It is always difficult to keep a franchise fresh and exciting from sequel to sequel without drastically changing the formula. What were once game play innovations are now commonplace in a sea of lookalike titles that attempt to capture the magic of their competition. Yet, the risks may be too great in reinventing the formula, and the legion of fans that once fell in love with the first game may not take too kindly to an overhaul of their favorite series.  The original God of War reinvented the action genre by having previously unseen production values and set piece moments paired with fluid combat and an unforgettable protagonist. The sequel only improved on the formula, maxing out the aging PS2 and standing out among a slew of more technically powerful games while still running on yesterday’s hardware. Now here we are, five years later and on a whole new console. Can Kratos recapture the throne and once again set an example for other action games to follow? In a short answer: Yes.

Not a face you'd want to wake up to.

God of War III picks up directly where its predecessor left off. With the help of the Titans, Kratos is found ascending Mount Olympus with little on his mind but vengeance (Who would have guessed?). As he nears the top, each remaining god is shown looming over the mountain in anticipation for the encounter. Basically, the developers are lining up your future bosses and saying, “Okay, this is the order in which you will kill these dudes “.  You are quickly thrown into one of the most cinematic opening battles that have ever graced a television screen. As you ride the massive flailing Gaia and fight for your life against aquatic stallions (a.k.a. Poseidon), the landscape consistently alters, throwing Kratos around like a drunken girl on a mechanical bull. There is no intermission to think or relax though, as you must continue your battle against the gods while mastering your terrain. With such an impressive beginning, it is difficult to imagine how one would keep the momentum up throughout the entirety of the experience. Yet, that is the beautiful part of this game: Not once will you be bored, not once will the experience slow down, and not once will you want to put your controller down and go outside. The first battle is only a taste of the delicious feast that is God of War III, and I sure hope you are hungry.

The combat is just as brutal and visceral as ever, with incremental differences but nothing that changes the overall feel of swinging the blades. Where the real improvement shows is in the variety of weapons Kratos has at his disposal. From gauntlets shaped like the heads of lions to a greatly improved bow that rains fiery arrows, God of War III continuously throws inventive weapon after weapon your way. You also have the ability to swap between these death-bringers mid attack, adding various combos and depth to the already exciting combat. What you really need to know is that for the first time in a God of War game you will actually use the new weapons you obtain for more than five minutes before switching back to your trusty Blades of Exile. Why? Because they are just that fun to use.

Kratos Smash? Eh, it was worth a shot...

So how about the graphics? Kratos is finally attacking the power house that is the PS3, and in his usual fashion, he shows no mercy.  From the minute the game kicks off all the way until the stunning conclusion, God of War III’s presentation never misses a beat. The animations are fluid, the characters are unbelievably detailed, and the frame rate is spot on.  This is the best looking console game I have ever witnessed, taking the crown from last year’s beautiful Uncharted 2. Every few minutes I would have to stop and marvel at not only how epic the current scene was, but also how breathtaking it looked.

So is God of War III innovative? No. Nothing here will move the genre into a new direction or shake up the industry. It runs around the usual 7-10 hours and contains no real online component. What truly makes this game special though is that after three iterations, the formula still works and works wonderfully. It is a testament to how far ahead of its time the original God of War was. This is the pinnacle of action gaming, and will most likely not be touched for years to come. Your quest for vengeance is over Kratos, and what a quest it was.

Thanks, Josiah!

Now that i’ve got little cliché out of the way, I can finally talk to you fine folks about StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; the first of three in the branching epic. It’s taken twelve years for the people to finally get their hands on the sequel to one of the greatest RTS’ of all time, and although people may remark about how long it’s taken, it doesn’t seem to me that there has been a wait at all. The first StarCraft, despite its age, is still one of the most played strategy games around – especially in Korea, where they take this game incredibly seriously. We have professional footballers – they have professional StarCraft players. The feeling of having to wait for this game only came around since they announced it some time ago. With the Terran-based Wings of Liberty released, the real wait (for me) comes with the second and third StarCraft II titles; the Zerg focused Heart of the Swarm, and the climactic Protoss centered Legacy of the Void. Anyhow, I digress. Wings of Liberty really has been worth the wait. It’s a fantastic meld of old and new. With so many developers trying new things, and so they should, Blizzard stuck with their guns on this one and produced a strategy game that is a must play for everybody.

Ah, Battlecruisers. There ain't nothing you can't do.

