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Shhhhh! (it's a Splinter Cell thread)
bosley
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I just finished playing Splinter Cell: Conviction on the 360, rocking some Deniable Ops online, and I got all nostalgic for my old SC games. So, being the kind of obsessive gamer that I am, I've decided to play through the whole damn series. I'm actually pretty excited; I only played Double Agent on my PS2 back when the game was new, and now a cursory Wikipedia search reveals that there were in fact TWO iterations of the game, which are both fundamentally the same, but with a few different levels. Couple the concepts of new levels and the chance to get more Cheevemints to pad the old Gamerscore, and I'm on that shit like WHITE ON RICE. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll have to beat SC, SC: Pandora Tomorrow, than SC: Chaos Theory first.
My question to you is this: what is your favorite Splinter Cell game? Do you have one?
mine is double agent
My question to you is this: what is your favorite Splinter Cell game? Do you have one?
mine is double agent
lol i totally shot lambert
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE SIG
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Maybe next game we'll get some sort of awesome hybrid with spies vs mercs multiplayer
But dear God, it was painfully short. Hopefully the new one is thrice as long.
I will admit Conviction's Co-op was pretty great when you had a good partner
of course, I never managed to find a good co-op partner for Chaos theory
Oh, for an answer, Chaos Theory, no question.
But I also really liked Chaos Theory and I think that moving away from that style of stealth entirely is not necessarily better
It's not like how the RTS evolved and suddenly playing Age of Empires 3 is like going back in time, is what I'm saying
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Very slowly making my way through Singleplayer, and I have to say, I like how it's different from the other games, granted I only ever really played the first. It's just nice being a stealthy badass without having to constantly check a shadow slider or make sure I'm not making too much noise.
Is Double Agent any good? There's a used copy on amazon that caught my eye.
Chaos Theory was the good one
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"Give Sam Fisher a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him a knife and he thinks he's God."
But other than that, great stuff
Also very hard co-op and really fun multiplayer
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Chaos Theory on the other hand is the way to improve on sequels in every respect, better graphics, better sound, keeping it familiar and adding more content. Co-op was amazing, and proof that stealth games can work well when designed with co-op in mind.
Double Agent was a let down, though the first 2 or so missions were on the right track, the double agent mechanic was not as well thought through as I'd hoped it would be. It felt like they had something going, but then it felt like I was doing mundane things to please no one but a set of stat bars.
Conviction, while throwing things out the window felt good at times, but I feel Ubisoft's original goal of social stealth would have been more rewarding. The original videos had more sneaking about and avoiding than Conviction, rather than relying on set pieces and screaming assholes. While it's possible to not shoot so many dudes in the face, sometimes I felt the choice wasn't always there.
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The mechanics were interesting until near the end when you had (minor spoilers)
Also:
Two of my favourite comics of the year.
And Chaos Theory, without a doubt - one of my favourite games of all time.
But on a serious note I really have to wonder after Conviction if stealth games are dead. Seems the last hope now is for a new Hitman game that's not turned into a horrid dumb shooter.
Is that even possible in Conviction? Or does the game sort of nudge you to be super violent and go in guns blazing?
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That right there. When I played Conviction (thanks Ubisoft $1 herpderp sale!), I didn't feel at all the game wanted me to play this as a stealth game as opposed to pew-pew-pew. There wasn't really an incentive to do so. Maybe a cursory level here and there where dude these guys are after you, you have to sneak up to them! to remind themselves that, yes, this is a SC game, but stealth? Nah, not too much really. Ghosting a level like in CT to get a 100% ranking at the end of a level has no meaning in this game. Because the game doesn't care.
I guess telling is how the game controls. In past PC versions of SC games, the mousewheel controlled Fisher's speed, which was an inspired way to map the game to the keyboard. Conviction doesn't have this. Why? Because it wasn't necessary. At. All.
edit: i mean, if you pretended the game was called Jason Bauer or Jack Bourne: The Game, then it was pretty fun times all in all. Still a dumpy-ass stealth game though.
