This is tangential to the topic, but since it was mentioned as being better, I have to say that while Twin Snakes has more polys than MGS1, so much of what made the game not only look good but made it more functional was thrown right out the window.
In the original Psycho Mantis fight you could see all of the important elements clearly and it had nice color theory with the green and orange. The reflection of the overhead lights was pretty too.
In the remake the floor had no reflection and nearly all of the colors made gray for the sake of "realism", as is the case with most sets in the game. The original MGS had areas with all kinds of colors and it was nice to look at, Twin Snakes is basically all dull, dark grays.
Also the most important parts of the fight, Snake and Mantis, are much harder to make out. This is just one example but pretty much every part of the game looks worse than the original in its "improved" state, frequently in similar ways to the ways the Mantis room was messed up.
The voice delivery suffered a hit too, with David Hayter even conceding that no one was as into it as they were back in the original game's recordings because the story was no longer fresh to them. Also, MGS1 wasn't the most realistic game to begin with, but they added lots of unnecessary goofy fight scenes and choreography in cutscenes that the game was perfectly fine without. And all of the characters look worse than their low poly originals, with Snake in particular having a really weird, dopey cross-eyed look the entire game.
Anyway, to get closer to the original topic, meta elements like referring to a game case are indeed very cool. Looking at the game case for Meryl's codec number is probably about as close to
Feelies- physical items included with some old games- as more modern games get. Sometimes they were even intuitively used as a form of copy protection, for example needing to refer to information on a document you physically received with the game to complete a puzzle. It could at the same time be immersive and act as a basic form of copy protection.
It's sad that as games go more and more digital release-only, feelies fall further and further from potential relevance. It would be great to see feelies come back as a fad because they're lots of fun! I think the tactile element they lend to games is very memorable.
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