Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials
Essentially busted.
Published: April 6, 2006
It sounded like such and awesome concept, and indeed when it was announced the PSP was in serious need of some quality titles. Ubisoft, the folks with development teams apparently assembled with the sole task of making games that looked too good to be running on their respective hardware, was about to port Splinter Cell to the PSP. Better still, it was going to be something of a best-of collection of Sam Fisher's exploits, thickening up his back story and even offering a peek at some of the levels from the upcoming Splinter Cell: Double Agent.
Wait, don't most bands' best-of collections kinda suck? Naaah, it's Ubisoft, they know what they're doing. Yeah, but didn't Prince of Persia Revelations suck even harder than the console version? Well, yeah, but, uh, they've probably ironed out any problems with the PSP hardware.
They don't know, and they didn't. Splinter Cell Essentials is a disaster.
It's not a failure, mind you, just a complete trainwreck of great concept, solid premise, decent technology and hideous use of lighting and texture detail. Essentials should have collected some of the best memories from previous SC games and presented them with a few sneak peeks at what was next, and then topped it all off with the kind of story that only Ubisoft can pull off. It almost did it, too.
Let's start at the beginning. Literally, the start of what made Sam Fisher so badass. Defying orders from a commander, Fisher bravely heads into the jungles of Columbia to rescue his SEAL commanding officer. It's the kind of order-defying bravado that makes the character fun, and it also serves as a kind of tutorial mission as you get used to the interesting control scheme.
I'm using "interesting" rather than "horrid" for a reason here. What Ubisoft did to make up for the lack of a second analog stick is admirable, but it doesn't really work. When Sam's gun is stashed, the analog nub controls movement, Square shifts in/out of crouch mode, Triangle jumps and X interacts with objects. Circle button use is where it gets interesting. Tapping it will re-center the camera, and holding it will turn the analog nub into the camera controls, which means you have to stop moving to look around. SC games have always been about situational awareness and quick moves. This affords neither.
It gets weirder. Your d-pad controls shifting to night/thermal vision (left), zooming in (up) or out (down), or readying/stowing your gun (right). Holding any of these directions will let you hug a wall, bring up your inventory, whistle to draw attention and reload, respectively. When the gun is out, things get funkier. The face buttons control movement/strafing, and the analog nub freelooks. This actually works far better than you'd think, but it's still a little disorienting.
The issue here, not surprisingly, is indeed the camera. Stopping to readjust constantly is an epic pain in the ass, and even hammering the Circle button to re-center the camera just doesn't work because enemies can still show up in all 360 degrees around you - hell, you'll often times miss them.
There's a very good reason for that, too. You'll travel all over the world, in some cases revisiting areas from previous games (and, again, some later from Double Agent), and all of them have one thing in common. They're darker than a black steer's tookus on a moonless prairie night. Now, this is a stealth game, and Sam Fisher lives in the dark, but on the consoles, you could at least see what the hell was going on every couple steps, here on the PSP, you have to flick on the night vision... and stare at a mess of grainy textures that may or may not be a wall.
I've fallen to my death almost as many times because the constant green hue and low-res textures fooled with my depth perception almost as much as I did because I didn't have the camera aligned properly, which is to say more than a couple of times. There's a lot of unwanted frustration that comes from this, mainly because it means you'll have to sit through a half minute or so of a loading screen just to try it again.
There is one concession that was made for the portable market: you can save anywhere, at any time and pick up exactly where you left off. The game will checkpoint you too if you'd like, but the save points are precise, and it's nice to know an effort was made to preserve progress through a level if you only have 5-10 minutes to play, because some of the levels are fairly long - at least as long play-wise as some of the console versions, which is a nice touch.
Really, a lot of Essentials hints at the kind of experience that we could have been treated to, but it's just a peek here and there. Rarely does the game every break into an experience that is genuinely worthy of the PSP, and it certainly isn't one that holds a candle to the console versions. Ordinarily, I wouldn't really mind too much, but we're starting to see PSP games that offer a genuinely good console-like experience on a handheld, and one of them is a rather stealthy affair, too. It's not so much that the game isn't decent, it's that it's Splinter Cell, which means even the PS2 ports, which most would call the crappiest of the bunch, are still good enough to worth a purchase.
