Konami's classic Metal Gear Solid from the PSone has been transformed by Silicon Knights into Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the GameCube. It's the original stealth action game, often imitated, and only duplicated by itself in the form of this wonderful remake, which takes the original MGS game and adds in all the gameplay features of the PS2 sequel, Sons of Liberty. Does that make for a better game than the original? Well, it does, but as great a game as this one is, there are still one or two things that can't be overlooked.

The game starts you off with quite a lengthy introductory movie of the crisis at hand. A terrorist group has claimed they will launch a nuclear strike if their demands are not met. Snake, our hero, has less than 18 hours to infiltrate an Alaskan base, rescue two key hostages, find out if the nasty terrorists have the ability to launch a nuke, and if they do, stop them at all costs. It's not all that spectacular of a story on the surface, but because you're actually playing it out in something that's close to real time, it keeps you involved in it, and you'll want to see how the story unfolds as each new cutscene comes up.

The general idea of being Solid Snake is to get through the terrorist's base as inconspicuously as possible. This means you'll need to avoid being sighted by surveillance cameras, not trip laser fences, and not be spotted by the super-alert Genome Soldier patrols. If you do get spotted, you can either run and hide, which makes things easier, or decide to take on the reinforcements the guard has called in, making for a tough 4-against-1 situation. Later on in the game, or in harder difficulty levels, you'll start to not want guards to spot you, because they'll put the hurt on Snake really fast. Not charging in might seem strange to people who are used to the "kill everything" approach, since those who choose to gun their way through will find that they're always short on ammo and life, meaning that this approach might not be the best way though the game. You can avoid being spotted by tranquilizing patrols, sneaking up behind a guard and putting a sleeper hold on him to render him unconscious, hiding in a nearby locker, hanging from the railing below a guard, or simply hiding yourself in a cardboard box.

While all of them are effective, some are a bit useless. A couple of the actions Snake has that were taken from MGS2 (lockers and railing), are nice to have, but it turns out that you really don't use them as often as you think you would. In addition, those Genome Soldiers that are supposedly really smart, are also really dumb. If you're spotted, you can hop into a nearby truck, hide behind a crate, wait a minute or two, and the guards will go away, not being able to "find" you. Also, reinforcements will come to the precise spot where a guard was shot or called for help. If you drag the body away to a new spot out of their field of vision (but still out in the open), they won't see it, and they'll go away harmlessly. Granted, with how the game works, little quirks like these are somewhat acceptable, but for a game as advanced as this, you would think that those patrols would at least throw a grenade at you or better patrol the area, or something.

As this game was originally designed for a PlayStation controller that has more buttons than the GameCube's, things had to be reworked a bit, but thankfully the controls work pretty well. To select weapons and items, you'll need to hold down L or R, respectively, then scroll through your inventories. If you simply wish to de-equip or reload, you can just quickly tap the proper button to achieve the effect. To raise your weapon, you hold down the A button, and to fire it, you let go. The Z button switches you to the first person view, where you can better aim your shots to take out a camera or shoot a guard in the head with a tranquilizer. You can also do more advanced things, like running and shooting at the same time, or lowering your gun without shooting it, and it's all pretty easy to do, except that you might forget which button to let go of at sometimes, since you will be holding down many of them at the same time. It's also a bit of an annoyance in that you need to hit two buttons to pause or use the codec, which might accidentally cause you to make a noise that you didn't want to make, leading to extra guards on the look-out for you.

The brand new cinematic sequences in Twin Snakes are sort of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the voice acting and presentation are the best you'll probably ever see on the GameCube. On top of that, they look stunning thanks to the GameCube's processing power, with everything done in real-time. You'll forget that you're playing a game after you watch them for a while... which is also the downside of the sequences. While they're extremely well done, they also take an extremely long time to watch. Some of them, which also include lengthy codec conversations, can take half an hour or more to watch. This is compounded by the fact that you usually only play the game in 20 minutes spurts before you get to the next painfully long sequence, meaning that if you know where to go in the game, the movies will take longer than the time you actually spend in control of Snake. Yes, they can be skipped, but toward the end of the game, you sort of wish the story could be told in a more compact form, as you still want to see how everything unfolds, just not over a 20 minute period.

That being said, once you have seen the whole story and beaten the game, if you decide to play it again and skip all the cut scenes, one thing will become obvious in a hurry: This game is extremely short. The first time through will take you about 10 hours, but when you take away all the exploration and movie time, you can beat it in about four or five hours quite easily, perhaps even less. Normally, a game of this length would automatically make it a rental, but for some reason, you can pick it up and play it over and over again, and it's still fun every time. Collecting dog tags from guards adds an interesting challenge to the game. The camera item lets you take pictures of whatever you want, so you can view them later in the options menu. The special items you get from both of the game's possible endings are fun to just play around with. However, this doesn't change the fact that the game is still as short as it is, and there will be many people who will play a few times (or even once) and be done with it. Just be advised that you're not getting a marathon game, but instead, more of a time trial.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is easily one of the best games the GameCube will ever see. The graphics are very good, the cinematics are even better (though really long), the voice acting is better still, and the game is an absolute blast to play. The system was in dire need of a title like this one, and Silicon Knights delivered it in the perfect way. If you've never played the original title, this game is a must-own, without question. For those who have played the original, however, you might want to rent it first to see if the remake is good enough for you to justify playing it a few dozen more times, as you most likely did in 1998. Either way, this is a great game, and you've got to play it.