Kojima has given me the best Christmas present I could ask for.

Kojima really needs to start making up his mind. He said that the last game in the series was going to be Metal Gear 2, then he made Substance and Metal Gear 3. Soon, Metal Gear had a drastic change and had two Metal Gear Ac!d games by Shinta Nojiri. Now Kojima is back with Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops for the PSP, and for those Metal Gear fans who don't have a PSP, they're getting the PSP for this whether it is good or not. I got the PS3 for Metal Gear 4.

If you haven't played the Metal Gear games before, the story is going to be absolute gibberish. The story follows another adventure of Snake, this one being about six years after the story of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater which was the prequel to Metal Gear Solid. This still is the prequel to Metal Gear Solid, and is really what happened to Snake in between those two adventures. In the story Snake wakes up in a prison in South America in a Soviet base, and he has been captured by his old squad, the FOX unit. He escapes with a Green Beret named Roy Campbell's, (the commanding officer that talks to you for pretty much the whole game of Metal Gear Solid 2,) help. They escape the prison right away and they need to find out why Snake is being held a prisoner. The story covers so many details of what is easily the best story in the video game business. They cover pretty much everything in this confusing story and you will be learning about the characters you have seen in all the other ones a little bit more than you had before.

The gameplay feels like a mixture between the old games and VR missions of the past. The game has a whole lot of dialogue in it, just as much as the full console experience. It's put in the form of the Metal Gear Ac!d games; you watch a cutscene, they put you into the action, and you get to the end, and then you are likely to watch a few more cutscenes. Don't worry, this game is nothing like Metal Gear Ac!d other than pacing. It's a real time experience, and the in game gameplay is basically the same as the other Solid games but the game is paced differently. In the others, they really pieced the game together as if it was one big world, one big level. In this one, you have a menu before every level where you re-organize your squad.

Yes, I said squad! Snake is no longer the one man army that he usually is. In levels, if you knock out a person and bring that person to the truck or another member of the squad, you will persuade that person to join your team, and you can them have them in your squad for the missions. During the missions, your squad doesn't follow you, they actually hide in boxes in various areas of the level and act as backup. If you die, you will play as one of the members of your squad, it's a cool concept, but since they let you play as more than one player, you know they had to have increased the difficulty, which they did. If you seen, there's a good chance that you are going to die. Characters are generally close and killing one will have him make a noise, and if he doesn't make a noise, he'll see you, therefore he will alert the other guys and you are most likely toast. Once your squad is wiped out, your mission is a failure.

The game adds a first person mode. Yes, the games of the past let you go into first person briefly and then you had to switch to third person to move. In this game you just have to hold down the right trigger and your in first person mode and you have a gun in front of your face and you can move around and shoot people.

The game feels like a mixture between the missions of Ac!d and the gameplay of Solid. Most of the missions in Ac!d featured a map of the area, you had to get to the end, where a red area was and get there. Once you got there, the mission was a success. It is the same with this game. Most levels will have you get to a certain point and either just go through a door, shoot something, or grab an item. This point will be indicated on your map, so there is really no puzzle in finding where you are going to, but how you are getting there. Snake usually will go down with only a few gunshots, so if you are seen, you better run away or try your hardest to get to the point you're supposed to be going.

For obvious reasons, people are going to worry about how this game controls. For the most part, the controls are pretty easy to get used to, but at first, and especially if you haven't played the series, the controls are going to be a little punishing. A lot of the actions in the game require you to press two buttons, and sometimes even three buttons. If you want to shoot your gun, press O then up then hold down L and press square; pretty easy to get used to, but if you have a guy right in front of you and you need to kill him right away, it may be a little tough for you to act right away and get all of that right your first time.

The radar has been completely redesigned, for the worse. Instead of having a big square at the top right of your screen that has dots that show the view of the bad guys, your radar juts shows the direction of the bad guys by showing how close they are to you but a color coded arrow. If the arrow is red, you are right by them, yellow your at a cautious distance, and at blue you are safe from being seen, until they turn around.

There is an included multiplayer with the game, and it is extremely fun. The modes for multiplayer are deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. If you have another friend that has this game, definitely check out the multiplayer. You can use melee attacks, mines, grenades. As you unlock people for your squad, you can trade them with friends through the multiplayer. There is an online multiplayer mode, but you got to play the game to unlock it, but once you do unlock it, man are you going to be playing it a lot. The game doesn't have you redo levels like in Ac!d for a better rank but it's a good idea to do so, because the guys you take in your squad you will be taking online! The online multiplayer is so much fun, and the game is almost worth buying just for multiplayer.

The game feels just like the other Metal Gear games. I will give this warning. If you haven't played Metal Gear 1-3, and liked all of them and paid attention to the story and you are someone who cares about the story, go out and beat the other ones first. This is a Christmas present from Kojima to all the Metal Gear fans. It feels like the other games, but the open level gameplay is gone. So really if this game wasn't a game where you had to go to different levels in between scenes, the game would be on par with the gameplay of Metal Gear 2. If you are a fan of the Splinter Cell series, I'd go with starting off with the first Solid and then working your way through the story, the story is really complex and you'll get a lot more out of it by playing them in order. Metal Gear is in my opinion, a whole lot better than Splinter Cell, it's not an extremely complex idea, with high tech gadgetry. It's a game during the 70s-80s where you won't find anything advanced about the weapons or the gadgets. Snake still uses a walkie talkie, and after reading Stephen King's Cell and watching the coolest character in the video game use a walkie talkie, I have decided to give up the cell phone and stick with calling people in my neighborhood on the walkie talkie. This is probably the best game on the PSP yet.... if you like the series. If you are a kid that just wants a run and gun game, stay far away from this, you're going to need real skill to get this game's fairly challenging difficulty. The game is pretty long, but is the shortest one in the Solid, or even Ac!d series, (with the exception of the original), at about 15 hours. Still, that's pretty long for an action game. This is my favorite series, and if you haven't started it yet, jump on the bandwagon, you need to!

The game looks amazing! The characters are so deeply designed as you go through the levels seeing new characters you will see scars and various facial expressions. The levels are fairly repetitive in design, but that isn't bad because they are going to places that should be fairly repetitive. The levels are usually belonging to the military, so there are various bunkers and sandbags in different areas so it all looks the same through the game. The level designs are great, and they placed the characters in just the right spots to make it a challenge to get past them, but not impossible. The textures that are in the game looked great anywhere from characters, to the levels look about as good as the Solid 2.

David Hayter as Snake and the cast of Snake Eater are back for voice work, and they sound just as good as they did on Snake Eater as they do on this. Although, there aren't as much voicework on this one as the other ones and most cutscenes don't even have voice overs and the whole game is primarily text based. They re-used sounds that have been in the game since the original Solid. They still have the noise of the walkie talkie, the extremely loud noise that makes your heart stop when you are seen by a gaurd, and even some music from the old games. The game sounds terrific, but I wish they would have had more voiceovers in it.

So should you get this game? Yes, but only if you liked the other ones in the series. If you haven't played the other ones and don't care about the story, this game be shorter and you won't get as much out of it. The story takes about a quarter of the time it takes to beat the game. To me, this is the greatest game on the PSP, and nothing even really comes close. This game will have you occupied for a long time. Superb.