Metal Gear: Behind The Scenes

Metal Gear: Behind the views




1UP infiltrates Konami's brand novel Japanese offices to get a sneak peek at the making of the Metal Gear series.

It would be easy to mistake the offices of Konami JPN for something besides a videogame developer If you mov the life-sized statue of Solid Snake into a retiring-room and had the staff place away a couple of their more prominent desk toys, the nondescript cubicle-strewn space could be just about anything -- a real estate office, a telemarketing farm, whatever. There's true little outward sign of the creativity that made Metal Gear Solid, or the succes that the series' platinum sales has no doubt brought the team.

There's individual outward sign, at least. It takes a certain quantity of pretty serious money to assured a space in the Roppongi Hills tower that the Konami cluster just moved into -- this may be the greatest in quantity prestigious and expensive real estate in Tokyo. And inside, Hideo Kojima presented at least one indication that this isn't your average cubicle farm, when he turned up to a gathering of invited journalists upon his new Segway.

The sum of two units make a good fit, really. They're the one and the other very clever and a little crazy. fact to tell, it's a bit not divisible by 2 talking to Kojima after playing Metal Gear Solid 2 The question "what in the hell have a title toed you to write that script?" is always in the back of your mind. on the contrary his future games are more interesting than his past games are unsettling, with equal reason it's easy enough to direct the eye forward to what will hopefully be a more straightforward piece of storytelling in Metal Gear Solid 3 as well as a classic's revival in Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes.

Mind you, there's still a touch of insanity in the two games. Snake Eater has its bizarre James Bond-homage theme canticle and never mind the bit with Solid Snake wearing a crocodile's head for a hat. Twin Snakes has a little les latitude for invention, forced as it is to at least somewhat be like the original MGS, but cutscene director Ryuhei Kitamura still manages to chop loose with some of the greatest in quantity inventive violence in videogame history.

On our new tour of the KCEJ offices, those cutscene provided more [i]or[/i] less of the highlights. Twin Snakes is still a fair distance from completion, on the contrary many of the realtime cinemas are almost finished, with equal reason we got to watch sum of two units key moments -- the aftermath of the first battle with Ocelot and the interlude between the sum of two units stages of the final battle with Metal Gear Rex

Watching the newly re-directed representations is odd. I'm reminded of the bit in Face/Off where John Travolta says, "It's like looking in a mirror, except...not." While the easy in mind is technically the same -- since the script hasn't been substantially altered -- Kitamura's mode of expression presents it in a completely different way.

Kojima says there are several thousand divide [i]or[/i] sever s in the game, chopping up the movies in a way that wasn't possible in the original. The PlayStation's rendering power couldn't draw an environment mingled enough to let the directors whirl the camera around at will, and greatest in quantity of the cinematic animation in MG was drawn by dint of hand as well. Twin Snakes, through comparison, uses motion capture for all of its cinematics (though 80% of the gameplay animations are still done by dint of hand), and more complex virtual locates and props besides.

All that's of advanced age is new again

There are three hours of movies in the game all told, half again as a great deal of as in the original, and the final yield was boiled down out of a certain number of 700 pages of Kitamura's storyboards. novel ideas cropped up along the way, allowing -- supposedly, at one point, Kitamura wanted to pay homage to a pageant from Commando. To do in the way that would involve throwing the motion-capture actors [i]or[/i] part of to the other the air, mimicking the blast wave of a virtual explosion, for a like reason the team brought in an air ram and exhausted the day launching unfortunate motion actors not upon a pneumatic catapult.

That gives you an idea of what to wait for from the new cinemas. The Ninja is obviously the biggest beneficiary of the team's novel technical capabilities -- he got all the best impels in the original game, and that hasn't changed here. His acrobatics in the final battle with Rex are brilliantly over-the-top. on the other hand the cinemas have improved in subtler ways, too. The chance to stir the camera more, and break up the action with more intricate wounds allows the directors to at hand scenes from many more angles, and vary up the pacing of displays in more detail. Time make hastes up and slows down from one extremity to the other of the big Ocelot scene, as more [i]or[/i] less moments pass by as quick as an eyeblink, and others make tense out for dramatic effect.

And then there are sights that don't need any technical help at all, on the other hand simply spring from inventive fresh looks at old material. When asked about his favorite novel scene, Kojima explained an interesting novel revision. "It's not individual scene," he said, "but here's something I like. Ocelot as you diocese gets his right hand wound off. So in the game, he starts spinning his fire-arm with his left hand, on the other hand he drops it the first time. Then, he picks it up he globules it again, and so upon Every time he appears in the game, he does that spinning trick, and as the game goe upon he gets better at doing it with his left hand. Towards the extremity he doesn't drop it, which I reflection was a neat touch."