By: Thomas P.
NORMAL-MGS3 was one of the PS2’s best titles, and is arguably the best game in the series. Now it’s coming to the 3DS, and has never been better.
While the game is still in development, and will be released on February 21, 2012 in America, a demo of the game was released to the Japanese eShop not too long ago, and we have had the chance to play it for ourselves. The demo is entirely in Japanese, with no English language option available, suggesting that the demo may take a while to come to the US eShop, if it even comes at all. Fortunately, the controls are easy to understand. You move Snake with the Circle Pad, moving the camera with the face buttons. The D-Pad is used to select items, crouch, lie down, and perform actions such as reloading and climbing over small obstacles. Aiming is done with the L Shoulder Button, and the R Shoulder Button fires. The game also supports the Circle Pad Pro accessory, which adds a second Circle Pad to control the camera more fluidly.
Gameplay-wise, it plays like MGS4, but with MGS3’s environments and Peace Walker’s controls. Most of the gameplay options are available in the demo, except for the Codec and Cure options, which were disabled in the opening chapter of MGS3, which makes up the demo version. The graphics look about the same, although the frame rate is a little slow and the draw distance on the wild grass is laughably bad. The sound is not compressed as far as the demo shows, which is a good thing considering that so many other 3DS games struggle in that regard.
Overall, what the demo shows a great effort by Konami to put one of its finest games on the 3DS. Not only that, but it shows that they can make it even better. MGS3D comes out on February 21, 2012, and you can bet we’ll have a full review when it comes out.
