Screenshots :.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
PSP
Jay
16-07-2007
"Lord knows what's occuring here."
"Exploding trucks are always a larf."
"Strange red glowing grids, however, aren't."
"No, doing monkey gestures won't help."
"You seem to have a feather duster there. Scary stuff."
I found myself wondering how I was going to write a non-biased review for one of the Metal Gear Solid titles. At the end of the day, I’ve always liked the series since the days of hitting the PlayStation...
Matt - You hit your PlayStation?
...sigh...In saying all that, I figured it would be easier to find something to annoy the hell out of me with it being transferred to something as finicky as a PSP.
The PSP, unlike MGS, has had its ups and downs in my book. There are some great titles for it, and some really lousy ones. On top of all this there are ones that have been ported across from another console, which really, really don’t work on a handheld platform. I worried that Metal Gear would be one of these titles - that the camera angles might not work, or controlling Snake with that nipple of an analogue stick would give me hand cramp before I’d completed CQC training. All of my worries were blown away by just how good this title is.
Unlike its strange turn of Metal Gear Acid predecessors that were turn-based strategy games, Portable Ops heads back to continue the story 6 years after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The FOX Unit have broken the alliance with the CIA and gone rogue. Snake has also become the target of the FOX Unit, and to show us said happenings, Snake starts in a cell being interrogated by one of the members: Lieutenant Cunningham. He’d very much like it if Snake tells him where the other half of the Philosopher’s Legacy is, seeing as the US have already acquired the other half from the Soviet Union at the end of MGS3. If you haven’t played it, and didn’t want to hear that, I’m sorry I can’t account for how bloody slow you are now can I?
Matt - Thanks a lot Jay :-(
It’s cheap, go and get a copy!
Anyway, where was I…
Snake’s being kept prisoner next to a bloke called Roy Campbell who’s the last surviving member of a Green Beret unit sent to investigate the base. Working with Roy, Snake then begins to recruit new soldiers in order to form a resistance.
This in itself is one of the large differences between Portable Ops and the previous Metal Gears, in that you can recruit soldiers to use on your missions. No, you don’t run around in a gang, you strategically place these soldiers in boxes around the map and use them when needed. It basically forms up one side of the game that any anal-retentive can obsess over, while the other side is mainly story driven. You can just progress down the story missions if you want, or you can try and recruit a lot of soldiers with different stats and build up your arsenal of weapons and items. As it sounds, this might take a bit of explaining.
Unlike the previous versions, Portable Ops is mission-based rather than roaming through a storyline mano-e-mano. This is actually a really nice touch as we normally want to play for a bit then switch it off, having the ability to do just one more mission then turn it off has been a good dynamic addition for a portable version of the series.
The whole recruiting process is fairly in-depth in itself. Where as before you could knock someone out and hide them in a closet, you can now shove them in the back of a lorry in an attempt to try and convince them nicely that they should be fighting on your side. [Konami obviously taking hints from the UltraGN scrapbook of personnel hiring! – Matt] Each soldier you capture will be converted to your army after a set period of time, and each soldier can have a set of stats. These stats can vary from allowing the soldier to run faster, to advancing your Tech tree.
As well as the guys you take on missions with you, there are Spies, Techies and Medics as well. You can place members who have good spy stats into mission areas and they’ll provide more detailed maps and ‘acquire’ ammo. The soldiers with medical backgrounds can form part of your med team, which means that every time you come out of a mission your stamina and health will regain faster. Lastly, those boffins that have decent Tech skills will help develop weapons and items for you and your troops to use.
Something that your spies provide you with are reports on the locations they’re in. Sometimes these reports will let you know of captives that are worth rescuing for their advanced skill sets. There’ll also be little hints along the way as to how to find the troops with better stats than their mates. Paying attention to the reports and spending time getting the cream of the crop is a choice you’ll have to make or ignore along the way, but as I found it can certainly give you an edge in certain situations.
What’s more is that there’s a whole online facility to let your guys go off and fight other teams on their own and possibly bring back new recruits. Not to mention that you can trade soldiers with your friends, or do a wireless access point scan, waving your PSP around for a signal and obtaining fresh blood that way.
That all said, what of the normal features? What to expect of the gameplay of such a title on such a platform? Well before I’d even put the disc in I’d been wondering about camera angles, not only how they’d work on a PSP, but which version of Metal Gear would they revert to. After all, MGS3 came as a bit of a turn of events with static cameras rather than in MGS1 where the camera followed you. It was a whole different playing style. Now, if like me you got used to third incarnation; Snake Eater, then you’ll probably get on fine with this.
Most of us by now have gotten used to the idea that using L will snap our view forward, and that’s pretty much what they’ve done in this. In some cases this can be a bit of a pain, an example being when the AI decides to run off and you’re trying to give chase or haven’t snapped your view around and so don’t know where he’s buggered off to. You can’t help but feel a little frustrated by this, but seeing as how the guards tend to stand around like gimps while radioing for backup regardless of whether you’re running towards them like some deranged knife-wielding baboon, this doesn’t tend to cause so many issues. There are compromises, after all!
The look and feel of Portable Ops is very much like that of the MGS1, as you’d probably expect. I like everything they’ve done with the platform they’re working with. The new storyboard-like animations instead of FMV’s or cutscenes are a nice addition, as is how they’ve laid out the controls on par with previous titles so you can get straight into it (Although adjusting to the whole O to confirm instead of X!).
I was disappointed to learn that Harry Gregson-Williams wasn’t doing the music this time around, but the guys that took over have managed to mimic the style of music you will have grown accustomed to from MGS2 and 3. David Hayter’s back to vocalise Snake and the full range of sounds from the previous titles have been re-established to bring you back to the Metal Gear world. Without ruining it for you all, I felt the ending could’ve been better, but this has made me look forward to the next series instalment that’ll grace our PS3’s at some point.
