How old is snake in metal gear solid 4

Metal Gear Solid. Not technically the game that started it all, but the game that truly started it all. The Metal Gear saga as we know it began here, not with the original Metal Gear. It's hard to imagine that the gaming industry today, with its reliance on voice acting and movie-inspired cutscenes, would have evolved the same way without the release of Metal Gear Solid.

It's a true watershed title in the video game canon. It's also the game where Hideo Kojima and his team's devotion to the smallest details became obvious. Each of the main characters, many of which go on to reappear throughout the saga, were thought through to unnecessary details like their height, age, and birthday.

This list covers ten of MGS1 's main characters. This 5'2" cm data expert had Snake's eye, leading to rapid-fire banter and flirting back and forth between them.

Born in the late s, Mei Ling was young at the time of the Shadow Moses incident -- probably her early 20s. She was still enrolled at MIT during the incident, in fact. While Mei Ling's purpose in the game is mostly functional, MGS1 keeps her from being merely a save function to mash X through with her charming personality and conversation-provoking proverbs. The Third Child is one of the most enigmatic characters in the franchise. Series ranking: 4. I know.

But the ideas are great, and the game underneath all the chin-stroking is even better. Series ranking: 5. Naked Snake, who is not Solid, is double-crossed by his mentor the Boss as she defects from west to east.

The political shockwaves mean that Naked Snake soon has a new assignment — assassination. Naked Snake is haunted by the success of his mission, and is given the name Big Boss — the CO and antagonist of the original Metal Gear. Best bit: The End, a hundred-year old sniper, and a boss battle that can take hours as you battle mano-a-mano over a huge environment.

MGS3 has aged better than any other entry, because the story is easy to follow and the amazing systems have the time they need to breathe. Series ranking: 2. And Meryl. And everyone else from every game. Weirdest bit : After beating the main bosses, they turn into scantily-clad ladies who try to hug you to death — and can also be enticed into a photo mode. While many fans remember MGS 2 fondly for its mind-blowing twist , Solidus Snake is certainly a unique character with two equally unique deaths — and is just as deserving of the appreciation received by the rest of his relatives.

Often portrayed as an anti-hero, the once noble goals of the MGS 3 protagonist faded as the world changed around him. Using increasingly cruel strategies in his ongoing battles against the Patriots, the true antagonists of the MGS series , Big Boss is not only a great allegory for war but an extremely complex character in his own right as well.

John or sometimes Jack met his tragic end due to the FOXDIE virus, but he died in the most peaceful way possible: having a conversation with his only living son by the grave of his beloved mentor and mother, The Boss.

Taking one final smoke before his last breath, Naked Snake meets his end in the same exact way as his son Liquid. It is extremely likely that the character did die like his fellow Snakes, however, which is part of the reason many feel like MGS 6 could never live up to its predecessors. Promising to watch over the new world he helped create from afar, Solid Snake steps into the shadows as the credits for MGS 4 begin to roll. With the cyborg ninja Raiden often referring to Snake as if he were alive, and other characters in the world hinting that he has passed away, it is up in the air whether Solid Snake is alive during the last canonical game of the MGS timeline.

The narrative keeps pulling you forward, faster and faster, but the interactive elements start to be phoned in along the way. Worse, stealth begins to be de-emphasised in favour of big set-pieces and half-baked variations, like tailing an enemy. MGS4's second half positively groans under the weight of mediocre on-rails shooting sections, pyrotechnic battles against multiple assailants, and deadening speechifying. There are exceptions: Metal Gear traditionally ends with a battle against one of the mechs, but like Snake, these machines are now relics.

Again, it's full of thematic repetition not least in Solid getting the ostensibly weaker mech but it's also just a clanking great throw-down of a fight, and enormous fun to play.

The fight goes through four stages, and each channels a specific MGS: the characters' names change, the health bars change, and the movesets change to exactly mirror the originals. The fight encapsulates the theme beautifully, allowing players to feel and inhabit the fact that - while all the extraneous stuff may change - at the core of Metal Gear Solid is a cycle. How does a series escape just repeating this stuff over and over? Kojima's answer is to wipe the slate clean by killing off almost every major character, and drawing closed the unrequited loop of the Snakes, doomed to fight among themselves on behalf of others.

The Metal Gear games have always had the theme of parricide, setting sons variously against their biological father Big Boss , their spiritual mother the Boss , or the father figures they create Raiden's Solid Snake. It is contagious: after meeting Big Boss during Operation Snake Eater, Ocelot becomes so obsessed he later adopts the identity of his dead son Liquid. Psycho Mantis talks about the 'trauma' of patricide he shares with Snake. The plot of MGS boils down to Liquid being pissed that he got dad's recessive genes seriously.

One of the great temptations with MGS as a series, especially now that Kojima's time with it is over, is to look upon their themes as autobiographical.

Such interpretations are always on shaky ground but, regardless, it is hard to ignore that Hideo Kojima's own father died when he was a young boy. MGS4 fakes out the ending at first, showing Solid Snake at the Boss's grave, getting ready to shoot himself - the only way out he can see.

Never mind that, says Kojima, as he blithely resurrects the father - and announces it through the ending credits. In this patchwork game, Big Boss comes back to life and is literally composed of the previous antagonists: his body is made up of parts from Liquid and Solidus, both of Snake's 'brothers,' and he's wearing the jacket of Gene, the main foe of Portable Ops. Over 10 minutes, this walking symbol CQCs Snake into happy submission, wheels out Zero and kills him, smokes a final cigar, drops the iconic MGS3 salute at the Boss's grave, and dies again.

This is absolutely crazy storytelling, but it gets to the heart of what Metal Gear had become, and what Kojima wanted to achieve with MGS4.

Whatever faults it has, there is now very little room for future sequels to repeat Kojima's characters or themes. In essence, it's salting the Earth: giving the fans what they want only inasmuch as it guarantees they can never have it again. Of course, Konami could turn around and announce a Kojima-free game starring a younger Solid Snake; no doubt one day it will. But that character's arc and ending are now fixed forever.

So MGS4 is a patchwork that, at times, doesn't quite work, but the conceptual genius of the whole demands attention. It is about how big video games sell us the same stories, in the same way, and change the window-dressing. It is about how creators that want to avoid repetition have to face the commercial reality that audiences demand repetition.

More than anything else, perhaps, it is about how our histories come to define us. Snake is pulled back into conflict because of his sense that the elements in play - Liquid, the Patriots - are part of his own makeup. There are regular 'flashback' moments where pressing X shows stills from MGS history superimposed over current events they parallel. There's the younger version of you, somewhere in that dream of Shadow Moses, and struck by countless other half-remembered references throughout.

Snake's ending is foreshadowed as suicide, from the title screen's gunshot to the penultimate cut-scene. But freed from all the baggage of his past, no more cycles, Solid Snake's final action is to lay down his gun.

It is the most muted of triumphs: finally, with a few months to live, the 'old killer' has no more demons to slay. Which leaves Kojima himself, the grizzled vet who created the wheels within wheels of the Metal Gear universe - and came back for one last job.

With MGS4 he freed himself from expectation by ending all those expectations, delivering the sequel the fans said they wanted in the form of a funeral pyre. There is a school of thought that Kojima 'deliberately' made MGS4 a bad game to emphasise whatever points he had in mind, which is obviously ludicrous. But if you want a video game blockbuster that deconstructs blockbuster design while using it, and is this close to success, MGS4 is well worth the repeat visit.

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