Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- July 10, 2006 13:33 PM PST
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If you saw the E3 demo, you saw the gameplay, and it's now more obvious than ever that MGS2 will be the PS2's first must-have game.
Konami wowed everyone at E3 with the great-looking demo of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. But for months, gamers debated whether the jaw-dropping demo showed actual gameplay or just slick pre-rendered CG animation.On Thursday, Konami finally ended the debate and proved that what you saw is what you'll get. At Konami's Gamer's Day in San Francisco, the company gave the American video-game press a 20-minute demo of MGS2 gameplay, the first playable glimpse seen by anyone outside Konami. And in the judicious opinion of this reporter, it looks freaking awesome! If you saw the E3 demo, you saw the gameplay, and it's now more obvious than ever that MGS2 will be the PS2's first must-have game. "We've been telling you all along it was all playable footage," said Ken Ogasawara, the game's U.S. producer, who assumed control of Snake for the demo. Best of all, you'll get a free copy of this same playable-playable!-demo of MGS2 when you buy Zone of the Enders at certain stores when it comes out in March. But how much of the game will gamers get in this playable demo? "The demo is very large," is all Ogaswara would say.
The demo opened with a cinema worthy of a feature movie: Cars sloshed in the rain across New York's George Washington Bridge as raindrops blurred the virtual-camera lens. Headlights and brake-lights glowed in the fog to reveal a lone poncho-covered man slogging across the bridge's catwalk. A close-up shot reveals the man to be Snake, who takes off running, jumps off the bridge, and slides down a rope to a nearby power plant.
As the game opens, Snake learns that a new Metal Gear is stowed onboard a freighter near New York City. He sneaks aboard to find it, armed with a single-shot tranquilizer gun adapted from a Beretta. But as he's scanning the deck with his binoculars, a military-style helicopter swoops in to discharge a squad of commando baddies who, using night-vision goggles, swarm the ship and zap the crew with silenced machineguns. As Snake ponders the identity of the hijackers, their leader dons a fur cap, confirming them as Russian.
That's when Snake stepped into action. With Ogasawara at the controls, Snake creeped across the ship, sneaking and peeking around corners. The view was third-person, and the preset camera angles were like those in the original game, but of course Snake and the environment were much more detailed and smoothly drawn-on par with or better than CG animations on the original PlayStation, but in real-time.
When he spotted a bad guy, Snake switched to a first-person view and shot him with the tranquilizer dart. A second baddie saw the first go down, came to investigate, and was also darted and tranquilized by Snake, who then dragged them away as they snored. Snake hid one of the enemies in a locker-room locker, standing him upright, then shutting the door (one locker had a photo-quality girlie poster hanging on the door). Snake then sneaked through a few more corridors and rooms, until coming right up behind another enemy commando, who threw up his hands in surrender. The commando stood shaking and screamed in Japanese a few times. Snake looked him over closely and the level of detail was impressive. His head cover was padded, like a Russian tank commander's and he had eerie, red-glowing night-vision goggles. Over his shoulder hung a sub-machinegun, which looked like a Heckler-Koch MP5. Snake then darted him and moved on. After sneaking near the ship's bridge and into a storage room, Snake found a cardboard box, which he hid under and moved around in, to the cheers and laughter of the assembled press. Finally, Snake burst into the ship's mess hall and was quickly seen by a guard and blasted with machinegun fire.
In short, the graphics were awesome, yet the gameplay looked like it will be familiar to those who already know and love the original game. While it isn't slated for release until fall, MGS2 looked complete and simply in the process of being translated and converted from the Japanese version. If you were excited by the E3 demo, rejoice. That demo will soon be a reality.