If you’ve played either the original StarCraft, or any of Blizzard’s other RTS series, WarCraft, you’ll feel fairly comfortable playing Wings of Liberty right from the start. Typically, you start with a town hall-esque building, create workers from there, and proceed to erect unit-producing buildings to build up an army while you collect a steady stream of resources. In StarCraft’s case, these resources are minerals and a nice green substance called vespene gas. If you strip everything apart and look at this game’s bare bones, the object is to basically out-build your opponent. Gather resources, build buildings, research upgrades – all to overpower your opponent and ultimately craft a better army than them. When you start to look at the game in depth, though, you’ll realise that StarCraft II is a lot thicker in depth than you might have originally thought. With returning units in the game, as well as new ones (and some taken out entirely), this isn’t quite the StarCraft you know, but it really isn’t far from it. It does look a lot nicer though, by the way. There are three races to the game too, all returning – the human mechanical giant Terran, the ancient laser-donning Protoss, and the squelchy crunchy creepy crawly Zerg. The armies are designed in such a way that each army can accomplish the same things, but in different ways, and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Mastering each of the races comes a long way when you hit the extremely competitive multiplayer, even if you just learn what the other races can do, and not how to play them.  But more about this sort of thing later – all of that i’ve just said really is only important in the multiplayer, and Wings of Liberty has a fabulous single-player campaign.

Originally, StarCraft II was going to be just one game. It would have three campaigns – a Terran, a Zerg, and a Protoss campaign respectively. When the decision to make a three-parter of sorts, each one focusing on each of the races, Blizzard got some stick from the fanbase. But I think this only helps the games credit. It allows for the game to go deeper with it’s characters, and it’s story. Many remember characters like Jim Raynor, Sarah Kerrigan, and Zertatul from the first game, but from playing Wings of Liberty alone, I already feel like I know these characters a lot better – especially Jimmy. Speaking of which, faces old and new will come up during the story, and you’ll even get a flashback cinematic part way through the game. This scene even has the exact same lines from the first game, just re-recorded. You’ll be following James Raynor and his path for vengeance against the corrupt Terran Dominion, and his old comrade-turned-nemesis Arcturus Mengsk. If that wasn’t enough, Raynor’s also fighting himself over what happened to his old flame, Sarah Kerrigan. Left for dead by Mengsk in the events of the first StarCraft, she was turned into the Queen of Blades, and she now leads the Zerg swarm, and Jimmy, of course, feels responsible. Throw an ancient alien prophecy into all that, and you get a very compelling story with a variety of characters, old and new, with every line of dialogue and every plot point feeling one hundred percent necessary and well thought out. Sure, the story might sound like a mess here, but the game certainly does a lot better job of explaining it to you than I do.

This is Jimmy.

Since you’ll be playing as the Terrans all the way through Wings of Liberty, besides a miniature Protoss campaign, the level design is a lot more unique, as well as the writing. Instead of the standard formula, that featured prominently in the first game, of ‘build units, send there, kill stuff, win’, the campaign can focus on interesting ways to make each mission different. Throughout all of the campaign, I can only think of two missions that were somewhat similar, but I still enjoyed them thoroughly. No sense of repetition here. The level design takes advantage of the fact that the player is controlling the Terrans – for example, one mission requires you to use the Terran-only ability of lifting off your buildings and relocating them, because the planet you’re on is slowly being demolished due to a star going supernova, and you have to constantly move your base around and survive. On top of that, you’ve got to build a suitable army to take out an enemy force and reach your objective. Exciting stuff.

Outside of the missions, you’ll be presented with a hub world of sorts, which is primarily set on the Terran battlecruiser Hyperion. You can move to several points on the ship and talk to a variety of crew members between missions, as well as research upgrades which are unique to the single-player. The writing really does shine here, as well as in the many cutscenes, both in-game and rendered, that you’ll see along the way. Like I said – a testament to why this game is better of with having only one main campaign and not three. Decisions have to be made along the way, often changing who stays on your ship or not, as well as what units you take with you through the rest of the game. Units are also introduced to you at a good pace, with a lot of the missions focusing for at least a little while on one new unit the game provides you with. The first time you get access to the powerful Siege Tank, you are told of its ability to deploy into siege mode, and are given the perfect opportunity to see why you’d want to do this. Deploy it at higher ground, and watch the Protoss units below you blow up before they can get anywhere near you. By the end of the single-player, you have a wide variety of units to choose from (some of which are specific to the campaign, as well as some that are old favourites removed from the multiplayer), and you don’t feel like any of them are useless in anyway. The game shows you how to use them without keeping you on a leash, so you still feel in control, and in the know.