Well, except for the multiplayer, and that trend has carried over rather faithfully to the PSP. Essentially little more than blind hunts in the dark (thanks to vision modes that have to be recharged after a little use), the Ad-Hoc deathmatch mode just feels too much like a last-second addition rather than something that could have really used the PSP like an online multiplayer component. Instead, it's just a clumsy tossed-in option, and while it might do the trick for some (if said some both have copies of the game), it's not the kind of multiplayer experience the series has become known for.
The other thing the games - even the PS2 ones - are known for is strong visuals. The first SC was all but a defining title for the Xbox thanks in large part to being so damned pretty. The PSP version isn't even close to the level of the PS2. Textures are a mess, the framerate is shoddy, guns and limbs regularly clip through doorways, and the character models just lack the kind of detail that the series is known for - and that the screenshots had us thinking the game would look like.
The audio fares a little better. There will often be a little bit of stuttering or popping as headset transmissions are streamed off the UMD, but they clear up quickly. Most of the music and sound effects in the game were lifted from the console versions, and as such they sound very nice indeed. You'll still hear dynamic music, and plenty of familiar stuff from previous games.
And of course there's Michael Ironside's voice, a gravelly, deep growl that makes me just want to start chain-smoking so I can sound that badass. Most of the game is told through conversation, and the voice actors do a good job of pulling off lines that usually end up being something to the effect of "nuh uh, that's not how it happened, here's how it really happened" while still pictures show angry-faced portraits. It works, but just barely, and the voice actors are what help sell it.
Splinter Cell Essentials is meant to be an additional chapter in the still-unfolding Sam Fisher saga. In a way, for die-hard fans, it's almost necessary in that it adds a bit of thickener to Fisher's past, and of course it does give us that glimpse of what's going on in Double Agent. Unfortunately, this means the gameplay here is tolerated rather than enjoyed, with each level being passed just to get a scrap of information about certain events. It's a worthwhile investment of time if you're a die-hard fan, but only as a rental. Everyone else will probably be too frustrated to push through.
Wait, don't most bands' best-of collections kinda suck? Naaah, it's Ubisoft, they know what they're doing. Yeah, but didn't Prince of Persia Revelations suck even harder than the console version? Well, yeah, but, uh, they've probably ironed out any problems with the PSP hardware.
They don't know, and they didn't. Splinter Cell Essentials is a disaster.
It's not a failure, mind you, just a complete trainwreck of great concept, solid premise, decent technology and hideous use of lighting and texture detail. Essentials should have collected some of the best memories from previous SC games and presented them with a few sneak peeks at what was next, and then topped it all off with the kind of story that only Ubisoft can pull off. It almost did it, too.
Let's start at the beginning. Literally, the start of what made Sam Fisher so badass. Defying orders from a commander, Fisher bravely heads into the jungles of Columbia to rescue his SEAL commanding officer. It's the kind of order-defying bravado that makes the character fun, and it also serves as a kind of tutorial mission as you get used to the interesting control scheme.
I'm using "interesting" rather than "horrid" for a reason here. What Ubisoft did to make up for the lack of a second analog stick is admirable, but it doesn't really work. When Sam's gun is stashed, the analog nub controls movement, Square shifts in/out of crouch mode, Triangle jumps and X interacts with objects. Circle button use is where it gets interesting. Tapping it will re-center the camera, and holding it will turn the analog nub into the camera controls, which means you have to stop moving to look around. SC games have always been about situational awareness and quick moves. This affords neither.
It gets weirder. Your d-pad controls shifting to night/thermal vision (left), zooming in (up) or out (down), or readying/stowing your gun (right). Holding any of these directions will let you hug a wall, bring up your inventory, whistle to draw attention and reload, respectively. When the gun is out, things get funkier. The face buttons control movement/strafing, and the analog nub freelooks. This actually works far better than you'd think, but it's still a little disorienting.
