilizer pistol. This makes the game much more fun, but still I couldn’t get past chapter 2 before getting bored.
With MGS3 however I felt the same urge to continue playing like the first time. The story and cut-scenes are great and never boring, Volgin is a wonderful villain straight out of an old Bond movie, the boss-fights are truly unique (the legendary sniper duel with The End!), and the whole stealth and survival game-play is much more fleshed out compared to its successor… Looking at all this goodness I wonder how the hell MGS4 could happen. There were so many great elements in the previous MGS games which have been dumped and replaced with all this “shooter-crap” which doesn’t fit at all into an MGS game… And the only thing I can remember from the MGS4 story is that nanomachines are bad (damn nanomachines, first they ruin Star Wars, and now look what they done to MGS!).
An MGS3 re-release on PSN (or XBLA hehe) in anti-aliased 720p and maybe a high-res texture pack would make me a happy gamer. The actual 3d models still look surprisingly good (the tree models and the grass for instance are better then in many current-gen games).
