Splinter Cell

This game is the first of it's kind. A spy game that has it all. Interrogation, going in the shadows, walking slowly or fast, night vision, thermo vision(which is helpful when finding an enemy). It's the first game that if you do it wrong, you have to start all over! And there are very exciting ways of finishing the game. Also, when there is a code you should enter to open a door, it brings the number pad to the screen, snd you enter it by mouse clicks. And other similar stuff, like when trying to open a locked door, YOU have to do it, pressing buttons and stuff. It's the first game that let's YOU play.

Sam Fisher is a CIA Black Ops Agent codenamed "Splinter Cell" who is recruited to infiltrate the Georgian government in an effort to locate two missing US spies. He soon uncovers a political conspiracy involving presidents, hackers and so on and so forth.

Games are not known for their plots but to be honest "Splinter Cell" has a pretty good one - it's a good starting place for a Tom Clancy novel and one can imagine that Clancy had the idea once, considered it unworthy compared to his other stuff and tossed it aside and later decided to use it as a game. It's never expanded upon fully as most of the time is actually spent on gameplay, not plot...but it does have one of the best video game stories of all time.

I liked the voicework by everyone's favorite villain from "Total Recall" (Michael Ironside) but the best part of this game was the beautiful rich textures and actual gameplay. In "Splinter Cell" you do stuff I've never seen in other games - stalking villains instead of shooting them. I do like shoot-'em-ups but it's come to a point now where new stuff is welcomed - and this is great! You can climb through windows, pick locks, open doors, stalk people, grab them, interrogate them, hold them at gunpoint (and use this as a neat defensive trick when surrounded by numerous villains), etc - and instead of just using a lockpick, for example, you really do pick the lock by pressing keys on the computer keyboard! And to open doors you don't just walk up to one, you have to manually push it open.

The graphics are great, fluid movements on characters...one of the best games of all-time!

Even though the game-play is great the story implies a world view which gives me the creeps. The essential freedoms and the human rights can only be protected if the "good guy" break undermine these rights? Terrorist and unliked politicians have to be executed. Not even the government is being informed...because it is just the right thing. Even though many games use these ideas the normally don't promote them in such a naive propagandistic style.

With such naive distinction between good and evil implicating that the end always justifies the means, promotes fascistic ideas. it is a shame that such a great game is being destroyed down by the infantile world view of its designers.

game-play 4.5 out of 5 story ought better be banned

When I was off work for many months with broken leg, I had nothing to do, so I brought an xbox, splinter cell is a budget games with everybody saying how good it is, believe me, it is good! For the xbox and P.C., the graphics are very good, I believe for PS2 they turned the graphics quality down, but they were still very good by PS2 standards. This game took ubisoft five years to develop, and it shows! The controls are easy to master on the xbox version, it totally gripping, very believable, running around with lots of guns will never happen in real life, hence why in splinter cell, for the first few levels, you get a silenced pistol, with very limited ammo, so ideally you don't use it, you have to think around how to get somewhere, how to moves to a certain locations, avoiding guards, knocking guards out, cleaning pipes and walls, action blending nicely with real life problems you might except in the real world of espionage, the object of each level is basically get in, get out, without anybody knowing you are there at all, tricky, mistakes either let the guards know your there, or get you killed. I'd recommend this game to anybody, and as it's so cheap on most formats now, trying it won't dent your wallet either!

Whilst Splinter Cell might have made a pretty good game for the Xbox, it simply is not up to the standard expected by more discerning PS2 owners.

Whilst it absolutely is not in the same league as MGS (1 or 2), the game itself is actually more akin to Syphon Filter on the PS1 - which it has "borrowed" greatly from in many areas.

Most annoying of all, it keeps the S-Filter approach to stealth - in that once you are spotted then it is game over on many levels (!!) Wheras in MGS, Solid Snake had to deal with the consequences of being discovered.

So in S-Cell you find yourself repetitively going over and over the same sections of the levels.

On the levels that dont have this drawback, the AI is so stupid that you can simply charge through as if you were playing a shoot 'em up.

And as for all those fancy moves you see on the box, forget it, I completed the game and not once did I find anywhere to perform the promised moves - they simply arent required.

And also, the box says "creat your own darkness path" - ie all lights are supposed to be shootable - rubbish, very few lights are shootable.

The game is very very linear, you simply can only take the route laid out for you, you cant climb on stuff that the programmers dont want you to - even though they are low enough.

This game could have been so good ! But quite frankly it is just plain ordinary. If you have never played MGS then you might think this was pretty good, but otherwise just rent it from Blockbusters (PS2 owners) before you consider buying it.

And poor PC owners need a 1gb, 256mb, 64mb GFX PC to run this !! Talk about sloppy coding !! It runs with all the same FX on a 300MhZ PS2 - the only difference being in a lower screen rez ! When will PC programmers learn to code as efficiently as Console coders ? Probably never.