The recent demo of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker gives players a glimpse at a game that’s staggeringly well presented, exquisitely crafted and undeniably compelling. It’s also visually exquisite, with graphics so resplendent you can’t help but wish you were outputting them on a big television in high definition. But it also makes one thing abundantly clear: old dog Hideo Kojima has no interest in learning any new tricks. It’s a true entry in the Metal Gear series, without doubt.

That’s not to say Kojima Studios doesn’t know how to tinker with the formula. Former PSP outings Metal Gear Ac!d and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops played with the franchise like an enthusiastic child being thrown into a ballpen for the first time. Good games, but hardly nuanced in their design, and downplayed by the developer as whimsical detractions. And whilst there’s also the upcoming 360/PS3 title Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which teases players with "lightning bolt action", it’s still to be confirmed whether Rising is even a stealth game. Fans of the series will probably attest that Rising’s protagonist, the cybernetic techno-ninja Raiden, probably has little need for the series’ traditional sneaking missions.

How much has the Metal Gear Solid series really changed since its early days?

Those fans will also argue that the series itself has also undergone drastic changes. The weapon customisability of the fourth and most recent entry opens up whole new opportunities in dispatching your assailants. It would also be very unfair to claim the third game - my personal favourite and the springboard for Peace Walker - to be similar in execution to any of the others. But I argue the series’ core stealth experience has remained largely unchanged since the original in 1998.

Elsewhere, the genre has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed II uses stealth to empower the player in a way that the Metal Gear Solid series lacks. Ezio’s predecessor Altair snuck up on the unsuspecting masses to great effect in the 2007 original. What’s the difference? Assassin’s Creed, for all its faults, used stealth as a powerful weapon instead of an artificial difficulty bump, and the sequel looks more than likely to continue this tradition.

The genre, for anyone that’s happened to miss it creeping up behind them, has traditionally functioned by encouraging the player to avoid enemies entirely, usually by disuading the player from combat by giving their character poor offensive capabilities. Your foes are generally only weak from behind, so these games end up a connected series of trials and errors, with a heavy emphasis on error.