What do you think? How are your hype levels for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, particularly after having seen this Dracula underling? I'm more excited than I have been for any of the 3D Castlevania games, but I've also played three 3D Castlevania games, so it won't take much at this point.

Early Christmas Present... [Twitpic]

"Games development these days is completely compartmentalized; you have people who do nothing but make the logo for a game," he tells Famitsu (translated by 1Up). "I think that's kind of a shame."

Kojima has been in the industry a good while now, and he offers this about where he sees it possibly going: "This point isn't limited to the game business, but if we don't have an environment where developers can make what they want and find an audience for it, then I think it's all going to come crashing down. I think we'll see fewer people wanting to get into games, and that's dangerous."

Maybe not fewer people wanting to go into games, but fewer creative people — and that is dangerous, indeed.

Kojima Reflects on Snatcher, Adventure Games [1Up]

That's according to a release from Japanese artist network pixiv—pretty much the overseas equivalent of deviantArt—which has tapped Kojima, Evangelion character designer and manga creator Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and Twilight manga artist Ryuji Gotsubo to judge a Twilight: New Moon fan art contest.

Kojima, who I'd wager aligns himself with Team Jacob, is reportedly a "huge fan" of Twilight, according to the Anime News Network's translation of the release. He'll contribute his expert opinion as well as a signed copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, apparently, to the list of grand prizes.

If you've got some Edward Cullen fan art lying around—perhaps in the Yoji Shinkawa style—you might want to get a Japanese speaking friend to register with pixiv and submit it on your behalf. Otherwise, expect this contest to be an "only in Japan" kinda thing.

The more cynical of you may see this as an attempt to broaden the exposure of things like Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker to a very passionate fan base. But I'm betting you're way, way off. Way off.

Eva, Metal Gear Creators Judge Twilight Art Contest [Anime News Network via GameSetWatch]

"The reverberation has been bigger than imagined," the game designer writes. How big? Apparently KP staffers who worked on Z.O.E. have been stopping him on the elevator, in the office, in restaurants and in Tokyo Midtown, saying "Is it true?", "When do we start making Z.O.E.?" and "Please let me join the team!" One guy even has a Anubis (Z.O.E.) print out tacked up on his cubicle!

"No, no, a little longer," Kojima writes. "I want you to wait."

アヌビスのその後｜コナミ小島プロダクション公式ウェブログ [コジブロ]

In an interview with Famitsu, Kojima told Assassin's Creed II developer Patrice and Patrice's beard:

Really, I don't think much about whether a platform's portable or for the home. In other words, it's not important to me. With the PS3, you've got a whole range of middle- and high-school kids who can't play your game because their parents don't let them play video games at home. Those kids can whine at their parents all day about how the game's anti-war and anti-nukes, but they'll just respond 'Well, you're still killing people with guns, aren't you?' and brush it off. I wanted to go the extra mile for gamers in that sort of situation. That was one of the reasons I chose the PSP.

Kojima isn't doing it for me or you, he's doing it for the kids. And the kids are alright. Elsewhere in the Famitsu piece, Kojima tells Patrice what games stand out in late 2009 (Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed II) as well as talking about Assassin's Creed II improvements. Patrice gives his impressions of Peace Walker. Sadly, Patrice's beard does not.

Metal Gear, Assassin's Creed Creators Interview Each Other [1up]

Anubis was slated for release during holiday 2002, but was pushed back to February due to the packed December release calendar, just as many games scheduled for this holiday have been pushed back to early 2010.

"Everything was due to an error by me, the producer," wrote Kojima in his blog (translated by Andria Sang. "At that time, if I hadn't made a mistake with the release date, Anubis might have ended up a major Kojima Productions title to follow MGS, still seeing development as a series."

Interest in Z.O.E. has not dimmed, and Kojima writes that he would like to make a sequel. "Also, we feel that if we do it, we'd like to make Anubis succeed this time," Kojima continues. "I already have a game plan and method for sales in my head."

Kojima, however, does not know if the Zone of the Enders sequel will get the green light as the production hopper at Kojima Productions is currently full.

"I cannot make a promise about time," writes Kojima. "However, I can promise a sequel." Someday!

