Directly underneath the health bar is your psych meter, which is broken into four segments. Your psych meter will diminish in extreme heat or other adverse weather conditions (temperature, weather, and wind direction are indicated in the map screen). It can even go down due to the stench when you climb into a dumpster. To raise your psych once it's gone down...why, you whip out your favorite nudie magazine, of course. This process is surprisingly involved. You'll bring the magazine up in first-person view to see the lovely, mostly bikini-clad ladies within, and each new picture will rapidly replenish your psych for a few seconds. The rub (ahem) is Snake will quickly tire of each picture, so you'll have to keep flipping through the issue to keep getting psych back. We're sure committed players (cough) will make a point of recovering all the magazines in the game. Alas, Payton didn't talk much about what psych will influence, other than to say that Snake can pass out when the meter is fully depleted.

Then there's the stress indicator, which is expressed as a percentage underneath the psych bar. This one is influenced more directly by battle conditions. When you're safely hidden in the shadows, it will sit at zero. When you're being pursued, it may go up a few points. When you're running down a street in a hail of gunfire with bombs exploding around you, your stress level will soar. It's at these times that you'll achieve a sort of "combat high," which will increase your firing accuracy and halve the damage you take from enemies. This boon only lasts for about 15 seconds, though, after which you'll crash from the high. Then your accuracy and such will actually go down. It's not clear yet whether you'll be able to control the use of this effect, or whether it will simply kick in when the conditions are right.