Kevin's Watch

Has anyone else played this?

I think it's great, I'm on the last level at the moment, and it's getting tricky.

I love stealth games in general, but this one is far and away the best I've played. MGS2 was very good, but there was something fundamentally Japanese about it which I felt didn't suit the genre.

Splinter Cell has some great, and believable, gadgets like 'sticky' cameras that are fired from your grenade launcher and can then be controlled remotely from your palm pilot, fibre optics for looking under doors and the wonderfully named 'sticky shocker' a special grenade that sticks to an enemy and delivers an incapacitating electric shock.

The variation in the missions is good too. On some levels you are under strict orders not to kill anybody. On one of these missions you have to infiltrate the CIA at Langley, and on another you have to get information from the Chinese Embassy. In a lot of the later missions you can kill more or less indiscriminately (I personally incapacitate rather than kill non-combat personnel, but your CO basically says "We're at war! Go nuts!").

One of my favourite missions starts in a underground car park. I like to shoot out all of the lights and then stalk my prey (Georgian mercenaries in this case) with LightAmp goggles. Much fun.

I'm looking forward to the sequel, Pandora Tomorow, which is out in March.

Yeah, I'll get Pandora Tomorrow on the PS2, probably. I've got the original on the comp. Downloaded it for free as a subscriber perk for joining Gamespy. Thinking about it makes me wanna play it again . . . I especially loved the diversion camera. You shot it and then you manually emitted that sleeping gas when someone came near it.

I couldn't really get into splinter cell, it looked good though.

Loved the game. Pity it's so linear and scripted.

It's not as linear as a lot of games. The route you take through each mission might be fixed, but theway in which you take it is quite often up to you. You can quite often choose between maximum stealth (probably what the developers intended), shooting everyone in your way or something between the two.

Apparently Pandora Tomorrow can be played online, spies against mercenaries. The spies will be played from third person, and the mercenaries from first person. Should be interesting, although the sticky shocker could spoil it by making things too easy for the spies.

It's an alright game... I thought it had it's moment... A little to slow paced for me at times though....