There's been a lot of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots coverage in the wake of the game's spectacular and dominant Tokyo Game Show appearance last month. We were particularly impressed by both the 1UP Yours podcast, which featured Kojima Productions' own Ryan Payton explaining various aspects of the games features and development; and MTV News Multiplayer's Q&A with the same Payton about the philosophy between the various trailers (nine, at last count) that the studio has released for MGS4. But the most intriguing piece of all was a seemingly unrelated story by a contributor to the Web site Ain't It Cool News who won an EBay auction for a previously unpublished and rejected draft of a script for the 1996 movie "Escape From L.A." from the screenplay's author, Coleman Luck.

Why is this interesting? Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has never hidden the fact that his game's hero, Solid Snake, was inspired by Snake Plissken, the hero played by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter's 1981 movie "Escape From New York." In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Kojima made the connection explicit by having the believed-to-be-dead Solid Snake give his name as "Plissken" to MGS2's second player character, Raiden. And in 2003, Namco announced that it had struck a deal with Carpenter and Russell to bring the comic book series "John Carpenter's The Snake Plissken Chronicles" to life as a videogame for holiday 2005. (The game, alas, is presumed dead, as Namco has never shown any playable code.) But like the twin strands of a double helix, the Ain't It Cool News story reveals that there may have been more connections between the two franchises--spiritually speaking--than we originally believed.

In the AICN post, contributor "RaulMonkey" uses an FAQ format to summarize the events of writer Coleman Luck's "Escape From L.A." screenplay, which was written as a prequel, not a sequel, as was the film that was ultimately released to theaters. After being dropped into L.A., Plissken runs into a series of soldiers from his former army unit, "Black Light," all of whom were believed to have been killed, and each of whom has been physically transformed by the horrors of war. RaulMonkey describes Plissken's first major opponent, Drummond, as follows:

Incognito and Sony Computer Entertainment's Warhawk

A Sony Computer Entertainment spokesperson has confirmed to Level Up that sometime later this month, retailers will begin selling a $39.99 SKU of Warhawk that does not include the Bluetooth headset. When the game went on sale in August, two versions were available: a download-only version sold through the Playstation Network for $39.99, and Blu-Ray disc version with a Jabra Bluetooth headset packed in, for $59.99. With this price reduction, the retail and digitally distributed versions of Warhawk now sell for the same price.

We first got wind of a possible stripped down retail SKU for Warhawk on Friday, when, in the course of reporting a separate story, we came across a listing for "Warhawk--Game Only" on GameStop's Web site. The listing says that the $39.99 version will be available on October 10th, but the Sony rep had not been able to confirm that with SCEA's sales department by press time. When asked whether this was indicative of Sony's strategy for future AAA games that are jointly released on PSN and Blu-Ray--i.e. an initial run with a pack-in for $59.99, followed by a standalone Blu-Ray version for $39.99--the rep only said that Sony had no new announcements to make at this time.

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