Splinter Cell: Conviction. Some Revised Thoughts.

Time to obey the statements I see on walls.

Almost every mission in Splinter Cell Conviction begins with a little swooping flyby of the area Sam Fisher is expected to navigate. Then the game's camera sort of wobbles right behind Sam's right shoulder. A few words will be projected onto some nearby wall or crate - usually some espionage boilerplate along the lines of "PLANT THE C4" or "FIND THE SCIENTIST" - before acceding control to the player.

These little preludes are very well done, bringing to mind those kinetic tracking shots in the Dardenne brother's movies. You're primed for some espionage action when that camera swoops in over Sam Fisher's shoulder as he slurs some final thoughts before the mission proper begins. (Here's an aside: Michael Ironside, who has been the VO guy for Fisher in all earlier Splinter Cell games, must have gotten hard alcohol negotiated into this most recent rider, because he sounds inebriated and disinterested in the entire acting gig.)  

I'm sure those prelude sequences were the result of countless iterations and collaboration between the many talented people at Ubisoft's Montreal studio. Still, that throwaway little bit of scene setting never failed. and someone had to animate all those virtual camera movements making sure it worked like they assumed it would in at least one early draft of SC: C's lugubrious dev cycle - and that person needs to be singled out. Looking though the game's credits, I'm guessing Juan Esteban Diaz, listed as the "Camera Animator," is the guy who deserves to be Singled Out. So, Mr. Diaz, you did an excellent job! Let me buy you a drink sometime after you meet Jenny McCarthy and Chris Hardwick.

Start moving Fisher around, and witness how Splinter Cell: Conviction continues to sell the game's assured and stylish presentation with an abundance these neat little gimmicks. I don't mean that in a pejorative way, let me stress - gimmicks are what separate a lackluster game from an exemplary one. Active reload is a stellar gimmick. Terrain deformation, at least as it was implemented in LucasArt's nearly forgotten Fracture, is not. The freedom to vault your way about a city during a firefight in Uncharted is a pretty good gimmick. Being one of an Army of Two in Army of Two is not.

So most of those clever gimmicks work great in Splinter Cell: Conviction. Like the black-and-white projections of mission objectives or brief vignettes of Sam's memories that pop up in the environment. Or the handy silhouette marking Sam's last known position, if one compromises whatever stealthy plans one was foolishly trying to implement and must resort to other improvised plans. Or the brilliant, intuitive, and quite lovely way the environment flips from color to black and white whenever Sam is hidden in the darkness.

The pièce de résistance, however, is the aforementioned virtual camera, wobbling and shaking in response to terrible acts of violence, nowhere more so than during the handful of morally dubious "interrogation" sequences. These pop up maybe half a dozen times throughout the campaign. In essence, these are sequences where one guides Fisher though a series of scripted beatings(ones Jack Baur would find excessive) to extract perfectly accurate intel from people as varied as scumbag dope dealers to powerful African American politician arms dealers. Incidentally, Fisher beats this latter man up in the Lincoln Memorial. Right there, at the feet of the Great Emancipator himself. I found myself wondering if the developers thought they had delivered any of the dramatic irony during this tasteless and insensitive set-piece or if they just thought the Mall was a great place to smash a guy's head though a wall of televisions at.

This once had an African American bad guy's head inside it.

Still, when that gentleman's head gets smashed into a wall of televisions as the camera circles and vibrates like something out of Children of Men, it looks amazingly painful and very cool. Sam Fisher may not have all the information on how appallingly unreliable information gathered through torture is, but I don't believe Fisher was ever steered wrong by his detainees over the satisfying, if brief, single player campaign.

However, one gimmick felt very pedestrian and flat to me. It was the most highly touted "feature" in all the pre-release coverage of this game, this "Mark & Execute" gimmick. Melee dispatch a dude with the B button, and you're on your way to Mark & Execute somewhere between 2 and 5 other dudes. Press the right bumper when said dudes are in your line of sight to capital M "Mark" them, then slam that X button down with AUTHORITY to capital E "Execute" those suckers.

I may have just played the game wrong, but I only did this between 3 and 6 times during the entire course of the game (if we exclude those moments where the act is mandatory to continue). If one truly embraces this system, it might help them get out of some of the hairy moments the late game can throw Sam's way -- but I found it more trouble than it was worth. I just aimed for a dude's head when no one else was looking.


