Saturday 1 September 2012

XOF



Well, this is all I'm going to be thinking about from now until the day it's released. Details are scarce, but it certainly looks like Big Boss is back in this ten minute hype reel for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Awesome things to look out for include: a kid with a microphone port in his chest, a chap with the skin and mouth of a snake, and rainy contra compounds full of angry dogs. Maybe we're finally getting a game inclined to wade into the moral gray of Latin America's secret wars? Series fans may also notice that this sequence is basically a this-gen upscale of Snake's arrival in 1990's Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Listen out too for an Ennio Morricone track last heard in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

2 comments:

Joe Sparrow said...

Really odd to watch this. Not sure what to think, although experience recommends giving Kojima the benefit of the doubt. Didn't you find it looked oddly slick, though? With 4 it really felt like they developed the engine to maintain and improve on the strange, crisp graphical style of 1-3. It felt like that really separated it from other cinematic military games. Revengeance's new look has a similar thing, which I just chalked up to Platinum's influence. Also felt like the pacing of the trailer was very un-Kojima-ish. Eager to see more.

Chris Ready said...

There's a fraction more gameplay footage here if you're interested:

http://uk.gamespot.com/metal-gear-solid-ground-zeroes/videos/metal-gear-solid-ground-zeroes-extended-gameplay-trailer-6394487/

Think what I responded to about this was what you describe - there's a swagger to this, an almost piss-taking Tarantino quality, especially dipping the sound to amp up that piece of Morricone score. There's that and the seamless move from FMV to a gameplay element that just played like a kind of boasting.

PR wise, Konami was positioning this as a bold challenge to the rest of the games industry. I can imagine many high profile Japanese dev teams would be quite upset about how the Western press at least has come to think about their output this gen. A kind of 'don't count Japan out yet, this is still what we can do'.

Maybe Kojima's eager to stress that his knowledge of how to construct an engaging non-input visual sequence has moved on from MGS4?