First off this game is not for everyone. You either love it or hate it. Me personally I love it. Big improvement over MGS3 Online. Don’t think this will be your standard FPS, it is not! That’s what makes MGO unique and fun. There is a big learning curve if you’ve never played a metal gear game. But there is a training mode to practice your shooting, CQC(close quarter combat), movement, adjusting the settings to your liking, etc. Which you should do before you jump into a live game, because you’ll get slaughtered quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.

It still took me some time before I really got used to the controls, and adjusting the settings to my liking. It’s a blast to roll over people in the barrel. But if you roll for to long you will throw up. It works great to hide barrels and boxes. Most of the time people just walk by, but you’ll get people that shoot boxes and barrels just to be sure. The catapult (I call it the man cannon), is so great. You hop on and you can move it to two angles, then just press triangle and off you go flying into the air. I like to rotate the camera in mid air to get a good look at the whole level almost and see if I can spot any enemies while flying. Then you nail the landing on both feet and continue on. You always know when somebody is flying because of the scream they make, lol.

Then there is the magazines with bikini clad ladies. Works the same as usual, but this time you can actually turn the pages and choose which sexy lady you want to “distract” you enemies. I think there is a about 4 pages. The CQC is fun, I finally leveled up my knife skill to lv3 so I can slit throats. So fun to hide around corner and grab a enemy passing by and knock him out or kill him. If you have CQC level 3 you can actually disarm your opponent of his weapons, inject a virus, knock him out, etc. I don’t have this yet, but I’m working on it.

The skill system has 4 slots and 16 skills total. For example you can select a gun type mastery which reduces the recoil and faster reloading or Fast Movement which would be useful for CQC or just getting away from enemy fire. But if you level up a skill to level 2 it will take 2 slots, and level 3 (max) takes 3 slots. Which I wish wasn’t the case. Because if you want to slit throats with a knife. You have to have lv3 knife and lv1 cqc, and that takes up all your slots. Wouldn’t be so bad if you could swap out your skills after you die. But you can’t until the whole round is over.

The SOP system is great addition. Just press triangle near your team mates and you are all linked to the SOP system. Once you die your not connected and you’ll need to connect again. This outlines them with your teams color (red or blue), and it’s still visible threw walls even. You can tell if your teammates are distracted by a magazine, stunned, being killing etc. There is even a skill that allows you to hack into your opponents SOP system and if the guy you hacked into is connected to his team mates you basically know the locations of everybody on there team!

On Monday Konami released another game mode, Sneaking Mission (my favorite), and a map called Midtown Maelstrom. Somebody at random is picked to be Snake, and if there is at least 11 players somebody gets to play as the Metal Gear Mk. II robot. To win Snake must collect 3 dog tags from enemies without dying, which can be very hard sometimes. While this is going on there are two teaming battling it out. For a team to win they have to kill snake up to 5 times (depending on your server settings). If Snake doesn’t collect his 3 dog tags or he doesn’t die five times from a team. Then the team with the most kills win. It’s a blast.

Snake has Octocamo, which takes the color and texture of whatever he’s against if he doesn’t move for a couple seconds. Sometimes he is extremely hard to see, think of it like trying to find predator cloaked during a fire fight. But for the Octocamo to be truly effective you have to keep changing the suit to match your environment. Snake also has another great tool in his arsenal, the Solid Eye vision system. Which allows him to switch between Night Vision and binoculars. Another cool thing is you can even do a hold up with Snake. Just point your gun at a guys back and he’ll say Freeze!

Playing as the Mk. II robot is a blast too. It’s basically invisible in the shadows, in the sunlight it casts a small shadow. The Mk. II only has one weapon & purpose really, to assist Snake in winning. He can deliver shocks to people to knock them out so snake can collect the dog tags.

Had a epic MGO moment over the weekend! A guy had my team member in a standing choke hold just outside the warehouse doors. I was hidden inside the warehouse with my sniper rifle. I zoomed in on the opponent doing the CQC choke hold and boom head shot. Team member saved. Then he saluted me!

