Considering the esteem in which the franchise is held, Metal Gear has a lot of disappointing instalments. This, however, wasn’t one of them, following up the best in the series – that’s MGS3, for those who aren’t keeping count – and absolutely stomping over the letdown of Portable Ops. This was a proper Metal Gear Solid game, originally planned as MGS5, and it’s a strong contender for my favourite of the lot.

Even if the story was mostly utter rubbish, taking a huge dump on some of the best characters, if you let that affect your enjoyment of Metal Gear games they’d never get anywhere near these lists. Cramming console games designed for dual analogue sticks onto portable systems rarely works, and indeed here it takes a period of acclimatisation, but in no time at all I had my head around it and, by the end, I found myself hoping that some of this game’s advances will get ported back to any future MGS games. This is the first one in which I’ve been able to make use of the CQC system, for example, now that it’s been slimmed down and the need to regulate pressure on the buttons as well as direction on the stick has been removed.

It’s looking increasingly likely that 2010 could be the PSP’s last year as Sony’s primary handheld console, and despite some of its most impressive games coming out – Persona 3 Portable also deserves a mention – it’s been an ignominious end, with mediocre hardware sales and almost non-existent software ones. This, though, must go down as evidence that the system had more to offer. Aside from its segmented areas – methinks as much down to hardware limitations as it is portable game design – this could have quite easily been a PS2 game, and as that seems to have been the Holy Grail of PSP development since the beginning, it’s one of the biggest compliments I can pay to one of its last great games.

What a finale, though, both to the Metal Gear Solid series and the PSP’s viability. I’ve had rocky relationships with both, but they’ll still be missed.

Many talk about how unexpected this was, given the series’, shall we say, inconsistent relationship with the third dimension, but in reality there was no time like the present. The ongoing commercial success of the God of War series and a spate of critically acclaimed games in the genre showed that there was a viable blueprint to follow, and with that, all it needed was some talent.

That’s Hideo Kojima explained, so perhaps the choice of MercurySteam as developer was the big surprise. Regardless, the Spanish dev did what Rocksteady Studios did with Batman: Arkham Asylum last year by unleashing a game on the world that exceeded all expectations, both in its own right and as a reflection of the developer’s pedigree.

Lords of Shadow isn’t particularly original, liberally borrowing from myriad similar games and also anything else that took the designers’ fancy: Pan straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth, an extremely familiar battle against an Ice Colossus Titan that immediately follows, and nods like a trip inside the Great Dekuh Tree – and those are all within the first couple of hours. Regardless, it’s a highly competent game, dripping with atmosphere and putting those high production values that are the mark of Kojima’s involvement to good use for some stunning environments and quality storytelling.

Word on the grapevine is that a sequel will be announced in 2011. With the hard reboot stuff out of the way, give me this with an appearance by a certain dark lord and I’ll be queuing up to indulge.

The Metal Gear series gets a lot of criticism for its labyrinthine story and ridiculous plot twists – AIs controlling the world by filtering the Internet, anyone? – and I’m no huge fan of it either, but my time with Peace Walker has convinced me of something.

Like how Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is the real main character in Star Wars, the key player in Metal Gear is not Solid Snake but his ‘father’ and frequent antagonist Big Boss. Considering Kojima’s love of pop culture the similarities in structure can’t be a coincidence – great warrior with good intentions is manipulated into evil, while his son defeats the super weapons of the true villain’s powerful organisation before reconciling with the father shortly before the father’s death – but unlike Star Wars, I actually far prefer the prequels in the Metal Gear Solid series.

Snake Eater is the first stop, which is by far my favourite game of the lot. In its Subsistence form with a competent camera, at least – it’s not a coincidence that every MGS game since then has used it – it offers some restraint in its story, a Cold War setting where the series’ brand of nuclear paranoia makes sense, features some of the best boss battles in the series, infinitely more interesting environments than the generic warehouses of Solid Snake’s adventures, and, in Naked Snake and The Boss, has the series’ two best characters. Not to mention my favourite ending in any game ever.

