Metal Gear Solid 2 - Substance

The strangest thing about Substance is how much of it has nothing to do with the main story. Hideo Kojima's team took Sons of Liberty, already a game about the unreliability of information, and wrapped it in a pile of extras: hundreds of VR Missions, a set of alternate Snake Tales, boss survival, and a skateboarding mode with Snake and Raiden. Some of it is filler. Much of it is the sharpest argument for the stealth systems underneath.

The VR Missions strip away plot and leave only the mechanics. You learn how guard vision cones behave, how the first-person aiming lets you shoot a radio from across a room, how hanging from a rail or freezing a guard with a pistol creates openings. Without codec chatter, the design is easy to see. The enemy AI was a real step up on the PS2 for its time, and the training missions reward the player who actually wants to master it. Some are brief puzzles, others are mean little tests of patience.

Snake Tales are shorter, separate stories starring Snake on the Big Shell. They are worth playing, though they feel more like side dishes than a second course. They reuse the setting and ask for the same careful movement, and they give the Big Shell a tone the main game never quite finds. Anyone who wants the cutscene-heavy, deeply argumentative main game gets it intact, including the Raiden section that divided players in 2001 and still does. His story asks questions about control, memory and manipulated narratives, and it often answers them with long lectures.

As a package, Substance has aged more gracefully than the sequel's reputation might suggest. The graphics are heavy on polish and the lighting and cloth effects hold up well, but the camera and the climactic talk-fest can test your patience. Stripped of the hype of 2001, it plays as a stubborn, odd, deeply self-aware game. The extra content does not fix its flaws, but it does show how carefully the underlying machine was built, and that may be the most lasting thing about it.