The recent buzz online has been about thrashing anyone who has dared to give Metal Gear Solid 4 a review below 9.5 and EDGE and Eurogamer.net seem to be at receiving at by daring to give the game a 8/10.
Someone mailed the PXExtreme editor to find out the situation of the review copies and got the following reply, and the following series of unfortunate events broke out one after the other.
- “Anyone claiming to have received an advance review copy of MGS4 is either lying or has stolen a copy from the shipments currently going out to retailers. I spoke with Ryan Payton recently about this in some length and according to him, because of the high profile of this title, not even members of the press are being given review copies. Any early play-through of the game is either done at specified events hosted by Konami (for example, the MGS4 boot-camp or the recent event in Paris) or not at all. With as vague a level of information as most of the early reviews in various magazines have been supplying, there are a lot of people who are out looking to garner attention for themselves by either claiming to have received an early copy or by stealing from early shipments through various means. In addition, anyone who manages to snag an early copy by any means will undergo a certain level of investigation by Konami representatives, should they catch wind of it.”
To remind most gamers who seem to have frequent bouts of amnesia this is an excerpt from “Shane Bettenhausen” preview of Metal Gear Solid 4 posted on 1UP a couple of months ago:
- “In March 2008, Konami invited 16 lucky game journalists to its corporate retreat in the sleepy mountain village of Nasu, Japan to play through Hideo Kojima’s long awaited PlayStation 3 opus, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Given the intense veil of secrecy that has shrouded the game since its announcement in 2005, this remote setting felt weirdly appropriate: We spent our days soldiering through the game at Konami’s onsite office (imagine: a Bond villain’s lair crossed with a Zen garden, stocked with an endless supply of canned coffee and whipped cream sandwiches) and retired to the adjacent Konami resort hotel (imagine: The Shining’s Overlook, but with relaxing volcanic hot springs in lieu of bloody elevators) to eat, sleep, and babble incoherently about the mind-blowing things we’d seen and done.”
This is exactly where they have got to play the entire game:
- “Four weeks after I watched its credits roll (well, most of them anyway…some things even we weren’t allowed to see), MGS4 still occupies a considerable amount of my mindshare. Trust me, there’s a tremendous amount of game to process here…and while the chance to pen a carefully controlled preview on its first hour might seem like an excellent opportunity, it almost feels like a disservice to the title Kojima and Co. have produced. This game deserves a thesis, not a moment-by-moment walkthrough of what you’ll be experiencing yourself come June 12. So if you’re a MGS fan who’s already sold on this game, I suggest avoiding any and all media that drops between now and its launch. The surprises it has in store for you simply shouldn’t be spoiled. But if you’re still teetering on the edge, wondering if MGS4 is truly worth it…keep reading.”
Now isn’t it natural to write a review in that span of time and I wonder if Konami would actually be such a selfish ogre to keep a revered magazine like EDGE out of the bunch of those sixteen journalists who had played the game.
The non disclosure agreement of course restricted them to stick to their first act which has been detailed out in the article. The bit about EDGE needing attention also seems a bit of a far cry, a magazine with such a high reputation and caliber does not need to spoil its image by posting a fake article. The primary reason why the reviews seem so insufficient because nearly 90% of the essence of the game lies in its story which cannot be spoiled for obvious reasons.
And does a review actually matter for a game with such a reputed and insane fan following. I’d pick the game up if it scored even a .5/10 and give it a whirl.
Update: Videogaming247 adds “Konami UK confirmed the game’s reviewing conditions, the rep telling us he couldn’t see any difference between the code played in Paris and the game in the boxed copy he had on his desk.”
“The Paris event was specifically engineered by Kojima Productions to allow key press to see the game and coincide their reviews with its launch, the spokesperson added.”
- By Neelesh Mukherjee