Ah, the Hyperion. I've never enjoyed not being in a mission so much.

The single player specific upgrades I mentioned are quite varied, and add some interesting decision making to be done in the already compelling story. With the unit specific upgrades, the only decision to be made is which one to purchase first. These are purchasable from the armory, which over time, houses some of the units you unlock. Clicking on one of the units you can see in the hangar gives you information on them, further expanding the games rich detail. However, that are scientific upgrades too. These are earned by completing  secondary objectives, primarily, and branch off in two trees, Zerg and Protoss research. In each tree, after so many points have been acquired, there are two options available to you. When you pick one, the other is unattainable for the rest of the game, so you really have to consider which matches your playstyle the most. For instance, do you want the ability to generate vespene gas 25% faster, or to be able to simply call in supply deploys from the air instead of having to build them. Personally, I went with the latter.

Both in-game and CG cutscenes look great. This is an in-game one, by the way. In case you're confused.

To think, we haven’t even gotten around to talking about the multiplayer yet. This is where StarCraft will be most familiar, because it’s pretty much that same game you played twelve years ago. Some units have been taken out, with other new units added in. In fact, the only notable difference from the first game, besides race and unit specific changes, is that you don’t have to send your worker units to individual mineral nodes. You can simply set a rally point to any mineral node, and that worker unit will pick one of the mineral veins by itself, depending on how many workers are already on it. This may sound minor, but it makes the game move just that little bit faster. So like I said, not much has changed, but the game is still as complicated as ever. In a fun way, though. I’ll admit I was positively terrified of playing this game online, and I still am, especially after being put into the top league available after my placement matches. I don’t belong there. You pick a race, after hopefully doing a bit of research and practice into whether or not that is the race for you, and you go. Mastering each units key strengths and weaknesses, both of your own race and of your opponents, is essential. Sending an army of marines toward a group of Protoss colossi is a really dumb idea, and if you don’t already know that, well, that really is going to be a wake up call. You need to know this game fairly well to be successful at it, and listening to some of my more proficient friends talk about the game, I feel like I really don’t know much, but I still do alright. The more you learn, the more rewarding the game gets. Especially when that knowledge is being turned into victories. If you’re anything like me, you will lose a lot at first, but you won’t really care. Sure, there will be a bit of moping around afterwards, perhaps even rage, but you’ll dive back in and find that, whether you meant to or not, you’re a better player. StarCraft II’s multiplayer is a very rewarding experience, to say the least.

I believe I mentioned something called ‘placement matches’? Let me go ahead and explain. Thanks to Blizzard’s new Battle.net, Wings of Liberty has a full ranking system behind the multi-player. When you first log in, you’ll be able to play in fifty practice league matches. These are unranked, and are played on modified versions of standard maps to prevent early rushes, as well as the game speed being decreased a notch. This is so you can, well, practice – learning build orders, what units are good against what, and so on. After the practice league, or if you just skip it at any time, you are then given five placement matches. Depending on whether you win or lose these matches, which are against players of varying skill levels, as well as other statistics like how long those matches lasted, you will be placed in one of four leagues. Bronze, silver, gold, or platinum. There is a diamond league also, but that is only reachable by climbing through the ranks of the platinum league, if you get there. On a personal note, I think i’m pretty bad at this game so far, as i’ve never been great at strategy games, but my placement matches still put me in the highest league it possibly could – platinum. I think this is purely down to the amount of players ranked at the moment, or something, and no doubt it’ll work a lot better in the future. This has lead me to just constantly lose my matches over and over, and is especially amusing as a friend of mine, who plays Zerg and is three hundred percent better than me, only reached the ilver league after his placements, and has since climbed to gold.

You get a nice breakdown after each match. Statistics you didn't even know you cared about are there, too.

Battle.net also supports cross-game friends lists, so you can see your friends playing World of Warcraft, and eventually, Diablo III, even message them. Each player has his or her own rather detailed profile, giving both information on how their doing in their leagues (be it 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 etc), as well what achievements they have acquired in both single-player and multiplayer. Portraits are rewarded for earning achievements, either tied to single-player or multiplayer. Sadly, the majority of portraits require a high number of wins to unlock. Want to have a portrait of the Queen of Blades? You’d best go and win one thousand matches in 1v1 as Zerg, then. Ah well, i’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before someone hits that. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it had already happened.