This game is so fun, I haven’t even been tempted to try out the new CoD4 maps I bought, or anything else really. A easter egg I found, is when your booting up the game and your on the screen with your character. If you rotate the camera for a while, your character with get dizzy and fall down. If you just sit there he hides in a box. Oh Konami what else have you hidden! lol This is exactly why I love the MGS series! I could go on and on about MGO, but I’ll shut up now.

Pursuent to Darrin’s post about GTAIV’s “ladies of the night”, I got to thinking. Personally I think that this is going too far. Having sex with a hooker, following her out of the car, and shooting her in the head. It offends the sensibilities, and I’m not ashamed to say I won’t be buying the game.

That’s not to say it’s otherwise not a good game. And this poll is not asking you about whether or not GTAIV is a good game, or whether you enjoy it. I want to know what you think about how it’s pushing the boundaries. For some reason, society thinks that pushing the boundaries is always a good thing, no matter what the boundaries are. Personally I feel that some boundaries are just best left alone.

Vote in the sidebar, as always.

Last Poll’s Results:

What do you think of in-game messaging on the PS3?

* Very important - must have both voice and text.: 62% (269)
* Very important, but just text is good enough.: 14% (61)
* Not important to me.: 13% (56)
* Somewhat important.: 11% (46)

Total Votes : 432

Now this is what I like to see. Developers are using the PS3’s unique abilities to do unique things with the PS3. Has your memory card slot gone unused? Soon you can use it to bring Burnout Paradise savegames to your computer and upload it to criteriongames.com where it will be analyzed and you can see all the stuff you’re missing!

PS3 players with the recently-released Bogart software update will be able to import their save game via USB drive or Memory Stick and analyse it on criteriongames.com!

Based on that, we create an interactive map that allows you to view the location of all incomplete discoverables. That includes Jumps, Smashes, Billboards, Junkyards, Body Shops, Paint Shops, Gas Stations and Car Parks.

Our technicians are just putting the final touches to this feature – we expect it to go live imminently!

Cool stuff.

PS3 Paradise players get all the love!

With all the controversy surrounding previous GTA games along with Bully and Manhunt, I was expecting the devs to cool it this time and keep a low profile. I was wrong.

This video is not safe for work at all. Higher res version here.

I have to admit, this game looks like a ton of fun.

Recently we pointed to IGN’s perfect 10 review of GTA4. I couldn’t be more excited about the game, however, some critics have a point: Isn’t the concept of exclusive reviews suspicious? Obviously, such an early exclusive review drives web traffic for the news site and creates influential early impressions among consumers.

Do exclusive reviews represent a clear conflict of interest?

A few points:

• Any pre-release review released with exclusive publishing rights, while other media outlets are under embargo restrictions, is obviously pre-screened. Even if all reviews were genuine and pure, the publisher is going to cherry pick among them and only grant exclusive-coverage deals to the more positive ones.
• Since game scores and media coverage is so influential, especially among the “inner circle” of influential media outlets, some corruption should be expected. There’s a clear conflict of interests. Publishers pour time/money into shifting media converage to a favorable light, and why wouldn’t they?
• IGN’s scores are widely respected for a good reason. They have earned a strong reputation among many over years of review scores. (Clearly, many disagree, but in general, they have earned high credibility). I still haven’t played GTA4, but I lean to believe that the review is justified. I’m sure that plenty of reviewers engage in corrupt coverage practices, however I’d suspect IGN is less guilty of this given their record.

Any SOCOM fans out there? Here’s a video interview with some actual gameplay footage in there. Once I get a job I might pick this one up - downloaded, even.

Of interest to me were the comments right near the end where they said that you can use the SIXAXIS motion controls to lean your character, among other things. I wonder if this will end up being the first really useful SIXAXIS feature?

The reviews for GTA 4 are starting to come out. IGN hasn’t given a score this high in ten years! Wow!

Control
I tried this game with a dualshock 3, and it’s good, but IMO, to get the real immersion factor, you need the steering wheel controllers. The G force sensations are still the big omission, but overall, this game comes surprisingly close to delivering the genuine racing sensation. The force feedback effects are much more involved […]