Splinter Cell is probably known by most of the people who read this blog. It’s been given extremely high accolades by many gaming magazines. Tons of fans couldn’t wait for it to be released to PC, PS2, or Gamecube, and before it happenend the case for buying an Xbox was that much stronger. What many people don’t realize, however, is that the stealth shooter is not a new thing in the PC gaming world, and, in fact, recently one came out, Hitman 2: The Silent Assassin, which is IMO just as good as Splinter Cell. Here’s a comparison.

Introduction

In Splinter Cell you play as a covert agent in a super secret US agency. The premise is that data encryption is so sophisticated nowadays that a reversion to more traditional forms of espionage is needed; in other words, agent insertion. Stealth is of utmost importance; leave no witnesses; better to kill someone than to have them identify you.

Hitman 2, by contrast, has you play as a hired assassin working for a global mercenary “problem-solving” agency. You aren’t necessarily playing for the “good guys”; you’re just doing an assignment. Stealth is still important, but disguises may work just as well. Instead of always sneaking about, you can infiltrate your target’s organization by posing as a henchman or civilian.

Moves and Controls

Both games are over-the-shoulder FPS games (which I guess makes them third-person shooters), so they both have similar control schemes (as made standard by Half-Life). The WSAD keys in combination with the mouse moves you around.

In Hitman 2 you can run, walk, crouch, drag bodies to dark corners (some really cool and sometimes funny ragdoll effects here), and zoom your view in and out a bit. Splinter cell lets you adjust your speed in two different stances (upright and crouched) using the mouse wheel, so you could run, jog, or walk kinda like Mario. Splinter Cell features some additional moves your character can do, like rappeling, jumping up between two close walls so that you are above the ground a foot on each wall (a la Jean Claude van Damme in Time Cop or Jet Li in Black Mask), and moving along the edge of a wall or building or along a pipe hand over hand style, whereas Hitman 2 features some scripted actions, like climbing out a specific window.

When you come upon a door, both games allow you to take a peek at what’s behind; Splinter Cell with a fiber-optic camera and Hitman 2 by having you peep through the key hole.

Splinter Cell features a light meter (similar to No One Lives Forever 2) which lets you know if you are hidden or plainly visible to your enemies while Hitman 2 has an alertness meter which is much more spastic (but not in a bad way) which keeps track of how suspicious your enemies are of you. For Splinter Cell if the meter goes up really high, you are in broad daylight, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone can see you at your current location. In Hitman 2 if your meter goes up too high, someone *will* walk towards you and investigate. They may have already spotted you ages ago; it’s only now that they think you might be an unwanted trespasser.

Objectives and Methods

Admittedly I only just bought Splinter Cell yesterday so have not finished the game yet, but from what I’ve seen I think I can assume all the missions feature you sneaking into an area, doing some espionage, and maybe killing or disabling certain things (like alarms) before going to the extraction zone. You are wearing a black uniform commando-style and have things like night-vision goggles, fiber-optic door peeper, and a trusty silenced side-arm. Gameplay pretty much boils down to observing patterns in guards movements, taking advantage of darkness, and sneaking around a whole lot, knocking out or sometimes killing when necessary.

Hitman 2, by comparison, lets you choose which items to bring for each mission, most of these being of the weapon category ranging from piano wire to assault rifles and a whole butt-load of ammunition. During a mission you can take out a guard or civilian and change into his clothes, thus having a disguise for the rest of mission (but if you are seen killing with the disguise on or if someone discovers the naked body of the person you took out, your disguise is blown). Gameplay in Hitman 2 often involves walking around (painfully slowly in a very good way) in plain sight and getting stressed out the whole time, watching your alertness meter frantically move up and down as you approach enemy guards hoping they don’t take the time to take a closer inspection. If you run, your meter goes up; if you crouch, your meter goes up; if you do anything out of the ordinary, your meter goes up. As its name implies, for most missions your objective is to kill a certain person, but each mission plays out a little differently to great effect. For example, on one mission you infiltrate a Yakuza bosses’ home to take him out. You can go in guns blazing (which is always an option for almost all the missions) or you can sneak into the kitchen, knock out the cook, prepare the blowfish sushi wrong, and wait for the servant to take out the boss for you while you make for the exit!

Ending a Mission

If there’s one aspect of the game which Hitman 2 does much better than Splinter Cell, it’s the mission endings. In both games, ending a mission involves going to the extraction point. In Splinter Cell your mission just ends, you get a cut-scene, and then it’s on to the next mission.

In Hitman 2, you are given a screen which shows your statistics for the mission: how many people you killed, how many alarms were raised, shots taken vs. shots scored, and an overall rating of how you did. Scoring a Silent Assassin rating means only killing your target (often using a quieter weapon than a gun, even if silenced) without anyone knowing about it. On top of that, enemies you take out during a mission can be searched for additional weapons or ammo and any weapons you gather during a mission are available to choose from in subsequent missions. You have a base of operations between missions which includes a garden shack loaded with gun racks which are empty at the beginning of the game and hopefully full by the end of the game, sort of a trophy room. This makes replayability very high; I played the game once normally, played again to try to get every weapon in the game, and played yet again to try to get Silent Assassin on each level (which precludes you getting all the weapons in the game).

