Dear Internet,
Now,
Internet, at the beginning of this day I was all prepared to go over the
various things that I liked yesterday about "Splinter Cell." I was going to play another few hours and
reaffirm my positive opinion about this game and detail its various positive
attributes to you. I was going to have
fun. But do you want to know what
happened, Internet? The game continued
to remind me of its problems that push away the various things it does
right. How did it do this? Wall mines, Internet. Wall mines made a simple segment of a level
to be forced to be done numerous times with no explanation as to what was going
wrong.
I had
to disarm two wall mounted motion-sensor bombs.
This was after I ran around like a chicken without its head for five
minutes, confused about what I was supposed to do. When I finally figured out that I was
supposed to disarm the bombs, I tried multiple ways of doing so. Most frequently was shooting them with an
electric bullet weapon. That was not
it. Eventually, I just snuck up to the
bomb. When I saw a menu option
appear for the bomb appear, I selected it.
Then, the bomb was either disarmed or it would blow up in my face. I was at the mercy of luck it would
seem. I had to repeat this segment for
twenty minutes, like yesterday. I was
miffed to say the least. Later on, I
decided to look up that segment of the game.
Apparently, I was supposed to deactivate the bomb when it was blinking
green, not red. On top of that, the game
tells you about this when you come across a dropped data stick. I do not reading anything of the sort in any
of the data sticks I picked up. So, the
game decided to place vital information about how to overcome an obstacle in a
missable format? If it did, shame on the
game. If I skimmed through information
that I could not have not come across, then shame on me. I will take it, but this one portion of
today's playing irked me something awful.
 |
| I was tempted to just let them die. |
So, let
me try and put all that aside and talk about what the game does well. I already mentioned the light monitoring
sensor that willfully admits to how the game calculates visibility. There is also the various gadgets that Sam is
able to use to explore, attack, and evade capture. A game like this relies heavily upon the
various tools available to the player. I
mentioned yesterday about how paranoid I became, and how I started to
constantly use the optics-cable to peek under doors before opening. On top of that are at least two ammo types for
non-lethal takedowns and a camera that can be shot. Add grenades and a gun with a scope and you
are going to have a fun time with all those toys. As the game continues, there are more and
more ways to overcome the various obstacles, even if there is only one right
answer at times.
I
should mention the game's audio. I do
not mean music exclusively, even if there something special about it. The game uses the background music to
indicate the level of alertness that the enemies are in. If you do something that the enemy can hear,
he will start to walk where he heard it and investigate. In turn, the music will become more dramatic with
a quicker tempo. When the enemy looses
interest in his curiosity, the music will return to a much quieter melody that
can be ignored. The change of music is a
great way to indicate such simple things.
A better example of audio cues would have to come from the security
camera. Thankfully, the cameras make a mechanical
noise when operation. You will most
likely hear them before you spot them in a room. But of course, the question is why am I
mentioning this? Many other games know
to use audio rather than visual for certain elements. "Splinter Cell" made me make sure
to play it while wearing headphones because these audio cues are so
important. Other games do not place so
much emphasis on the audio cues or choose to make them as loud as possible to
make sure that the player cannot miss them.
A little subtly goes a long way.
That
subtly is what makes up a key part of "Splinter Cell." As you can see with my experience with the
wall-bombs, you cannot approach this game with the intention of speeding
through it. You have to take your time
to analyze and examine everything, or at least use the trial and error method
while spamming the quicksave feature.
You have to read everything that gets handed to you. You have to examine all your new equipment in
the game's menu. You have to go slowly
to listen to what the guards say to one another. You have to look everywhere to see where you
are supposed to go next. This is a great
thing on one hand. Games should make you
think and use problem solving skills to overcome the various obstacles that it
presents to you. However, on the other
hand there is another problem with relying on such a thin line of information being
given to the player. Numerous times, the
game will tell you to go search for some object or objective and give no
indication to where you should start looking.
I can think of one time when the game told me to go find a specific
person's computer. Where was this
computer? It was somewhere in the
building. The game likes to give
generalizations a lot of times as what you are supposed to do. Thankfully, the game is pretty much a
straight line as to where you can and should go. It is hard to take a wrong turn when navigating
this game. Either you find out the
single route in the game, or you go around in a circle until you figure it
out. The lack of a useful map, even one
that builds itself upon your discovery of the building complex, would have been
nice.
I will
stop here today, Internet. Tomorrow, I
will try and talk about the game's story and hopefully wrap things up.
 |
| On a side note, the enemies burn for a rather long time. |
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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