Images of characters from the forthcoming PSP game Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker have come out in Famitsu magazine. Characters have been identified named Amanda, Huey, Chico, Strangelove, Coldman, Cecile, Miller (presumably the actual Master Miller this time), Paz, and Galvez. It looks pretty cool, although Miller's aura of elite stone cold killer mercenary badassness is somewhat diminished by the fact that he's wearing what appears to be a Boy Scout uniform.
The game is set in Central America a decade after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and is about Naked Snake/Big Boss and the band of soldiers who will go on to form Outer Heaven. Hideo Kojima will be doing the game himself, presumably because he felt dissatisfied trying to tie up the Metal Gear universe’s assorted loose ends, mysteries, and contradictions in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and realized that sticking another prequel into the middle of the series’ timeline provided the perfect chance to retcon all those revelations and once again make Metal Gear the incomprehensible, self-contradictory 20-car pileup of bewilderment that it was meant to be.
My theory is that in this one The Boss will turn out to be alive after all (with the woman killed by Naked Snake in the final battle of Snake Eater revealed to have actually been a time-traveling Otacon in drag) and warn Snake that both the Patriots and the Philosophers are merely front organizations for a still-more confusing and diabolical cabal called the Theologians who have secretly ruled the world since their founding by William Pitt the Younger, James Monroe, and Pope Pius VII in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Then Revolver Ocelot- who, needless to say, has actually been working for the Theologians all along- shows up, and… well, I don’t want to spoil it.
The name of the character “Strangelove” is no doubt an homage to the titular character from Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War film Dr. Strangelove, a movie that has quite a few parallels with the Metal Gear Solid games: the threat of nuclear holocaust looms large, secret doomsday weapons are deployed, and at least half of the major characters are out of their damned minds. And when I think about it, Dr. Strangelove himself is probably the most Metal Gear-esque movie character ever. He’s crazy, he has a distinctive physical abnormality, he’s a defector, he’s intimately involved with nuclear weapons, and one of his limbs has its own independent will that sometimes works at cross purposes to his own. Give the man a tragic ten-minute soliloquy and a bipedal mobile nuclear weapons platform, and he’d fit right in.
