METAL GEAR SOLID: Peace Walker - Master Collection Version

phenomenal memories playing this in the dead of winter 2018 on a CRT TV, having to communicate in broken English with diehard Japanese and Brazilian players that exclusively play Peace Walker ONLY, for some reason. even though there was only like a dozen people still playing back in 2018, it hilariously turned out to be the only game they played, and they showed me just how insane this game can get. i see these guys S-RANKing missions in under a minute with items and gadgets i didn't even know you could get/existed in-game - stealth camos, railguns that need multiple players to charge up and another to fire, sniper rifles the size of 3 MSF soldiers, a human slingshot that needs cooperation from 2 others.. just the most absurd ♥♥♥♥, completely destroying these lobbies like its nothing. it makes you feel like a student learning from a master, or something. i remember in particular a lobby we had going - me, an American, a Brazilian, a Japanese guy, and a guy from Mexico, all attempting our damnedest to communicate out of the sheer love for some ancient PSP game everyone forgot about a decade ago, where if they needed to correct me or tell me to do something, 90% of the time i had to run their message through google translate, think of what to say, run my message through google translate, and type it on the stupidly slow PS3 chat keyboard. we all still have each other on PSN to this day! a genuinely caveman like experience that i can never forget the thing with the PW grind is that eventually you learn to love it with enough hours (and friends). completing missions faster and faster, getting more and more S-RANK soldiers and firing the useless ones, eventually getting the recipes for stealth camo and the best smoke grenades in the game... the AI are braindead once you learn how it works, and once that happens you can break the game in half. grueling battles i struggled with at the beginning turned into sub 1-min sweeps, especially with multiple people. for a while, i actually needed a buddy to help me get through certain SIDE-ops until i was able to manage it on my own. it felt like a true triumph being able to S-Rank any mission on my own within minutes once i got the gear i needed. there's a point system called Camaraderie, where you make better and better connections with your friends based on how much you play together/actions done, and i met a Japanese guy who took me under his wing in particular to show me the most ultra-esoteric metas and info, and he would often just go AFK for like 3 hours so i could grind out whatever i needed to do with a real person. there's no other community where you will find people like this, and i think it's because peace walker is not for everyone, so if you find yourself grinding end-game PW content with other people, you naturally are gonna run into people of the same temperament, i guess. you either end up getting through the main story once and forgetting about it, or end up obsessing over it and getting into the nuances of R&D grinding and S-tier soldier farming, there seems to straight up be no in-between. this game is bizarrely content rich, to the point that i don't think all of it has been discovered.. in any case, to see 4,000 people playing this port in 2026 is a bit surreal and special for me.. getting to experience the whole climb to the top again is fun, but the real enjoyment for me is getting to a point where i can help new players and share whatever esoteric information with the new players i meet (cause there is a lot), just like the community taught me years ago