Belated Shootember! Splinter Cell Conviction OR Adventures in uPlay

choke 'em out UNDER THE CLOWN

I didn't buy this game, but I've wanted to try a Splinter Cell thingie for a while, so when my friend offered to give me a free copy generated via a nvidia promotion I was all excitebike. Or, well ok, not so much excited as vaguely interested. The promotion was for the deluxe edition of Splinter Cell: Black List, but for some reason also came with a free copy of this game, which is pretty nice given I hadn't played any of them. It's pretty weird that a deluxe edition (ie, purchased by the game's core audience) would come with an extra game but hey that's really nice of them.

uPlay though, man oh man is uPlay a thing. I have two experiences previous with uPlay: One, I installed it to add a key from one of the Assassin's Creed games. I think Brotherhood, or something. The key was generated via a pricing error, so it was eventually revoked. I'm not upset about that, but it's worth pointing out that Electronic Arts had a pricing error that gave up hundreds of thousands of copies of games and they didn't revoke a single one. It worked too, that's why I have Origin and have actually given them money for Origin titles - Kingdoms of Amalur through Gamersgate, but certainly more of a success than nothing. My other experience is installing uPlay to figure out what I actually had on the account and the entire process being a bit well into irritating.

This latest experience is just a hassle. My friend gave me the code amazon had spat out. This code then goes into the nvidia website, which requires a webform. That gives me a coupon code for the ubistore, which uses my uplay account credentials. But it isn't uplay, really, because upon finishing the checkout process after getting all my ducks in a row (and it changing my address to a US postal code matched to Alberta, Canada which is a place I do not live in) it spat out ... An email. The email gave me the Conviction code, which I would then I have to input into uplay myself. But there was no Blacklist code!

No, that code shows up later, because this was before the release date. My word, there are so many more steps here than if it was on Steam. And most of them involve using outdated storefront software and gee wilkers mister ubisoft, get your damn shit together! Later it gave me Blacklist anyway and emailed me to let me know, but there's just so many things about this whole experience that gives me the feeling uplay is a year too early. Then an Installshield Wizard popped up and I honestly thought I'd traveled back in time.

I don't know overmuch about Splinter Cell, beyond the main character having a name I like and something about Tom Clancy which to my understanding is like a kiss of death? A friend of mine read spy novels by the dozens and Tom Clancy apparently upsets him. But this series has been going on long enough that something about it must be worth playing, right? And then the voice actor for Sam Fisher becomes apparent and it's the guy who played Ultra Magnus in Transformers Prime. UM was a space cop in the IDW run, and it's hard not to connect everything in my head and it's just so awesome. Sam Fisher, duly appointed enforcer of the awesome accord. Hells yea.

And then I remembered this is this VA's last game and damn it now I get why people were mad!

oh this is a good sign

It's nice going from Mark of the Ninja to Splinter Cell: Conviction, since many of the mechanical elements that comprise the "stealth game genome" are shared DNA here. I think if I hadn't gone through MOTN all of a couple minutes before I started playing this one, I'd probably have found it much trickier to get into the stealthin' and shooting groove. To summarize: You're mostly invisible in shadows, unless you're under a flash light. The game uses the absence of color to specify if you are or are not in the light. You creep up on dudes, execute them, and the game uses a little outline of your model to articulate where enemies saw you, referred to as Last Known Position. I don't know how much of this was copied from Splinter Cell into MOTN or where everything comes from, but basically it's very familiar.

MOTN did lighting better, as SC:C doesn't really compartmentalize the differences between where shadows and light lie, which MOTN did very well. Inversely it's much easier to understand the meaning of your former location and to trick enemies by flanking in a 3d world. MOTN also used visuals to denote sound and the give you an idea of how far enemies could see. It would be interesting to see how surreal a third person game would look with that sort of set up, but I imagine it is actually entirely possible. Maybe the next one has it, I'll play that in December or something.

What makes this game confusing is how much better several of its systems are than DE:HR and how much stronger its level design is. Isn't DE:HR a newer, arguably higher budget game? I'm not sure why the stealth elements in DE:HR were so much weaker, but I guess we just wanted to trade shadows to conceal and shooting out lights for, oh I don't know, killing dudes with vending machines?

