Unique, enjoyable, and one genuinely funny game. Laughs for all.
You are Solid Snake, a government secret agent of sorts who is sent in, alone, to stop a nuclear crisis on Shadow Moses island in Alaska. You're to save a few hostages, pick up your commander's female relative, and diffuse a very volatile situation. A summary like that doesn't quite do the game justice, however - Metal Gear Solid has a kind of manic weirdness that makes it feel more like a sneaky, very strange, Japanese 007 game. You feel like some kind of queer stealthy guy, but despite Solid Snake being so badass, he comes off as a bit unrealistic. The problem with the game world is the incongruity of the seriousness of its issues with the world (the meaning of life, the threat of nuclear destruction, killing as a soldier, et cetera), with it feigning seriousness the majority of the time, whenever almost only encounters are horribly comedic.
However, Twin Snakes still feels like a smooth game, incongruity or not. Story sequences are divided up into three forms - the very impressive cinematics, of which there are hours worth on both discs. Then there are the less than thrilling Codec sequences, where you look at a green screen with a frequency code at the top and see Solid Snake's face moving with some poor animation on the right and whoever you're talking to moving in a similarly bad manner on the left. Now, were there some action going on at the time (such as Snake infiltrating Shadow Moses while on Codec), these sequences wouldn't be so mind numbingly dull. But instead, it seems that Hideo Kojima chose to put all of the very dull conversations into the Codec. Perhaps the only long, dull conversations he avoided putting on the Codec were the many insane bosses' extremely long monologues, each going upwards of ten or twenty minutes each. Obviously, whenever you shoot someone twice in the lungs, they should be able to talk for ten minutes about life (without coughing). The last form of the story is in a few very rare story sequences that take place during gameplay - don't think this is like Deus Ex, where you sneak up on guards and hear them discussing things. Instead, it's just you trying to shoot at something but your character saying, "I just can't do it!" every time you press the kill button, while another character is monologuing about nothing.
Now, these strange story sequences wouldn't be so bad if Metal Gear Solid reveled in them, but instead, it seems to be trying to be extremely realistic, in most cases not seeing the absurdity of its own situations. This makes the game extremely funny. If you ever want to MST3K a game, Metal Gear Solid is one of the best games to do it with, purely because it genuinely is a good and enjoyable game that just needs to look into the mirror and see how ridiculous it looks.
Part of the reason the Twin Snakes is so easy to make fun of with your friends is because it's so short - I spent seven hours playing it last night and then two hours this morning and I was done. There are a few sequences that seem rather luck based and a few boss fights where the unconventional fighting method required makes you say, "Huh? Why did they design the game like this?" But once you know what you should do, the game flows very smoothly, easily being finished in under ten hours. Perhaps the worst part about the pacing are the three required points of back tracking, purely because, unlike games like Metroid, where your character actually improve when you go back, you have almost the exact same abilities as before, plus maybe a sniper rifle or something similar. It makes all these back tracking sequences tedious, feeling like the designers were trying to add time to an all ready brief game.
You can't really fault Metal Gear Solid for trying, because, despite how short the game is, as it's obvious years of time went into it. Despite my personal dislike of the Codec, everyone has something different to say at just about every time. There's a story update for just about every imaginable thing. There are several ways to escape various predicaments, and though the game is no Deus Ex, some of the dialogue can alter quite a bit whenever some story events change slightly. It doesn't feel rushed at all, and has the same stamp of quality as other Silicon Knights games (absurdity and all).
Beyond that, the voice acting is excellent, particularly during the most dramatic parts. The things that happen are so ridiculous that my friends and I found ourselves saying the exact same things as characters when strange things happened. However, the character's "WHAAAT?!"'s were certainly more dramatic and drawn out than our own (bringing us quite a bit of laughter). The music is also delightfully dramatic, and fits all the cinematic moments and infiltration times perfectly, making the sound one of the best aspects of the game.
The graphics also look quite good. The only nagging problems are the Codec sequences, which look rather sixteen bit (and not in a good way), and the bodies of all the characters move a bit unrealistically. It's rather obvious that the characters were intended to have their arms at their sides, as when they are moved away from there, it looks like there are some kinds of cancerous protrusions on the shoulders of the characters.
Despite this, the game maintains its dramatic seriousness. Purely due to its comedic but ultimately amusing and enjoyable story, Metal Gear Solid is worth the price just for a rather long movie. Just don't expect the best stealth action gameplay or the best boss fights ever. If you want needlessly dramatic story sequences and a surprisingly enjoyable and pertinent story, you'll be more than happy with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.