Conclusion

Which game is better? Well, they both are very, very fun games if you’re into stealthy tactics and together they make a great combo. If I had to choose, I’d go with Hitman 2, but to be fair, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve yet to finish Splinter Cell, so we’ll see. I just don’t think Splinter Cell will have a great replay value, unless I set a personal goal to be as stealthy as possible or, alternatively, to kill as many people as possible, etc.

I like this trend for stealthy FPS games and am looking forward to Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3!

I watched it on opening day during my extended lunch hour. 🙂 A coworker and I just slipped out, picked up Robin, and went to the movies and lunch for 3 hours…

The movie was good. In terms of action it was grittier than the first, scarier in showing the raw power of some of these mutants. In terms of story, well it was okay. When I saw that William Stryker was in the movie, I was really looking forward to the Sentinels, but that didn’t happen.

They’ve introduced a few new mutants (Nightcrawler, Deathstrike, Iceman, Pyro), but that sort of makes up for the fact that some of them from the last movie are gone (Sabertooth, Toad). The biggest problem about the first movie I thought was that it didn’t go into all of the characters enough and spent too much time on Wolverine. Well, this movie is a slight improvement in balancing out who is featured, but it also short-changes some of the roles, and I mean really, really short-changes them. Cyclops is in the movie for maybe 15 minutes, Nightcrawler has a great intro and then just sort of gets dropped, Deathstrike has like one line in the whole movie which is a shame since Kelly Hu is at least as good an actress as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. The kids Iceman and Pyro make a pretty good introduction but don’t get the same screen time as the adults which is fine and makes sense, but Rogue is given as much a role as them, which when compared to the first movie is slightly disappointing. Storm plays about the same as the first movie, she is just there. Colossus even makes a brief appearance and according to Robin, he was hunky.

Jean is featured pretty well in this movie, which I think doesn’t jive well with Scott’s afore-mentioned 15 minutes. In the comics they are a pair and really have a sort of synergy when teamed together making for a more team-based feel to the X-men. Scott has been given a lesser role in the movies which really sucks since he is supposed to be the in-the-field commander second to Xavier only when out of battle. Xavier depends on him to lead the team in the field. The movie portrayal also gives an unfortunate disbelief in the Jean-Scott-Logan love triangle; who in their right mind would stick with Scott as he is portrayed in the movies?

The X jet plays a pretty big role in the movie, too, which is fine, but it’d be cool if they featured more of the ground vehicles like the motorcycle from the first movie.

So, I thought the first movie should have been about 30 minutes longer and after viewing the deleted scenes on the DVD, I became satisfied. Maybe the same will be true for this movie.

All in all, a good movie, continuing the trend of good adaptations of comics to the big screen, but not as good as say Spider-man. And The Hulk has the potential to be better. I think X-men will really shine as a series if they do make more and continue to focus on different characters each time. The last scene pretty much hints at a sequel with potentially amazing special effects.

I was extremely disappointed that the viking kittens singing the immigrant song was taken off of www.rathergood.com when I wanted to set my boss’ computer to always be redirected to that site no matter what domain he typed into his web browser for April Fool’s.

Tonight, Robin mentioned that she wanted to show a friend of hers, so I went looking. Here it is in all it’s glory!

http://www.markdangerchen.net/media/blog/viking_kittens.swf

You rule, Dr. Schrag.

I totally forgot that you were defending today. I was thinking about driving down to heckle you, but then I contracted SARS over the weekend at the Red Sox game (they came back from 0-5 against Toronto to win 6-5 on a Nomar walk-off HR in the bottom of the ninth… WOW). Still feeling a little nasty today, but both Britney and I are very proud of you!

Go ahead, take a little time to enjoy Britney over at http://www.britneyspears.com/. You’ve EARNED it. What’s next? Lemme guess….

For those of you that are interested, I posted a few pictures of my new place in the articles section. Thanks to Lara for the images…

Especially for you, Mr. Danger, photoshop tennis. Seems to be over now, but a clever idea: one designer creates a photoshop layer, and a second designer returns “volley” by adding an additional layer, and so on…

This is the outside:

This is the kitchen area.

The U-shaped kitchen provides a lot of surface area for cooking, but not a significant amount of storage space. The Corian countertop was chosen to match the concrete surface at the left, and the red highlight on the edge was supposed to match the red accents on the Vulcan stove. The stove is a heavy-duty commercial-grade unit with four gigantic gas burners and an oven (no broiler, though… a minor bummer ). It’s not insulated, which is why you see the spacing between it and the cabinets and why there is a strip of concrete flooring under the stove and along the cabinets. The exhaust fan is a KitchenAid (I think). The refrigerator and dishwasher are from the GE Profile line. In the upper-right corner, you can see where the wall is open to the mechanical closet. None of the interior walls extend all the way to the ceiling.

