Entry 113: "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" Pt. 3

Dear Internet,

                You know, Internet, I really wanted to have fun playing "Splinter Cell."  I really wanted to like this game, but that is not saying much.  It would not have been on the Backlog if I did not want to play it and like it.  If I did not think I was going to like it at all, I would not force myself to watch it.  The only reason for doing such a thing is to justify an argument against the work.  The last time that I did that was with "The Notebook," and I would not like to go through that again.  "Splinter Cell" is not a bad game in most sense, but it is a frustrating game to say the least.  But I said in my last entry I was going to say something about the game's story, so I will start there.

                "Splinter Cell" has got a pretty generic story even if it is a bit confusing.  Basically, Sam Fisher is brought out of spy retirement to serve his country.  Beginning with the disappearance of two NSA agents, Sam follows breadcrumbs that lead him to terrorists.  The terrorist leads him to the head of a former Soviet country.  The head of the country leads him to a WMD.  Throw in a few Communists, inter-spy agency spying, and a few paramilitary organizations and you have got all the trappings of a by the book secret agent adventure story.  It is all a lot of very overdone clichés.  There is nothing really wrong with using clichés, recycled tropes, and old story techniques.  The problem is that "Splinter Cell" does a rather poor job in presenting these story elements to the player in a way that minimizes confusion.  

                The story definitely felt confusing, and not in the suspenseful manner that it was going for.  Lots of names and countries get thrown around at the player in a way to justify the various settings that the game uses.  Sam goes pretty much around the world twice, sneaking all the way.  However, the game's plot made no real impression on me in the end.  None of the very few characters are given any depth short of Sam who is shown to have a daughter.  When one character is shot dead, the game tries to invoke sympathy, but seeing as the character had only appeared twice or so, and only to transport Sam around in the back of a van, I did not really care about that character kicking the bucket.  It is even pushed harder upon the player when the game tries to show Sam hiding his grief over losing that character.  Then there is the plot's McGuffin, which appears late in the game.  The cast does not know what it is until the final hour or so, and when it is revealed it comes as no shock to the player.  The worst part about how the game handles the story is that it is all shoehorned into bookends.  In between missions, the player sees a series of news clips made to show the effects of what the mission accomplished.  While this is a neat way to show the story, the problem is that it occurs rapidly and after a long stretch of gameplay.  Just as soon as one news clip plays, another one cuts in.  They go by so fast that they do not have time to sit and be absorbed by the player.  It is made worse by the juxtaposition of the slow gameplay that the game revolves around.  Instead of being sources of information, they speed by and break any sort of flow that is occurring before and after.

                The locations in the game are varied, but they all felt similar.  I know I was in Myanmar at one point for some reason, but do not ask me why.  You could even break the various locations down into three key groups.  There is the outdoor location, with streetlights and no ceiling.  There is the indoor location, which is just narrower than the outside locations.  And then there is the building on fire, which seems to happen a lot and is just hotter than the other two.  The only other variable to the location equation is whether or not you can kill the people that populate the location.  Eventually you get to the point where you can kill some but have to wait until they punch in the passcode to a security door, which led to a number of aggravating sections of the game where I was chastised and failed the mission because I killed out a guard that was supposed to unlock a door, but I had reflectively killed him when he came around a corner.  How was I supposed to know that he was going to unlock a door when I had neither seen the door nor had trigger the scripted event when he turned around instead of walking straight towards me?  Bah, at least the game told me why I should not have killed him, but it is an annoyance when the game forces you to fail to tell you something or to advance the game.

