Final Thoughts on Splinter Cell: Double Agent

I’m kind of an idiot for only now finishing this game. It really is the best stealth-action series going, and Double Agent only solidifies that title. It’s a very tense and rewarding experience, and while all you’re really doing is sneaking up on enemies in the same manner over and over, the execution of every aspect of the gameplay is damn near perfect. My body tensed in unison with Sam Fisher’s as I got closer and closer to an enemy, and perfectly taking out someone without alerting other guards is, quite simply, fucking awesome. There are a variety of moves at your disposal in this regard, and they’re all contextual to the positioning of both you and the enemy. If you successfully get the drop on someone while their back is turned, you can choose to grab and choke them out, snap their neck, or give them a fierce elbow to the base of the skull. If you decide to grab them, sometimes you can interrogate them for information, and one of my favorite things to do was let them get about half their sentence out of their mouth, and then mid-sentence choke them out. It usually goes something like this: “Honest, man, that’s all I know! There’s trip wires all over the – aack, blurghhh, uhhhhh.” What's that? I didn't quite catch that last bit.

Aside from the enemy encounters, each level is unique and exciting to explore and stealth around until you find the right way to approach the given situation. During the course of the game, you’ll find yourself slinking along in a lot of suitably varied locales, and the missions never become boring or repetitive. In between missions, you’ll be tasked with bugging and generally spying on the JBA at their headquarters, and while I didn’t really like it at first, each progressive mission got better and better. The final headquarters mission is possibly one of my favorite endings in any game, or at least any game in the past few years. One thing I noted in my first impression of the game was the mechanic of balancing missions for the JBA and NSA. I thought it might be kind of shitty, but as it turns out, it was quite the opposite. While on a mission, there are multiple objectives for both sides. Some are primary, while others are totally optional and don’t affect the completion of the mission. Both sides have goals for you to accomplish, but if you aren’t able to do everything for everyone, it’s not a deal breaker. I found it really fun to try and do everything I could, but I simply couldn’t do them all. I know the ending changes in some regard based on the decisions you make, but I’m a bad ass and got the best ending possible, so suck on that. And I played it on hard, natch. Anyways, the story, while simple, hit all the right notes for this particular genre, and its culmination was insanely awesome and a blast to play through. Speaking of story, I much preferred Double Agent’s tale to the arguably more popular stealth-action game, Metal Gear. Obviously, it wasn’t anywhere near as complicated or dramatic (read: melodramatic) as Kojima’s series, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It gave me a plausible set up, logical progressions in the unfolding chain of events, and a fucking great ending. For a game like this, what else could you ask for? Nothing, as it turns out. Where Metal Gear tried forcing its false sense of deepness and worldly relevance on me, Double Agent was more concerned with letting me, you know, play the fucking thing. It’s quite nice to actually use stealth mechanics for more than ten minutes at a time before having to sit through a soap opera about a gay vampire and a formerly gay cyborg ninja. Honestly, who likes that shit? A lot of people, apparently. But whatever, it’s pretty damn awful in my opinion.

The last few missions of the game also reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 4. Being that this game came out first, that’s an interesting fact. The setting is like the first act of MGS 4, but with one big difference. In MGS 4, if you fired just one bullet, suddenly everyone on the battlefield was trained on you, and you alone. Not so in Double Agent. As you move along the level, you’ll encounter plenty of enemy soldiers who, upon seeing you, usually start shooting. But a lot of the time they cut their assaults short because they had to turn around and continue the fight they were already in. The whole thing felt like a real battlefield, because I wasn’t the prime target for anyone. I was simply moving through an ongoing conflict, and if they could take me out, great. If not, they have bigger things to worry about than some dude hiding behind a truck 30 yards away. It’s things like that I really appreciated, and it made the experience that much more memorable.

Of course, now I’m really interested in how Ubisoft is approaching Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game was given a hefty delay, and I really hope it turns out as good as I want it to be. Double Agent took the existing formula of past games in the series, shook up the story, and made the (basically) same mechanics feel fresh and new again. From what little I know about Conviction, I think it might do the same thing again. It seems the series is actually maturing and evolving with the times, instead of being stuck constantly remaking the same game. It’s a great thing, really, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next iteration Ubisoft comes up with.


