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Kojima Productions confirm that the development team that worked on Metal Gear Solid 4 are now starting to work on Metal Gear Solid: Rising.

Hideo Kojima reveals the inspiration behind the story theme in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

There are a few games which help to define an entire generation of gaming. So far this generation, we have seen games such as Crysis, Gears of War, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4, Call of Duty, and others lead the games industry on its respective platforms. Here we will take a look at one of the games that defined the last generation of gaming (about 2000-2005) and see how they hold up in terms of todays expectations, in one of a series of articles to come.

Over ten million people own a copy of FFVII. Released in 1997, Square’s iconic RPG is still regarded with reverence by RPG die hards and casual players alike. FFVII sold 2.3 million copies in its first three days on sale in Japan alone. To put this in perspective, Metal Gear Solid 4 sold 77,000 copies in its first week, growing to 5 million copies worldwide.

Thirteen years on from FFVII’s glorious debut, Japanese RPGs are losing their luster among committed, and casual, fans alike – and, poetically, it’s Final Fantasy XIII that’s the most iconic, if polarising, symbol of the genre’s perceived stagnation.

Japanese tweets, like English tweets, are limited to 140 characters. You can still get quite a bit through in those 140 characters, though, as evidenced at the Kojima Productions Twitter today.

Writes Kojima Productions’ Kenichiro Imaizumi:

"Recently in the news, it’s been written that MGS4’s development costs crossed 5 billion [yen], or 7 billion. It didn’t cost that much. If it did cost that much, it would have been multiplatform. But, of course, the data can’t fit."

PSUni: God of War III won’t be utilising a PlayStation hard-drive install, despite using the complexity of a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. The last PS3 game to make use of the greater capacity 50GB Blu-ray was Kojima Productions’ Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which not only required significant HDD space, but also made a new lengthy install after every one of the game’s five acts. There will be no such suffering with Sony Santa Monica’s God of War III.

Metal Gear Arcade gave me a headache. Announced at last year’s E3, Konami has taken the multiplayer component of Metal Gear Solid 4 and attempted to recreate the experience with networked arcade machines. Though, the company didn’t release any more information after E3, and many forgot about the game in the interim; it finally reappeared this weekend at the AOU Amusement Expo (an arcade game trade show in Japan), and we had the chance to play it.

Metal Gear Arcade (MGA) did not exactly set the gaming world on fire when it was announced. For one thing, outside of a handful of hardcore players, MGS4’s multiplayer component was widely derided and quickly forgotten. So the prospect of paying the equivalent of several dollars a round to play an underwhelming multiplayer shooter was not exciting. In order to combat this perception, Konami decided to add two important features to the game that can?t be replicated at home.

Sean Eyestone of Kojima Productions says that the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker development team is as big as the one that developed Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Who says PS3 games don’t sell? Konami should certainly be happy with the success of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots sales.

GameZone’s Louis Bedigan writes,

"Bar Officially Raised

Kojima doesn’t mess around; with each PlayStation, he raised the bar on in-game cinematics, voice-overs, facial expressions, and virtual acting. The cinematography of Metal Gear Solid 4 – including the impeccable editing, movie-worthy camera angles, and the way each scene was lit and color corrected to gritty perfection – is unlike anything else out there. All this from a game that arrived only 10 years after the original.

Now stop and think for a minute: what might happen if you were to give the man behind these games an actual film camera? Or even an HD or digital camera like the RED? Kojima would have fewer boundaries because, let’s face it, as gorgeous as our current video games are, they’re still a few decades away from matching real humans. He wouldn’t merely be capable of breaking new ground with video-game flicks – he could have potentially changed the face of movie-making as we know it."