Good old Sony. They’ve just launched a very useful Metal Gear Solid 4 application on the Playstation Store – in the States. Gah!

MGS4: Guns of the Patriots is a complicated thing and newcomers to the series may now be waking up to the fact that there’s an awful lot of backstory to comprehend – character histories, relationships, previous game storylines and so on. Fortunately (thankfully, more like) these wide-eyed neophytes won’t need to trawl through each of the preceding games in the series in order to get up to speed, thanks to the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database which hits the US PSN Store today.

This handy application is absolutely stuffed with useful Metal Gear information, starting from the very first outing in the series and bringing things right up to date with plotlines, biogs, mythologies and even spoilers for this latest, brilliant iteration. The latter can be effectively blacked out too, by way of a clever feature that recognizes when you’ve actually finished the game. But will you be able to resist looking ahead?

Sounds good, right? And an ‘Extras’ option rewards the faithful even further with nifty new camouflage for Snake and a brand new downloadable track, with more goodies promised in the pipeline. So when’s it all coming to Europe?

It’s a fair question, but, as you might have guessed, Sony UK has not yet confirmed any such details. However MGS4 is a massive game for Sony – the biggest-selling PS3 exclusive over the first weekend so far, in fact – so we reckon it’s firmly on the agenda and will be here soon enough. At least it had better be...