Splinter Cell: Arkham Asylum

Two nights ago, I finished the single-player mode of Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game can be breezed through in ten to twelve hours.

I quite enjoyed the game as an action game. I’ve long accepted that Ubisoft decided the franchise needed to go into a new direction for this generation of gaming, and Conviction doesn’t so much take a leap forward, not even a step forward, but sticks its foot in the water to feel the temperature. The game feels experimental, which means Ubisoft should take what people liked and didn’t like about the story of Sam Fisher and how he went about his mission and make it something better for the next time.

The outstanding aspects of Conviction lie in the enemy AI, though I’m writing this based only on having played through the game in Realistic mode. The bad guys are still jumpy, but under the new circumstances, they have every reason to be. They won’t notice a light being shut off, but the sound of lightbulbs shattering will prompt a reaction and in more extreme cases, a sweep of the area. If you give them any reason to be suspicious, they will never just happily go back to their patrol route. They know something is up, and know to “stay frosty.”

I was also impressed by the pacing of the story, although there was one sequence that flashes back to the Gulf War that I was not too fond of, and judging from numerous forum posts everywhere, I’m alone in that feeling. In that sequence, there is no reason to employ stealth, and that part of Conviction tiptoes between Splinter Cell and something along the lines of Gears of War. As a storytelling decision, it’s fine, but because there is almost no way of getting through it without killing dozens of Iraqi soldiers along the way. The game flows very well, and cements Conviction, the single-player anyway, as a good action game.

Why isn’t it great? Well, because the story doesn’t even try to emulate Tom Clancy’s style, for one thing. I understand the man exists by name only nowadays, but I always enjoyed that while the storytelling reached some improbable, unlikely levels, Conviction takes a tired scenario seen in any American political thriller film with a dash of daytime soap for extra flavor and unabashedly runs with it. The game takes one of my favorite characters and makes them unlikable, nearly. At least fans can rest easy knowing Sam Fisher is still Sam Fisher.

One other hiccup the game suffers from is how ambitious the first half of the game is, but seems desperate to get to the conclusion of the story, so areas of exploration and alternate routes become corridors with “chemical lights” that just so happen will not be affected with the portable EMP gadget or putting a bullet in the bulb. The game pushes you to fight by the second half, when it seems fair to assume people are playing this to avoid the fights. We all knew this was where the series was going, but based on the first half of Conviction, it’s entirely possible to put out a stealth game that is not sluggish and where using a gun is Plan B.

This is a game where both sides warring over the direction of this game have good points. I would have liked to play a current-generation version of Chaos Theory. I would have loved to see Ubisoft Montreal take a fantastic game from the last generation and improve on it so that it would play strongly on an Xbox 360. There’s also the idea that the formula is dated, which is the viewpoint of the game “journalists,” something the fanatics scratch their heads at. It would seem like people wanted another Chaos Theory, but I don’t think that’s the case. The purists wanted Chaos Theory 2, exactly as I explained it, a fresher, tweaked take on that game, which, in my opinion, is a pretty reasonable thing to do. However, given the success of Ubisoft’s other intellectual property Assassin’s Creed, why not borrow from that cash cow and essentially make Splinter’s Creed?

The game itself plays fine. There is indeed stealth to be found here, but it’s not Splinter Cell stealth, which, whether you like it or not, is appropriate this time around. It’s not even Metal Gear stealth, but more of a complex take on Batman: Arkham Asylum’s stealth areas. You aren’t penalized, you just anger or scare the bad guys with more bodies lying around. My only issue is how simplified a lot of actions are. I missed the hacking and lockpick minigames, and here tasks like that are done with one push of the A button. I had to let the Mark & Execution feature grow on me. Finding a poor sap to smack in a hand-to-hand takedown to fill the meter is probably the only challenging thing about Conviction. The black-and-white filter that everyone either hated or didn’t mind stops being noticeable after the first mission. In fact, I would sneak around hoping and waiting for the screen to go grayscale, so I can plan my next move in peace.

I’ve yet to play the other modes, which seem to be a better reason for owning the game than the next chapter in Sam Fisher’s life. In the three or four years and all the nonsense the development had gone through, I was honestly hoping for something more substantial.

Grade: B- (Applies to the single-player mode only.)

Splinter Cell: Conviction “The Sam Fisher you knew is dead.”

That line above may very well be the sales pitch Ubisoft has for the long-awaited Splinter Cell: Conviction. Under development since 2006 or 2007, Conviction saw a lot of changes for Sam Fisher and company. Ubisoft Montreal, the game’s development studio, sought to rebuild the franchise from the ground up. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is deemed to be the masterpiece of the series, but apparently players were getting exhausted from the hiding in darkness, lugging an unconscious or dead body to a good hiding spot, and, you know, not firing your pistol and sneaking around, you know, the entire point of the series.

