Will Metal Gear Solid 4 ever come out on the X-Box 360? It is a question on the lips of many people. I hope to tackle that question in this post and I will do so by breaking it down into two smaller questions. Should it happen? Will it happen?

My first question is much easier to answer. Should it happen? Of course it should. Now I know there are of lot of PS3 fanboys that had a joygasm the day MGS4 came out and that is understandable because having MGS4 as a PS3 exclusive is a big freakin’ deal. However there are some practical reasons why MGS4 should make its way to the 360.

No doubt that the 360 is definitely the dominant gaming console right now. To date, the number of 360 units sold far accedes the number of PS3 units sold. Simply put; more people own a 360. So releasing MGS4 on the 360 would do wonders for the game sales. The more people that buy the game the more money Konami can make and therefore the quicker they get to recouping the money spent on producing the game.

For me personally though a more important result of releasing MGS4 on 360 is that more people will get a chance to experience the game. MGS4 is such a masterpiece of a game that it should be experienced by every video gamer. A multi-system release would help that happen.

So we’ve determined that it should happen. But will it happen? That question is not easy to answer because there are many factors at play.

Game size, the number one factor people reference, is not as big a deal as some make it out to be. Simply put, MGS4 is a massively large game. It is so large in fact that even Sony’s Blu-Ray disc format couldn’t hold it in a conventional fashion. Thus Kojima’s team had to get creative and develop a system that installs data for each act of the game onto the console hard drive depending on which act is being played.

Seeing the lengths that had to be taken to fit the game onto on a Blu-Ray disc there is no chance that the game will fit on a smaller 360 game disc. The simple solution to this problem is multiple discs. The people who say size will prevent MGS4 from going to the 360 seem to forget that multiple discs per game has been a common occurrence in video games for many years now. Heck even the first Metal Gear Solid game was a two-discer. So the only real “problem” with the game size on 360 is that gamers will have to get off their kiester and switch a disc every now and then.

A more challenging a roadblock would be the ways in MGS4 directly incorporates key aspects of the PS3 into the game play. Case and point, two weapons in the game are manipulated by moving the sixaxis controller. Also there are in game references to the Sony consoles. Snake can be seen using a PS3 controller to control the Metal Gear Mk. II and Sunny can be seen playing a PSP during a briefing cutscene.

The PS3 elements present in MGS4 are not impossible to remove, but they would take some work. By no means is it just a simple case of porting over the code and once the game was transferred into a 360 format, it wouldn’t quite be the same game it originally was.

In the end, despite how much others and myself would love to see MGS4 on the 360 we can’t ignore the very obvious fact the MGS4 was built with the PS3 in mind. MGS4 is a PS3 game in the strongest sense of the term. It’s much like what Halo 3 is to 360. In fact that might just be the ideal way to look at this situation.

Think of it this way; you are just about as likely to see MGS4 on the 360, as you are to see Halo 3 on the PS3.

Now doesn’t that get ya thinking?