They let you do cool stuff like pull a guy off a lighthouse walkway and then penalize you for it?
Possibly a crazy theory, but I really do think the shift away from the stealth genre goes hand-in-hand with an increased focus on console development. Stealth games are perfect for PC - the resolution of and proximity to the monitor means that you can pick out details easily, KBAM controls give you the required precision in awareness and rapid aiming, quicksave eliminates the frustration inherent to the genre, and your typical posture (bolt upright rather than slumped on something) is more conducive to the alertness needed. I never felt remotely comfortable playing stealth games on console - Chaos Theory, despite the graphical excellence for the oXbox, felt blurry and indistinct, and manually saving all the time really broke immersion - so it makes sense that game would move towards something more suited to the platform and a broader audience.
Having said that, I really do want to play through my oXbox copy of Double Agent - it was made by the original Splinter Cell and Chaos Theory team, is actually radically different to the 'next-gen' version (similar story points and locations, totally different missions), and was really well received by reviewers. I think a huge number of people missed out on that version, as it was released at a point where most had moved on to the newer consoles.
wasn't that the best level??
Look Alpha Protocol was bad but not that bad, Spoit
It was right up there with No Fighting in the War Room from COD4 and the ghost fish section from Ninja Gaiden in terms of levels I love!
And sorry Bioptic but I completely disagree with you, I don't find any of those issues playing stealth games on consoles. Opinions, and so forth.
That aside, I've only played Double Agent on oXbox. It wasn't bad, but I think the reason I don't hold it in high regard is Sam. I miss smartass Sam from PT and CT.
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But you know, as much as I will defend AP's gameplay to death, I really can't argue that it definitely suffered from "car person" syndrome, though not nearly as sluggishly so as that certain other game
I did love SC:Conviction but towards the end of the game, proper stealth went out of the window.
There was no way i could resolve a situation with just pure stealth. It was just merely a tool to get into position to enact some ultra violence on the bad guys.
Sadly though I barely have free time at the moment, this being the Christmas season and all. I may be down for it in the new year, Primus, if no one else takes up your offer.
I really liked some of the stylistic choices in Conviction, like projecting objectives on the scenery and the idea of grayscaling for stealth (although I'm not entirely satisfied with the result - I'd prefer the option to turn it off, or to gray only the player and not the environment or vice versa), but the last third of the game where you had to follow extremely linear paths to take out military dudes with SC's terrible shooting mechanics was pretty crappy. On the approach to the final level, I tried to veer off the road with its ominous cement blockades and stroll across the lawn instead, only to be greeted by one of those 2D bush walls that rotate with you so you always see the same thing. I find one of my biggest complaints in stealth games is restrictive level design - I just want to be given a big area and go about it however I like, taking out as many or few dudes as character resources and personal skill permit, which is part of why I love Deus Ex, Blood Money, and Arkham Asylum's predator challenges. The early sections of Conviction had some promise, climbing around on the mansion, but it was still pretty simple and dried up as the game progressed.
Ambushing and clearing 8 dudes in a matter of seconds by marking four, dropping down on one, shooting a chandelier down on three and then executing the marked four was pretty awesome, though.
I'm pretty sure SC was originally an X-Box title, then a PC port. Which was originally a boon for the series, since they implemented ideas from consoles onto PC. The wheel-speed for example, is the best damn thing any stealth game on PC has ever done. Every other PC stealth game is apparently designed by chimps, because I don't know how, in the last 10 years, nobody else has used this mechanic.
Anyways, I'm in the Chaos Theory camp. The best thing is that CT was eventually released sans-StarForce by a company called Encore. I'm hoping Conviction gets the same treatment, because I'm tired of buying Ubisoft's DRM-riddled nonsense. The Bath House level in CT was complete horseshit, though. I'm playing SC and they made a level that cannot possibly be stealthed in the end. It was a thriller, but I want my 100%. Other than that level, I enjoyed the entire thing.
