So finished the main mission in Ground Zeroes. The mad dash to the chopper was pretty exciting. Kinda feel the ending cinematic was a wasted opportunity, could have been gameplay (not as a bombastic action scene). Kojima manages to be hamfisted in a 90mn demo, that's pretty impressive, I mean that whole scene in the chopper is teenage movie stuff, shock for sake of it. A better translation would have been funnier...
spoiler (click to show/hide)
"Spill the beans bitch" by Kaz, or something like that.
Pretty sad about the writing to be honest. James Horan does a great job as Skull Face here and there's glimpses of good stuff in what he has to say. His little tirade about Nicola & Bart could have meant something about order vs chaos, I dunno... That's maybe more for the spoiler thread, but I'm a bit confused at the people who awaited Big Boss descent in the heart of darkness. Yeah, KojiPro are guilty of hyping up the "missing link" but it's the trap of those prequels : they ended up spreading the stuff thin and it becomes this giant bloated mess (especially with Kojima at the helm). I mean Big Boss and his staff are already there, Huey brags that they will fool the nuclear inspectors and parade as beacons of peace when in actuality they're a rogue mercenary outfit with nuclear capacity. But it's hard to get this sense of vilainy to come through when you're playing the guy and the game itself continues to glamourize him.
Anyway, I found the gameplay solid, the base design was cool, the open approach worked but it's hard to get a real feel of the stuff in such a limited time. I wasn't ecstatic while playing too. I know a Splinter Cell Chaos Theory system with a concealment and sound meter is "gamey" but I wished sometimes the game was more explicit about whether I was concealed or not, especially since detection can be instantaneous. Paradoxal of me to say that when I turned off most display signs... but in previous MGS the boxier environments were less difficult to navigate even without a radar. I guess you get a feel for it after a point.
EDIT : Also Konami, it's cool to let me have a custom soundtrack, but the implementation man... An awkward in game menu that loads all it finds (with a hard cap, there was maybe 1/3 of the music I do have on my PS3 at best) on your hard drive, without any sorting options, and a preview function that takes a good 30 seconds to load the file, freezing everything else. In play, the game will stutter hard everytime the track changes while you navigate Camp Omega. Awkward japanese design in action.