ANUBISでの苦い想い出｜コナミ小島プロダクション公式ウェブログ [コジブロ via andriasang via Destructoid]

Kojima tells PlayStation.Blog.Europe:

A lot of [people] love Zone of the Enders, and we love the title as well, especially at Kojima Productions and we always want to create one for the next gens as well.

Of course, Kojuma Productions has a long list of things we want to bring out, and of course Zone of the Enders is one on the top of the list.

However, we have to manage staffing and work around projects therefore it's not going to be out too soon, but we are really considering it.

He also says that he wants to create an original title and he could produce Z.O.E.

Oh, and Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear Solid anymore. Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear Solid anymore. Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear Solid anymore. Kojima-san doesn't have to...

Kojima on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker [PlayStation.Blog.Europe via VG247]

Just as Kojima explained to Kotaku at this year's Tokyo Game Show, he going to great lengths for Peace Walker, giving it the attention and effort the title deserves.

The game's script is as thick as Metal Gear Solid 4's. But there's something else Kojima has in store. What? He wouldn't say.

"I'm putting everything I want to do on a portable console into this game," Kojima told Famitsu. "I haven't announced this yet, but there's another feature in here that will surprise people, to the point where they'll want to go out and buy a PSP right now!"

Kojima also discussed other Peace Walker features like interactive 2D cutscenes. "For example," art director Yoji Shinkawa says, "if you zoom in on the scene where you first meet Paz, you can see the uniform she has on under her coat, and then what's under that." Besides this, voice interactivity appears to be planned with the inclusion of Vocaloid software.

Wonder what this surprise is... Oh, and Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear anymore. Well, starting after Peace Walker, that is.

Kojima Discusses Cutscenes, Metal Gear's Future [1UP]

Here's what the eminent games designer had to say:

President Obama, who declared 'A World Without Nuclear Weapons' in Prague, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has the era at last started shifting? The start of the Peace Walker plan? I hope that comes to be.

'Peace will not walk to you'

'You must both walk towards one another.'

Pretty bold plug of one's game, I'd say.

ノーベル平和賞 [Kojima Productions via Go Nintendo]

The demo will go live on the game's official page at 6:00 PM Japan Time. This demo is the same demo that was playable at this year's Tokyo Game Show. You can read Kotaku's impressions right here. Or not.

Peace Walker Official Site [Konami]

Here's why. The game designer has been pumping iron.

But Kojima blogs that because of the Tokyo Game Show, he wasn't able to hit the gym that much. He gained 2 kilograms and lost muscle mass.

Still, check out those guns! Hideo Kojima will mess you up, yo. Baaaaaaaaaad.

二週間ぶり｜コナミ小島プロダクション公式ウェブログ [コジブロ]

"It doesn't have to be me who makes it," he said, noting he may not enough years in his life to get to it. The top-down Solid Snake adventure that started it all was released in 1987 on the MSX and became world-famous on the Nintendo Entertainment System. "I made it a long time ago. It could be somebody young that maybe has more abilities than I do....It would even be good if a foreign production team even did it."

That's all we got from him on the topic. So, we know that Kojima is too busy to re-make the game. We know that he's been willing in the past to let the foreigners at Silicon Knights re-make Metal Gear Solid.

So, Kotaku, which non-Japanese studio would you like to see re-make the original Metal Gear?

At the end of my interview with Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima last week, I asked the renowned game developer about the desire of many of our readers for him to make games other than Metal Gear.

It's been years since Kojima attached his name to projects like Boktai or Zone of the Enders, and while he may have a supervisory role on the next disc-based Castlevania game, he's been consistently making Metal Gears for most of his recent career. Up next for him are two more: Metal Gear Peace Walker on the PSP and Metal Gear Rising on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

As I reported last week, Kojima said this about the topic of expanding his horizons beyond the adventures of Snake and Raiden:

"Not only the Kotaku readers but I myself am interested in doing something besides Metal Gear," he said. "But, right now, I am working on Peace Walker. Eventually, after the project is done, I might think about it."

He joked: "If you write that 'Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more' every day on Kotaku, and write to the CEO of Konami and tell him that, then it might be easier for me to make non-Metal Gear games."

