It’s not exactly easy to create a game and release it almost everywhere around the world at nearly the same time, but Zipper Interactive has declared MAG gold in all but the European territory as of today. To celebrate they’ve decided to take the zig-zagging policy on their betas — now they’re invite-only, now they’re preorder-only, now they’re down entirely — and streamline it into a single public open beta from January 4th to the 10th. That should give them time to put out the no doubt flaming server clusters that will result from a full public beta before the game’s January 26th launch, and it should also let them work some kinks out ahead of reviews — something an online multiplayer only game really needs to get right from the start.

My own brief time with the beta was pretty fun. I got a hint of that old-style SOCOM shooter feeling — this is the same developer that made the wildly popular PS2 iterations of that famous series — and actually found I was able to accomplish something with my team of publicly matched people. In other games like this all I tend to accomplish is getting shot, which I guess sometimes helps my teammates shoot the guy shooting me.

I’ll definitely take the new beta for a spin in January, but I don’t expect to buy the final game. No slight on these very talented developers at all, but military shooters as a rule just don’t do it for me anymore.

From the PS Blog.