I'm woefully under-qualified to review a Splinter Cell game in context. I've never played one before this installment. I make no claims for my gaming prowess. I have little of it. I've been stuck at 75% in the XBLA game Limbo for nearly half a year now, and I've played it just about every week since I bought it. I've done everything save watch a Youtube clip explicitly telling me how to solve it.

Still, I'm recommending this game. It's 20 bucks on Games on Demand. I spent about that much on a belt today.

I've enjoyed the belt much less so far.

"I Hope That's Not Chris's Blood"

Here's some thoughts on Resident Evil 4. They're pretty much identical to my feelings re: Resident Evil 5, actually. Why is this series so frustrating to me, and yet still so endearing? One of life's mysteries, I guess. Also, this essay is a goddamn mess. I don't know why I'm posting it.

Resident Evil 4 is winning the lottery a few hours before getting diagnosed with terminal cancer. Resident Evil 4 is a reunion with your childhood sweetheart, now mired in drug addiction and madness. Resident Evil 4 is the affordable, rustic old house with a shockingly low rent and 

a wonderful view of the city; Resident Evil 4 is also the roommate who never does the fucking dishes. Resident Evil 4 is large; it contains multitudes.

Resident Evil 4 calls itself a "survival horror" game. You may not understand what a "survival horror" game is; that's okay. Capcom has no idea what the "survival horror genre" is, either (so is it horror to survive?). As the abecedarians [it seems like the most accurate word to use, douche-y as it makes me feel] behind this weirdly compelling marketing-speak nonsense branding, Capcom was the moral compass to all the other developers of "survival horror"-esque games. No, they were more than a compass, they were a role model, like Sandy Kofaux. Just as Kofaux's famous decision to sit out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it coincited with Yom Kippur inspired countless Jewish sportswriters to write identical columns about how brave and inspirational Kofaux was every Yom Kippur, so does Capcom's brave embrace of anachronisms inspire others to embrace anachronism. When one sets out to make gobs of money with a spooky videogame, one must examine the Resident Evil franchise intently. How stingy should one be with ammuntition in the game if one expects a player to survive the horror? How many rubies must one pry from the eye sockets of marble statues? And should there be marble things other than statues, with emeralds instead of rubies crammed into various places? What is the optimal ratio of marble statues to other gem-hiding objects ? How often should these rubies and emeralds be inserted into hidden mantelpieces behind trick bookshelves before a horror can truly be survived?

Nevermind how much the Resident Evil series borrowed from Alone in the Dark. Alone in the Dark never owned these conventions as Resident Evil owns them. Alone in the Dark was so awkward to control, and so ugly, I could never get past the first 20 minutes or thereabouts. If I wanted to survive horror whilst playing Alone in the Dark - hell, if I wanted to tell my friends what happens after advancing past the first couple of spectral encounters - I would have needed serious commitment. I imagine "solving" Alone in the Dark was similar to entering an empyrean realm of joy and enlightenment. I'll never know. I'd get bored watching someone else play Alone in the Dark. I'd rather go off to buy a cheeseburger and some Magic: The Gathering cards or whatever. No, without Capcom's help, the "survival horror" tropes might simply have disappeared, and we'd live in a world where Konami might have implemented something like, oh, let's say functional controls to Silent Hill 2, the undisputed masterpiece of this whole silly genre, and what a tragedy that would have been! Defenders of the tank controls tell us a 'widely believed fact' that busting a player's ability to interact simply with his game "increases the tension and makes the game scary." These mouthbreathers also find the incredibly limited resources scattered obliquely thoughout the game something of a turn-on; the very idea that you cannot save your game without ink ribbons is enough to excite them.

No more! With a simple shift of the camera and a creepy guy willing to sell you massive amounts of weaponry, Resident Evil 4 not "survival horror." It is something else entirely.

It's fair, for one thing.

Every failure to survive the horror is instructive -- and, due to some smart planning on the part of the developers, most scenarios allow for quite a bit of freedom, depending on how adept you are at improvisation and the availability of ammunition, This breadth of options is the best thing about Resident Evil 4, and it's a wonderful consequence of the obstinate, fixed camera's demise.