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First Impressions - Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Yes, I’m a bit late to the party on this one. Over two years late, actually. But I turned on Splinter Cell: Double Agent tonight for the first time, and it instantly brought back memories from the very first game in the series. I only played the second and third games briefly; in fact, I played so little that I can’t even tell you if they were good or not. But when the original Splinter Cell came out, I remember being absolutely floored by what I was looking at. The only other stealth games I’d ever played at that point were Metal Gear Solid and its sequel, Sons of Liberty. The difference between the two series was astounding to me, and more specifically, the realism Splinter Cell had on display was something I’d never seen in a game before. Darkness was my ally, and skulking through the shadows like a vampire on the prowl was truly an exhilarating experience. Looking back, I really wish I had hunkered down and completed Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory. Maybe my I’ll go back to them at some point, but I have a sneaking suspicion (sneaking, ha) that after playing Double Agent, they won’t hold up quite so well.

The first mission of Double Agent instantly brought me back to 2002; it was like getting reacquainted with an old friend I hadn’t seen for years. Even though this was my first foray into Third Echelon’s chain of command since before I was of legal drinking age, I almost reflexively remembered what the game was about. Infiltration still works pretty much the same, and once I surfaced from my underwater sneaking point, I immediately put the first person I came across in a fantastic choke hold and read him a nice little bedtime story. One thing I noticed right away was even though this game is almost three years old, it still looks really great. The animations are particularly awesome to watch, and since I’ll be spending a lot of time shimmying across ledges and pulling myself over railings, the fact that Sam Fisher moves so smoothly won’t go unappreciated. One new addition to the formula this time around was the partner Sam had with him at the beginning of the mission. He was totally green, and eventually got himself killed by running into a room full of bad guys like a retard. I guess, then, it didn’t really add anything to my experience, but I know you can play some co-op missions, so I still have that to look forward to (if anyone is still playing this game, that is). The end of the first mission had me stopping a missile launch by basically putting a cork in the top of it and letting it blow itself up. It was a bit anti-climactic, though, since I just hopped in a helicopter and flew away without seeing any big explosions or anything. Big explosions equal big fun to the part of my brain that enjoys that sort of thing (the same part that still laughs at fart jokes, I think). Regardless, the first mission was pretty brief, but it served its purpose in making me remember what I loved so much about the series. But then, the second mission began.


Here’s where Double Agent departs from the previous games pretty drastically. For story reasons (I’ll get to that in a moment), Sam takes on a ridiculously dangerous mission which involves helping a member of a terrorist cell escape prison. His ultimate goal is to infiltrate the ranks of the cell and, um, probably stop them from doing whatever it is they’re doing. I’m not sure what that is just yet, but it probably involves big explosions and lots of anti-American stuff. So, yea…screw them. Aside from the plot, the gameplay also switches into a gear this series hasn’t used before. The mission starts off with Sam in prison, as just another inmate among the countless probable assholes hanging around the place. And right off the bat, I was tasked with starting a riot and helping that dirty terrorist escape. Fortunately, Sam had been digging a hole through his cell wall, so I used that to access the ventilation shaft above me and made my way to the guard room. I jumped down into the room and proceeded to elbow the guard in the face, which is my way of playing the “what’s that on your nose?” game. I then opened all the prisoners’ cell doors and threw smoke grenades everywhere to aid in their rather chaotic break. Here’s where I noticed something that might annoy me as I get further in the game: there’s two meters on the hud – one for JSA (the terrorist cell), and one for NSA (Sam’s organization). The more I help the bad guys by knocking out guards and the like, the more the meter for JSA goes up and NSA goes down. It’s a good idea, but it seemed like I was only able to take out a few guards before I apparently became untrustworthy, and I failed the mission. Maybe it’s just me, but if my goal is to get this dude out of prison and find out what his group is up to, I don’t think sucker-punching a bunch of security guards would put me out of the NSA’s good graces. It’s a much better alternative to them being shot in the head by the real terrorists, or so I would have thought. I hope the game becomes a little more lenient; otherwise it might become frustrating having to balance my decisions according to a really stringent trust-based system.

