The Saga Of the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta.

Konami has been bitch-slapped by the realities of getting online. Probably almost as bad as Nintendo and Smash Bros. Brawl. It's going to be a tough time for a lot of Japanese developers as they attempt to catch up to the rest of the world as far as online gaming is concerned. But the ordeal of the beta actually begins a bit further back in time. It starts with the announcement of the collector's edition of Metal Gear Solid 4 and the announcement of the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta promotion. Simple plan really, walk into any GameStop and put down your money for Metal Gear Solid 4 and get your Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 disc which contains the access key to the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta. Only Metal Gear fans are rather rabid regarding Metal Gear and Konami is notoriously stingy with their limited editions and promo items. And the first bit of confusion arose and set the gaming section of the Internet on fire. What about those who've already reserved a copy? What about those reserving the standard edition? What about the limited edition? My GameStop hasn't heard of the promo DVD! Oh my god! Oh no! Oh no! What about those who've ordered online? Will someone please think of the children?! People were freaking out left and right on message boards all over the Internet. I personally ordered the game online. So GameStop didn't get around to sending my copy of the DVD until this last Thursday. It arrived today, the day the beta was supposed to begin. Konami being a Japanese company rather new to the whole online thing has sort of gone about things in a decidedly stupid fashion. First of all, everyone with a PlayStation 3 and an Internet connection has a PlayStation Network ID. It's Sony's version of the Gamertag, you know, the overriding single bit of identification so you can play your PlayStation 3 games online and buy things from the PlayStation Store. Well, that's not good enough for Konami as they've decided to ditch that entirely. No, they want to do it all themselves. So in the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 case there is an insert with your access code for the beta. Now get this, some of those codes are only nine of the required twelve digits. Yeah, another smooth move from Konami. So people have been having to email Konami with the codes to get working ones. Some people have done this without issue. Other people have found themselves seemingly ignored. Once you've gotten yourcode, you go into the Account Management section of the PS3's Cross Media Bar, or XMB for short. In there you'll find Manage Account Transaction, and within there is the redeem code option. Entering the code allows you to download the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta client. My code was twelve digits, luckily. No problems with the download. Just slow. No big deal. So after the beta is installed on the HDD after the download, you can start it up. Starting the beta will bring you to a screen where you'll be told there is an update available for the beta. Lovely. You're able to actually select to download the update from Konami's HTML source which they discourage with a warning about the more users attempting to download the slower it'll go or from a torrent client. Torrents on the PS3, will wonders never cease? And where are all those morons who were screaming 'it's not a console it's a PC!' over the original Xbox? I went with the torrent option. Mainly because it was promised to be quicker, and because torrents are entirely peer to peer. So I was more than a tad worried after the nightmare of getting Brawl online. It found other users almost instantly after giving you options turning on UPnP and selecting which ports to use and setting a limit to your upload speed if so desired. I just left everything as is. Lucky me. I averaged downloading from fifteen users and uploading to ten. It wasn't exactly fast, but it worked. So after the update patch is installed you're prompted to use the PlayStation button and quit out of the game and reload it. Doing that brings you back to where it'll check for updates, and once it sees you're running version 1.01 you're able to go to the next screen. Now it tells you you'll need to create a Konami ID to be able to play any Konami games online. This has been known for a while now, a bit over a week. So I was able to eventually get my Konami ID created using my PC a few days before. But again Konami dropped the ball. Going to Konami's ID site to create a Konami ID should be a rather simple process, I mean that's not too much to expect, is it? No, of course not. But get this. Upon starting the ID creation process on the slowly crawling site you're prompted to enter your birth date, and your language. No big deal. Only Konami literally gives you like six seconds to get this done. If you're too late you'll get an error message about due to a period of inactivity the form has been reset. So, after racing through page one the next time around and clicking next in time, you're brought to the terms of service page. We've all seen these. Yeah we agree. No we're going to read all this legal mumbo-jumbo. But since the site is crawling along, if you click agree before the terms have fully loaded you've screwed yourself and are sent back to the beginning.  On to page three. This is the heart of the whole thing. This is where you give them your name and email and create your Konami ID and password and what's this? I need to create a Game ID and password for that too? PlayStation Network ID, Konami ID, and Game ID to play this thing? Whatever Konami, jeez. So the IDs have to be all lower case, so many letters long, and the passwords all have to be this specific way. Great. Now I have to create these stupid ID names because none of my regulars fit the silly criteria. So after you get this all done, which would take a normal person a minute or more you'll find yourself getting that same inactivity error if you didn't enter them in like six seconds again. What the hell, Konami? Luckily there is a plug-in for Firefox that essentially lets you automatically fill specific online forms. You just go to some page, enter all the values at your leisure and click save. Next around on that page you'll find those values loaded. Okay, great, we're by the six seconds retardation and we can finally get this done. Now what the hell is this shit? What do you mean my ID name is invalid, how can my email already be in use? Go to hell Konami. So we try again and again and again. And after about the fifth time it goes through for me. And I'm one of the lucky ones. People were trying for hours over days and days of this crap. My confirmation email arrives in mere seconds. A lot of people don't receive a confirmation email at all and have to go through a whole other set of hurdles to get it to arrive. So now I just have to paste this confirmation URL into the browser and one click and I'm done. Except now I'm getting an error message from this. Fuck off Konami, fuck off. After four or five attempts I have success. I'm set up. Now I just need to plug in my Game ID into the client on the PS3 and I'll be playing. Except Konami has delayed the start of the beta because they've admittedly found themselves unprepared for the worldwide traffic for the beta. No fucking kidding Konami.  So now we'll try our luck Friday. All I really wanted was something to kill the time before Maximum Attack G starts, which happens to be Friday. Which would take me into Mario Kart Wii and into Grand Theft Auto IV and into a solid month of gaming. But it's not to be it seems. So I'll be trying to keep myself from climbing the walls as I not start anything as I await the tidal wave of gaming that's about to hit.