Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots [PS3]

All of that will play into the new health and evaluation bars for Snake. There will be three separate processes that will govern how Snake is handling the rigors of battle. The first one is his standard health bar, which dictates how much damage he can take from bullets, explosions and other injuries. The second bar, below the health gauge, is his Psyche gauge. Similar to the Stamina bar in Snake Eater, the Psyche gauge dictates how he's doing within the heat of battle. Based around actual studies on soldier's mental states in the midst of warfare, the lower Snake's Psyche gauge gets, the harder it will be for him to aim straight or perform other functions in battle. The heat of the locale will also affect Snake's Psyche, as the hotter a location is, the harder it will be for him to keep his concentration.

Finally, there will be a stress meter, which will govern how hectic a given situation happens to be. If Snake's stress level spikes, he can enter a combat high state, where he'll feel less pain and he'll shoot much more accurately. Again, this is a state that's based around studies from real battle data. However, there's a definite trade off to this adrenaline rush state - once the combat high wears off, he'll crash, with his Psyche gauge bottoming out to almost nothing. To raise his psyche once it's exhausted, Snake can read a magazine, checking out the pictures of scantily clad women. However, he can't keep looking at the same page for too long; Snake will need to flip pages to gain additional visual stimulation from new images in the book

We moved our way towards a bombed out building, and were confronted by a PMC armored personnel carrier, with a striker machine gun set on its roof. The striker swept an area in front of the APC, and any enemy presence that was detected by this pattern was immediately fired upon. Unfortunately, we didn't have access to rocket launchers at that point, and grenades were simply useless, so we were forced to run away. Fortunately, we were close enough that we could continue to a new area after a couple of close calls. This brought us back to the location we witnessed two months ago at the Anniversary party, and we were able to finally experience this level from start to finish. While we didn't attempt to grab anyone's balls, we were able to pull of the new CQC ground choke by grabbing an enemy soldier with our knife, then releasing R1 and flicking the analog stick in either the left or right direction before pulling R1 again. By holding the soldier down on the ground for ten seconds, we could knock him out. Holding any longer would immediately kill him.

In fact, we found that CQC and weaponry has changed within the title, primarily because Kojima Productions decided to allow players to perform CQC moves with two handed weapons now. You can take your MP5 and bash enemy soldiers with it, jarring their guns loose or knocking them unconscious. What's more, you can even customize your weapons to fit the particular need of a situation. We managed to equip the MPS with a scope for additional accuracy, and rig it with either a shotgun or a grenade launcher attachment, giving us secondary fire ability. Apparently, every weapon, including the knife has this option (with the knife imparting a stun feature that discharges electricity into a target), so players can adjust their tactics accordingly.

As we went through the rest of the demo and interacted with Otacon's Mark II, we received the Solid Eye system, which provided three different viewing modes which performed functions like highlighting enemy soldiers and displaying dropped weaponry or items. Snake could easily use this to plan out his attack strategy on PMCs, and make his decision as to how he'd choose to help out the militia. In fact, we found out that aiding the militia would be a huge bonus, because they would give Snake additional weapons, ammo or items. Plus, depending on the kind of battle that we engaged in, we were able to clear districts of enemy combatants, and the militia would hold those areas, permitting Snake to pass through as long as he remained an ally of the indigenous fighters.

While it had only been a week since Kojima Productions had implemented rumble support for the tech demo, it was definitely noticeable and a welcome addition to the gameplay. The recoil from fired weapons felt just as good as it did on the PS2, and blowing up an APC with a Javelin rocket or an RPG was extremely satisfying as the controller thumped soundly. The team still has a number of ideas on how they want to implement the vibration control, with everything from Snake's stress level to ambient gunfire and explosions triggering subsequent rumbles in the new DualShock 3. We'll have much more on MGS4 soon.

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