I haven’t finished this mission yet, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see how that mechanic plays out. But so far, I’m really enjoying the new gameplay elements Double Agent is introducing, and I’m actually interested in where the story is going to go. Speaking of story, I can’t say it’s off to the greatest of starts. The reason Sam took such a dangerous mission is because right after the game’s first mission, he learns his daughter was killed in some kind of car accident. He becomes a wreck, and feels he doesn’t have much left to live for so he takes on the most dangerous assignment possible. It sounds great, but it was all set up way too fast. When I got into the helicopter at the end of the first mission, Lambert (the guy that always talks to Sam in his com) just starts narrating what happened, and says Sam “didn’t take it very well.” So I then get to see about ten seconds of Sam punching a mirror and starting a fight with someone, and then all of a sudden I’m on my next mission. It didn’t do a very good job of eliciting any kind of emotional response from me, because everything was explained to me in the span of about 30 seconds, and that’s it. However, I still think the different direction the story takes, coupled with the new way of handling stealth mechanics, just might give me an experience wholly new from that of the first Splinter Cell. I’ll keep you posted as I progress through the game, and I’ll plan on giving my final thoughts once I complete the game. So far, so good. Read more...

Surprises Await - The Story of Prince of Persia

Earlier, I talked about the game play and level design of Prince of Persia. I’d like to now focus my attention on its story, which, while it could have been implemented better throughout, totally threw me for a loop with the way it ended. It’s a pretty simple story: evil is corrupting the world, and only the Prince (who remains nameless if I remember correctly) and his female companion can put an end to it. Certainly, this scenario has been done before, but what sets Prince of Persia apart from the countless other games to feature good versus evil is the emotional weight the proceedings take on once the credits roll.

At the beginning of the game, the Prince is going along, minding his own business, when he comes upon a girl being chased by a group of men. Naturally, he decides to help her out in eluding her pursuers. But in doing so, he also enlists himself in the aid of a dying kingdom in need of a savior. I really wasn’t too invested in the story for the first few hours, but after a while, I started to realize that the interactions between the Prince and Elika went beyond the standard action fare. They slowly became more and more attached to each other, and as the game went on, I found myself feeling the same way. However, I think the one glaring fault with the storytelling was the way Ubisoft went about telling it. Whenever new conversations became available, I had to stop what I was doing and talk to Elika. The game would then grind to an abrupt halt as the two characters would talk about themselves and what was going on around them. The conversations eventually became deeper in meaning, and it was at times touching to watch as they gradually laid more of their souls bare to each other. But I can’t excuse the fact that I had to sit there and watch them just standing there talking while the fate of the world was in their hands. A much better approach, in my opinion, would have been to allow the same conversations to unfold naturally through the game play. Instead of standing around shooting the shit, the Prince and Elika should have been learning about each other while navigating the treacheries laid before them. Still, the things they talked about - how a person’s destiny figures in to free will, for one – were genuinely interesting and kept me invested in them as characters.


The most impressive part of the story was, by far, the ending. After learning of the sacrifice Elika’s father made to bring her back to life, I instantly understood the selfishness he displayed by choosing his daughter over his kingdom and the lives of everyone residing in it. All the corruption and death could have been avoided if he simply let things unfold the way they were supposed to. But he chose to condemn the land to destruction for the sake of a loved one, and while it’s only human, it shows that every sacrifice isn’t necessarily the right one to make. But knowing the consequences of such a sacrifice doesn’t mean it won’t be repeated. At the end of the game, Elika gives her life to restore all the goodness back to the world, and the Prince isn’t prepared to accept that fact. There’s an amazing sequence where the Prince is carrying her body through the temple back to the place of sacrifice. There’s a palpable sense of loss, and it’s evidenced in the way the scene plays out. Instead of running around like he does during the rest of the game, his gait is slow and methodical. It’s a long walk out of the temple, and it’s one that the Prince dreads embarking on. Another great touch was the inclusion of a small bit of credits scrolling across the screen as he’s walking through the hallway. It’s one of those moments that will stay with me for a long time. Once the Prince gets to the stone slab where Elika will be revived, it’s up to the player to finish the deed. I knew it was wrong, but the game didn’t give me a choice in the matter. If I wanted to see the game’s real conclusion, I had to undo everything I had spent hours upon hours doing.

