Use the Metal Gear Database or watch the GT retrospectives if you wanna get into the story.

keep mgs4, just shelve it until you play the others. i know it's hard to have it sit there but you'll enjoy it more if you play the other 3 first (which are all really fun).

listen to ALDRO, he never played mgs in his life, and mgs4 is the best game he has ever played.

Why don't you just buy a PS2 on ebay for like 50 bucks, then get the Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection it has MGS1,2 and 3 in it.

1. MGS1 I would recommend a play thru. It should take you 8 hours or less. It's a great game. You can get it and play it on the PS3 cause it is a PS1 game and all PS3 games can play PS1 games.

2. Keep it.

3. Yes

The man above me speaks the truth, buy the ps1 version of mgs off amazon, if you enjoy it enough buy a ps2 to play the others.

If you have no intention of buying a ps2 then I recommend you play the first and watch the retrospectives on gametrailers which have already been linked to in this thread previously.

Playing MGS1 is enough, you can do that on your PS3. Two introduces Raiden, and a few others not in one, but isn't too important to understand the game.

Three is important, but they go into great detail to hash out much of three over again. So you really only need to play one to have a sufficient understanding of who everyone is and what's happening

I only played MGS 3 and read about MGS 1 and 2 in the Metal Gear Solid Database that is a free download on PSN.

outlawauron I did the exact same thing :p

The only thing I didn't like about this game is that you wouldn't know shit about the story if you don't have knowledge of the previous games, I could imagine myself being confused as hell if I didn't know anything about the previous games.