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Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes TGS Update

Konami's new TGS trailer features a host of cinematic scenes from the forthcoming MGS remake.

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Konami's Tokyo Game Show booth is featuring a new trailer for Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the upcoming GameCube remake of Hideo Kojima's seminal 1998 stealth action game. The Twin Snakes is being crafted by Nintendo second party Silicon Knights as a sort of reimagining of the original game. Though it will follow the plot of Metal Gear Solid, the game will feature newly recorded dialogue by the original cast and entirely new cinematic scenes, which the original game was well known for. Konami has enlisted Japanese film director Ryuhei Kitamura to direct the cinematic scenes (or "polygon demos" as Kojima calls them), and Kitamura is using motion capture and all of his cinematic talents in making the new scenes as film-like as possible. The trailer on the TGS show floor gave us a good look at several familiar scenes from MGS that have been redone by Kitamura and his crew. Newcomers to MGS who don't want anything in The Twin Snakes spoiled, be warned: The following paragraphs will do just that.

The most enigmatic character in Metal Gear Solid was the cybernetic ninja who haunted Solid Snake's steps throughout the game, and we got to see a lot more of the ninja's Twin Snakes incarnation in the new trailer. Both his first meeting with Snake, during Snake's battle with Revolver Ocelot, and his first mano a mano battle with Snake were revealed more fully, and it seems as though flashy, impressively acted hand-to-hand combat will feature prominently in Kitamura's rendition of the two characters' rivalry. The scenes we saw in the trailer had a lot of fancy martial arts and quick, nimble moves (such as a backflip-dodge move by the ninja) that are far in advance of the animation seen in the original MGS. The glimpses we got of these fight scenes were superbly motion-captured and will undoubtedly lend The Twin Snakes a more action movie-like feel.

We also got to see more of the sequence involving Meryl and Sniper Wolf, which had a slowly paced, almost poetic sort of pacing; in a surprisingly artsy shot, Meryl pensively considered the laser sight that was painting her chest before Sniper Wolf shot her in the leg and arm. Then a few quick shots of Snake's fight with Wolf were shown, which featured some pretty cool gunplay, with Snake spinning his sniper rifle around as he turned to face Wolf.

Finally, we got to see a bit of the fight between the rocket launcher-armed Solid Snake and the Hind D-piloting Liquid Snake. The clearest image from this scene that's remained in our minds was of Liquid Snake firing a missile from the helicopter at Solid Snake and Solid Snake leaping upward and literally jumping onto and springboarding off of the incoming missile. Again, this kind of stylish, over-the-top action is quite a bit different from what we saw in the cinematic scenes of the original MGS.

From what we saw today, Konami's enlistment of Ryuhei Kitamura has certainly accomplished the goal of giving MGS's polygon demos a new and more stylized feel. Alas, diehard MGS fans will have to wait a bit longer to enjoy them--The Twin Snakes was said today to be delayed until early 2004. In the meantime, watch this space for further information on the game.

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