                The one thing that irked me the most is probably the gameplay itself, or at least parts of it.  I have already talked about the various gadgets that the game has and how they are fun to use, but let me talk again about the moving mechanics.  Trying to find a hidden ladder is frustrating, especially when it is in the corner of the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.  The idea that Sam and the NSA just knew that there would be a ladder placed specifically there that could get them into an embassy is silly.  If anything, it shows that the NSA is just winging it at that point and has no idea what to do.  But then there is the collection of side jumping points where you are more likely to jump off a cliff than reach the desired platform.  In the last mission, there is a really annoying part where you have to climb up the side of a cliff.  It is done terribly because of how awkward the game handles platforming.  Maybe this is because of how games since "Splinter Cell" have refined climbing and jumping mechanics to the point where it is a selling point.  Take the "Assassin's Creed" franchise which mostly gets climbing and free running down perfectly, buggy recent games not counting.  The non-stealth movement found in "Splinter Cell" is like handling a potato on a string made worse when you try to jump to a pole that you cannot climb, fall, make a noise, and have everyone start shooting at you.

You see that scaffold?  I am supposed to be able to walk over to it.
Instead, the game makes a six inch gap that I have to jump over and alert all the guards.

                The gameplay is slow.  It has to be slow.  "Splinter Cell" is a stealth game.  You have to creep past enemies without being seen or making a sound.  To do that, you generally have to go slowly and monitor the situation.  However, did some of the missions have to take an hour or two to finish?  Could the game have broken the missions up into smaller bits to make more missions and make the missions easier digestible instead of pushing for long session plays?  Perhaps, but I found myself getting frustrated and tired with how long some of these missions got.  It gets worse when the game tells you to do something and refuses to gives bad hints as to how to accomplish it.  One time, the game told me to meet up with an individual for extraction.  The person did not say where the extraction was going to take place, so I looked at the abstract map that the game gives to where the extraction would take place.  I figured that I had to leave through the front gate that was being operated by a soldier.  I tried time and time again to knock unconscious all three guards so I could get into the security booth, hoping to find a lever or switch to open the gate.  There was no switch.  I was supposed to have climbed up a pole that I had walk right past at least two times to get into an alley that I did not know existed.  I am not saying that these things should be as obvious as having a glowing outline, but a game needs to have some sort of visual identification to show available interaction.

An effort in futility.

                In the end, "Splinter Cell" is a unique game that frustrated me to the point that I tried everything to just get it over with.  Terms like "Invisible 1" and "Playersonly" will help you understand what I mean.  I wanted to get into this game, but it frustrated me too much.  Perhaps the game is just showing its age.  The graphic quality is a testament to this, even if I do not count graphics as a strike against it.  There is plenty wrong with the game, but there is plenty right with it as well.  I am just so underwhelmed by certain aspects of it that I found myself forcing myself to finish it.  Maybe it is enjoyable to someone else, but not for me.  I would rather go back and play "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" or "Batman: Arkham Asylum" if I want fun sneaking rather than this.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "Valkyria Chronicles."

Entry 112: "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" Pt. 2

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

Entry 111: "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" Pt. 1

I wonder what the NSA is up to now-a-days.

Dear Internet,

                "Tom's Clancy's Splinter Cell" will be eleven years old come November.  For some reason, it feels older, as if it was back in the late 90's when it came out.  This might be because the seventh game in the series just released a week or two back.  That averages one every other year if you add in the original development time, less if you do not.  The latest one looks like an action shooter game by what the TV trailers are showcasing instead of a stealth based one.  The real kicker that got me laughing was when they started to advertise stealth weapons available in-game if you pre-ordered it.  Does that mean otherwise the game would not give you stealth accessories to complete a stealth game?  That is like admitting your game is no longer about stealth.  But never mind my mindlessness or current trends of oversaturation from other genres.  Right now, let us look at the original game.

                "Splinter Cell" follows Sam Fisher, espionage extraordinaire who works for the NSA as part of a special enforcement group.  He sneaks into office buildings.  He creeps onto oil rigs.  He slips into foreign mansions.  He pilfers files, photos, and pass codes.  Using a suppressed gun, he shoots light bulbs, cameras, and guards.  All the while, Sam uses night vision goggles.  He does this less because he needs to see in the dark, but more because he likes the little electronic chime that signals their activation, or maybe that is me.  Either way, Sam is the go to guy for infiltration while leaving no trace of his actions.  Or at least that is the general idea of the game.  