Double Agent is also pretty damn awful. The controls feel awkward and wrong, I just can't get used to them. Many of the controls can't even be reassigned, like inventory. The damn gigantic, obscuring, distracting, ugly context-icons on the action-menu. Wondering around the terrorist base is also really boring and the balance-aspect wasn't remotely as entertaining as it sounded. Bad game, left a bad taste in my mouth.
I was kind of hoping DA's balance would be like shooting that Israeli spy in PT. Not knowing who to trust entirely, being given an order and questioning its value. I still don't know why I was supposed to shoot that lady. In the end, I did, but I never figured out for what reason.
as someone who played the game about a hojillion times, it's doable, but your window of opportunity is very narrow and i think that if you dawdle for too long then guard positions will have changed enough to pretty much guarantee you'll eat a couple bullets
but that's what the taser rounds are for
I bought the fifth one during a sale but haven't touched it. Also I bought a used copy of the oXbox version of the fourth one two days ago cause I read its more like CT but jumping back into the oXbox is kinda yucky.
All in all the bottom line is that Michael Ironside is the best Batman.
Sam Fisher is literally getting too old for this shit.
sam was definitely pushing it in years and getting creaky in the joints, but his movements and actions were always very precise and deliberate
he came off as someone who excelled not so much through physical prowess as sheer experience
It is quite do-able, albeit definitely the most difficult to ghost out of the entire game. Its the one map where using gadgets is actually quite integral to making it through completely undetected with no use of knockouts.
As a pc-exclusive gamer (I don't own any consoles), I would have to respectfully disagree. I think the shift away from stealth games has more to do with a diversification of gameplay styles in regards to attracting a wider target demographic. It seems to me that a selling point for the modern game is a flexibility of gameplay choices, as opposed to a focus on a singular playstyle.
For example, these days you're much more likely to see a game where action and stealth are blended, and the degree to which either approach is utilized is left at the discretion of the player. It allows a studio to market that game to potentially both the action gamer and the stealth gamer, as opposed to just one or the other. Just look at something like the modern warfare series, where you suddenly start seeing stealth elements where you would typically expect a straight up firefight (the sniper mission in modern warfare 2 in particular comes to mind).
I almost wonder if they designed conviction to potentially do exactly that. I mean, at this point in the story they have a perfect setup to move on to another character if they want.
His appearance always seemed to change a little bit everytime the series was passed between the Montreal and Shanghai studios. Each studio seemed to have their own interpretation of his appearance.
What I find funny about the cover system in Conviction is that people fixate on it as a shooter feature. But in Conviction, its actually best utilized as a means of moving between points of concealment with a minimal amount of exposure time. The Iraq level in particular was a great example of this, where you can use cover to stealth past at least half the map without so much as firing a single shot just by carefully using cover to hide.
But there were so many times I would get through an encounter, progress through the area, find a cool ledge or other feature to the level design that I, presumably, could have used to stealthily kill people, only to have already killed them several minutes ago because I never would have gotten this far and had no reason to try to with them still alive.
More shades of Arkham Asylum's predator sections, less corridor crawl would have been nice. There are a few places where you can see how that would be so much more fun, but then the level design gets even worse as soon as you get the sonar goggles and Ubisoft decides exciting stealth gameplay is easy to achieve by putting two holes in the ground with a tunnel between them in every area with an encounter because you can hide in there and see everyone anyway.
I mean, it could have also been a better game with a story that wasn't so mind bogglingly retarded, with characters that weren't angry about everything all the time or destroying who they were in previous games for the sake of being totally fucking awesome in this totally fucking awesome game, trying too hard to be live up to some juvenile notion of completely badass, or it had some better voice acting. But yeah. Awful game.
You can see shades of what would have made it play better in the co-op campaign, but they ruin that by the end too.
I said that back when Conviction was first announced. "I hope they clear the way for a new main character, not because I dislike Sam Fisher but because he's getting on in years, and his character arc is finished."
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