Controls were awful. Didn't play for more than 30 minutes. Why did they didn't offered better control in the HD edition boggles my mind.

Put in a few hours until I got bored. I had a lot of fun with the first one, can't really say the same about this one.

I love everything about mgs2. I played it then mgs1 then mgs3 and i loved all 3.

#2 is my favourite and i complete it at least once a year. To me it is truly great. Just my type of game.

Couldn't agree more.  Splinter Cell came along a year later and showed Kojima and company how to do the gameplay/control properly, IMO.  Fortunately, they got it right with Metal Gear Solid 4.

I was a huge Metal Gear fan, and when Metal gear Solid came out it was what I wanted from the series. metal gear Solid 2 tried many things that were "beyond" my vision of the series at the time. I wanted spy thriller with sci fi elements, and it had a lot of meta commentary that made me go "Huh?" when I played it in 2001.

By the end I didn't hate it, but I felt like I went in to see James Bond film and someone gave Terrance Malick the director's job.

MGS2 is one of the best game ever made, more relevant now than even went it was released. My favourite game of al time.

MGS2 was my first ps2 game and probably my second most replayed game. The story and characters left a big impression on me. However, It never toyed with my expectations because I didn't have any. Kojima and friends pulled a risky move, and that adds to the context of the story. Though you can't appreciate that if you only played the game now. That is unless you've known it in since the height of its controversy like I did.

"Infinite ammo".... So snake has cheats on?

Raiden was ridiculed for his look and... well... for not being Snake, whose badassnes was intentionally accentuated by the rookie. I felt like his backstory was the most macho-sadistic compared to other characters: an alcoholic child soldier with PTSD who was trained by the former US president, which happens to be Solid Snake's other "brother".

Each entry had its own plot holes and convoluted mess, but subtext is more important than cannon. They all felt like they were their own entities to me. Even if the story was interconnected, retconned parts or not. So the "whole thing was a VR simulation" interpretation still holds up.

Raiden to me in MGS4 was the most developed character. It's true that he wasn't an extension of the player anymore, but he still retained some of his characteristics. It made sense why he altered his body to come out of Snake's shadow, and why he was self destructive. Still as androgynous as ever, too. Didn't appreciate his look in Revengence, though.

You might think you're hot sh*t but European Extreme is not fun.

It is quite a coincidence that this topic was raised now cos I'm currently on my first play of MGS2 (the HD collection for PS3) and I'm new to the series, it's my first MGS game. I tried MGS3 on PS2 in 2011 but I found the controls terrible and quit early so that doesn't count.

I'm about 5 hours in MGS2, my impressions so far:
- One of the worst if not the worst controls I have seen, simply terrible. They feel unfinished and probably are, and don't tell me that I have to take the age of the game into account because around that time (2002) there were plenty of 3rd person games with decent controls (Hitman, Splinter Cell, Mafia, Max Payne etc.).
- The story so far feels like a 13 year old tried to come up with something but got lost in his ideas and cound't connect them. I hope it improves because so far it's simply rubbish.
- It has some cool cutscenes. That's the only good thing I can say about this game so far.

Playing the Vita version as we speak. Touch controls suck but the game is still great.

Truly great cinematic game. I played it twice when it came out and again as HD remaster.
It was ahead in the visual and audio department at the time, still stands up very well. I like how it portrays the passage of time as it gets darker slowly while progressing in the story. That works much better than a disconnected 30 minute day/night cycle.