                "Splinter Cell" requires the player to spend a significant portion of the game sneaking in a crouched position, hiding in the dark.  Thankfully, the game grants the player a light sensor bar.  On a scale of 0-4, the bar indicates the amount of light that is hitting Sam.  More light means that there is a better chance for an enemy to spot Sam.  Sneaking in total dark, allows Sam to pretty much walk straight up to an enemy before they figure out he is there.  The light gauge makes things a whole lot less complicated as compared to other games that try to implement stealth aspects.  Most games, now at least, will attempt to shoehorn in stealth and disregard any sort of indication as to the game's mechanics for the sake of "immersion."  What ends up happening is the player never knowing when he is safe or in danger because of the unsaid, grey, and fuzzy line that the game sees when it computes the data.  In "Splinter Cell," you know when and where it is safe and where you should not dare set foot lest you kill everything on site.

Notice the segmented bar above the gun logo on the right.
If this screenshot was not taken with night-vision goggles activated, it would be pure black.

                Well, you could knock the various guards, cops, and henchmen out by sneaking up behind them, which is the proper way, considering that you can interrogate certain individuals for information.  If you try to sneak up to a guard while the surrounding is pitch black from the person's front, you will end up being pelted with a number of bullets before Sam is able to stand up and punch them in the face.  I am not sure if I am doing it correctly or if there really is no proper method to take out guards from the front without eating half a clip.  In fact, half the time I feel like I am not doing something the proper way at all.

                Let me take the various climbing mechanics first off to explain what I mean.  There is a designated "jump" button that makes Sam hop a little.  At the same time, it lets him climb up any waist high obstacles and grab onto ledges while airborne.  You need to jump to grab ledges.  You cannot just reach up to some ledges to begin climbing unless they are ladders and a few very specific instances.  This is all well and good.  The problem arises when the game makes it pretty darn finicky as to what you can and cannot do.  For example, in one segment, I saw a ledge decorating a side of a building.  In some segments, you can climb it.  In the part that I was in, the game would not let me grab on to the ledge and slide across the building and avoid the guards below.  I would just jump up, and not grab on to anything at all.  The problem is that the game does nothing to indicate as to when you can or cannot do specific maneuvers in relation to the environment.  See a ledge that would be good to climb up to and walk on top of to avoid a guard?  It may be feasible, and it may not.  

                Then there are the times that you can think beyond the abilities of the game, which is where the game shows its age.  One time, I wanted to go out an open window and hang on the ledge.  I planned on leading an enemy to the window and hanging out the window, out of sight.  As I let Sam lower himself out the window to test my plan before trying to lure the guard, the game would have him go down and then instantly pull himself up.  He would not passively hang there and wait for player input to pull himself up.  There went that plan.  Another time, I wanted to shoot a light out to let me sneak past an enemy.  Sadly, the light was apparently made of stone and could not be hit by a bullet.  It swung on the wire it was hanging from, but kept on shining.

                Numerous times today when I was playing, I found there to be only one single way to solve each room's puzzle.  Now, that is not necessarily a bad thing.  Puzzle games only have one solution, but this is not a puzzle game.  "Splinter Cell" gives the player a bunch of tricks to get through the game, which also implies that there are a variety of different ways to tackle each hurdle.  It somewhat implies that there are different ways to solve every problem, but this is not the case.  If you are presented a room with three guards, you should be able to assess the situation and determine the best solution.  What will end up happening is a forth guard will show up from nowhere and fall over the bodies of the other guards, which will in turn make him trigger the alarm.  This extra guard will show what the one real solution is.  In "Splinter Cell," it feels more like a trial and error situation than a test of well planned attack.  Double checking all the corners and looking under the doors to see what is behind them will only get you so far.  Throwing yourself into the fray to see where all the enemies are will yield more information.  

