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.

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.

The only real loss in its conversion to the PSP is in its controls, which, in the default setup, put camera and aiming controls on the face buttons while you move with the nub, approximating dual-stick controls as well as can be expected on the PSP. There are other options, but once I got the hang of it I found it to be very workable, and the game does a good job of compensating for any downsides with a hint of aim assist. Some of the simplification’s a boon, as well, as this has what I reckon to be the least fiddly implementation of the CQC system yet.

Konami’s done a decent job of building the game around the portable format on the whole, diving it into relatively small, replayable missions that could often do with mid-mission checkpoints but can usually be beaten within 15 minutes. I wish the same could be said for some of the later cut-scenes, but this is Metal Gear, after all…

It’s loaded with stuff, from returning clever uses of the PSP like generating ‘volunteers’ from nearby wireless networks, to the ability to play almost every mission in co-op, and a pile of ‘Extra Ops’ bite-sized missions that really are properly suited for a bus journey. Not to mention a bizarre appearance from a certain popular Capcom franchise. It’s probably about halfway through the game where it stops randomly throwing new things to do at you between missions, from collecting parts for your own Metal Gear to pitching your accrued forces into Advance Wars-style battles for more R&D funds to help you out in the single-player missions. If there’s one thing that you can’t criticise Kojima for, it’s not cramming prodigious amounts of content into his games.

Gorgeous, unrestrained in both its scope and storytelling, deeply layered, and highly replayable – this is every inch a Metal Gear Solid game. Despite my love/hate relationship with MGS, which has been pushed more to the positive side with more recent games, this is a franchise that I’ll be disappointed to see ending. But since MGS4 was definitely the last and we’ll soon have second new game in the series beyond that point, it’s not something that I’m overly worried about yet.

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.

This generation couldn’t have been more different, though. Look at the big new IPs that have been hits, the big games for this Christmas, and even the successful games of generations past that have received next-gen makeovers: almost all Western games.

Lost Planet and Dead Rising hit early on and boded well, but where are their sequels, let alone the second volley from Japan? Devil May Cry 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4 have done well, but DMC4 was still a disappointment by many accounts – including mine – due to its recycled environments and conservative design, and who was it that helped in redesigning many elements of the Metal Gear formula, including its increasingly cumbersome controls? Ryan Payton, its American producer, who has spoken about the Western influence that he fought to bring into the new game. Even the mighty Ninja Gaiden disappointed me on its next-gen debut.

The RPG genre, which has traditionally been dominated by Japan, in very much in transition at the moment as well. Where are the big-budget next-gen JRPGs? With the exception of Lost Odyssey, I’ve found all of them so far to be extremely disappointing; Final Fantasy XIII is at least another year away and Dragon Quest IX is a DS game; the latest MegaTen game, Persona 4, is on the PS2. Meanwhile we have Western devs mixing RPG conventions with their favoured genres, bringing us stuff like Mass Effect. Hell, someone even spilt their RPG in my Call of Duty 4.

As far as my opinion for this phenomenon go, I have to surmise that it’s Japanese conservatism biting its development community. This generation has been less about the graphical leap – at least for those without HDTVs – than it is the experience that Internet connectivity brings. It was Microsoft, the only Western platform holder, that led the way there, with Sony only now beginning to catch up and Nintendo barely acknowledging that people even want to play online. Looking at how Sony has been retrofitting community features to the PS3, it’s been said that the reason why we still don’t have cross-game invites is because Japanese developers find the idea that the console itself could prompt the player to leave their game for a competitor’s to be rude. Never mind what players want…

LittleBigPlanet and Halo 3, for my money the two games that have done the most for connectivity and content-sharing on consoles, are both from Western developers, and without this kind of stuff games really do feel like their PS2 and Xbox counterparts with shinier graphics. Where’s anything even close to those from a Japanese developer? The implementation of online features in MGS4, for example, was shockingly poor.

This is, of course, just one of the massive changes that this generation has brought. The leading console is from Nintendo for the first time in 14 years and yet it remains unpopular with traditional gamers, Sony is in third place – making those original PS2 ads extremely prescient – and Japanese development is in the doldrums while American and European developers run away with the plaudits.

What on Earth happened?

Now, though, you can add networking to the mix, which isn’t yet necessarily as simple as it perhaps ought to be, and, of course, the minefield that is connecting your new device to an HDTV. Still, those have given us benefits for those who can do a bit of research, and even the dreaded patching is done automatically and quickly (mostly), meaning that a bug is no longer either something to deal with or wait for the second pressing.

But unfortunately, the one thing that I always hated about PC gaming has made the jump: installs. What started as a worrying but quick (Resistance, with its 220MB install) or optional process, taken through the promised land of Uncharted, which managed lush graphics with barely a load and no install, has now almost become the standard, and I HATE IT.

