A little background of the game for you. A covert ops team known as Fox Hound has taken over a nuclear weapon disposal facility and is threatening to launch a nuke if America does not comply with their wishes. As Solid Snake (that's his codename – he wasn't named by hippie parents or anything) it's your job to infiltrate the base and disable the weapons. Of course, Fox Hound aren't going to make it easy on you but an assortment of weapons such as the PSG1 sniper rifle, Socom Pistol and Nikita portable guided missile system should go a long way in helping you out. Although the story initially seems just as original as your average Saturday morning cartoon, as the game progresses the story turns out to be one of the game's strong points, drawing you in as the plot thickens quite considerably. You're constantly forced to discover what's really going on and just who to trust as the often lengthy cut scenes move the tale along.

As it's a port of a two year old game from a console system that is over five years old, Metal Gear Solid isn't that much to look at, even though it was considered pretty gorgeous by PlayStation owners when it was first released. The first thing that will strike you about the game is that it is not overly attractive by today's standards. Textures are very low resolution and characters appear well animated but not particularly detailed, especially due to their lack of obvious eyes (they instead just have a general area of darkness around the eye area). To their credit, the conversion team at Microsoft added a new save game interface that works better with the higher resolutions the title offers (up to 1024x768) and it of course included bilinear filtering, but there's nothing here that'd stress out even a Voodoo 1. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the port of the game or if this bug appeared in the original PlayStation version too, but the odd wall texture will also distort and shake now and again which can be a little distracting. Sometimes the pretty good voice acting doesn't match a caption either (for instance when someone mentions using the keyboard rather than a PlayStation joypad), but that's more of a quirk than a problem. There's no way on earth Metal Gear Solid for the PC will be winning any graphics awards, but then that's not what matters. As ever, gameplay is king and Metal Gear Solid proves it.