Mind you I still think MOTN is largely a better stealth game. Several of the things that make me abhor stealth games as a genre - instant alarm set off, arbitrary rules to what is or isn't detection and so on are all present. The game is more than willing to give you a couple chapters where this crap isn't relevant, but when it comes up it is as aggravating as ever. I don't understand why shit needs to be so arbitary and irritating but here I am, reloading this mission for the tenth time at the first check point - Don't get me wrong, I'm terrible at stealth, but this is just unfun.

lean in close to the goony goon as he tells you his secrets

Outside of the stealth stuff, SC:C is a pretty normal shooter except for Sam Fisher having a somewhat more diverse moveset than the average shooter. It's third person, but I barely notice and it feels worked in really well. I don't know if the game is the product of a team that worked on a string of such games, the gameplay is mostly very polished and solid. I get a crysis like vibe from the game, albeit Crysis without the absurd battle suit, but that's still a great feeling. Crysis was a little bit better in making me feel like every death was out of my own mistakes and inability to use my toolset, but CS:S had much of that same feeling. Even for a game made in 2010 and what I imagine is an older Unreal engine, the game uses its art assets well and looks pretty good.

Obviously it doesn't look as good as newer games, but SC:C has something of an advantage in how stealth works. You don't really dwell on the stuff that looks ugly because you spend much of your time watching subtler elements. Another thing that is super nice about this game is honest to god level variety. I mean yeah, it's got chest high walls out the stealth hole but they're all different sorts ... Of chest high walls. Boxes, displays, computers...

Wait, offhand, but did anyone use CRTs in 2010? I mean really

what the fu

The game's story is ... Bizarre. I don't know if the weirdly overlapping elements are supposed to have some underlying subtext or it was just written in sections. It reminds me of this Penny Arcade comic, although to be honest one thing that stands out here is the voice acting is excellent. So you have excellent, professional voice actors reading off their absurd, over the top nonsense lines. There's this very odd thing in fiction where you must immediately head up to the top of the chain; you battle the emperor, you were born a princess, you seek revenge on the cruel god that blah blah ... You never really deal with middle management over much. I mention this because, being unaccustomed to SC in general the story's emphasis on THE PRESIDENT was just so jarring to me. I suppose the main character is famous or something but he almost seemed not so much? And then he is?

I'm not really saying I minded the story, which is well presented and uses visual elements really well to articulate what the Fisher is feeling... But it's pretty out and out loopy in parts. It also does that "flash forward ahead of the plot" cheap trick which I think is basically just a way to easy mode foreshadowing. What I am saying is that in spite of the quality effort put in, it just didn't mean much of anything to me. I like Fisher, but I don't really care about Fisher.

Also, the game carries the same repeated flaw that many cinematic yearning games do: NPCs or cutscenes play after the checkpoints. I guess the same is from 2010 so I can't get on its case for being out of date, but I just can not fathom how this nonsense gets through playtesting. Here I am, trying to figure out your rather arbitary multiple moving pieces god why can't I save puzzle shit and here it plays again. Mark of the Ninja did this too, and I just don't get it.

There is nothing stopping putting cutscenes in cutscenes, so to speak. If you want to put a shot of the character walking up in such a fashion that the player does not have agency, make it a cutscene and then allow me to skip it. The game has a bunch of issues with this and it's almost like the game designer didn't understand where he could or should end his storyboards. If you do not have control over your character, you are not playing the game. You are watching a cutscene. Cutscenes should be skippable. This rule is ironclad.

can I get a sub first

Regardless of the occasional irritation with stealth cutscenes where you walk down a hallway and basically having no interest in the story, SC:C was surprisingly good. It's a bit on the shorter side than I'd like, but the level design and overall gameplay is mostly high quality as well as more varied than most shooters. I actually feel sort of frustrated after playing it in that I'm shocked at how much better its level design is than say, I don't know, every other shooter than Crysis 2 I've played in ages. It's still a linear corridor shooter in parts, but at least those corridors don't feel like a visit to the box factory. Set pieces are more than just visual elements and feel interactive, at least on some level, which really improves how the game variety feels.

I had fun with it. I got it for free, which is nice, but if I'd gotten it for $5 or so I'd be pretty fine with it as well. I'm looking forward to SC: Blacklist, but I think I'll put it off for a couple weeks to shoot some other stuff and play indie games in november.