Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction

Photo by Dan Siney

TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Ubisoft

How many times has the following happened to you? You’re playing a stealth game, and you’re having fun sneaking around, when you make a mistake and a guard spots you. Suddenly, you’re not playing a stealth game anymore! You’re playing a sort of awkward third-person shooter with really clumsy controls!

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction

is the first stealth game I’ve ever played that stays a stealth game all the time. Even in the middle of a firefight, it’s a stealth game. It is probably too short, but Ubisoft deserves a commendation for finally solving the problem that’s plagued the modern stealth genre since

Metal Gear Solid

.

The key is the game’s Last Known Position mechanic. If you take cover during a firefight and hide from your enemies, they cease to know where you are—instead, the game drops a phantom image of Sam Fisher, and that image is where the enemies

think

you are. Then, while they’re advancing on that position, you’re free to try and sneak around and flank them. The other mechanic, which helps make flanking worthwhile, is called Mark and Execute. You can mark any enemy you can see, up to three or four of them (it depends on what weapon you’re using and what upgrades you’ve bought for it), and when you’ve made a melee kill, you unlock Execute, which allows you to quickly shoot in the head any enemy you’ve marked.

So, the last several levels of the game, which are

very

fighty for a stealth game, have a lot of firefights where you get detected, drop back into stealth, mark a bunch of guys advancing on your last-known position, sneak up on the most outlying enemy and melee-kill him, then quickly execute all his friends. Granted, it doesn’t actually make sense that Sam can’t shoot dudes in the head without punching someone first, but I can accept the abstraction because it provides incentive to move in close to enemy groups in a way most stealth games discourage. I’ve seen attempts to blend stealth and action before, but

SC:C

actually succeeds at it.

The plot is by-the-numbers domestic-terrorism coup-d’état shit—I’m getting tired of stories about the vice president trying to take over the US by assassinating the president in a terrorist attack that’ll leave the country fearful and open to authoritarian policies by the new sovereign—but what the hell, it’s a

Splinter Cell

game. It’s got “Tom Clancy” in the title. At least they tried to mix it up a bit by having Sam Fisher going rogue and getting dragged into the politics while trying to track down his daughter’s killer.

And there are some multiplayer modes I didn’t have an opportunity to try, so I don’t know if they’re any good.

BEAT HAZARD

Platform: Windows PC

Publisher: Cold Beam Games

Beat Hazard

is a top-down shoot-’em-up of the sort where one stick controls where you go and one stick controls where you shoot, like

Robotron

of ages past and the more recent

Geometry Wars

. In fact, on a PC with an Xbox 360 controller plugged in, the game superficially plays almost exactly like

Geometry Wars

, except you can only drop bombs with the right trigger (which confused me at first because in

GW

you can use either trigger and I habitually use the left).

What makes it different is that it’s also a music game. You can only meaningfully play it on a PC with a decent music collection, because a

Beat Hazard

session is a single song. The intensity of the music determines the strength of your guns, and the game also, in a less obvious manner, uses the song data to determine when to spawn in enemies and bosses. (It’s pretty good at throwing asteroids at you until the chorus, where it spawns the first wave of enemies.) God help you if a boss spawns in just before a quiet bit.

Beat Hazard

isn’t the first game to do this; it was preceded by a game called

Audiosurf

, which is a sort of rail-shooter-racer thing. I never got into

Audiosurf

, but I love

Beat Hazard

because I love both

Geometry Wars

and exactly the sort of electronica

BH

is optimized for. (Am I allowed to call it “electronica?” I know sometimes serious electronic-music fans sneer at terms like that one and “techno.” I just like listening to the music, myself.)

Mind you, it’s not all sunshine and roses. The game’s enemy behavior isn’t really complex. Enemy movement seems determined entirely by song data and not your behavior, so the enemy ships sort of fly around in predetermined patterns, automatically turning to face you. There are not a lot of types of enemies, and even after having unlocked the hardest difficulty, it’s not that super-challenging. But comparing any game of this genre to

Geometry Wars

is sort of unfair—not all first-person shooters can be

The Orange Box

, either.

I’m glad I checked this one out. The game’s also available on the Xbox Live indie-marketplace thing, although I haven’t played that version. I guess you’d have to load your music into your Xbox 360 HD for it to be worth it.

RESONANCE OF FATE

Platform: PlayStation 3

Publisher: Sega

Playing

Resonance of Fate

kind of creeped me out; it made me realize that all “serious,” “mature” JRPGs lately are just retellings of

Lord of the Flies

. All the important characters are, at the

oldest

, barely post-adolescent, and all the plots revolve around someone going crazy from the existentialist horror of the human condition and trying to destroy society—you know, just normal teen angst and rebellion exaggerated a bit. I’m getting tired of it.

Anyway,

Resonance of Fate

is a “serious,” “mature” gun-fu Japanese role-playing game, set in the last human supercity after the apocalypse, which happened long enough ago that there are no records of the time before. All the protagonists are teenagers, and the game’s big draw is that the outfits they’re wearing are designed by actual real-life Japanese clothing designers, and you can a) change what they’re wearing and b) see the outfits you choose in the cut scenes. Very trendy.

The play mechanics are neat. The combat system has you using pistols and machine guns. Machine guns do a lot of damage, but it’s scratch damage—it can’t kill enemies. Pistols do real damage, and any scratch damage an enemy has is turned into real damage if that enemy suffers any real damage. So combat revolves around shooting the enemies with enough machine gun bullets to fill their health bars with scratch damage, then finishing them off with a pistol shot. While this is happening, characters are running around the battlefield and leaping over one another and doing their best to look like John Woo protagonists. Not an oversized sword in sight!

Also, while the story is a load of ridiculous shit lacking anything resembling relevance to the human experience except on the most facile and superficial terms, it’s not bad. I mean, it’s not intolerable. The characters aren’t all loathsome fucks like they were in

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

. They do the standard JRPG protagonist angsting about fate and the human-condition thing, but I don’t mind. I’m not even trying to damn the game with faint praise, here—the state of JRPGs is such that this is a genuine compliment.

I guess what I’m trying to say is if you like JRPGs but have been leery of the sort of JRPGs that have seen release recently, this one might be worth an investigation. If you don’t like JRPGs, it won’t do anything for you.