Image stolen from someone who stole it from IGN

Okay, so after all the drama about registration servers, multiple IDs, and whatever other negative nonsense the internet could drum up… the time has finally arrived. Metal Gear Online has opened its beta doors here in the U.S. to anyone who pre-ordered the game. After watching some hot cylon-on-cylon action I fired up the PS3 and jumped in for a little friday night preview of how I’m going to be spending the next two weeks.

My game of choice was Team Deathmatch tonight. I was pleased to see that Konami has given us the option of doing Matchmaking or a pretty robust server browser. Because its getting late and I’m officially two and three-quarter sheets to the wind I opted to go with the matchmaking option. The system had me in a game in under a minute which was nice because I was kind of expecting a long wait.

With only a small idea of what I was supposed to do, I was dropped into a 6 vs 6 match on the training map. The first thing you’ll notice is the game has a slower paced feel, similar to many tactical shooters, and yet its not quite the same at all. You have the option of hiding behind cover and popping out to have a shootout, or you can sneak up on your opponents and use a CQC attack to knock them out or kill them.

For each kill or assist you perform you are awarded points. Each time you respawn (or if you go back to your team’s base and press ’start’) you can spend your points on different guns or explosives. Its a little reminiscent of Counter-Strike in that respect, which makes me very happy. If you do really well, you have a lot of options to choose from. If you you just act like a shell-catcher the whole time you’re going to be limited to some of the lesser guns. I’m not sure that this makes a huge balance issue, but it is nice being able to buy a nice big assault rifle as opposed to a little sub-machine gun. Hey, this is Metal Gear you gotta have some sort of phallic penis-envy type humor… even in multi-player.

Yes, as online multi-player goes this has that unique Metal Gear feel to it. I haven’t played on the map with the man-cannon yet, but I’m looking forward to being thrown into the air like a fool. Kojima’s sense of humor from the series is fully intact here in Metal Gear Online. At one point i was sneaking through a sewer type area to get to the other side of the map, and someone from the other team popped out of a box that was sitting in the corner. He almost got my ass with some CQC but I managed to mow him down. Pretty fun stuff.

The controls feel pretty tight, although I’m not crazy about using the square and triangle buttons to jump between 3rd person, over the shoulder and 1st person. I’d rather click the thumb stick or something like that. It just seems like that is the more natural way to go when it comes to shooter controls (not that I would necessarily classify this game as a garden-variety shooter, by any means).

Regardless, the most obvious joy of feeling these controls is realizing that this is most likely how MGS4 is going to handle. Sure, they probably streamlined some of the controls for the online game, but I think it’s a safe bet that its pretty damn close. Just playing this for an hour and a half made me even more pumped to get my hands on MGS4 (OMG, betas are teh marketing scam!1).

The character creation was pretty nice, the options seemed a little limited for face and stuff like that. However, this is a beta and its very likely that there will be more options when the game launches. In a similar fashion to COD4 you can give your player different attributes. I chose CQC, Assault Rifles, and Enemy Detection. I only looked through this area for a few minutes, but it looks like these skills can be leveled through earning points. I’m going to spend more time looking into this over the period of the beta test.

Anyway, I went on much longer than intended for a simple early impressions post. If you have a PS3 you should already have MGS4 pre-ordered, which means you should have your beta key in hand… so what are you waiting for? Good times to be had by all in the world of Metal Gear!?

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