During all of this, I got a strong sense that the people at Ubisoft played, and really loved, Shadow of the Colossus. Prince of Persia’s story could be described as the problem to Shadow’s solution. Instead of starting the game after the character’s mind is made up, it shows exactly how a decision like that could be rightfully (or wrongfully) made from an emotional standpoint. While it wasn't told quite so eloquently, the story in Prince of Persia deals with the same issues as Sony's last generation masterpiece. Even the final boss sequence reminded me of the end of Shadow, where the main character was transformed into a demon for his decision to sacrifice, basically, the entire world to bring someone back from the dead. The perspective of the boss fight in Prince of Persia mimics that of Shadow, but instead of becoming the demon, the task at hand is to imprison him forever. It's an interesting role reversal, and I really think that having played both games greatly impacted the way I felt about both of them. Ubisoft really outdid themselves with Prince of Persia, and hopefully the next game in the series will build upon an already amazing start.

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First Impressions - Siren: New Translation

Much to my delight, I recently received my hard copy of Siren: New Translation in the mail. You see, I had to import the damn thing since Sony seems to be hell-bent on pissing off at least some people all of the time. Anyways, now I can play it, which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. I actually played the demo when it first arrived in the Japanese store, but for whatever reason, it didn’t instantly grab me the way the final product did. Maybe I just wasn’t in a survival horror mood, or I could have been in the middle of playing a bunch of other stuff – who knows. But for a first impression, the Siren I’m playing now nailed it from the get-go.

The game starts off with a suitably creepy home video-like perspective of some bizarre killings being performed by people in hooded clothing. The people behind the camera are part of a news crew who are on a supposedly deserted island in Japan. Why they’re there, I’m not really sure at this point. What I do know is that they soon find themselves on the run from the disturbing locals, and they’re none too happy about it. The game takes a really interesting approach in the way its levels are spread out – each chapter is broken up into episodes, just like a TV show, and so far each episode lasts between 5 - 15 minutes. You play as different characters, and switching between them during the episodes gives a unique perspective to the way the story plays out. One episode has you playing as a high school student, while another starts you off as one of the TV crewmen. Each person seems to play the same, but I’m guessing the developers opted for multiple characters as a way of fleshing out the story in an interesting and different way than what's normally seen from games in this genre (or any genre, for that matter).


With Siren being a survival horror game, the atmosphere needs to have a certain dread in the air, and it certainly has that in spades. Some of the characters carry flashlights, but even with them turned on, you can’t see very far in front of you. Everything is near pitch-black, and ambient noises from within the blackness surrounding you add to the creepy-as-shit vibe the game has going for it. You can also hear the mumblings and crazy laughter from the zombie-like enemies in every direction, and a lot of the time you don’t know where they are until you’re right on top of them. That is, until you get the “sight-jacking” ability. “Sight jacking” allows you to see from the enemies’ perspectives, and the mechanic is implemented with a vertical split-screen – the normal third-person view of your character on the left, and the first-person viewpoint of an enemy on the right. You might think it would get confusing, but I found it to be a really cool effect, and it’s also pretty damn useful. I used it one time to wait for a guy to turn a corner, and as he walked away, I beat him about ten times in the back of the head with a shovel. It was awesome. That’s not to say you can run around beating people with gardening tools all the time – your best bet is to avoid contact as much as possible, because they can fuck you up pretty bad if they get a chance. When you’re nearby an enemy, the controller vibrates a bit and you can hear a heartbeat sound that can only mean bad things. Once they’ve spotted you, the screen turns all kinds of trippy colors, and pants are shat as you run away like a little girl. By “you,” I mean me. And by “run away like a little girl,” I mean just that. What you often find yourself doing is running into a house to hide in the closet or under a bed or something. Your pursuer follows you, and you can see them searching for you from the safety (or lack thereof) of your hiding spot. Once they leave, it’s up to you to either stay put or book it the fuck out of there. So far every encounter like that has been insanely tense, and I can’t see the mechanic wearing thin any time soon.

