No.0012 Splinter Cell
Splinter Cell had a lot going for it when it came out. Visually it had very impressive lighting and the animations were great considering there was no motion capture used for it. Little touches like the way Sam Fisher puts one hand on his pistol holster when he moves quickly in a crouched position to stop it making noise really brought him to life. The first time I saw the thermal view I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I had never seen anything like it in a game and even though it wasn't nearly as useful as your standard night vision goggles (NVGs) I still tried to use it as often as possible. Coming back to it however the thing that really makes Splinter Cell stand out is its plot. The short version is that a coup occurs in Georgia and the new President has developed a taste for information warfare, using hackers and viruses to attack his enemies or further his goals. It treated that subject matter with a lot of respect and was far ahead of its time in that regard. I'm sure at some point games are going to start returning to this idea as the tactics the villain uses as it becomes more and more common place in the real world.
In the end sadly the first Splinter Cell, and the second game Pandora Tomorrow, suffer a bit in terms of their gameplay. It's not game over as soon as you've been spotted, but quite often a guard will kill on the spot so it might as well have been. I still like Splinter Cell a lot but I can't get myself to play much of it these days because the next game I'm going to talk about perfected Splinter Cells gameplay formula and is one of my favorite games ever.
No.0013 Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory is to Splinter Cell what Bloodmoney was to the Hitman games. The gameplay is still recognisably Splinter Cell but all of the systems the player can use have been polished and shifted around to create the absolute perfect version of that game. In the earlier games you had to equip your lock picks in order to unlock a door, now its just part of the standard drop down menu when you're at a door. A guard is approaching you, if you want to knock him unconscious you press the left mouse button or the right button to kill him. There are very few games that manage to get all of their systems working so harmoniously that the player can't tell where one ends and the other beings. Between Sam's climbing abilities, his weapons, his NVG's there are very few times where the player will think of a strategy that simply wont work, not because it wouldn't be possible, but because the designers didn't think of it.
Chaos Theory is also, in my opinion, the last of the Splinter Cell games to have a really good story line. It still revolves around electronic and information warfare, starting this time with the kidnapping of a programmer who had been studying the code developed by one of the master hackers from the first game. One of your handlers equates the situation to if Che Guevara had abducted Professor Oppenheimer in 1956. It's an accurate analogy of how important information warfare will become over the next few years. Chaos Theory also has one of the best non-orchestral soundtracks of any game I can think of. It was written and performed by Amon Tobin and if you're into electronic music at all you really should try listening to it, it's amazing!
No.0014 Splinter Cell : Double Agent
Well that was a nice little trip through a franchise, I think I'll try and do this kind of thing for any other game series that gets multiple mentions.
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