Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (PS3)

Pros Collects all eight major Metal Gear games. Games are all just as playable as the original releases. Graphics enhanced for HD displays. Brings games from several different systems together for PS3.

Cons Confusing game organization. Not all titles have aged well. Format changes lose bits of vital information. Bottom Line Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection gathers together the core games of the Metal Gear series, giving fans a Metal Gear fix like no other and preserving a slice of gaming history.

By Brian Westover

For more than 25 years, the Metal Gear series has been surprising gamers, redefining staid gaming clichés, and popularizing the stealth genre that now includes popular titles such as Assassin's Creed III (PS3) and Batman: Arkham City. Now, Konami has gathered up the core games of the series, releasing all eight games for the PlayStation 3 under one title, Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection. Whether you're a Metal Gear veteran or just coming to the series for the first time, this collection of critically acclaimed fan favorites is highly recommended.

Sneaking Through History
I first played Metal Gear when I was 6 or 7, playing on an NES at a friend's house. I still remember it as a frustrating experience—the NES version was a poorly ported version of the original MSX release, making a challenging game even harder—but it marked my first brush with the game. I gave up on the insanely hard game, but remembered it for years. When Metal Gear Solid debuted on the original PlayStation in 1998, I was hooked.

As I eagerly await the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sometime in the next year or so, I jumped at the chance to revisit the gaming franchise that has captured my imagination and kept me sneaking, crawling, and shooting for more than two decades. So when Konami announced the release of Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection, I eagerly purchased it, even though I already own five of the eight included games.

For the sake of brevity, this review will only briefly summarize the storyline of each game, staying spoiler-free for any newcomers. Instead, the main focus will deal with the technical aspects of each game: the quality of the port from one system to another, the differences in control schemes and gameplay from one game to the next, and any notable changes or bugs encountered along the way.

Anyone wanting further details on any of the eight included titles will need to look elsewhere, but information shouldn't be too hard to find—these are all top-rated, best-selling games, and a lot of ink has been spilled dissecting the plots, characters, and twists of each.

Series Snapshot
The Metal Gear Solid series may be infamous for its convoluted plots, over the top characters, and unique blend of military action with sci-fi and fantasy elements, but at its heart, it's a simple series. Each game centers around a single special ops commando (Snake, though this name refers to more than one character), sent to infiltrate an enemy stronghold. Facing overwhelming numbers and starting out armed with only a pair of binoculars (and maybe a knife), Snake's only hope of completing his mission is to use stealth, skillfully and patiently sneaking past enemies, and procuring equipment as needed along the way. Most of the time (though not always) the ultimate goal of his mission is to stop the titular Metal Gear, any of a line of high-tech, nuclear-equipped walking tanks—along with whatever terrorist cell or rogue military unit happens to have captured it. Sneak in, find stuff along the way, stop the bad guys, destroy Metal Gear. It's a simple enough premise, but over the course of 25 years, the surrounding storylines have gotten very complex.

For example, Solid Snake, the protagonist in several of the Metal Gear games, is actually one of several clones of Big Boss, who is both his unit commander and ultimately his enemy. And Big Boss was originally also codenamed Snake. On top of all of the classified missions and top-secret technology, there is at least one shadowy conspiracy group manipulating events from behind the scenes, and one or more characters working for this group as a double (or triple) agent.

The cast of characters has also grown from a handful to dozens, each with detailed backstories, ulterior motives, and secret agendas. The end result is so labyrinthine in its plot turns and twists that prior to the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Konami actually created a wiki dedicated entirely to explaining the plots and characters of the previous stories.

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Windows 8 stains Ballmer's legacy

Computerworld - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer survived the flop that was Windows Vista, but he wasn't able to do the same after the disappointment of Windows 8.

"Last year, Ballmer said Windows 8 would be his defining moment," said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. "Now, this has caught up with him. Windows 8 is the primary reason why he's retiring, specifically Windows RT. There's been a lack of progress on Windows Phone, but the forcing function was clearly the write-down of the Surface RT."

From Moorhead's perspective, it was that write-down, a $900 million charge against earnings to account for excess inventory of the company's Surface RT tablet, that precipitated Ballmer's retirement, in large part because the overstock was a blatant indicator of the magnitude of his misjudgment about how customers would react to the newest Windows.

And Windows 8 may be the thing that people remember about Ballmer, said another analyst, whether that's fair or not.

"Any evaluation of Ballmer can't start in 2007 or 2008," argued David Cearley of Gartner Friday. "His legacy is the totality of Microsoft. But inevitably, a CEO is judged by what the company looked like when he left. [And] Microsoft has struggled to reinvent itself."

The problems Ballmer recently faced were greater than just the Surface tablet or the tile-based, touch-first Windows RT operating system that powers it. Windows 8's failure to spark a surge in PC sales also played a big part.

Ballmer weathered Windows Vista, the delayed follow-on to Windows XP that was widely derided as a mess. But it wasn't Windows 8's poor numbers, by some metrics even poorer than Vista's, that brought down Ballmer: It was his unrealistic predictions of its success that did him in.

Ballmer, known as an enthusiastic promoter of Microsoft and an overly-optimistic salesman by trade and inclination, was, to use a phrase he coined multiple times in his career, "all in" on Windows 8.

"I think with the addition of Windows 8, with these incredible new form factors that are tablets and PCs, I think we're going to see a lot of growth and vitality and explosion in the PC market," said Ballmer last October at the company's BUILD developers conference. "I guarantee you, this will be the best opportunity software developers will see as hundreds of millions of new machines go out with the potential of billions and billions of new applications being sold."

Ballmer made those predictions even though PC shipments had fallen year-over-year in the quarter before. They then continued to contract in the next four quarters and show no short-term sign of recovery. According to estimates by researchers at IDC and Gartner, PC shipments will decline in 2013 at more than double the rate of 2012.

The dismal results so far for Windows 8 and Windows RT -- together, they accounted for 5.4% of all operating systems used to go online in July -- have put a spotlight on Microsoft's inability to capitalize on the quick-growing tablet market, a fault Windows 8 was supposed to quickly correct.

"It's clear that the problems of Windows 8, Windows RT were not addressed in a short enough timeframe," said Moorhead, referring to Microsoft waiting until May to admit that the first iteration had been a miss and it would release the Windows 8.1 course correction this year. "The result was a PC market that didn't get back to Windows 7 levels."

Even the recast of Windows with Windows 8.1, while generally applauded by analysts, may be too little too late to repair the damage. Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker that last quarter was the world's largest, recently struck a deal with an American company, SweetLabs, to bundle the latter's Start button and Start menu replacements on all its computers, essentially a vote of no confidence in Windows 8.1's marketability without third-party tweaks.

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