Pocket Stealth
Sam Fisher sneaks onto the PSP for the first time in Splinter Cell Essentials.
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Popular console franchises have been popping up on the PlayStation
Portable with surprising frequency these last few months--Burnout,
Grand Theft Auto, and Prince of Persia to name a few. Thanks to the
PSP's technical prowess, everyone's getting a chance to move to a
portable format without sacrificing the gameplay conventions and (most
of) the graphical fidelity that made them popular on television screens
everywhere. Thanks to Ubisoft's Montreal development studio, it'll soon
be Sam Fisher's turn to step onto the small screen with Splinter Cell
Essentials, the vaunted stealth-action series' first original
appearance on a modern handheld.
Essentials won't be the next chronological addition to the
Splinter Cell timeline--that duty falls to Double Agent, the upcoming
fourth installment in the console series. Instead, the PSP game will
take a retrospective look at the entirety of Sam Fisher's career, from
his early days as a Navy SEAL to the shady events of Double Agent--and
maybe even beyond. Ubisoft tells us the game will use a unique
narrative framework to tie all of the missions together, though they
haven't divulged yet exactly how this scenario will play out. We do
know that these discrete missions won't even be presented in
chronological order, so presumably their presentation will serve a
greater storyline.
At any rate, you'll visit such exotic locales as Colombia, for
a 1992 SEAL mission; Yugoslavia, to take part in Fisher's first mission
as a Third Echelon operative in which he helps NATO destroy a SAM
launcher; and a factory in Warsaw, Indiana, where he'll retrieve a
palette of stolen NSA weaponry in a mission set after Pandora Tomorrow.
It's important to note that while many of Essentials' missions are set
in or around the time frames of the previous Splinter Cell games, the
nine story missions are all newly created for the PSP. Anyone who gets
all misty-eyed over Fisher's life and times, though, will be glad to
know that three bonus missions ported from past games will also be
available.
The PSP's technical capabilities are shockingly close to the
PlayStation 2's, but designing a game for a handheld platform still
presents inherent challenges. Luckily, it looks like Essentials'
designers have crafted the game with these obstacles in mind, and so
far the game looks like it'll be nicely tailored to the portable gaming
experience. To start with, Splinter Cell diehards will be glad to know
that none of Fisher's trademark abilities or maneuvers have been
removed from the game. You can still sneak up behind enemies or
civilians to kill, incapacitate, or interrogate them. The first-person
aiming and shooting action is intact as well, and there will now be an
optional aiming assistance feature that will help you compensate for
the PSP analog control's lower precision. In short, Essentials should
play exactly like fans of the series have come to expect from past
entries on the bigger consoles.
That means Ubi Montreal hasn't sacrificed any of Splinter
Cell's controls or accessibility. For instance, you'll still have
360-degree camera control, though you'll have to stop moving to adjust
the perspective. When you hold down the circle button, you can use the
analog stick to move the camera, effectively giving you the same
viewing freedom as you have on the consoles. Other concessions have
been made to the PSP's control layout to maintain the gameplay--an
example being the use of the square and circle buttons to strafe
quickly when you're in first-person aiming mode. It seems like some of
these minor changes will take a little while to get used to if you're
coming from the previous Splinter Cell games, but once you've gotten
everything down, you should be able to crack heads with the best of
them.
Finally, the internal game mechanics have evolved slightly to
accommodate gamers on the go. For one, the designers know that getting
Sam Fisher through a dangerous mission unscathed requires you to use
all your senses, especially hearing. So what if you're playing
Essentials on the bus and you can't hear the footsteps of that
approaching guard? Essentials will augment the heads-up display with a
new bidirectional sound gauge that will give you a visual cue as to the
strength and direction of ambient sounds. So if you see the sound meter
suddenly spike to the right, you know something crucial is going on in
that direction. The HUD remains otherwise unchanged, showing you how
much noise you're making and how well hidden you are. Lastly, and
thankfully, you'll be able to save at any point in a mission--rather
than just at the predesignated checkpoints like in the previous
games--so you can get through one short part of a mission and then come
back to it later.
From what we saw of Essentials, the game seems to be maintaining the
series' high graphical standards on the PSP. The game's technology is
based on the PS2 Pandora Tomorrow engine, which has been pulled apart
and reworked to run well on the portable platform. All the series'
trademark effects are here, from the night and thermal vision modes to
the dynamic lighting that facilitates many of Fisher's hiding places.
As on the consoles, many lights can be shot out to give you even more
hiding places. The levels and characters look to be a little less
detailed in terms of geometry--which is to be expected from a PSP
game--but otherwise, this is unmistakably a Splinter Cell game.
Ubisoft hasn't committed to a firm release date for Splinter
Cell Essentials yet, though it's said to be due out in the first
quarter of the year, which leaves plenty of time for us to check out
more of the single-player game (not to mention find out what kind of
multiplayer plans the Montreal team has cooking). In the meantime,
check out a bunch of new videos for Essentials, including gameplay footage and an exclusive developer interview.
Source:
GameSpot