Thanks to Psychoholic420, I downloaded and played the crap out of the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker demo yesterday. It's been one of the biggest games I've been looking forward to, and one of the only reasons I bought a PSP-1000 from a friend of mine. So what was it like?

You're given three missions to test out -- A tutorial, an actual sneaking stage, and a boss fight with a tank. Each stage plays pretty differently, so it's good that they made the demo to show you all the different styles of play you can choose from. Visually, this game is stunning. It easily looks better than most parts of the PS2 Metal Gear Solids, and the attention paid to detail is excellent. The controls really got to me, though -- You use the thumbstick to move Snake, and the face buttons (X, Square, O, and Triangle) to aim, as if it were the second joystick. It works, but it's not nearly as accurate as using an actual stick -- I suppose that's where the auto-aiming help comes in. There's another control scheme, too, which I call the RE5 scheme since it's a lot like Resident Evil 5. You move with the thumbstick, all of your actions are mapped to the face buttons (like the previous MGS games), and you hold R to ready your weapon. So how do you aim? If you hold L, the thumbstick goes from moving Snake to aiming your gun. Much more accurate than the face buttons for aiming, but now you can't move while firing. That wasn't a problem in RE5, but it sucks to have to stand still when a tank is coming right for you in this game. The controls are all up to your preference.

Interesting absences were the crawling and cover movement features. You can't crawl in this game -- At all. You can play dead, but you can't move while you're doing it. And if you press up against a wall to peek around the corner, you'd better be at the corner, because you can't strafe along the walls like you could in every other MGS game, including Portable Ops. I don't know if this is a big deal yet, as this was just a demo, but it didn't seem like a Metal Gear game without being able to do so.

Overall, it was a really good demo. I quite enjoyed it, and I'm still playing through it as we speak. What do you guys think? Which control scheme do you prefer?