Metal Gear Solid is my favorite game and it always will be. First I would just like to thank everyone who stayed up late with me and helped me in one way or another (Parents,Justin,Megan,and Damian). This run took me about 2 weeks to finish. Although I save 15 times I try to make every segment as flawless as I can therefore eliminating the question of running through any segment faster.

The hardest, but best part of the game for me was believe it or not the guard elevator 2 battle followed by raven (Segment 14). All the guard battles were tough and as for raven, he has to be on steroids, i couldn't shake him.

The Metal Gear and Liquid battles (Segment 16) were not exactly hard but it was tough to get a good time on.

Those two segments were probably the toughest for me. other than that everything went smoothly. I did however have some ammunition problems in two parts of the game. I managed to shoot Psycho Mantis with my last famas tracer bullet before running out and having to use my last couple of socom bullets. I also had to shoot Sniper Wolf in the second battle with my last PSG1 bullet to kill her.

I did smoke while i was waiting for some events, especially since i had almost 0 life anyway it didnt matter anymore. I saved about of minute not picking up the body armor, consequently after repelling down the building and crossing the bridge I ended up with just about no life for the rest of the game until segment 16.

Segment 1:Infiltration
Segment 2:Guard Battle
Segment 3:Ocelot
Segment 4:Tank Battle
Segment 5:Gray Fox
Segment 6:Psycho Mantis
Segment 7:Retrieving the PSG1
Segment 8:Sniper Wolf
Segment 9:Guard Stair Battle
Segment 10:Bridge
Segment 11:Hind
Segment 12:Guard Elevator 1
Segment 13:Sniper Wolf 2
Segment 14:Guard Elevator 2 and Raven
Segment 15:PAL Keys
Segment 16:Metal Gear and Liquid

Game level - Extreme
Play time - 1:54:05
Save - 15
Continue - 0
Being found - 4
Enemies killed - 21
Rations used - 0
No special items used

MGS AnyBoss Extreme Bigboss Run Segmente 1:09:16

I'd like to start off this by thanking MGSlade, Dono, Snake, and all the other MGS speedrunners out there who so easily accepted me into that family of speedrunners, 2xsGameReape for finding the 46 second timesaver in the torture area, and TheThrillness for creating the EZcap guide which has enabled me to stream and record this run.

Quick bio before the run! I started speedrunning MGS in early OCT 2013 (ish) after having seen a youtube of Slade's run at SGDQ. I only had a PS emulator at the time and decided that the current MGS vids were out of date and thus needed to be updated! So I set out learning the run. It is now Jan 2014, and I have what I feel could possibly be SDA acceptable. I set out to do this run with 1 major thing in mind. "Keep it smooth looking" It is a segmented run, and for world record purposes I'll say right now that I don't meet the mark with this run. If I had made it through a segment and there were no horrible errors I would call it "good enough" and continue on. I wanted it to be a showcase of the latest in MGS routing and strategies, and what a world-record run would kind of look like played by a human.

I hope you enjoy it!

Seg 1

So the first room is kinda normal, I wait for the elevator, then hit the wall to distract the elevator guard while I board asap. Now, there are 4 alerts allowed for big boss, and only 3 of them are mandatory, so there is 1 alert to play around with. Of the possible alert places, taking the alert here at the helipad saves the most time. And so I get spotted by the search light on the way to grab the chaff. Exiting north from the helipad is possibly a third or half a second faster maybe, but at the time of recording, exiting to the left was much safer, and the one I was most comfortable with.

Once in the torture, utilizing the vent glitch, I hide under the bed so that the guard is afraid he's lost me, then finds me, thus skipping his "I'm so sleepy" sequence, saving 46 seconds off the previous run. We submit to the torture asap, because going through the torture sequence is a 6 and a half minute longer ordeal then just spamming select. After escaping johnny. It's time to head to the armory, this room has changed, the story I like to tell (because it makes me feel better) is that I was asking Slade about his route through here, because he used to pause and I couldn't do his strategy through this area. Questions led to the explainations and eventually some more playing around in the area, and Slade found that that armory route was possible. This change saves 2 seconds or so due to the runner not needing to wait for Guard 3 (the 2nd throw) to turn away from the elevator as you approach it.

After the armory, I make my way to the nuke building, picking up a grenade in the Canyon where we would have fought the tank. This is to be used specifically in a later segment. Enter nuke building head left, throwing the guard and cancelling the animation with R1 to re-equip chaff in order to make it to the elevator on time. Go to B1, collect Nikita, and Stuns, and then book it past the commanders room.

I lose a bit of time attempting the glitch on top of the entrance to the wolf pit. but its still faster than crawling through the thing, and that was really the only terrible loss of time on this segment, so I was happy to continue past the wolf-fight area and into the Comm Tower.