It's not like the Metal Gear games that Kojima is still making are bad or anything. The new PSP one actually seems to be very good. But since the publication of my Kojima story on Friday, at least 45 readers have written the sentence "Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more" in the comments section to that post. I promoted the comments to make them easier to see.

So just remember, if and when Hideo Kojima announces that he's making a game that isn't Metal Gear, you'll know what caused it. That said, we won't be publishing that sentence every day here on Kotaku. The point has been made.

Written and directed by some guy named Giacomo Talamini, the fan flick claims to be totally non-for-profit and has CG graphics, military vehicles, exotic locales and even a gravely Snake voice.

The folks who made this picture have been working on it for years. Well, now it's done. You can watch it, even.

Full flick in the link below.

Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy [Official Site]

Hideo Kojima elaborated on his interest in Microsoft's hands-free Xbox controller system, Project Natal, during his interview with Kotaku at the Tokyo Game Show on Friday. He was following up on comments he made during an all-star Natal panel of Japanese developers.

"I am very interested in Natal," he said through a translator. "It seems like magic." Some of the excitment around Project Natal has been from those who see it broadening the access of gaming systems to non-gamers, of making the Xbox 360, like the Wii before it, a better generator of casual experiences.

That's not where Kojima's interest lies.

"I'm not interested in making Natal games for casual users, but I'm interested in making games that hardcore users always wanted to play," he said. "I want to make to a core game experience on Natal — something that , like a Halo or Gears of War or, of course, like Metal Gear Solid, is a core experience. It's not like I just want to make an FPS. And I don't want to make something that's very simple. I want to make something that is deep for players. I want to give them something that is a deeper experience with Natal."

Kojima said he was also interested in the potential of the Natal's voice-recognition and motion-sensing systems to empower a machine to recognize and maybe even "understand" a person. But while he's interested in that, he thinks creators other than him will be the ones to focus on that aspect.

During a half-hour backroom chat with Kotaku and Kotaku Japan at the Tokyo Game Show on Friday, sitting beside Metal Gear character designer Yoji Shinakawa and a publicist cos-playing his next game's female characters, one of gaming's most celebrated creators amiably discussed his latest works, a curious detail of his past and his hopes for the future. Much of the conversation, covering all three eras, involved Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series, of course, a series the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will continue but not complete.

"I think the Metal Gear story will not end until I pass away," Kojima said. "But, even then, young people of the next generation will continue the story as they would a classic. It's basically the story of a master and an apprentice."

Kojima's latest Metal Gear is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a portable adventure that supports multiple players and tells the pivotal story of the master, Big Boss, who would become the nemesis for the hero of the next generation, Solid Snake.

"In Metal Gear Solid 3, Naked Snake became Big Boss, but, in reality, he's not really the Big Boss yet," Kojima explained. "Eventually he's going to become the enemy of Solid Snake. I want to tell the story of how Big Boss began and what changed him."

Peace Walker is the game that will tell that story, a PSP experiment that finally puts Kojima in direct charge of one of these portable adventures of his Metal Gear heroes. It's also an early test of a theory he has. "I basically think that the future of gaming is less about platforms and more about cloud-computing, with a super-computer and people connecting to that," he said. "We wanted to experiment with the idea early on with Peace Walker and have a portable game."

(Yes, Kojima believes that cloud computing, the technique of users engaging with digital content that is stored and processed far away, is on the rise, "more of a longterm thing before cloud computing is the mainstream of games." But, no, said Kojima, who has seen his words turned into hyperbolic headlines, "That's not the main part of this article. That's just my idea on the future of gaming.")

We moved to discuss the importance of cardboard boxes as they relate to Peace Walker and his own past.

In Peace Walker, up to four players can participate in missions co-operatively. Among the co-op maneuvers available, two players can hide together under the series' signature cardboard box. "I think the cardboard box is what represents Metal Gear in a way, of stealth," he said. "This time I wanted to emphasize the co-op part through the cardboard box by having two people in it." (Read more about how the game's co-op works in Kotaku's Peace Walker preview.)

The cardboard box has been an unlikely device for Kojima to utilize to think about things differently. Long before Solid Snake or Big Boss ever hid under a box in a Metal Gear game or trailer, their creator did. He was young. "There was a story in Japanese literature called the Box Man, and, kind of an as an homage to that story, I used to hide under cardboard boxes when I was little. That Box Man book is basically about hiding under a box and looking at the world through that box and having a different point of view. I wanted to experience that, though I'm not sure if it worked."

