Did anybody report on this, this whole Snake has an iPod thing? Guess that was part of the NDA that all the review sites are bitching about.

The iPod lives in the Items menu, right alongside Snake's rations and whatnot. When you pull it up, you have to use the click wheel by rotating the right analog stick! Freaking hell awesome. And it is preloaded with a selection of Metal Gear tunes, sorted under Artist and Album and Song just like a real iPod. There's even podcasts! Yes, every so often Konami will release a new exclusive podcast (and additional songs as well) which you can download in-game to listen to while you're playing the game. Unbelievable.

The first podcast runs about eight minutes, and mainly seems to be about how and why they negotiated the iPod rights. Turns out Kojima and his pals are big Mac heads! In fact, there's Macs all over the game. Otacon seems to have half a dozen of them in his lab.

And if you want another reason why Metal Gear 4 is great, take a look at the improved girlie mag item... an official Playboy production:

After finishing Act 1, the game started another install. It only took a few minutes, but clearly the game is worried about my sleeping habits...

Also, Clark and I went to the mall this morning to pick up my reserved copy, right? Then as we're just dapping around riding the escalators, I started sweating my decision not to get the Limited Edition version. So we went back to the GameStop and traded up for it. I'm such a Metal Gear Sucka.

The limited edition comes with an extra blu-ray disk with hours of behind-the-scenes stuff. And also a slip of paper warning you not to watch it until you've finished the games, thanks to spoiler content.