In 2002, Sam Fisher debuted as a kind of countermeasure to Metal Gear’s Solid Snake. The two could simply not co-exist in fans’ eyes. People embraced this new stealth, where light and shadow played a huge role as opposed to hiding in a cardboard box. Splinter Cell had the Tom Clancy name, so we could at least have expected a hard tale of international tension and information warfare, as opposed to all the melodrama from the then recent Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In addition to all of this, Splinter Cell was an Xbox and I believe PC exclusive. The Xbox had a stealth franchise to call its own and spawned three sequels before it was all reinvented. In irony, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots also saw something of a makeover, implying the use of stealth, but ultimately making a straightforward action game in the process.

I’ve put in about four or five hours into Conviction, and turned it off because one part is currently frustrating the heck out of me. I jumped straight into Realistic after I came to know the demo like the back of my hand. The game is a massive improvement on the demo in a few ways. One way is how, finally, I have to deal with smart AI. They’re still dumb in a few places, and still jumpy as jumpy can get, but they know how to work as a team and sweep an area for Sam. I also underestimated their field of vision. In other games, enemies either had a limited field of vision that was on par with Mr. Magoo, or if they thought they saw something they would investigate, find nothing, shrug, and go back to their regular duties. Not here. If they think they see Sam, they saw Sam. Everyone goes nuts and have their rifles ready.

I feel like the aiming and gun control has been fixed from the previous Splinter Cell games, and the aiming works great when picking off bad guys from a hiding spot, but when the down-and-dirty moments arrive where I have to take these guys down in a Wild West style fight, not so much. There’s one segment that tries to be part Gears of War and part Army of Two and it teeters on the edge of being annoying and broken. It also puts the story itself to a halt, not that it matters, because as of where I am the story is so disappointing.

I’d prefer not to be spoiler-heavy, but the story feels more Michael Bay, Modern Warfare 2 than Tom Clancy’s most ridiculous day. Even the Bourne films, whose presence is felt a number of times, has a more entertaining story to unfold. I’ll probably be wrong about it by the end because of what I’m expecting to be an M. Night Shyamalan twist.

The one thing I miss is saving whenever I want to. The game is supposedly rather short in length, but when you want to do things a certain way and have to restart, you have to restart at the game’s checkpoint and some of them are horrible. In one checkpoint, I kept having to talk to a woman before hitting the detonator and blowing things up because I kept getting Fisher killed in the ensuing battle. The same goes for having to constantly get rid of the same team of guards that comes looking for Fisher before dealing with an idiotic laser grid system, some lasers which have no practical placement except “Place here in case Sam Fisher goes rogue and has to infiltrate our base and hops our flower pots instead of just walking around.”

I’ve yet to try the other, supposedly more fun modes. That’s probably a weekend job.

Still Alive, like the ‘Portal’ song

I haven’t written in more than a week, now, and that’s mostly because I’ve been all over the place both personally and in playing whatever. A few days ago, I’ve reached the third disc of Final Fantasy XIII, which puts me at the 25-hour mark about now. I finally have the full effect of the story, and it seems most of the storytelling attention was placed on Sazh. He seems to be the one to have the most to lose as a father, and that’s as far as I’ll go there. I’m sure most of the RPG geeks have blown through the game by now, but they probably aren’t playing 20 more games like I am.

The only reason I haven’t really posted anything new is that although I’m playing a handful of games, there isn’t much to say at the moment. In Pokemon: Soul Silver, I’m come to a halt in Goldenrod City. I’m not playing Voltorb Flip, but from what some of the town’s citizens are telling me, I’m going to need a Pokemon that specializes in fighting to take on the town’s gym leader Whitney. I’m trying my damnedest to capture one in the Pokewalker, since walking around in the game looking for one has been an act of futility at the moment.

There was one game I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on, and that’s The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. What a great title. You’d think it was based on a Victorian-era novel, or more recent, a J.K. Rowling novel. I’ll cover the game as I play more of it, but it’s Braid in the silent movie era without all the drama. Based on the “plot” alone I prefer it to Braid. The one objective in Winterbottom is to steal pies. That’s all.

Now we come to the main event. Although I haven’t written anything in the last week, that’s going to change this week when I receive my copy of Splinter Cell: Conviction in the mail and play it to death. Next week will be dedicated to every last mode.

Splinter Cell: Conviction Demo

I played through the Splinter Cell: Conviction demo at least three times on its highest difficulty setting. I keep having to remind myself that this is a demonstration of a product still in development, an appetizer if you will.

Initially, I had written a post on my Twitter page about my disappointment with the demo. What once was a game where the challenge lied in getting the objective done without a single alert, like you were a ghost, has become The Fisher Identity. I thought if Splinter Cell: Conviction featured Matt Damon instead of Sam Fisher and had “Bourne” in the title, I’d probably be more interested in the final product. Because it is none of this, I instead wagged my finger at it. Hooray for double standards!

We have to embrace change sooner or later. Change for Ubisoft Montreal meant taking a game that was slowly paced and, for the most part, a calm experience and changing it to something with a faster tempo. The music is not the mysterious and ambient soundtrack of Amon Tobin. It’s on the level of Harry Gregson-Williams or more along the lines of John Powell. After a cheesy intro about what a superspy Fisher is, the game opens with him beating the life out of a man in a public restroom. Then you learn the controls, and you see what’s the same and what’s different.

