Stunning Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops video

We know you won't be able to resist watching the video first, so take a look (press play bottom right) then read on for an idea of what it all means.

Good, wasn't it? But what was it all about? Well, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops is arguably the most eagerly-anticipated upcoming title for the PSP – and yet probably the easiest to underestimate.

You might think that with such a huge game brand pretty much guaranteed to sell itself, the legendary designer Hideo Kojima and his team would content themselves with simply porting over the last PlayStation 2 title, as too many have done when creating games for Sony's handheld.

Happily, that couldn't be more wrong. Portable Ops looks about the most innovative game in the pipeline for PSP, truly showing what the hardware is capable of.

As you may have noticed from the video, the chief change for this latest Metal Gear Solid title is that the hero, Solid Snake, will fight alongside other characters for most of the game.

But what's really clever is how that's integrated to take advantage of the PSP's wi-fi functionality. And with the title hands-on playable at the recent Leipzig Game Convention in Germany, loads more information has come to light about how this will work in practice.

It turns out you'll be able to go to different designated real-life wi-fi hotspots – cafes, shops and so forth – and download a random selection of characters, drawn from the literally hundreds available at various hotspots around the world.

Characters can also be swapped with other Metal Gear owning PSP's in the immediately vicinity, so the game positively encourages you to get out there and mix it up to recruit your own squad of up to 100 different fighters.

The characters you collect have different skills (close assault, medicine, sniping and so forth), and thus a varied squad will mean more than Pokemon-style bragging rights – it will mean you've lots more options of how to take on your opponents.

You see these, a selected squad of your characters can be deployed in multiplayer battles (where you'll lose them if they get killed, although they can surrender beforehand if you're quick). But even more impressively, they can be brought into the single-player game.

Characters can be cycled in and out of the action as you progress through the levels, which should lead to a huge amount of variety in how you can beat the game (as well as a headache for the designers, who'll have to build levels that can accommodate such a wide variety of approaches).

Suffice to say, this is one game you really don't want to miss. Alas there's still no word on a release date, so we'll just have to leave our breath baited!