It just shouldn’t be happening. Big titles like Devil May Cry 4 require over 20 minutes of doing nothing before you can even play, and Metal Gear Solid 4 took it to the extreme by having five installs, with a new one if you ever load a save in an act that you’ve played before. The game may be able to fit onto one Blu-ray, as they delight in telling you, but I’m pretty sure I could get up and swap a disc faster than that.

I suppose it comes down to the relatively open nature of the PS3. By taking the good, like open standards for controllers and memory cards, you have to deal with the fact that the experience isn’t as tightly controlled. It’s the same reason why Metal Gear can have such a shitty online implementation and stuff like custom soundtracks, the system-level friends list, voice chat, and now achievements trophies aren’t supported in every game. It gives devs the option to skip a bit of optimisation in trying to get cross-platform titles to run identically.

At the moment it’s merely an annoyance, a one-time inconvenience, but I’m not looking forward to the long term. When you inevitably need to do some spring-cleaning and delete some older installs as your hard drive fills up, deleting that little cache takes away the plug-and-play nature of that game. When even fighting games – surely the most pick-up-and-play of all genres – have over 2GB of data to install (see Soul Calibur IV), it certainly takes away a lot of the immediacy. No one would watch a movie that had to install before you could play it.

So stop it, developers. Delay for a couple of weeks if you have to, but stop taking away what has always made consoles my preferred way to play games, especially if it doesn’t give us any benefit in return.

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.

I suppose the big deal with MGS4 has to be the graphics, though. Other games may pile on more effects, but few look as solid (no pun intended) as this. While it may, in places, lack the wow factor that we all felt when we first saw Unreal Engine 3 or even when we first saw this game way back in 2005, it doesn’t bog itself down and ruin its frame rate like so many other games feel the need to do. There’s no cheesy bloom lighting or motion blur to hide its flaws, and once you’re outside the fairly monochromatic Middle East it actually has some colour. I’m not actually convinced that some of the cut-scenes aren’t pre-rendered because of how great they looked.

But as someone who plays Metal Gear for the story as much as anything, that was arguably the most important thing for me. If that left me satisfied and tied up the loose ends I could overlook most of the other flaws, but a failure there could leave me ambivalent on the whole thing. In the end… it’s a qualified success. I won’t talk too much about it, but it did answer pretty much every remaining question and did it with suitable aplomb. I know people are wary of spoilers, so suffice to say the only disappointments were the revelations about Liquid Ocelot and about the identities of the Patriots. They just felt like retcons to me, but I’ll let the statute of limitations on spoilers expire before I talk about it. You can always email me if you want to discuss it.

As I type this, it’s been a couple of days since I finished it (took me 18 hours 42 minutes, incidentally) and I’ve had time to reflect on it. While it’s undeniably impressive and a brilliant game – I’d put it second only to MGS3 if I had to rank the series – I can see where the 8/10 reviews were coming from. Later acts aren’t as open and new-feeling as the first two, with the last one having very little to actually play and the other two being Splinter Cell and an appeal to nostalgia respectively, and I think the other games left it with too much to do. Still superb stuff and the first game this gen that I’m feeling the urge to finish more than once, but not the perfect game that some would have you believe.

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.

Personally, I don’t think that it’s a good thing. It speaks of the limitations of a game’s ability to tell an effective story – or maybe Kojima’s limitations as a storyteller – that as much of a third of a relatively linear game could be completely non-interactive, essentially telling the story in film form because a game couldn’t do it. It’s like someone accusing cinema of being unable to capture internal emotion like a novel can and a prominent director compensating by putting pages of text up on screen. Different media should have different conventions, and while games are still discovering theirs, this sort of thing is a step in the wrong direction. Watching something like Metal Gear REX face up to Metal Gear Ray might look mind-blowing, but if I’ve got a game on it’s because I want to play something, not watch it.

That’s not even mentioning the more practical issue of accessibility. What happens if I’m playing MGS4 late at night and suddenly find myself committed to sitting there for another hour and a half? I know the game allows you to pause cut-scenes, but can you save your progress in the middle of the scene? Or do you just have to pause it and leave the PS3 running until your next opportunity to play?

Given that there’s a clear disagreement between people who’ve actually finished the game on something as simple as cut-scene length, I think it likely that the ’90-minute question’ is down to differing use of the term ‘ending’. For example, I see people talk about MGS2 and 3 having hour-long endings when they’re actually nowhere near that and it’s only the case if you count, say – MGS2 spoilers – Arsenal Gear, the codec weirdness, fighting alongside Snake, the Metal Gear Ray battle, the fight with Solidus, and the actual ending cut-scene (only a few minutes long) as “the ending”. MGS3′s final cut-scene was very long and one of the most affecting scenes in gaming, but it’s similar to MGS2′s finale if you count the various boss fights and escapes at the end.

Regardless, only ten days until we can see for ourselves and find out who’s full of lies and who may have been sucked in by the hype. I honestly doubt any game can live up to the levels of hysteria that this game has commanded since its announcement, but if I like it anywhere near as much as I did MGS3: Subsistence, I’ll be happy.