Conviction is a different game because the circumstances in its universe are different. Fisher is no longer under orders from a higher authority, and because part or all of the story involves solving the murder of his daughter, we see a Fisher with nothing to lose after the JBA mission from Double Agent. It doesn’t seem like you’ll be penalized for putting a bullet in the bald skulls of every henchman in sight. In fact, a new “mark and execution” system practically encourages it. If you take a guard down with your bare hands, you earn the points needed to execute this move, where you place tags on three enemies, hit a button, and Fisher automatically pops them clean. I’ll say one thing: manually firing a weapon has drastically improved from its predecessors, it would seem.

Your famous trifocal goggles are only equipped with a sonar detector. It will send a sonic wave that highlights the presence of enemies in a distance. From there, your actions are your own.

It seems like Conviction will be a fast-paced action game that will still encourage the sneaking around, which seems a bit downplayed in this episode. If you’re successfully tucked away in the shadows, the screen will have a grayscale filter initiated. I’m hoping this is an option, because I find it incredibly distracting. If the game is going to tell me I’m good in the shadows, why not just bring the light meter back?

I’ve let this demo settle in for a day now, and I wish the series had gone a more substantial direction after four years in development hell. I also believe it was the long wait and the public troubles the development has endured is why the negative reaction is stronger than it might otherwise be. I’m not displeased that this is the route the franchise is going, but I’d also like to enjoy Conviction the same way I enjoyed Chaos Theory, and I hope that’s possible. If anything, I’m hoping for a cooperative demo, but with the game’s release about three weeks away, that’s doubtful. That mode might be what still puts a copy in my hand on April 13th.

“Darkness!” (Revisiting Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell)

Since we learned that Microsoft intends to permanently shut down their original Xbox Live servers in April, my friend and I have made several attempts to play the cooperative mode of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory with moderate success. The only mission we’ve successfully completed was the first mission (Panama) after the training mission. Every mission after Panama ended with a disconnection either midway through the mission, or just when we were reaching its end. We became frustrated, but we were too busy having fun and reminiscing to become permanently infuriated over it. The cooperative mode is still one of the more entertaining experiences in online gaming, and Chaos Theory was one of the first to really make the mode about true cooperation and teamwork.

I then tried playing the single-player mode on my Xbox 360, but the surprisingly sluggish performance influenced me to pull my original Xbox console, properly stored in its box, out of my closet. After connecting it and popping the disc into the tray, I remembered why this is one of my favorite games of all time.

Not that I didn’t forget such an important feeling. The last time I played the game was some time after its release in March of 2005. This means that at the end of March, Chaos Theory will be five years old. When I completed the last task of the last mission and saw my success rating as being 100%, my first thought was how incredibly well the game held up five years later. The atmosphere, the ambience of each location, and how the game plays put a big smile on my face and a thousand-yard stare in my eyes. Hell, I’m even trying to get my hands on Amon Tobin’s soundtrack. What I also remember loving is how the game allows me to carry out the tasks thrown at me my way and I wouldn’t be penalized for it. Despite tons of reloading save files, where half-hour missions might really take me two hours, I did my damnedest not to make any kind of contact with the enemy, simply knocking them out cold if I had little to no options left. That’s how I played Chaos Theory: in and out, like I was never there.

Some time between 2006 and now, I learned something that is still a bit baffling to this day: the original team, Ubisoft Montreal, did not work on the Xbox 360 version of the next episode: Double Agent. Instead, they worked on the game for the original Xbox console. The Shanghai team, who worked on Pandora Tomorrow, the series’ second episode, developed Double Agent for the Xbox 360. While taking into consideration that I felt Shanghai’s Double Agent was a good (no more, no less) experience, I absolutely had to play Montreal’s Double Agent, met with such acclaim from fans across the board and supposedly superior to Shanghai’s game, which brings us to this past Tuesday when my copy of Double Agent arrived in the mail from Amazon.

I am revisiting a franchise that found its way into a bit of a bind. By 2005, the Splinter Cell franchise was at the top of its game and with the then upcoming release of Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox, its fans wanted to see how the people of Ubisoft were going to handle the future of the series with a new wave of game consoles on its way. In 2006, the next installment, Double Agent, was released for all popular consoles at that time, including the new Xbox 360.

I don’t remember Double Agent having a huge impact on the series, but that was nearly four years ago, so I could very well be very wrong. In the summer of 2007, I watched the E3 presentation of Splinter Cell: Conviction, awaiting its release that fall. It didn’t happen that year, with whatever issues in need of working out, and I’d be able to play it in the following spring. 2008 came and went, and still nothing. The series seemed to be in trouble and dipped below the radar until the last E3, when folks all over watched a video of the new and improved Conviction where hero Sam Fisher sneaks around offices in Washington, D.C. in a kind of atmosphere that’s right out of a graphic novel. Like James Bond, Sam Fisher will return.

So far, Double Agent has been a mixed experience: the missions are classic Splinter Cell, even slightly improved over Chaos Theory, but I have been coming across a few glitches that have kind of hindered my progress.

Next up: More Double Agent, and a look at the Splinter Cell: Conviction novel.