Metal Gear Solid 4 Finally Leaves the PS3 Behind - and It's Landing on Switch 2

I still have a PS3 in a cupboard, and honestly, Metal Gear Solid 4 is most of the reason why. That game came out in 2008 and then just... stayed there. No remaster, no PC port, nothing. If you wanted to see how Snake's story ends, you needed the exact box it shipped on, plugged in, whirring away like a small aircraft.

That stops next week.

Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 arrives on 27 August, and MGS4: Guns of the Patriots is finally in it - on Switch 2, on Switch, on PS5. First time off Sony's old machine in eighteen years. I don't think it fully landed for me until the comparison videos started turning up: YouTube channel ElAnalistaDeBits has put out a three-way side-by-side of the Switch 2 build against the PS5 version and the original PS3 release. Seeing a Nintendo handheld in that lineup at all still makes me grin a little.

What's actually in the collection

Three games. MGS4, Peace Walker, and Metal Gear: Ghost Babel - yes, the Game Boy Color one, which is a genuinely lovely deep cut to include. Konami says MGS4 gets a resolution and frame rate bump plus customisable controls, Peace Walker gets custom controls too, and Ghost Babel arrives with the proper retro-collection kit: screen filters, pixel-perfect display options, rewind.

There's also a full restoration of the MGS4 Database, that enormous in-game encyclopaedia that tried to make sense of the entire series' canon up to 2008. Good luck. The digital version is listed at $49.99.

Why I care more than I expected to

Because this is the kind of thing that usually doesn't happen. Games welded to dead hardware just quietly vanish - they stop being part of the conversation, they stop being something you can hand to a friend who missed them. MGS4 has been sitting in that category for the better part of a generation, and every year the odds felt worse, not better.

And now it's coming to a machine you can take on a train. That's the detail I keep circling back to. I'll absolutely play the first few hours docked on the TV, blanket, lights off, doing my best 2008 impression. But the idea of finishing Snake's last mission in handheld mode is faintly ridiculous in the best way.

Eighteen years is a long time to wait for a port. I'm just glad someone finally bothered.

Image: Hiroshi Matsuda / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metal_Gear_Solid_logo_20080103.jpg