The previous PSP game, Portable Ops, didn’t really do it for me, but Peace Walker is built as a full-on entry in the series that would be as at home on a home console as it is on the PSP. It was originally going to be Metal Gear Solid 5, in fact, but don’t let its demotion from the main series line-up make you believe that it’s any less than those entries. It’s up there with MGS3 in my opinion, and everyone should play it. (more…)

It’s hard to believe that after so much hype, so many trailers, so many years in development, Metal Gear Solid 4 actually came out last summer. It always seemed destined to be one of those epochal games, assuming it could live up to that astronomical hype, and it really did.

I had my doubts that it could come anywhere close to tying up all those loose ends that the last two games in particular had left, and while it had to utilise some insanely long cut-scenes to do it, I put it back on the shelf at the end more satisfied than I had any right to be after finishing a game with such a labyrinthine story. Some didn’t like playing a game that you could spend up to an hour not actually playing, but if you came away from the game with that as a complaint you apparently hadn’t played a Metal Gear game before.

That’s not to say that MGS4 was more of the same, because it deserves credit for being a game that wasn’t afraid to change what had always been a highly successful formula. While so many Japanese developers are struggling to make the jump to the current generation – can we stop calling it ‘next-gen’ yet? – Kojima and his team modernised what had been a bit of a dinosaur in terms of controls and movement in 3D space. Where MGS3 required three hands to perform some of the more complex techniques, this one actually felt like a proper, modern game, able to work just as well as an action game as it was the standard stealth fare.

I did have issues with it, the main one being that aside from the endgame, it peaked with the phenomenal first two acts, but overall the fact that this game even met my expectations was an achievement. That it exceeded them is testament to how big an achievement that was.

The wait is over, then. What has been heralded as one of the truly genre-defining games of the generation is out, and now we have nothing left to look forward to or something.

I love Metal Gear Solid 4. Yes, it’s indulgent (I made it 75 minutes for the ending); yes, Kojima needs someone to rein him in occasionally. But I enjoyed the hell out of MGS3 despite the same flaws and the few annoyances I’ve had over the gameplay, which hasn’t aged particularly well in all honesty. MGS4 overhauls the controls rather than trying to retrofit yet more features onto the setup, and as a result it’s a lot more accessible than previous games, no longer requiring great feats of polydactylism to perform simple tasks.

Take the CQC system, for example. A good idea introduced in MGS3, which turned Snake – who, until then, was supposed to be a martial arts expert despite only being able to throw and do a punch-punch-kick combo – into a suitably versatile fighter. It was clunky, though, and far too easy when halfway through a non-lethal playthrough to grab an enemy and slit his throat. Here, with CQC moved from circle to R1 and fatal attacks requiring an entirely separate button press, it’s much more manageable.

The gunplay has received a similar reboot. Kojima has been taking notes when he played the recent over-the-shoulder shooters like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, because it’s just about possible to play the game’s battlefield scenarios entirely from this perspective. Even if you don’t want to run around like that, which you don’t, mapping this function to L1 and separating the draw and fire functions – admit it: having both holstering and firing the weapon on the same button was the worst idea ever – has turned the shooting into far less of a crapshoot.

That’s two of my biggest problems with Metal Gear down in one fell swoop. (more…)

OK, so the Metal Gear Solid series is hardly known for its subtlety and brevity in storytelling, what with several 20-minute scenes in MGS3 and… well… the whole of MGS2, but the reviews of MGS4 are blowing my mind. Some of the reviews, notably Edge, are claiming that the game has two extremely long cut-scenes.

That’s a bit like saying that Metal Gear has a big robot in it, of course, but word is that these sequences are pushing the 90-minute mark. And Konami doesn’t want reviewers to mention it.

In the interest of fairness, GamePro is saying that it’s an exaggeration. We’ll find out for ourselves in less than a fortnight anyway, but I’ve always had respect for Edge and can’t imagine that such a prestigious magazine – possibly the only gaming publication that I’d use that word to describe – would make a claim like this about such an important game without there being some truth to it. And would Konami really care if reviews mentioned that the cinemas were no different to the other multimillion-selling games in the series?

True or not, it brings up an interesting question about storytelling in games. Would having 90-minute cut-scenes actually help games as a storytelling medium, or does it undermine it and defer the job to the conventions of film? Half-Life tells a story within a game and BioShock does it even better, and the irony is that the part of BioShock’s story that attracted the most criticism was the least game-like part: the ending. (more…)