I’d just like to state how hard it was to not ramble on to some ridiculous degree about StarCraft II. There’s a lot in this game to explore and talk about, and i’ve probably said too much already. Whether you’re a fan of strategy or not, you owe it to yourself to play this stellar strategy game. We waited twelve years, and Blizzard did not disappoint. Come on, there’s something to be said for a game that remains just as fun the more you lose. Don’t let the learning curve stop you like it did me at first – it’s a rewarding, grand play experience, with a gripping single-player campaign to boot.

Oh yeah, it looks pretty good, too. Didn’t even have to mention the visuals to tell you how good this game is. Now that should tell you how awesome it is, if nothing else has.

That was the excerpt I attached to this post. Now, normally I don’t accept generalisations like that as acceptable, especially if it’s merely a beta of a game we’re looking at, but I can’t help but make Medal of Honor an exception to this rule of mine. When Medal of Honor was announced, we were told that its single player would be separate from the multiplayer in the sense that the single player was being developed by EA LA (at least, I think it’s LA), and that the multiplayer was to be developed by DICE – creators of the much loved Battlefield franchise. With Bad Company 2 having only come out earlier this year, there was much hope that Medal of Honor’s multiplayer would not simply be a carbon copy of Bad Company 2′s, and while that isn’t strictly true, it’s similarities – and downfalls in comparison – are too, you know, right there. At the just recently passed E3 also, we finally got to see some multiplayer gameplay, and here was to the hope that it would not just be Bad Company 2, but with a Medal of Honor sticker on top. This just further proved my thoughts – it looked like Battlefield. It seemed to play like Battlefield, right down from the weapon bob and the Rush-esque game mode, to the way it looked (same engine as Bad Company 2 for MoH’s multiplayer, go figure) and sounded. I still reserved my open opinion of the game until I had it in my hands. EA recently sent a PC beta key my way, and I can now confirm, that Medal of Honor, is just Bad Company 2 – but not as good. Not as good at all.

Does this look sorta familiar? I thought it might.

So, it’s Bad Company 2. Right down to how the game feels, the pace of the gameplay (well, not quite, but i’ll get to that later), sounds, looks, everything. Much like Bad Company 2, there’s an objective based game mode which has vehicles in it, and you have to blow stuff up in a sequence in which the defending team are pushed back upon each accomplished objective. There’s also a more deathmatch-y mode too, with the games combat focused onto smaller, one might say ‘Modern Warfare-ish’, maps. This would all be acceptable if the single player turns out differently. If it’s significantly different, or even just very good by its own merits, then Medal of Honor would be a fairly good release. It’d probably get ripped somewhat for the issues I have with it – you know, the whole multiplayer thing, but even so, it’d be a good game and people would buy it, of course.  However – and this is a big however – if the game handles like it currently does in the Beta, the multiplayer will suck. For me, at least. In my eyes, it’s downright broken.

Apparently the Taliban have gained access to equipment such as red dot sights. Interesting.

The first issue I have is with how the spawning works in a multiplayer game. In Bad Company 2, you can either spawn at set capture points, or on a member of your four man squad, provided they’re alive, of course. In Call of Duty games (the most recent ones, anyway), the game appears to place you either near a fight so you don’t frequently get spawn-killed (as best it can, anyhow), or spawn you away from the fight when it gets too heated, and your teammates spawn from there too until the process repeats itself. At least, that’s how I understand it. Medal of Honor tries to kind of meld the two concepts together, from what I can tell – and it’s frustrating. In the objective based game mode (I think it’s called Combat Mission), you can either spawn at your base, or on the front line. Spawning on the front line usually meant imminent death, a couple of bullets in my chest, or just placed me half way across the map away from the action due to a camping teammate. It seems to randomly pick a member of your team – as there’s no squad system in play at all here – and spawns you with him. This was problematic. As I said, either instant or near-death, or far away from anywhere so I couldn’t do any good until i’d ran across the map. Usually that resulted in me getting picked off before I could even get to where I wanted to go, and then I had to go through the spawning process all over again. Like I said – frustrating. This in itself was a total game killer for me. It just seemed broken, especially with non-existant or barely any spawn protection to shield me from the constant gunfire I was being subjected to upon entering the battlefield.

I either keep clicking, or just hold down the trigger. It doesn't seem to matter.

