Sorry to hear your early orders are being backordered. Mine is one of the late orders that somehow get shipped

Anyway, it looks like the ebay price for the LE has skyrocketed. I'll be keeping mine regardless.

I picked up mine yeterday afternoon and tried it out. The Existence disc is a mixed bag. The video quality is atrocious and made worse by the fact that, although it's all just MPEG-2 video, the disc is made to only work on the PS2. The re-editing of footage is also a mixed bag. The moody opeing in the game (just prior to the HALO jump) is excised in favour of showing a slightly recut version of the game's final confrontation. Then it jumps to the HALO sequence as Snake is about to make the jump. What's really annoying is that the movie keeps jumping back and forth through time making thinks unnecessarilly confusing. (Basically, this is the Alexander director's cut of MGS3.) And wait 'til you see how cheesilly the fights with the Boss were recut. That said, there are things I did like. The best example of which being how the firing of the nuke was recut with that brief moment between an injured Snake and the Boss, early in the game.

Now if only I can get used to the new camera. To keep the camera behind you, you have to keep the L1 button pressed at all times (if you want to strafe, hold square and keep L1 pressed). This is kind of annoying and I wish the L1 button was a toggle button like the R3 button. I keep reverting to the old camera because it's less of a hassle. Unfortunately, it's camera lock feature was exised in order to use the R3 button to toggle between normal and 3rd person view.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on 5 copies of the LE. Kept one for myself and made enough profit on the other four to buy me a DS Lite. Gotta love ebay!

and here I am and can't even get lucky with getting my one.

How the hell were you able to get FIVE copies, you greedy bastard?

My LE/Saga finally shipped from gamestop yesterday. I cannot wait for MGO come Monday.

I had 2 on pre-order and bought 3 from my local Game Crazy.

As for calling me a "greedy bastard" - I was just taking advantage of the opportunity.

I didn't mean that as an attack, it just sounded funny.

I myself don't care about the LE, as it doesn't have enough content to justify $10, much less ebay prices. But there are many people that pre-ordered it months ago that couldn't even get the one copy they pre-ordered.

Best thing about this game: when playing as Raikov you can stun people with a Ballsack Squeeze.

I know you didn't, I was just explaining myself. Like the rest of you wouldn't do it given the same situation.

hows the video quality on the existence disc? i think i'm going to make an actual movie DVD of it if its worth it.

Remember how great the video quality of Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1 was? Well it's nothing like that. The transfer is very (VERY) soft and murky. It looks even worse since you're forced to play it back only on the PS2. But I doubt even a high quality DVD player could make such a pitiful transfer look good. The audio, for the most part, is pretty good.

Sure does. When you select a new game, select "I Like MGS3!". After you save your game, the bonus material, like downloading camo, will be available.

Well, that's great to know after I already started a game using a different option. Oh well, I haven't gotten that far, maybe I'll just start over.

Anyone with a copy of the LE they want to trade?

It took me a while but I think I've finally gotten used to the new camera. It's been a blast so far but, is it just me or did they weaken the bosses? I'm playing it on normal (the same dificulty I played the original release) and I find that I defeated the four main Cobras (The Pain, The Fear, The End, and The Fury) far too easily. I know it's been mentioned that the new camera makes the end easier to beat (and it's true) but I've been wearing down their respective stamina bars in order to get their camos (and The End's rifle) and, for example, I beat The Fear with the Mk22 far quicker than I ever did with the M37. When I played the original release, it took me quite a while to beat The Fear this way because he kept grabbing food to regenarate his stamina. He never bother once when I fought him anew in SUBSISTENCE. The others just seemed to be over too quick as well. Anyone felt like this while fighting the bosses?

I haven't tried it yet, but I actually picked up a cheap used copy of the original Snake Eater the other day because I suspected the gameplay might be affected.

uh, both cameras are in the game. You toggle it with R3(or maybe L3 can't remember).

Is the Ape Escape cross-over any good?

Sweet! My local Game Stop buddy had a beautiful copy of MGS2: Substance come in today, and he put it back for me... That thing is rediculously hard to find...

Yeah, you toggle with R3. The problem is that now you can't lock the normal camera anymore. They could have used the L1 button as the new camera lock but no one bothered. It's weird cos in the basic/intermediate/expert action videos they tell you to use R3 to lock the normal cam even though this is no longer possible.

I think it's fun. YMMV.

If you go in the options and turn off the new camera, can you still not lock the normal camera? I haven't tried it to see.

Yes, you can. I just tried it right now. In fact, you can go back and forth between toggling or locking with R3 in the options menu while playing the game.

BTW, if you start a new game with "I like MGS3," save the game and then go to the main title screen. From there go to special and select camouflage download (even if you don't have a network adaptor - no net connection is required for this trick) and you'll have available 20 camos to download. That said, each camo takes up 804k from your memory card.

Anybody else noticed that the Subsistence game is actually the PAL (European) version of of MGS-SE, as opposed to the original North Americna NTSC version? I assume that was necessitated by the inclusion of the extra European difficulty levels.

Not that there is much difference between the two, but there are a couple of places where it might throw you. For one, one of the kerotan frogs is located in a different place than in the original US version. Also, I think the pinup poster images are different in some places.