Matt - You hit your PlayStation?
...sigh...In saying all that, I figured it would be easier to find something to annoy the hell out of me with it being transferred to something as finicky as a PSP.
The PSP, unlike MGS, has had its ups and downs in my book. There are some great titles for it, and some really lousy ones. On top of all this there are ones that have been ported across from another console, which really, really don’t work on a handheld platform. I worried that Metal Gear would be one of these titles - that the camera angles might not work, or controlling Snake with that nipple of an analogue stick would give me hand cramp before I’d completed CQC training. All of my worries were blown away by just how good this title is.
Unlike its strange turn of Metal Gear Acid predecessors that were turn-based strategy games, Portable Ops heads back to continue the story 6 years after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The FOX Unit have broken the alliance with the CIA and gone rogue. Snake has also become the target of the FOX Unit, and to show us said happenings, Snake starts in a cell being interrogated by one of the members: Lieutenant Cunningham. He’d very much like it if Snake tells him where the other half of the Philosopher’s Legacy is, seeing as the US have already acquired the other half from the Soviet Union at the end of MGS3. If you haven’t played it, and didn’t want to hear that, I’m sorry I can’t account for how bloody slow you are now can I?
Matt - Thanks a lot Jay :-(
It’s cheap, go and get a copy!
Anyway, where was I…
Snake’s being kept prisoner next to a bloke called Roy Campbell who’s the last surviving member of a Green Beret unit sent to investigate the base. Working with Roy, Snake then begins to recruit new soldiers in order to form a resistance.
This in itself is one of the large differences between Portable Ops and the previous Metal Gears, in that you can recruit soldiers to use on your missions. No, you don’t run around in a gang, you strategically place these soldiers in boxes around the map and use them when needed. It basically forms up one side of the game that any anal-retentive can obsess over, while the other side is mainly story driven. You can just progress down the story missions if you want, or you can try and recruit a lot of soldiers with different stats and build up your arsenal of weapons and items. As it sounds, this might take a bit of explaining.
Unlike the previous versions, Portable Ops is mission-based rather than roaming through a storyline mano-e-mano. This is actually a really nice touch as we normally want to play for a bit then switch it off, having the ability to do just one more mission then turn it off has been a good dynamic addition for a portable version of the series.
The whole recruiting process is fairly in-depth in itself. Where as before you could knock someone out and hide them in a closet, you can now shove them in the back of a lorry in an attempt to try and convince them nicely that they should be fighting on your side. [Konami obviously taking hints from the UltraGN scrapbook of personnel hiring! – Matt] Each soldier you capture will be converted to your army after a set period of time, and each soldier can have a set of stats. These stats can vary from allowing the soldier to run faster, to advancing your Tech tree.
As well as the guys you take on missions with you, there are Spies, Techies and Medics as well. You can place members who have good spy stats into mission areas and they’ll provide more detailed maps and ‘acquire’ ammo. The soldiers with medical backgrounds can form part of your med team, which means that every time you come out of a mission your stamina and health will regain faster. Lastly, those boffins that have decent Tech skills will help develop weapons and items for you and your troops to use.
Something that your spies provide you with are reports on the locations they’re in. Sometimes these reports will let you know of captives that are worth rescuing for their advanced skill sets. There’ll also be little hints along the way as to how to find the troops with better stats than their mates. Paying attention to the reports and spending time getting the cream of the crop is a choice you’ll have to make or ignore along the way, but as I found it can certainly give you an edge in certain situations.
What’s more is that there’s a whole online facility to let your guys go off and fight other teams on their own and possibly bring back new recruits. Not to mention that you can trade soldiers with your friends, or do a wireless access point scan, waving your PSP around for a signal and obtaining fresh blood that way.
That all said, what of the normal features? What to expect of the gameplay of such a title on such a platform? Well before I’d even put the disc in I’d been wondering about camera angles, not only how they’d work on a PSP, but which version of Metal Gear would they revert to. After all, MGS3 came as a bit of a turn of events with static cameras rather than in MGS1 where the camera followed you. It was a whole different playing style. Now, if like me you got used to third incarnation; Snake Eater, then you’ll probably get on fine with this.
Most of us by now have gotten used to the idea that using L will snap our view forward, and that’s pretty much what they’ve done in this. In some cases this can be a bit of a pain, an example being when the AI decides to run off and you’re trying to give chase or haven’t snapped your view around and so don’t know where he’s buggered off to. You can’t help but feel a little frustrated by this, but seeing as how the guards tend to stand around like gimps while radioing for backup regardless of whether you’re running towards them like some deranged knife-wielding baboon, this doesn’t tend to cause so many issues. There are compromises, after all!
The look and feel of Portable Ops is very much like that of the MGS1, as you’d probably expect. I like everything they’ve done with the platform they’re working with. The new storyboard-like animations instead of FMV’s or cutscenes are a nice addition, as is how they’ve laid out the controls on par with previous titles so you can get straight into it (Although adjusting to the whole O to confirm instead of X!).
I was disappointed to learn that Harry Gregson-Williams wasn’t doing the music this time around, but the guys that took over have managed to mimic the style of music you will have grown accustomed to from MGS2 and 3. David Hayter’s back to vocalise Snake and the full range of sounds from the previous titles have been re-established to bring you back to the Metal Gear world. Without ruining it for you all, I felt the ending could’ve been better, but this has made me look forward to the next series instalment that’ll grace our PS3’s at some point.
9/10