Another gripe I have with the game is with how the guns feel. In Bad Company 2, a game which, may I remind you, is powered by the same game engine as Medal of Honor’s multiplayer, needed you to burst for efficient shooting, unless you were at close range. Aiming down the sight and holding down the trigger seems to work just fine in Medal of Honor, or just repeatedly clicking as fast as you can if you have a semi-auto sniper rifle like I used. Now, this was great fun for me to some extent, because it meant I could get even easier kills than I usually do when i’m playing a first person shooter. But it was also kind of, again, frustrating, because it meant everyone else could get easy kills too. Again, this is another factor that breaks the game. Between holding down mouse 1 with my assault rifle, to spawning and dying, Medal of Honor’s beta is just not fun to play. The last gripe i’ll mention for now, until a possible video feature i’ll be doing on the beta, is with the progression. As you’d expect from a modern day first person shooter, there are unlockable weapons and attachments. These seem to be oddly ordered, particularly with the sniper class. The first sniper rifle you get is a semi-automatic one, and you’d expect it to have your typical sniper scope mounted on it, right? With something like a 4 to 8 times zoom on it? Nope. You get a red dot sight. You know, those sights you look through with the laser dot on that are mounted onto sub-machine guns and assault rifles for close quarters confrontation. A sniper rifle with a CQC sight on it. Brilliant! After that, you unlock an ACOG scope, which appears to be more like a 2 or 2.5 times zoom, which is still virtually pointless, and then you get the scope you were expecting.

That’s all I can really bare to say for now, for both your sake, and mine. I could probably go on for some time about this beta, and like I said, I may well do in a potential video feature. My advice for now is – wait until you hear better from this game, as for now, it’s broken, broken, broken. Same-y, too. If you’ve played Battlefield: Bad Company 2, you’ve played Medal of Honor. Well, you’ve played a much better version of the game if you’ve played Bad Company 2, so stick with that. Further advice would be to wait for what the reviews say about this game before you buy it.

Such a shame.

Now, this all makes great business sense…but what about the rest of the 360? Microsoft’s console is the primary home of the modern day online gamer. Thanks to game franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War (two of which are independent to Microsoft’s console), the Xbox 360 is the home of the self-titled ‘hardcore gamer’. Now, correct me if i’m wrong, but Kinect doesn’t do anything to enrich any of that. It’s providing us with games like Kinectimals, which Microsoft has shown, was the most terrifying thing one could see at this years E3. Thanks to a young girl demonstrating what Kinectimals had to offer during their press conference, we all were able to witness the most sickening display of…affection, and playful…gameplay. Come on, the girl even confessed her love for the damn cutesy tiger on screen.

The sheer horror of Kinectimals

Other Kinect products like Kinect Adventures showed more of a ‘gamey’ side to what Kinect can offer, and Dance Central proved that the technology certainly does have a pretty cool market to lend itself to, even if you don’t like/aren’t good at dancing. Features like navigating the dashboard with Kinect, as well as some of the user interface integration that was shown using the sleek black device was impressive too, but like I said, where does this leave the ‘hardcore gamer’? If what has been said is true, and by that I mean the fact that Kinect is only really functional when standing up, then I really don’t see what Kinect can offer the majority of 360 owners. Being able to emote a chainsawing motion while playing Gears 3 might be a cool concept, but standing up to it? We play video games – we’re not athletes, dammit.

Check back soon so you can see my thoughts on what the PlayStation Move has to offer, and then i’ll be looking at the two together in more depth. This is a but a mere taster of my E3 retrospective – so stand up and get ready to wave your hands about like a maniac.

If you’re like me, you’ve barely played a Megaman game. Whether that be because it was before your time, or just because you didn’t have access to a system to play a Megaman game on. Whatever your reason, you should still check out this fantastic film from Eddie Lebron. He’s directed this rather anticipated live-action interpretation of the Megaman games, and put it into film – with great success. Before you watch it, also understand this – Megaman is a non-profit film, and if I recall, it’s funded purely by the people on the project and nothing more, maybe some donations. So it’s low budget, and non-profit – but still awesome – so why aren’t you watching it already? Go check it out!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

In my opinion, that’s bloody amazing.  Not only does it seem to be the kind of thing that’s incredibly hard to pull off for multiplayer games, due to all the animation needed, but also the extra strain on servers to be able to watch players in all 3 axes of movement and let them climb where they should be able to climb. There’s even going to be a character customisation mechanism in there!  Of course, there’s a lot of hype surrounding it, as there always is with any big release, so do take what I say with a pinch of salt, but I think leaving you with the video is probably the best course of action here.

