It’s mostly very enjoyable and there’s an awful lot of content in the demo, but the camera’s a real problem. The answer’s probably just not to be seen by your enemies, but it’s a bit of shame that fighting your way out of bad situations is so broken.

Metal Gear Solid Touch Lite – Very much enjoyed this. Drag your sights around the screen to shoot enemies, the catch being that when you’re moving the sights and shooting you can be shot, but when you’re still you go into cover. I’d very much like the full version, but £4.99 feels steep when it used to cost £3.49.

I Love Katamari Lite – Haven’t quite got used to the tilt controls. Not sure I ever could. I need to play it more, see if it ever becomes comfortable.

Eliss Lite – A game that wouldn’t work on any platform other than the iPhone, which makes it something of a novelty. It’s meant to be good, but the demo is too short and the instructions make no sense at all. I’m interested, but not rushing off to buy.

My Brute Lite – Very limited demo. I play the web version every day, so an iPhone version would seem like an immediate buy, but £2.99 just feels too expensive. £1.79 or less and I’m there… though I may well cave and buy it soon anyway.

Tangled Lite – Untangle stuff. Can’t get my head around it at all and only solve puzzles by fluke. For clever people, though, I can see this being decent.

Unblock Me Free – Great little puzzle game that works perfectly and requires actual thinking. Good stuff.

Skybound Lite – Last but far from least, this is a lovely little game that reminds me off a flash game from a year or two ago where you had to collect bells, or something. A ball falls down the screen, you draw clouds underneath it so it bounces back up, you see how high you can go. Great little demo. I’d buy the full version for 59p in an instant and will probably pay the current price (£1.19 I think) before too long.

But also very, very, very tedious when it wants to be.

Of course, I wasn’t going in blind. I’d seen all the fuss over the Internet about the length and frequency of the cut scenes, but I’m not sure you can really prepare for it. It’s only when you’re “playing” the game that you realise just how much talking there is. It’s not that the cut scenes are especially bad – they’re technically very impressive and are often interesting and exciting. It’s just that there are so, so many of them.

Which wouldn’t matter quite so much if the game itself wasn’t so good. It’s one thing to be pulled out of an okay game to watch some non-interactive scenes, quite another to be pulled out of a wonderful, marvellous, brilliant game like Metal Gear Solid 4. Because that’s what it is. It’s just superb. I’m playing on Easy, so it’s not as tense as it might otherwise be, but it makes up for that in sheer fun. I love it, when I’m playing it.

…what?

I need to cross a bridge, so was told to blow up a truck at the supply depot as a diversion. I did that, but I still can’t get over the bridge. It seems I need to blow something else up as another distraction, or something, but the only way to find out what I can blow up is by stationing a spy in a level where something can be blown up, who will then tell me about it. Except there are many levels and I only have a single spy.

So I think I’m stuck now until I put my spy in the correct place. Meanwhile, I just have to go to other levels and scavenge items and new recruits from them, while I hope to get lucky.

A bit odd, that. But I am throughly enjoying playing the game still, so it’s not all bad. I’m finally starting to get more comfortable with the controls, too.

Despite telling you it does at the beginning of the game.

All of yesterday’s progress lost.

I must like it, though, because I’ve started again.

Anyway, I just decided to try the single player game, as I’m too poor to afford the new and shiny Metal Gear Solid 4. It’s surprisingly great, but the PSP’s controls try their very hardest to ruin it. Still, I’ve played a fair few levels, recruited some new soldiers and have created a doctor from my wifi connection, so that’s nice.

I’m slightly concerned that the game will get too hard, too quickly. Due to the control problems there’s a lot of muddling through to do and most sneaky situations end in cack-handed gun fights, often with off screen enemies. I’ve died a few times already and I fear the first boss fight. Maybe there won’t be bosses in this version. Maybe?

Sigh.

And I’ve no idea how the CQC stuff works at all.

The only real change I noticed is in the graphics, which are cel-shaded and, optionally, in 3D. The 3D thing works fairly well, but it cuts in half the amount of screen space and makes you hunch over the PSP looking through a weird card contraption. It’s not really worth the effort.

Which probably sums up my thoughts on the whole thing, right now. If I could just get my head round the sneaking and – most especially – STOP CHOOSING MOVE INSTEAD OF USE WHEN TRYING TO SHOOT PEOPLE, then I might get somewhere.