PC, PS5, Xbox; Konami
Konami’s lavish remake of Hideo Kojima’s PS2 masterpiece swaps in slick controls and stunning visuals, but leaves the eccentric espionage drama as gloriously unhinged as ever

A wise fictional character once said that war never changes, and if you play Snake Eater, you’d be hard pressed to argue. A remake of 2004’s cold war PS2 classic, Konami has dropped the three from the title and replaced it with a delta – but, make no mistake, this is the jungle-roaming jaunt almost exactly as you remember it. Without Hideo Kojima at the helm, Konami has sensibly not meddled with any story beats of this madcap masterpiece, instead pouring its energy into lavishly rendered art and adding slicker modern controls.

Still, if there’s any PS2 title that can pass as a modern release, it’s Metal Gear Solid 3. Shifting the series into the great outdoors, Kojima squeezed every last drop of power out of Sony’s ageing console – sending Naked Snake slithering across the jungle. To contemporary players, these were vast, sprawling locales. Yet revisit Tselinoyarsk’s soggy swampland in today’s open-world gaming landscape, and the leafy jungles that once seemed impossibly vast on PS2 now feel almost quaint.

Intimate image abuse is a crisis in the UK – with a fortyfold increase in calls to this service since it opened in 2015. Thankfully, there are effective ways to help those being victimised

By midday, Jessica has dealt with five calls from highly distressed young women in their 20s, all close to tears or crying at the start of the conversations. She absorbs their alarm calmly, prompting them with questions, making sympathetic noises into her headset as she digests the situation. “Are these images sexual in nature?” she asks the last woman she speaks to before lunch. “Do you want to tell me a bit about what happened?” She begins compiling a tidy set of bullet points in ballpoint pen. “It’s all right. Take your time.”

Jessica is sitting on a bank of desks with three other women, responding to calls to the Revenge Porn Helpline. For the past decade, the helpline has been offering advice to callers whose partners or exes have uploaded nude images or footage of them without their consent. “It’s a shocking time for you. I’m so sorry to hear what happened,” she says, as the caller explains that, just a few hours earlier, an ex-partner messaged her to tell her he had decided to post videos of them having sex on the OnlyFans website.

The west faced no reckoning for the death and destruction it wreaked in Iraq. That made the war crimes we’re now witnessing inevitable

“You destroyed Iraq.” I had to wait for my companion, the Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, to translate these words, but the thunderous look on this middle-aged man’s face already told its own story. We were standing on Haifa Street, one of Baghdad’s main thoroughfares, which runs along the west bank of the Tigris, and he had just been told I was British. “They promised that Iraq would be a heaven,” he said of the US-UK occupation. He then told a familiar tale: of being kidnapped by the sectarian militia, who flourished after the 2003 US-led invasion, and being tortured so badly that he could barely walk.

We had come to Haifa Street to retrace Abdul-Ahad’s steps on a gruesome day 21 years ago. With its alleyways and tall buildings, this two-mile-long road proved ideal for urban warfare and snipers, and soon became known as Death Street. Early on a Sunday morning in September 2004, Abdul-Ahad rushed from his hotel room after learning of an explosion. A crowd had gathered in the aftermath, civilians among them. Then two US helicopters fired missiles, scattering bodies and dismembered limbs. As he took photographs, men died before his eyes, while survivors begged him to “show the world the American democracy”.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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They are scale insects, and you’re going to have to take action if you want to prevent your plant from fading away

What’s the problem?
My rabbit’s foot fern (Davallia fejeensis) has developed small, brown lumps along its stems and is leaving sticky droplets on nearby surfaces.

Diagnosis
These brown bumps are almost certainly scale insects. Often mistaken for part of the plant, the scales look like tiny brown discs attached to stems and leaf joints. They feed by sucking sap, weakening your plant over time. The sticky substance you see is honeydew, their waste product, which can attract mould or ants if left untreated. These pests are slow-moving but persistent, and it’s not uncommon for infestations to spread quietly between plants, as you’ve noticed with your collection.

Alexander Stubb says Russia deploying a ‘typical’ delaying tactic as Trump warns of ‘consequences’ if Putin-Zelenskyy meeting does not happen

Residents queueing up with bottles at tanker trucks petition Putin for help; Polish president vetoes support for Ukrainian children. What we know on day 1,280 of the war.

You can read our daily briefing here:

We would like to hear people’s reaction to Transport for London targeting ‘headphone dodgers’

Transport for London (TfL) is launching a campaign to target people who play music or videos out loud on public transport. The posters targeting “headphone dodgers” will appear on the Elizabeth line and other services including buses later this week.

A TfL survey of 1,000 people found that 70% described loud music and phone conversations without headphones to be a nuisance. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have said they would tighten the law, proposing on-the-spot fines.