Before I do though, watch out for the very TF2-like characters that appear throughout, and don’t forget to do a barrel roll!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Drop your thoughts in the comments section below, or on the Reaction Time forums for more discussion

It’s called Call of Duty: Black Ops, and it’s being developed by Treyarch. It’s coming out on the 9th November 2010. That’s all we know for now.

Update:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

If you’ve been keeping track of Conviction since it’s second unveiling at E3 last year, then you’ll know that Sam is out of the game, and looking for the killer of his daughter. Seriously – I swear all of the trailers for that game, besides the co-op ones, had Sam saying the same “Who killed my daughter?” line. Anyway, as he tracks down a suspect or two related to the death of his daughter, he finds himself back in the web of Third Echelon, the all-seeing, all-knowing organisation that Sam used to work for – but he’s looking at them from a different perspective. Third Echelons leadership now consists of some rather nasty individuals, and they seem to have something nasty planned for America. Go figure. With both the quest of knowledge relating to his daughter, and fighting old colleagues, the Sam Fisher you may know isn’t here. He’s one angry, grief-ridden man – and he’s not afraid to do things a little louder than you may remember.

Who KILLED my DAUGHTER?

Despite the story in Conviction being quite predictable, it’s definitely a blast to play through, thanks to the good performances all around (especially the returning voice talent of Michael Ironside for Sam) and varying environments.  In typical Splinter Cell fashion, the missions are quite linear as you head from point A to point B, but there are different ways for you to navigate each of areas. In Conviction, I find each room full of armed enemies as a puzzle. Sure, I could go in pretty much guns blazing, or stick to shooting them from the shadows without them seeing or hearing me, but the real way I like to play this game, if possible, is the way in which a stealth game should be played. Each area usually presents you with a variety of different objects to climb up or around, which helps you set up traps for your enemies, if you need to. You don’t even have to engage anybody, but thanks to Convictions vast array of ways to take people out (or ‘neutralize’ people, as Tom Clancy game prefer to say), the need to ‘neutralize’ is too great. You can pull people out of windows, jump down from ledges to knock people out, even snap their necks – or just pop them with a single bullet to the head from behind cover. If you are spotted, the game draws Sam’s last known position in the form of a while silhouette. This actually adds a benefit to being spotted, and in many cases I have purposefully made it so the enemies can detect me, so I can exploit this. Once you’ve been detected and the last known position appears, you can lay a remote mine down, for example, to take out anybody who investigates that area shortly after – or just wait in the shadows nearby to nail them with an elbow to the face.

That ‘I win’ mechanic I mentioned? That is what Conviction calls ‘Mark and Execute’. Depending on the weapon you have (and depending whether you have upgraded it or not), you can tag a number of enemies (or ‘mark’, you might say) and with the press of a button, you kill them all one by one within seconds. Luckily, this is balanced, because you can only ‘execute’ people after marking them when you have performed a melee kill, and you can only store one execute at a time. That’s a good thing, because otherwise, you’d just end up clearing a room with melee attacks alone, then go through the rest of the mission using the executes that you’ve gathered to clear entire rooms. See why I thought it was an ‘I win’ mechanic? Like I said, though, it’s balanced to stop it from being just that, and there are some moments when you’ve rightfully executed this mechanic (see what I did there?) in which you can’t help but do a little victory jig in your chair afterwards.

Look up. Why do they never look up?

The game has a good selection of firearms and gadgets to choose from, though I have  to say, I barely found myself using any of them. The gadgets are handy once in a while, like the remote mine for setting traps, or the sticky camera for distracting enemies, but they’re very situational. The weapons, ranging from pistols, sub-machine guns, and assault rifles, aren’t anything special. Once i’d unlocked a particular pistol, I didn’t use anything else, and left all of the other guns except for one assault rifle without upgrades. Use of a silenced pistol alone can carry you through the story mode, and the other weapons do find a bit more value in the other game modes. Even there, though, they’re nothing spectacular.