Seg 2

Segment 2 is really the make-break point in determining your rank in the game. I start off with a pretty perfect stun to cancel the cutscene of the camera. Into what I affectionately call Stairmaster. Stuns are at a premium because we need them for the walkway, but I throw a stun for the guard that might appear on floor 17 because the other alternative is to get shot by him, losing time. Or to do a couple punches leading up to that stairwell saving the damage but again costing time. After the ascent, the rope switch is weird as I had been playing multiple times to get this segment, the rope would move in the inventory from save to save, the 1 left swap is what it tends to stick with after a bunch of tries, so it's where I went, and just reset if it wasn't there. The rappel goes really well, I take a bit of steam damage to avoid a round of bullets from the hind via invincibility frames.

Now I said I threw a stun for guard on floor 17, this leaves me with just 1 stun to get past the guards here. It is a much riskier strat, in that if for whatever reason the guards volleys aren't unified, you're going to take damage on the way down and probably not make it across with enough hp to perform the next set of glitches. Comm B goes fairly well aside from the fact that I like to hug stairs and I ate a shot from a set of cameras because I missed a grenade. Again, time lost from the mistake wasn't huge, and the technique was showcased with the other cameras down the tower.

There is a faster way on to the boxes but its stupidly inconsistant and therefore I don't use it. Wolf goes down quick, I collect the stinger and am off to disk 2.

The blast furnace, Ichabod the crane is a really bad spawn, and I lose about 10-12 seconds, but rng is rng and there isn't much to be done about that, the rest of the run went so well that rng that could hit even a single segment runner and not affect your ending rank in the slightest was an acceptable setback. There was no strat to showcase other than "Cross your fingers" I do waste another second or 2 also waiting for the 2nd guard to turn before I throw him. this segment was really good and I decided to play it more cautiously toward the finish.

Segment 3

This segment is short, sweet, and lots of fun to look at.
Hellevator goes by nice with a 1 shot clear, it is possible to take 0 damage, but that is extremely difficult non-tas. I was then stuck and really did need some good luck after. I could have used my 1 chaff and grabbed more later, but the itemization is really tight with the new route, and normally you'll have enough hp to survive a shot, but I messed that up with the camera attack earlier. Thankfully the rng gods smile upon me and I am able to just dodge the camera's shots to the next elevator. Raven goes into the loop and then goes down. I throw the chaff then intended in the next room. and thus ends the segment in the rex room.

Segment 4

While it is the longest segment, there isn't too much to talk about here. Go up, throw the guard, come back down, grenade the rat to pick up pal, then complete the sequence. I do use in-game sound/nascar timing techniques to let me know when the card is heated/cooled. In the cold room, doing the outer outer loop, then the outer-inner loop, then the third loop (just watch) followed by 3 small victory circles, half-way during that third loop somewhere is when the card freezes and I run out without looking.
The hot card is a music cue, the music changes and when I hear the high-ish note for 4 beats(to be safe) is when I leave.

Segment 5

My rex fight takes 1 more stinger than it should in the 2nd phase due to not hitting the sweet spot. Liquid was in the words of Slade who caught me when I was streaming/recording this "Almost TAS-like"
I am a little little slow on skipping the cutscene for when liquid is falling, so we head a "Snaaaaake" for a beat or 2. The escape goes fairly smoothly except for the 2nd guard encounter, and liquid did get off a few more shots than I would have liked. But all in all. The Liquid showcase was a definite means to keep this segment in my eyes.

This run is just an update to the strategies and in no way are they executed absolutely perfectly (except for maybe the liquid fistfight) there's a good minute to be saved in the run by rng and by not saving.

My next venture is to update the All-Boss run posted on the site, unless Slade beats me to it by posting up his 1:38 time. But that's about it. Thanks to the verifiers for the work they put in, and thank you SDA for a wonderful community.

First of all, I would like to say my thanks to a few people:

• Radix, for accepting my run, Nate, for capturing it, and both of them for the amazing work they do at SDA.
• Arnaud, my brother, Alban and Mohamed for their support.
• Rémi, for selling me this game a long time ago, and lending me the equipment to record my run and for his general support.
• All the MGS speedrunners, Adnan Kauser and Zeno in particular, whose runs have been very helpful.
• Dark Angel, Liquid316 and Samuel Riesterer for their guides on GameFaqs.
• Adnan Kauser, again, for correcting and changing these comments.

This run was done on the French PAL version of the game played on the PlayStation.

Metal Gear Solid is my favorite PlayStation game, and naturally I decided to do my first speedrun on this game. I started to work on this run practically one year before completing it. I didn't work on the run for a whole year though: I trained for a few weeks, and then stopped for a few weeks. This caused the run to stagnate for a long period. At the beginning of my training I thought I could barely break the 2:15 mark, but, as time went by, my target time gradually decreased to finally breaking the 2 hour mark. I'm really happy to have finally done this, even though it has taken me so long to produce. I am happy with fact that I didn't complete it in two or three months, like I first expected, otherwise my time would have been around the 2:10 mark. The extra work put into this run allowed me to use better strats against a lot of bosses and to find plenty of little time savers that I'm sure you are going to like. One of the difficulties concerning the planning of this run is the ammo management, in particular the stun grenades which are very helpful in various situations. I don't claim that my strategy is optimal, different choices can be made like skipping the FA-MAS or the Thermal Goggles, picking up fewer Claymores...