                This does not stop me from colliding with certain broken and buggy aspects of the game.  I spent fifteen minutes on a single zip line.  It was at the begging of the oil rig level.  In the game, you are supposed to jump up to a zip line, ride it down, automatically fall, and automatically cling to a ledge that you can pull yourself up.  Did you notice those two uses of "automatically"?  Between those two automatically parts, the game would refuse to line things up.  Over twenty times, I had to repeat this segment because Sam would refuse to grab onto that ledge and would fall into the water.  I had to look up guides online to see if I was doing the right action considering that an explosion also occurs at the same time.  Because of this broken obstacle, I started to abuse the quicksave feature and began to use it with all the other aspects of the game.  Thankfully, the game allows the player to save whenever they wish to.  Otherwise, that single hurdle might have taken more than half an hour to do.  Afterwards, I started to never go five minutes without quicksaving my progress lest the game throw a screwball at me.  If the game is going to be picky with deciding whether or not it will do what it is supposed to, I am going to take full advantage of a feature that lets me insure my efforts.

I hate you, oil rig level.

                That will be all for today.  More come tomorrow.  Probably on what the game does right.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 063: "Thunder Seven"

Dear Internet,

                Hello, again.  I feel like I just talked to you.  Maybe it is just my imagination.  Perhaps I should just go straight into telling you about Triumph's album "Thunder Seven."

                Thankfully, "Thunder Seven" is the seventh album put out by the heavy metal band.  Otherwise, the first question would be "What happened to the other six thunders?"  Well, I do not have an answer for than anyway.  I think this might be the only album I have of Triumph.  At first I though the band's name was the name of the album and the album's name was that of the band.  At the risk of sounding like an old man, the title of the work is more important than the name behind it.  Music albums and books as well have a tendency to randomly choose if the title or artist is more important from one entry to the next.  It gets even more confusing if you approach a book at the store and the title of the book is a character's name.  Music albums are definitely worse when it comes to this because the bands can name themselves and their albums after any little thing to strike their fancy.  But I digress and should be talking about "Thunder Seven."

                The music is clear metal rock.  I did not say clearly metal rock because there is a difference.  Unlike Pitbull Daycare which almost prided itself on making as much noise as possible, Triumph knows how to mix the various sound levels.  The guitar does not drown out the drums, nor do the drums beat so hard to kill the synthesizers.  The vocals are clear and understandable, which is important especially when lyrics are no longer cared about.  You do not believe me?  Then how did a South Korean pop song become an international sensation despite the works being in Korean?  "Thunder Seven" has a high level of technical skill which is apparent n the instrumental tracks like "Midsummer's Daydream," but that should be expected from a band that had been financed for six previous albums.  

                The good part of "Thunder Seven is that it is good old rock and roll.  There are no gimmicks or tricks to the music.  There are no audio samples playing from a computer, no Auto-tune robotic voices hiding poor singers, and definitely no "WUB WUB WUB."  However, describing what it is by what it is not is a poor way of saying nothing.  The core of "Thunder Seven" is the lyrical songs.  The songs deal heavily with the passing of time and having to keep up with it.  Three of the ten songs have "time" in their name.  The album for the most part approaches the problem of keeping up appearances and having to deal with the world forcing broken molds upon people.  Having to change oneself to fit the passing and illogical moods of the time is something that is just as foolish as the trends that are followed.  "Stranger in a Strange Land" makes a nice dig at a specific artist that ate and fed into that idiotic plate.

                The songs are all enjoyable to an extent.  The only strike that I can have against it is that I want more specific things after having listened to the album.  I wished "Midsummer's Daydream" to have lasted longer because it is such a beautiful acoustic guitar solo.  Other than that song and "Stranger in the Strange Land" the second side was not as strong as the first.  This album is good, very good, but for some reason, there is a missing element that the album lacks.  I wish I could place my finger on it, but I cannot.  Maybe if some of the band's other strong songs from other albums were here, I might say otherwise, but I cannot since I do not know what those other songs even are.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop