By now everyone has seen the astounding gameplay demo for the new Metal Gear Solid and if you haven't, what type of gaming fan are you? Here's the link, hurry up, I'll wait. Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes extended 14 min gameplay demo.

Back after changing your under garments? Good.The new FOX Engine that Kojima has been working on for the last few years is the real deal and we haven't seen the bar raised like that since a certain Killzone 2 demo blew us all away years ago at E3. Unreal Engine has been put on notice. We're used to cutscenes looking incredible, but once the camera pulls back and you start moving Snake around, you realize everything you just witnessed is actually rendered in game with absolutely no difference in quality. Incredible stuff.

Let's get to actually analyzing the demo and making sense of it all. The level of misinformation going around on gaming sites surprises me as you'd think with how long Metal Gear has been around, people would have some semblance of the time line and the series set of characters. I'll go bullet point from here on out and make sense of it all for you as much as I can.

-Based on wording and the conversations taking place here, the game is 100% the sequel to Peace Walker and likely only a few years after the original. Names like Paz, Caz, Motherbase all support this. I've come to the conclusion of the year being 1977 at the latest, for a few different reasons.

-The burned man is unknown. It could be Volgin from Metal Gear Solid 3, Zadornov or Coldman from Peace Walker, or the likely scenario, that it is a new character entirely. I've heard a notion that it may be The Fury. Ya, It isn't.

-The child in the cage is certainly Chico from Peace Walker and the traitor comments support the fact it's him as they relate to events in the previous game. Interesting to see that his ear phones are plugged into his chest. Very creepy. Using Chico as the basis, it helps determine the year this game takes place. Chico doesn't look much older than his previous iteration, maybe 2 to 4 years at most and that puts the game in the 1976-1979 range.

-Using the information to determine the dates also rules out that this character is a young Raiden. If you remember, Raiden was a child soldier in the late 80s to early 90's. The appearence of who you are controlling also rules out that it is a young Solid Snake as well as it doesn't fit in the timeline.

-The main character and the one you take control of during the demo is Big Boss aka Naked Snake aka Jack from Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker. The look, the eye patch and the Les Sans Frontier emblem all support this. The year estimate would place him in his mid 40's and would explain his slightly aged appearence.

That's about all that can be determined so far, but rest assured you can take this information as pretty much fact. Story theory? Ground Zeroes will show the final steps in Big Boss's Outer Heaven rebellion as explain why he does what he does. It will also show us the beginning of the Les Enfants Terrible project, giving birth to Liquid, Solidus and the famous Solid Snake.

On a personal note, this game just jumped to the very top of my most anticipated list and I can't wait to see more. Kojima has surpassed almost all expectations with a demo that truly felt next gen. It was interesting to hear him say that this was running at current gen specs as nothing we've seen from the 360 and PS3 can match this. It reminded me of the Watch Dog demo that was running on a high end PC. My theory is that this will be a launch window game for next gen consoles and will set the standard moving forward for what visuals can and should be. WIth that being said, what about the Wii U? Based on current estimates of the hardware, I don't see it being able to even run the game and doubt Kojima would comprimise the quality of the game just to bring it there, but who knows. For now, let's just go back and watch the demo again and look on in awe.

The next gen is upon us ladies and gentleman.

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