Comments:

In the Tank Hangar if you reach the stairs too fast, the guard underneath will spot you; this is the reason I performed a combo before passing the last camera, this gave me just the right amount of time to pass without the risk of getting caught. The Cell fight wasn't really great. At the beginning, I only killed one guard to be able to kill the other ones. This is handy if Meryl doesn't fight well, which is frequent. The guard I held at the end of the battle didn't die like he was supposed to and shot me as I didn't realize he wasn't actually dead.

OCELOT: Ridiculous, isn't it?

Going through the laser room without Thermal Goggles is very easy to do, the timing doesn't have to be very precise and the CODEC ringing acts as an aid for timing the path.

TANK M1: The main difficulty in this fight is the great speed of the Tank in Extreme, making the use of Claymores practically mandatory. This battle can be very random, so I decided to use a 'slow' but reliable strategy. Two grenades were necessary to kill the first soldier but that didn't cost me too much time.

Chaff grenades don't only act as a disturbance to cameras; they can be used to distract guards' attention as their explosion acts exactly as a knock on a wall or a step in a puddle. This can be very useful in various situations. In Nuke Building B1, I used this to stop the guard, which gives me enough time to grab the stun grenades without being spotted.

NINJA: A few mistakes, but overall a good fight.

MANTIS: Of course, I used the second controller to defeat him. Grenades act strangely on Mantis, they hurt him but he instantly regains his life. The trick to use them in this fight is to shoot Mantis 20 times first (I actually shot him 21 times to be safe, I sometimes lose count), and then use a grenade: his life is reduced and replenished but that triggers the cutscene where he controls Meryl. When she passes out again, his life is always reduced to the same level. The obvious drawback of this tactic is the loss of a large amount of Snake's health; but if one of the objects controlled by Mantis hits you before the grenade explodes, you don't get hit by the grenade and damages are reduced by half.

WOLF 1: I was unlucky with Wolf's starting position and had to wait to for the opportunity to get into position. The fight was pretty good after that.

I made an embarrassing mistake in the Underground Passage where I equipped the PSG-1 for a second. My finger slipped, I still don't understand how. Since this run, I now always equip stun grenades after the Wolf fight ...just in case. The Communication Tower chase is a big stun grenades consumer, but I had to save a few of them for later in the game, hence the use of the Socom. The rappelling scene was terrible; I got shot two times and was lucky at the end when I brushed the steam. It is not obvious, but the way I went through the Walkway requires good timing, in particular for the launch of the first stun grenade.

HIND: The first part of this fight is easy but the second one is random and only a few shots can kill Snake (when he doesn't wear the Body Armor). Fortunately, this second part went very well and I managed to keep the Hind above me at all times, even if some shots weren't very well timed.

I picked up Stinger ammo after the Hind battle to have 10 missiles for the second Wolf fight. I got stupidly shot during the Elevator fight: I usually turn around the last guard to avoid his shots, but this time, I eliminated the first three guards faster than usual, this tactic didn't quite work out...

WOLF 2: This wasn't a very good fight; I missed a lot of Stinger shots and didn't use the PSG-1 very well. Notice that the last bullet was shot after the Diazepam effect ended ;-)

The crane in the Blast Furnace can sometimes be very annoying; this time, it only slowed me down a little bit though. During the Cargo Elevator battle, running through the bullets like I did is risky and requires some practice. Unfortunately, I got shot at the end, right when I thought I was safe. This left me with minimal life until the MG-REX fight; that led me to be extra cautious (too cautious sometimes) for the end of the run, especially when I equipped a ration in inappropriate places.

RAVEN: Raven is the easiest fight of the game because of his set pattern. He spotted me a couple of times but the path I used didn't enable him to shoot me.

There's a faster way to pass the guard in Underground Base 3, I didn't use it because of the risk involved. I was very lucky with the mouse's starting position :-)

METAL GEAR REX: A few mistakes, plus the strange behavior of REX (when he turned on his left) slowed me down a bit. The fight was nevertheless pretty good.

LIQUID: Hitting Liquid continuously requires Snake to be perfectly aligned with him, which is pretty difficult: a very little deviation makes him slowly leave Snake's action range. That's what happened when I cornered him at the top of the area. The beginning of the fight was excellent. Unfortunately, it turned very bad and I lost about 20 seconds on my average fight time.

The Jeep escape was very bad, I got shot a lot by guards and by Liquid and I was slow to shoot him.

This run is obviously improvable: with better fights, improved strategies against a few bosses and enough luck, I think that a time under 1:58 is possible.

Thank you and Enjoy!

Slade