Anyone here played Ground Zeroes yet?

Went in there expecting it to be quite short so wasn't surprised when the credits started rolling after a couple of hours. As you'd expect, the cutscenes are gorgeous, the rain effects in particular. Anyway, it's easy to get bogged down and all caught up in the graphics, but the main thing is that they're very pretty, and more importantly very detailed, so you get quite immersed in it which is nice. Many different ways to complete the main mission, and it kind of lives up to the whole "open-world" no-linear-path thing. You can get quite creative, so there's plenty of replay value there.

If you haven't completed this yet, then I probably wouldn't recommend reading the rest of this.

** SPOILERS **

What in the ever-living fuck was Kojima thinking.

Ham-fisting sexual violence into a 2 hour video-game and expecting it to be some taboo breaking genre-defying feat of story-telling? You can't just throw a cassette recording of a child being forced to rape a girl into a game and expect it to be some emotionally enthralling event. There is virtually no character development whatsoever in Ground Zeroes, and it seems all this recording did was try to force you to feel empathy for someone you barely even know (assuming you haven't played Peace Walker, which being a PSP game, I'm going to assume a vast majority of fans haven't). Using rape as a plot tool to make you hate a character is not only lazy but it's incredibly insulting to the player. It's a vapid manipulation of emotions that isn't clever nor does it enhance the already weak story-line in any way. I can't help but think that Kojima realised he had an incredibly short game, and that he needed to inject it with something really controversial in order to make it have some sort of buzz about it. "See, the story-line isn't weak for something that can be trotted out in 2 hours, it deals with mature subjects, such as rape!"
It's a real shame because I think this is a subject that can (and has been to a certain degree) be dealt with in a mature way in video-games (Roger Ebert is currently turning in his grave). I don't necessarily agree with having it mentioned in video-games (as a story-telling device) but I think that if anyone was able to pull it off it would be Kojima. Unfortunately, it seems he's still stuck in that cartoonish-style way of spewing out a story, and if he has gone this far in the prologue, I'd hate to think what he'll tackle in the "200x bigger" Phantom Pain. I don't know, maybe I'm over-reacting, or looking at this the wrong way, but I play video-games as a mean of escape, and when you get a subject like that being dealt with with the sensitivity of a Dyson, I no longer feel the incentive to sink more hours into something that no longer feels rewarding.

I guess at the end of the day it's an adult game with adult themes - the problem here is that it doesn't feel like an adult game.

And don't even get me fucking started on that "second bomb" situation.

Anyway yeah, game's alright. 6.5/10.