Overall, Siren has really impressed me. I wasn’t sure how it would fare, since I actually have the original PS2 version of the game, and I found it really hard to control. The controls in the new version still hamper your movement in a lot of regards, but not to the point of the fun being taken away. I’m a firm believer that for a survival horror game to be genuinely effective, you have to feel – at least on some level – totally helpless. Siren does just that, and if the suspense can sustain itself over the course of the entire game, I might have just found my new favorite series. Fatal Frame is one of my all-time favorites, but the next entry is on the Wii, so fuck that. Luckily for me, Siren seems able enough to take the place of that once great franchise, and gives me a new reason to turn the lights off again.
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Level Design 101 - Prince of Persia

Sometimes, a game doesn’t sound so hot on paper. Take, for instance, the latest Prince of Persia. If you were to read the design doc, it would have words like “backtrack” and “re-navigate” all over the place. A lot of developers run into that problem; designing levels is hard, and budget constraints and time are both factors that heavily weigh on how much content they’re able to put into the product you see on store shelves. It’s with this in mind that, upon finally finishing Prince of Persia, I can only applaud what Ubisoft Montreal has accomplished with the world they created.

There are two central reasons Ubisoft succeeded at the level they did. For starters, each area of the world is unique, and you’ll never find yourself cursing at having to go back to a place you’ve already been. The world is big enough that you might go hours without revisiting an area you’ve already cleared, but when you do, it’s just so damn fun to navigate that it’s anything but a chore. The platforming has some of the most fluid and intuitive controls I’ve seen in quite some time - but great controls in the context of crappy level design wouldn’t impress me much. Fortunately, Ubisoft felt the same way, and went about crafting supremely satisfying, easily navigable environments to compliment the silky smooth controls. Some would call the game easy, and I wouldn’t argue against that. There’s not much challenge – you essentially can’t die, after all – but for me, the fun wasn’t in how hard the jumps and shimmies were to execute. In place of traditional platforming, where your character has to be positioned just right to accomplish anything, Prince of Persia opted for a more streamlined approach. One press of a button sends your character flying towards a wall, and you don’t have to press anything to continue momentum. It’s almost like a rhythm game, and once you’re in harmony with its beat, tunnel vision sets in and everything else just melts away. All this is made possible by the truly inventive spaces you find yourself in. While a game like Tomb Raider gives you the same basics to repeat in same-y looking areas, Prince of Persia’s landscape is as different as it is easy to progress in. Throughout the game, you’ll find yourself propelled against hot air balloons, flying through the air, Rez style, plummeting hundreds of feet down the side of a wall, swinging from poles and grappling onto vines. All of those activities blend seamlessly, and it honestly never gets old. It’s a game I could see myself going back to for a second, third, and even fourth time before it’s all said and done.


The second reason the game turned out as well as it did also has to do with the level design. I mentioned backtracking before, and it comes into play for the entire length of the game. The idea behind the game is that the world is becoming corrupted by an evil force, and as such, it’s polluting the environment with a black sludge over almost every surface. Your goal is to navigate through this shitty, dreary land and make your way to “fertile ground,” where you can then cleanse the surrounding area of all evil and shittiness. Once you do that, the environment instantly turns from dark and foreboding to bright, colorful and happy. Your goal is to then collect as many “light seeds” as you can, which are white orbs scattered throughout the world. They only become visible once an area is cleansed, so here is where the backtracking starts. But what makes this particular brand of backtracking enjoyable is the drastic visual change made to everything around you. Gone are the black pits of death waiting for you on almost all solid ground, and in its place are blades of green grass, flowers, and butterflies hovering just below eyesight. The darkness that once plagued the land has given way to illuminating sunlight, and you almost forget you’ve been there before. Previously barred areas are sometimes found, since the sludge covering a particular ledge or crevice is no longer there to bring down the décor. This aspect literally doubles the play time, and definitely not in a cheap way. Some of the most fun I had was in collecting the “light seeds” and seeing the places I had just come from in the new light of day. It also helps that the art style is such that Prince of Persia will still look good ten years from now.

If you couldn’t already tell, I loved this game. There was one particular boss that I found to be downright annoying to fight, but other than that, I enjoyed the combat a lot. It wasn’t my favorite part of the game – it got boring here and there – but it didn’t detract nearly enough from the otherwise fantastically designed game play to bring down my overall enjoyment. I’m pretty sure the next Prince of Persia game will be a direct sequel to this one, and I, for one, will be marking the days off my calendar until it jumps, shimmies and falls into my hands. Read more...

