Metal Gear Solid 4 Wows Japan

Kojima stuns TGS with new trailer, promises (again) that this is his last time at the helm.

Though the game wasn't playable, Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for PlayStation 3 was undoubtedly the game of this year's Tokyo Game Show. Kojima and his team wowed the hundreds of thousands of people that swarmed the Makuhari Messe with a teaser trailer that set the tone for the upcoming stealth-'em-up.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is set in an undefined point after the events in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, where an older Snake is deployed onto a battlefield, with series regular Otacon playing a supporting role from a remote location.

Early information suggests that you'll be able to alter Snake's allegiance to the warring factions through the soldiers you kill during your missions. But as yet, there's little in the way of solid details.

The first ever real-time debug screenshot of MGS4. Possibly.

The visually stunning demo had many asking whether what they were seeing was being rendered in real-time. Kojima's response was to show off the demo running in real-time during a brief session on the closing day of the show.

Several of the game's developers were on hand to play around with all manner of lighting and camera effects, giving a glimpse at the sort of power we can expect from Snake's latest outing.

Sadly, and once again, it seems that series fans could be in for a Metal Gear future without its principal designer. Kojima said at TGS that this would be the last game in the series for both him and character designer Yoji Shinkawa. Kojima made threats like this before - he wasn't supposed to be involved in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots at all - but this time he could mean it.

Kojima demos real-time MGS4 video at TGS 2005.

MGS4's HD detail is beyond breathtaking, and notably, everything we've seen in this and other PS3 videos (admittedly they're only really technical demonstrations on unverifiable hardware) runs at an infallible sixty frames per second - a goal which many big first-generation Xbox 360 games is currently struggling to achieve.

Kikizo Staff