…and not much else, because it’s still not working. Having been released for download over a week ago and taking an inordinate amount of time to download (I was at 17% of a 741MB file after three hours), it required the immediate download of the 1.01 patch, which would either time out on the HTTP download or, on the BitTorrent option, max out at about 16kbps while uploading at over 40. And now there’s a second patch, which you have to download after 1.01, because they’re incremental. And I’m having the same download problems after eight days.

Not to mention that when it does work, you need a Konami ID (lower-case alphanumeric), a password for that, a game ID (lower-case alphanumeric; must be different to the Konami ID), and a second password (this time only numerical). Given the fact that every online PS3 user will already have a unique ID… why!?

Epic fail, in other words.

Xbox Live gets a lot of stick for costing £40 a year, but I’d be more than happy to pay that for PSN if the damn thing worked half the time. I’ve never spent more than 30 seconds downloading a Live patch (unlike Super Stardust HD, a twin-stick shooter that inexplicably gets a 153MB patch) or dashboard update, and because it’s a closed system I know that my one account will work on all games. On Live I’ve participated in three betas – Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, and currently Battlefield: Bad Company – and all worked just as transparently as any demo or downloadable game.

That’s worth £40 to me. I’d rather pay for a nice steak than get a free grease burger and I’d rather have something that works to something that doesn’t. I’m not even demanding feature parity with Live on the original Xbox (universal friends list, cross-game invites, etc), though that would be nice; just a system that works. Yes, it’s free, but so is Steam, and that’s arguably better than Live at the moment.

In case I haven’t made this clear, I hated Snake Eater. But what a difference a little camera control can make.

After Sons of Liberty the MGS series lost a lot of goodwill, and so tried something new with MGS3. Now you play only as Snake (not Solid), and you’re not in the near future of infinite battery lives and soliton radar, but in a Soviet jungle at the height of the Cold War. You’re really on your own, with even the need to sustain yourself completely in your hands. It was just too bad that a bit too much digging in menus and a truly terrible camera let it down.

Luckily someone at Konami had played Splinter Cell. That second stick was put to good use and let you move the camera in full 3D (in a 3D game? Whatever next!?), and in doing so completely transformed it. What was game-ruining flaw suddenly become totally transparent to use and allowed the parts that the game does so well to shine through.

What it does well, it does very well. A slick and exciting stealth adventure with a wry sense of humour carries a superb story – all told through cinematics that can stand up with the best blockbusters – right through to an epic and emotional ending (around twenty minutes long) that gives the perfect finale to what had been a top class game. Bring on MGS4.

The immediate concern when playing this game is the control system. One of my criticisms of MGS3 was the convoluted controls and although they still take some getting used to here and are overall inferior, Kojima’s team has done some much-needed pruning. The lack of buttons eventually stops feeling limited, and I hope that the lessons learnt here are carried over to MGS4.

The 3D camera obviously doesn’t control as smoothly on a D-pad as on an analogue stick, but is still a welcome transplant from the last game. The frustration of unseen enemies is further alleviated by a permanent radar/sound sensor thingy (no worrying about battery levels) and a full map of each area on the pause menu. I still got spotted by an enemy that I missed in the first room but that was my fault for not realising how the radar worked.

The fundamental change to this game comes with the recruitment system, where each mission can be played out with a squad of four allies. Almost any enemy in the game can be recruited into your little rebellion and then their unique skills can be utilised – uniformed enemies are less conspicuous when infiltrating a base, for example – in your efforts to complete the game. It even uses the wi-fi function of the PSP to generate random recruits, meaning that just stopping in a coffee shop can yield an S-class supersoldier. I’ve taken my PSP out with me a couple of times with the sole intention of visiting a known access point to see what I can get.

Graphically, the character models are comparable to their PS2 counterparts, albeit with a lower polygon count and lesser detail. The tradeoffs don’t really affect the graphical acuity on the screen size that you’re going to be playing this on. The stages have received a similar drop in detail and range from good to functional. When playing in the Town area at night I found myself remembering Medal of Honor on the PS1 for some reason – it doesn’t look that bad, but that’s what I was channeling.

Where Konami deserves credit is in not shovelling a PS2 MGS game onto the portable. This has clearly been designed as a portable game, with stages that rarely take more than ten minutes to finish and the chance to micromanage your growing army if you don’t even have time for that. It’s a model that I hope more developers take note of before the state of PSP software gets any worse. They’ve clearly understood the target platform which is all too rare on Sony’s handheld.

So then, what this looks to be is a highly competent portable MGS, and quite possibly my favourite PSP game behind Lumines. Any flaws are generally systemic and, despite a story that has so far seemed slightly perfunctory (although confirmed canonical), I’m confident that fans of the series will find this thoroughly enjoyable.