Thursday 11 January, 2007

Today I played about an hour of the multiplayer function of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. I played a series of standard "death-match" type games on the Ad-hoc setting (not over the internet). In this game each player chooses a squad of four characters and outfits them with weapons. The characters and weapons you have avaliable to you is directly influenced by how you have played the single player game, for example, if you have gone through the game "stamina killing" (knocking out a boss by depleating their stamina instead of killing them will unlock them as a playable character) all the bosses and recruiting tech experts for your tech unit you may have a team full of nothing but boss characters equiped with rocket launchers, which can sometimes throw off the balance of the game. You play your characters one at a time and as each one dies he/she is replaced by the next member of the team in line. The game controlls in multiplayer just as it does in the single player missions and many of the levels are directly based on levels of the single player campaign so they are familiar and, for the most part, very well designed. The design of the levels and the way the game controlls puts a strong emphasis on strategy and "getting the drop on" your enemy instead of simply running in, guns blazing. This counter balances one of the frustrations that I initially had with the game which is the fact that you cannot aim in the first person mode and move at the same time since movement while in first person is done with your left thumb on the d-pad while aiming in first person is done with your left thumb on the analog nub, once I developed some strategies I no longer found myself being frustrated by this. One of my favorite strategies is to equip one of the members of my team who is skilled in sniping with a tranquilizer sniper rifle, I will lie in wait and knock out the other player from a long distance and then run up and kill him with a knife (which nets you extra points). One of the interesting innovations of the multiplayer mode is the use of the sound based radar system, the player who is the point leader of the match will have a small frog above their head which will periodically make a "ribbit" noise that will show up on his enemy's radar.

"ribbit"

Sounds like they did a great job of setting up the unlocking system. It's always a challenge trying to make a game personalizable (thats so a word now) without detracting too much from its style or feel. In what ways do you think they did a good job with this, in what ways do you feel they didn't?

If you had been on the design team, what other things might you have added into the single player campaign...either in terms of content or dynamics...to help make it a better game?

"rrribbit"

...

*sniped!*