Splinter Cell has an unlock system running through it that associates points with challenges, and both the singleplayer and multiplayer use this. For instance, complete a challenge for killing ten enemies with your pistol without reloading, and you will gain a set  amount of points. These points can be spent on weapon/gadget upgrades that both Sam and your character in multiplayer benefit from. They can also be used to upgrade the different armour you can customise in the multiplayer mode. These multiplayer modes consist of a co-op story, which serves as a prologue to the singleplayer story, as well as modes such as “Face-off” which sets you against your once-cooperative friend. Conviction removes the tried-and-tested Splinter Cell multiplayer mode of spies versus mercenaries, and though that may turn some people off, the multiplayer is still solid here, and great fun to play. Being shot by your friend who is dangling from a pipe on the ceiling certainly is disappointing, but you can’t help but appreciate how awesome that is. This works both online and split-screen, but as with most games, split-screen hinders the gameplay experience because your screen just isn’t big enough to take in what’s around you – and the obvious drawback of your opponent always knowing what you’re doing.

This image should make Conviction an instant buy for it's multiplayer.

An internally modified Unreal 2 engine (called LEAD) powers this stealthy delight, and though you may associate said-engine with games from the previous generation, Conviction certainly holds its own. Characters can look a bit nasty when you get close up, but besides that, the game looks very nice, and runs at a solid framerate. Animation is smooth, especially when you’re sliding from one piece of cover to the next. Like I said, Michael Ironside is back voicing Sam Fisher, and he doesn’t disappoint. Despite other people thinking he sounds drunk in parts, it’s still a solid performance, which further fuels the disappointment I will experience once he inevitably backs out of the role.

If you wanted an accessible Splinter Cell game, you got one. If you wanted another Splinter Cell game that is still Splinter Cell, you got one – it’s just not quite what you are expecting. But considering what you’ve just read, i’m pretty sure you understand that Conviction’s gameplay changes the series formula in the right places. The only real significant issue with this game is that there isn’t much replayability. The story mode took me just under five hours to complete, but apparently the average is around seven hours. The story co-op mode is fairly short, too, and the other multiplayer modes will only last so long. Regardless, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction is definately worth your time.

The fact is that they don’t. If we beat the old example of Modern Warfare 2 again, the closest you get there to getting ‘in the head’ of the people down on the ground is when you’re asked to slay innocent civilians, but the game makes no attempt to follow this up, simply killing the character off and furthering the story. When anybody dies in this game, there is no lasting effect on any of the characters. The worst you get is a quick ‘noooo’ and then it’s back to saving the world as usual.

Six Days in Fallujah wanted to do something different. The idea behind the game was to portray what it’s really like to be at war, what the people down on the ground think, how they feel, to actually put a player into their shoes, their mindset. I believe it was even meant to be based on real events. But of course it was decided by the media that such a thing is disrespectful, ‘God forbid we actually show what these people go through!’, they must have collectively said.  If anything it’s the complete opposite, it allows anyone and everyone to find out exactly how bad war can be, to realise what people go through after losing friends to war, and perhaps even what it really feels like to suddenly realise you’ve just killed an innocent bystander to a war.  Is that a bad thing, to let people understand such things?

That said, there is the question of whether we really want to see such things in games anyway.  It works well enough in film and writing,  films such as Saving Private Ryan do a good job of showing this sort of thing, but for a game, are they designed to entertain as films and books are, or simply to provide fun?  If such a thing were to appear in games, it would most certainly be a new genre, ‘realism’ storytelling, rather than ‘realism’ for gameplay.  Personally I’d like to see such a thing, it would make single-player experiences far better, and perhaps even ebb the flow of games-bashing that comes from the media as a whole.

What about you?

“The goal of IW.net was to provide a safe, reliable gaming environment that provided a smooth and cheat free environment. We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone for failing to deliver on any of these goals.”

You may have seen the beginning of Dan’s rant on the creation and use of IWNet on the site not so long ago. I guess this means he’s never going to finish this series, because Activision and Infinity Ward have announced that they’re adding dedicated servers after seeing so many petitions, forum threads…and articles. Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward ‘tweeted’ recently to shed a bit more light on when this functionality would be added. In typical fashion, however, the following binary code was given as opposed to a straight forward answer: “010000010111000001110010011010010110110000100000011001100110111101101111011011000111001100100001″.

This development makes me happy. Not just because dedicated servers are a very good idea, but because because it’s good to see developers experimenting. There is going to be a point, and there has been points already, in which something can become stale. Not necessarily the case with something like server structure and alike, but regardless, if developers aren’t willing to experiment with what they have and change the formula somewhat, then the job of keeping up a website like this is going to be mind numbingly boring, at a point.