For a start he's found a new setting - the jungle - that allows us to play outdoors without sacrificing the environmental diversity key to his character's stealth exploits. And therein lies the key: he was well camouflaged. Up to now he was almost invisible, lurking below the radar. Had Kojima finally lost his grip on the genre he pioneered, or did he have something lurking up his sleeve? Wasn't his new game just some jungle romp with no radar? So we can hang from trees and drop down to snap necks in this one - oh, and we can eat snakes - but so what? Were we not destined for another light stealth adventure with mostly the same elements and another slew of whimsical cut-scenes full of clumsy jokes about Vice City? And then up popped Kojima with a sleeve full of bombshells to tickle our gaming taste buds. Still, when the ranks of US press crowded into a San Franciscan press conference recently to discuss the game with its creator, they must have felt more than a little uncertain. In fact, don't dwell on it too long - it's a sentence we might need to drag out again when we're discussing Snake Eater's influence in years to come. You can claim Splinter Cell was that much better than MGS until you're blue in the face (or have three supposedly invisible green torches sprouting from your forehead), but without MGS there wouldn't even be a Splinter Cell. This is the man who virtually invented stealth-action, and certainly crafted it into what we've now come to expect from the genre. However anybody doubting Hideo Kojima's ability to bounce back into the public eye with his third game was plainly fooling themselves. Anybody remember it? In light of such a dramatic upstaging though, at the time we remarked that MGS had lost some of its influence.
Something to do with spindly legged aliens, or something we've sort of forgotten about it. Although the PS2 specialist press wet themselves (bless), the rest of us were far more interested in some game being shown off on the other side of the LA Convention Center. When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater took a bow at E3 last year, it wasn't quite the showstopper everyone expected.
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