Konami's first volume of their collection of Metal Gear series remasters was released recently, but fans are less than impressed with it.
Konami hasn't changed, it seems. If you expected the Metal Gear publisher to finally give its most popular franchise the star treatment it deserves, then you might be in for a rude awakening: The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol.1, containing remasters of the first three Metal Gear Solid games as well as both Metal Gear 1 and 2, is reportedly a bug-ridden disappointment on every platform, with severe technical issues on PC to top it off.
The collection released just earlier this week, but Konami are already being raked over the coals for it. Players were quick to notice that these new versions of the games were barely an improvement over the original releases and inferior to earlier re-releases like the PS3 HD Collection in many ways. Not only that, there are several issues on all platforms that severely affect the experience, like cutscene audio and subtitles not lining up properly, bad audio mixing, typos in subtitles for several languages and more.
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Less Than Masterful On PC
It gets even worse when you look at the Steam versions. MGS1 through 3 are locked at 720p despite Konami's claims that 2 and 3 would run at 1080p. None of the games in the collection have any graphics, control or audio options to speak of, or even a fullscreen toggle (apart from MGS1). Moreover, players are reporting frame drops and atrocious load times in MGS1, a game originally released on the PS1 in 1998. And that's still only scratching the surface! Every game in the collection is currently sitting at a "Mixed" rating on Steam.
How Konami managed to mess up these re-releases this badly boggles the mind. Then again, they do have a history of putting out terrible ports of their most popular franchises (ask Silent Hill fans about the HD Collection sometime). Still, if this Master Collection was an attempt of theirs to earn back some goodwill from Metal Gear fans ahead of the release of their MGS3 remake, after years of mistreatment of the franchise, then I would consider it a definite failure.
Here's hoping they at least get their act together for the remake.