Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence Prerelease Update

It's been well over a year since Konami unleashed the third chapter in the Metal Gear Solid series, and finally, the remixed, feature-packed rerelease of Snake Eater will be coming to American shelves in just a couple of weeks. At a recent Konami press event we got to take a look at the English release of Subsistence, which--surprise--looks just like the Japanese version! And we've covered that one to death, so if you want the full scoop, check out our past previews. But luckily, we did manage to glean some new details about the American release that should prove informative to eager Metal Gear fans.

We always knew that Subsistence would roll with a fully featured online competitive mode, a new third-person camera option in the single-player, and a host of other peripheral bonuses. But shortly before the game came out in Japan, we learned of one other tasty extra: a third DVD called "Existence" that simply cut the Snake Eater storyline and cinematics into a lengthy movie that fans could watch like a feature film.

To us, this disc always smelled like a Japan-only bonus, so we had to find out if American gamers would be able to enjoy Existence as well. Turns out there will be a limited edition of Subsistence that will contain all three discs, while the regular release will only ship with the main game on disc one and the multiplayer on the second disc (which is already a ton of game). So if you want the complete and total package, you'll have to make sure to get a hold of this limited edition, which may in fact be of, well, limited availability.

We were also interested to note that the American release of the game will feature full online leaderboards that you can access from within Subsistence's multiplayer interface. These boards will rank players over a long period of time and also by the week, and you can view overall rankings or simply the top players for one particular game mode, like deathmatch, sneaking, and rescue. Finally, players will be awarded animal rankings (much like in the single-player Metal Gear Solids) that gauge their performance, such as scorpion, tarantula, and fox hound (which is, of course, the highest rank).

The content of Subsistence will be identical to that of the Japanese version (except that it'll be in English, natch). Of course, the biggest news is the announcement of a new documentary DVD for preordering customers--check out our first look at that product. And at least it's nice to know that American gamers won't be deprived of all the other appealing bonus aspects of this value-loaded package. Stay tuned for our full review of Subsistence when it launches in March.