Killzone 2 Demo Impressions: A Very Short, Very Sweet Example of PS3 Development Perfection

It happens by simple chance that I had the privilege of playing through the official Killzone 2 demo (several times). After having a rather pointless conversation about arcade sticks for Street Fighter IV with a local GameStop rep, he ended up offering me one of the download codes for Killzone 2 preorders, with the great exception that he didn’t make me preorder. Free Killzone 2 demo? Sure, why not!

Before saying anything about my actual impressions of the demo, let me say that if you plan on getting this demo early with any amount of anticipation, you should know that it is short. Very short. I don’t think it would be unreasonable for me to say that it might be one of the shortest demos ever produced, for any platform. My first run through the demo took me only 10 minutes and 30 seconds (it will actually provide you a completion time), and it even felt like a short 10 minutes at that.

The demo’s ten minutes basically consist of you storming along a short beach front, and then taking an elevator up into a storage hanger to fight off a few rounds of Helghast soldiers. One that’s over, the demo ends, and you’re simply left with a lingering of wanting more.

That probably works to the developers’ advantage as far as marketing goes, because now I totally want this game on launch day.

After you play the demo, so will you.

That's because what the demo lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in demonstrative power and quality. Immediately upon booting up the demo and opening cinematic, you will be given a glimpse of in-game graphics posing as a cinematic. Yes, that is correct, I did not write that backwards. After the initial E3 trailer for Killzone 2 came out a few years ago, and touted that the video on screen was in-game graphics, there was a lot of skepticism from a lot of people who weren’t ready to believe it. Now, having experienced the demo, I can safely say that it was all true.

Without a doubt, this game speaks to the development potential that is just now finally being utilized from the PS3’s hardware. If this game is any indication, we have barely seen the beginning of what the PS3 can do, when the system is chosen as the lead platform.

You begin the demo on a flying drop-ship, which is carrying you and several of your soldier brothers towards a war-torn beach, as you witness some of the other drop ships getting blown up and narrowly missing yours as they fall from the sky. As the flying “boat” lands on the beach, one of your fellow soldiers yells at you to get up, and suddenly your HUD appears with gun in hand, and you’re in control. Similar to Metal Gear Solid 4 in the way the game seamlessly transitions from cinematic to gameplay, Killzone 2 never deceives you away from the game engine. There is one exception: Killzone 2 looks even better than MGS4. No, the facial animations might not be quite as robust, but the in game environments and sheer amount of activity on-screen easily outweighs Kojima’s opus.

One thing of note: During my first play-through, I wasn’t immediately blown away by the game’s visuals. At first, I simply just felt they were great, but there wasn’t that initial shock and awe that I was expecting. Then on my second play-through, I realized that the reason I wasn’t blown away was because I had already seen the E3 trailer for Killzone 2, and this looked exactly like it. So in that way, the game’s visuals meet expectations, and actually exceed them at the same time. You will also really notice the difference once you play Killzone 2 a few times, and then try and go back and play another FPS, like Call of Duty. The visuals in Killzone 2 really outclass everything else that’s come before it.

The gunplay has a very different feel from other console shooters. Unlike Call of Duty or Halo, where control and gun response is immediate and fast, Killzone 2 offers a very deliberate weight and delay system to looking and aiming, which adds a sense of realism by accounting for gun weight and movement delay. It will take some time for newcomers to adjust to the changes (especially if you’ve been sinking a lot of time into COD World at War’s multiplayer lately, as I have), but once you get a feel for it, you will be surprised at how “arcadey” and unrealistic the movement in other FPS games feels when compared to Killzone 2. It has similar aiming mechanics to Call of Duty, with the ability to both fire from the hip as well as aiming down the sights, and there are several control options available to where you can even configure the game to share the same button layout as Call of Duty if you’ve already grown accustomed to that.

What remains to be seen is how robust the multiplayer options end up being in the final product. So far, it essentially sounds like a blending of all the previous multiplayer experiences ever made into one game mode. Whether that will make for the most brilliant multiplayer game ever made or a haphazard stumbling of multiplayer chaos will only come with time.

Look for my full review of Killzone 2 shortly after its launch. Read more...

Sorry, I haven't played anything.

So instead, I'll leave you with this.


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