The change from the pre-rendered backgrounds and frustrating camerawork of RE's past to the more traditional third-person camera found in this game once prompted some internet commentators to declare this a complete break from the bad old Resident Evil ways. Their enthusiam is only partially warranted. Due to the extreme emphasis on shooting gooey things in this iteration of the franchise, that old, German Expressionist-influenced series of pre-rendered rooms would have crippled the game. Seriously, though, this is kind of a clunky and unintuitive half-solution to the problem, not a revelatory departure from the old style.

The function of the Resident Evil camera is to generate a mood -- claustrophobia, creeping dread. Fear, in short. I'd hate to see Shinji Mikami's (now Jun Takoishi's) team of developers allow anyone to program some full, freely adjustable camera, because the shlock horror style shocks of the series depend greatly on shlock horror tactics borrowed from films as old as "The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari," or Bela Lugosi's "Dracula," and as new as, um, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse."

The still-clunky controls also fit the game better than they probably should, because it's clear a lot of thought went into pacing and designing your typical LAS PLAGAS encounters so the specific limitations of the control scheme are moot. This elicits a confabulation of excitement, tension, dread, exhilaration, and an increased sensation of personal self-worth when playing.

It's clear just as much thought went into the first third of the game as did the control scheme. While the game is rigidly linear, each major location where killing's gonna be going down is filled with dozens of options as to how said killing will actually go down. Never are you stuck in a linear corridor with tenticle-headed monsters blocking your forward momentum -- at least, not during those crucial first hours.

Resident Evil games have always cultivated a sense of desperation, but prior to RE4, the balance between the "I don't have enough ammo or herbs and I've got to run though this hallway and GOD I hope I have an ink cartridge so I can save my game," moments, and the "I just got me a big, new gun, and I got plenty of ammo, time for vengeance!" moments was never quite right. Here, again, things are different.

RE4 - which is much, MUCH more action packed than previous games in the series - gives us opportunities to experience genuine power uncommon in this made up genre. Fairly early on, we're treated to a set piece that illustrates what amounts to a philosophical change in "survival horror" perfectly. While riding down a ski lift, or industrial crate transport, or something, I had trouble arriving at my destination until I equipped a bolt-action sniper rifle -- a weapon I had used not once the first 4 or so hours of the game, because, hey, I like to look my kills in the eye as they die. Imagine my delight when a handful of well-aimed shots -- three dead zombies per round, when they were queued single-file --ended the ambush on the little train-car-thing before it started. Not a single injury to myself or my traveling companion during the entire gondola trip -- and around 14 corpses re-corpse'd to my credit. Never were there killing sprees like this in Resident Evils past.

Also, goddamn. This game looks great, and it isn't just flash for the sake of flash; the technical proficiency is married with a perspicacity to the overall atmosphere. Nothing is done just becuase some whiz at tech whipped up a rockin' new shader. It's not showy or gaudy in the way something like Devil May Cry is. It's atmospheric.

Sadly, as I write this review, I admit waning interest in the game. Moving out of the village and into a more traditional RE setting -- a musty castle -- gives me the feeling that, before the adventure is over, I'm bound to see some abandoned laboratories where mad scientists devise unspeakable chemicals. The plot is going to continue along it's convoluted, half-retarded path, and it is likely that I will murder, if that is the word, hundreds more of these quasi-zombies.

So. If a AAA Capcom production of one of their flagship franchises, intelligently updated to both revive a staid product without fundamentally changing it's cadence can lose my interest with an almost admirable, if shocking, legerity -- well, there is a fundamental problem at the core. I think that problem might just be me and my interests. It also might be a problem with the game being too padded with nonsense to extend that length.

But -- there must be a middle path between the mental anguish and pain the Silent Hill protagonists face and the cheesy scenarios our friends from Resident Evil endure. A videogame that manages to be both thrillingly creepy and populist without suffering from Stupid Plot Syndrome is going to be huge. Fatal Frame? Siren? Maybes. I'm pinning my hopes on Heavy Rain, which is unlikely to be a survival horror game per se but will at least have serial killers and stuff in it.

Well. Maybe it's not that. It's just - the Resident Evil formula doesn't feel like homage any longer. It feels like self-plagurization. I've read elsewhere that this is a 20+ hour video game. I'm already starting to sense that the game doesn't have many more tricks up it's sleeves, after that phenomenal first 3 or 4 hours. I'll finish the game if I can find time, because I have faith that there will be a few more bright spots along the way. That I feel obligated to complete it rather than compelled to see the conclusion saddens me.