Yes, it’s here! Whether you pre-ordered your special edition, won a free lottery or happen to be located in Europe, you finally have the chance to download the MGO Beta and prepare for its launch on the 21st. That is you will be able to if you can hop a couple of little hurdles Konami has placed in your virtual path.

Rather than using your own PSN ID Konami is requiring you to sign up for their own service, Konami ID (basically Konami’s equivilent of the PSN account you’ll already have). Apparently, this has been around for a while in Japan but is being tried for the first time overseas in MGO. Upon launching your beta it will in turn fire up the PS3’s browser so you can sign up for the service. If you’d rather skip this on the day you can also do it here.

This is totally unnecessary. But I’m sure sitting in some board room somewhere are a little team of marketers sharing dolce lattes, high-fives and giving themselves big pats on the back as they watch loyal fans everywhere hurriedly sign up to whatever they put in front of them. And, no doubt, I will be following suit as soon as I get to my PS3.

This whole debacle reflects very poorly on Konami and may take some of the sweetness off Metal Gear Online. Not only is it just a plain old hassle, overly complex and totally irrational when there is a perfectly good ID system already in place but it’s very cheap of them to harvest data on the back of something like this.

[See also: Metal Gear Online gallery]