I-pod loading. It's a miserable task that requires absolute fortitude and patience. When you are in the throes of its gnashing jaws, your life ceases to move. Why go out when you can inch closer to putting all thousand of your rank, molded cd collection into one tiny device? Why fumble with garbage, when all you have to do is press a button? Once it's complete you will never have to reload this machine again. A word to those who undertake this prodigious task. Make absolutely certain you add everything! I forgot to add Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake to my library, and not having this in my music files was enough to make me reset the software. I had also left out my hundreds of video game soundtracks completely. Why? I simply felt the styles would clash, and someone casually looking through it would judge me for having them at all. The music loading ritual would have to be done from scratch. I simply had to have Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake on a trigger.
8-bit music can be a powerful thing. Though it strains at every turn, churning bolts that need oil, thriving on shortcuts through redundant circuitry, through loops, it processes emotion on a scale so tiny it chokes when delivering the rising action, the denouement. So it's not so difficult to fathom that the MSX-2, an archaic personal computer even by late 80's standards, could be the home of such a labyrinthine, attritional, toiling artistic work. Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake's soundtrack is all shards, blips of themes you will come to know over the ensuing 2 decades. Solid Snake becomes the character he does largely due to the suffocating ambiance of this game.
Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake is a score involved in an excruciating, emotional skirmish. The weight of consequences, the disillusion of the objectives that Snake must complete. The stalking of the unobservant hordes of armed men. The tight, nauseating space inside ventilation shafts. It's all handled here with delicate pruning. Each leaf cut to maximize its searing, blinding illumination. It gives context, prose even, to a soldier who's stranded on a small strip of land fighting to save the entire self-destructing world bare handed.
Solid Snake is just a man. If he were omnipotent, beyond the grasp of fear, if he could outpace his enemy it's likely we would regard him with mere reverence. It's because of his ability to be so ordinary and so completely flawed that we would raise an army for him at his mild suggestion. The musical accompaniment had to give Snake the hubris, and the blood. Forge a character that can consume his obstacles, but come out the other end a bit more broken than before. Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake's soundtrack is the making of a franchise from small dotted wilderness, to industrialized nation. 10/10
