Actually sorry to burst the american bubble here. The reason for many extreme difficulty and the EE mode on MGS games (Resident Evil is another series with this commonly found feature) is in general because although Japanese gamers enjoy playing game scientiffic studies have proved European gamers to simply be better at gaming than them, they often recieved complaints from countries over in Europe (The UK in particular apparently) that gamers found the difficulty even on Hard mode TOO easy.

The off topic part done I'll be looking for a PS3 sometime soon I guess too.