The issue here, not surprisingly, is indeed the camera. Stopping to readjust constantly is an epic pain in the ass, and even hammering the Circle button to re-center the camera just doesn't work because enemies can still show up in all 360 degrees around you - hell, you'll often times miss them.
There's a very good reason for that, too. You'll travel all over the world, in some cases revisiting areas from previous games (and, again, some later from Double Agent), and all of them have one thing in common. They're darker than a black steer's tookus on a moonless prairie night. Now, this is a stealth game, and Sam Fisher lives in the dark, but on the consoles, you could at least see what the hell was going on every couple steps, here on the PSP, you have to flick on the night vision... and stare at a mess of grainy textures that may or may not be a wall.
I've fallen to my death almost as many times because the constant green hue and low-res textures fooled with my depth perception almost as much as I did because I didn't have the camera aligned properly, which is to say more than a couple of times. There's a lot of unwanted frustration that comes from this, mainly because it means you'll have to sit through a half minute or so of a loading screen just to try it again.
There is one concession that was made for the portable market: you can save anywhere, at any time and pick up exactly where you left off. The game will checkpoint you too if you'd like, but the save points are precise, and it's nice to know an effort was made to preserve progress through a level if you only have 5-10 minutes to play, because some of the levels are fairly long - at least as long play-wise as some of the console versions, which is a nice touch.
Really, a lot of Essentials hints at the kind of experience that we could have been treated to, but it's just a peek here and there. Rarely does the game every break into an experience that is genuinely worthy of the PSP, and it certainly isn't one that holds a candle to the console versions. Ordinarily, I wouldn't really mind too much, but we're starting to see PSP games that offer a genuinely good console-like experience on a handheld, and one of them is a rather stealthy affair, too. It's not so much that the game isn't decent, it's that it's Splinter Cell, which means even the PS2 ports, which most would call the crappiest of the bunch, are still good enough to worth a purchase.
Well, except for the multiplayer, and that trend has carried over rather faithfully to the PSP. Essentially little more than blind hunts in the dark (thanks to vision modes that have to be recharged after a little use), the Ad-Hoc deathmatch mode just feels too much like a last-second addition rather than something that could have really used the PSP like an online multiplayer component. Instead, it's just a clumsy tossed-in option, and while it might do the trick for some (if said some both have copies of the game), it's not the kind of multiplayer experience the series has become known for.
The other thing the games - even the PS2 ones - are known for is strong visuals. The first SC was all but a defining title for the Xbox thanks in large part to being so damned pretty. The PSP version isn't even close to the level of the PS2. Textures are a mess, the framerate is shoddy, guns and limbs regularly clip through doorways, and the character models just lack the kind of detail that the series is known for - and that the screenshots had us thinking the game would look like.
The audio fares a little better. There will often be a little bit of stuttering or popping as headset transmissions are streamed off the UMD, but they clear up quickly. Most of the music and sound effects in the game were lifted from the console versions, and as such they sound very nice indeed. You'll still hear dynamic music, and plenty of familiar stuff from previous games.
And of course there's Michael Ironside's voice, a gravelly, deep growl that makes me just want to start chain-smoking so I can sound that badass. Most of the game is told through conversation, and the voice actors do a good job of pulling off lines that usually end up being something to the effect of "nuh uh, that's not how it happened, here's how it really happened" while still pictures show angry-faced portraits. It works, but just barely, and the voice actors are what help sell it.
Splinter Cell Essentials is meant to be an additional chapter in the still-unfolding Sam Fisher saga. In a way, for die-hard fans, it's almost necessary in that it adds a bit of thickener to Fisher's past, and of course it does give us that glimpse of what's going on in Double Agent. Unfortunately, this means the gameplay here is tolerated rather than enjoyed, with each level being passed just to get a scrap of information about certain events. It's a worthwhile investment of time if you're a die-hard fan, but only as a rental. Everyone else will probably be too frustrated to push through.
