‘Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1’ is completely broken on one platform

Soldiers, rejoice! The Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 (boy, that’s a bit of a mouthful) is finally out in the wild, on just about every platform to boot. There’s plenty to dig into here, and although this new anthology packs in 7 games, 2 graphic novels, a bevy of scripts and books, and a digital soundtrack, we imagine most gamers are going to be picking this one up to play the first three Metal Gear Solid titles, which are arguably some of the best games ever made.

Unfortunately, if you were hoping that you’d be able to sneak through facilities and hide under boxes on the go, you might want to curb your enthusiasm. Gaming On Linux reports that the collection is largely unplayable on the Steam Deck, at least at launch.

So, what’s broken, exactly?

To its credit, it looks like the original Metal Gear Solid does work fine on Valve’s portable PC, though it’s by no means a perfect port. The aspect ratio and resolution are not user-configurable, so you’ll be stuck with a letterboxed and pillarboxed image. This is a holdover from old analog/retro consoles; Metal Gear Solid launched on the original PlayStation and ran at a resolution of 320×240, which has now been scaled up to 960×720.

As a result, it’s not a perfect match for the Steam Deck’s 1280×800 screen, which is why it features borders on all sides when playing it on the Deck. Worse yet, there are no options to tweak the output image with scanline effects or other filters. These options are available on the most widely-used PlayStation emulators, so it’s disappointing to see them omitted here.

As for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, they just don’t work at all. While you can boot them up on the deck, the games eventually crash shortly after you start a new game on either of these two titles. Gaming On Linux tested these games across multiple versions of the Proton compatibility layer to no avail, so it seems like the collection is dead on arrival, at least on Steam Deck.

To be fair, the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 doesn’t officially support the Deck, but it’s still sad to hear that PC gamers won’t be able to play through Konami’s flagship series on the go. For now, those who want a portable version should look to the Nintendo Switch version of the game.