Few who have followed Kojima's work would say he has failed to see the world a different way. He is a fan of a different stripe of video games, saying the only games that interest him at TGS are the non-Japanese ones: Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin's Creed II. (Well, he admitted, he liked Konami dating game Love Plus, too.) He is the designer of a different kind of game, maintaining a standard of dramatic storytelling and quirky gameplay unique to the Metal Gear series.

And, with Peace Walker, he's hopeful to promote a different kind of multiplayer emotion.

Multiplayer games was originally cut-throat, the developer explained. "In multiplayer gaming, especially in online gaming, first it was about competition with each other. Then the next level was co-op. But it wasn't really about friendship. It was about benefiting from your teammates, a give and take kind of thing. But, this, time I want to take it to the next level and to give a feeling of sharing.

"I want players to feel the joy of helping each other out. For example, there's the game's life bar. When players are close to each other, it becomes one. Even if one player is dying or weaker, they can help each other. We want to express the strength of friendship through that."

Huddling under the box might bring the players closer too. But the box can't fit all four players supported by Peace Walker. Blame PSP memory restrictions, Kojima quipped. "I wanted to have it fit four," he said before naming a non-programming justification for fitting only two. "In reality, there is not a cardboard box that fits four people. Maybe if it's a next-gen console I can do four or five or 10 people. And then it probably doesn't need to be a cardboard box."

A Kojima mention of the next-gen platforms might stir memories of his other Metal Gear announcement of this year, the development for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 of Metal Gear Solid: Rising. While Kojima was happy to speak about Peace Walker, he chose to reveal little here at TGS about Rising. He referred to it simply as a "next-gen Metal Gear," a game he said is designed to apply his team's Metal Gear know-how to a revamped engine and new development system. He said the game is "far from completion."

One of Kotaku Japan's bloggers asked Kojima to react to some Japanese gamers' concerns that the developer's announcement of Rising at an Xbox 360 press conference was a betrayal of the PlayStation 3. "I don't make games for platforms," Kojima said. "I make games for players, and it's because of the players that I'm able to be here."

Kojima has a full plate of Metal Gear projects ahead of him to ensure he's busy. But I noted to him that some of our readers have clamored for Kojima to work on something other than Metal Gear. He gets the message.

"Not only the Kotaku readers but I myself am interested in doing something besides Metal Gear," he said. "But, right now, I am working on Peace Walker. Eventually, after the project is done, I might think about it."

He joked: "If you write that 'Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more' every day on Kotaku, and write to the CEO of Konami and tell him that, then it might be easier for me to make non-Metal Gear games."

That could free him from the Metal Gear box, perhaps. But from within it, for now, he will continue to see the world differently. With Peace Walker, he's got room for more.

According to Siobhan Reddy from LBP developer Media Molecule, "In fact, when we were in the US late last year we were introduced to Kojima and he told one of the level designers that he loved the design of the Metal Gear Solid pack."

It's official, LBP Metal Gear pack has the Hideo Kojima seal of approval.

Media Darlings [Develop via PS3 Center]

David Cox, producer on the Konami Europe side, tells Videogamer that visits from Mr. Kojima inspire a level of fear amongst the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow that no level of bowel control could possibly withstand.

"Yeah we're shitting ourselves! You got to make sure that the quality of what you deliver is very very high," Cox says of Kojima pop-ins. "You're constantly saying to yourself, is that really good enough? Is that really going to be good enough? It's funny, because sometimes you think, no, he's not going to like that and he loves it, and then other times you think, check this out, it's amazing, and he'll go, hmm don't know. It's shit. So it's swings and roundabouts."

Cox calms some of our own fears about Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, noting that the game's cut scenes last no longer than 15 minutes, despite Kojima's involvement.

"Story is important but it's not the most important element in the game," he says. "The most important element in the game is the combat, the exploration, the platforming, the puzzle solving, all those kinds of things, the atmosphere, that kind of stuff. That's more important."

Agreed!

Dave Cox: When Kojima visits we sh*t ourselves [Videogamer]