This is the TV area.

It’s tough to tell with the shades drawn, but the windows are slightly below grade. They get a significant amount of direct sunlight, but you can’t see too much from them. In this picture, you can see the exposed rafters in the ceiling. There are numerous exposed pipes throughout the unit.

These are babies chilling at the domicile.

Right behind the couch, there is a square (2’X2′) brick column. There are four of these incorporated into the unit, but this is the only one that is free-standing. On top of the column, there is a huge wooden beam that supports the ceiling. On the right, the double doors lead to one of the two closets. This closet contains the water heater and the air heating unit.

This is where the “magic” happens.

Can’t see much in this picture, but the brick is another one of the columns in the unit. The big pipe that is next to it is a drain from the roof, and the tub/shower is half enclosed by the pillar.

I was listening to a show on NPR this morning about Americans and wealth. They talked to this one lady in New Jersey who’s husband makes 100k a year. They own their own house and cars. They have two kids who want for nothing. In fact, the kids go to four or five dance lessons a week. They go out whenever they want. Knowing that her income is in the top 20% in the US, she complains that she’s just barely getting by and considers herself middle class. WTH (what the heck)!

If you can’t save money making 100k a year then it’s your own damn fault.

Then there’s this lady who’s income is in the top .2% in the US. She doesn’t think she’s rich or wealthy because she knows people who make a bit more than herself and she doesn’t go flying around Europe all the time. She makes more than a mil a year and doesn’t think she’s rich because she isn’t a jet setter? We’re not talking pesos…we’re talking about dollars! I repeat. WTH!!!

Hey Isuru, do you have to pay for tickets to watch your Div 3 team play. I bet it’d be pretty sweet to get front row seats for one of their games.

Ben, a good offense will make up for poor defense. Just start asking your board tough questions about their mothers. Actually..It’s all about defense Benny. Good luck.

Hey Robin, I’m going to be in portland this Monday. Wanna give me driving lessons?

Have a good weekend yaww.

This is my review of Wizard’s First Rule and also a response to Mark’s review. First, to put things into perspective, I actually think there are many readers who would share Mark’s opinion of WFR. Readers who are very critical of the fiction they read will probably fall into Mark’s camp of thought. I tend to be moderaly critical of my fiction and when I become immersed in the book, I can be very forgiving.

Terry Goodkind does a great job with character development and the description of thier motivations and emotions. With ya on this one Mark. This is definitely one of the most important part of the novel for me. Since you get to know their thoughts, I often think that I come to know the the characters better then people, which leads me to become attached and emotionally invested. When that happens, you know that at least for you, it’s a worthy piece of fiction. For me, this ties into my love of long novels and movies.

In response to your assertion about the length of the novel, I actually thought that T.G. did a good job with the pace of the plot and kept things interesting. Part of the reason the characters are so well described is because of the many tough situations T.G. puts them through. IMO, authors should not have to cut out parts which they feel to be important just to keep the novel at a certain page limit. I feel similarly about movies. Many movies under two hours are too short…except for B moves staring Ben, in which case two hours is way too long.

Readers will probably make some intuitive leaps while reading WFR but I don’t think they are as clear cut as you make it out to be. There are quite a few plot twists but just in case there is someone viewing this blog that would like to read WFR untainted I won’t hash them out here. Here are a few things to know about WFR.

1. I’ve read quite a few fantasy series and most have plots that drag in places. IMO, T.G. does a masterful job in keeping the book suspenseful and high in energy. Of course one might complain about how many times the main character almost gets killed but you can’t have everything.

2. One of the reasons why I like WFR so much is because T.G. isn’t afraid to be graphic with his descriptions of emotions and scenes….although some may find this to be a bit too much.

3. Personally I found the plot twists surprising but admittedly I didn’t put down the book long enough to do any serious plot analysis. Some may complain that there are a few too many cliches but I didn’t mind it so much. The “intelligent” characters often act rashly but ususally the situations are pretty intense.

4. WFR and Stone of Tears, the second book in the series, “borrows” some elements from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The later books have much more original work and they do get better but I don’t know if the changes are significant enought for me to recommend them to you Mark. For a mainstream fantasy novel with a huge following, I think the sword of truth series is pretty daring in many respects, especially when compared to Robert Jordan’s wheel of time and David Edding’s Belgariad.

Misinformed is what I meant, of course. But malaprops are pretty funny.

when you said “malinformed” did you mean “misinformed” or “malformed”? I thought it was kinda funny, imagining this web designer with some hideous mutation, hard-coding text font and cackling to himself….

anyhow, sorry that link got you ticked 🙂

Okay George,

I finally read a book of yours.

Overall, Wizard’s First Rule was pretty good, and Goodkind does a great job describing emotions and motivations, but the same well-emoted characters were rather stupid. Actually, I suppose it was more a combination of two things: 1. the book was twice as long as it needed to be, 2. I could immediately see solutions the author obviously never thought of. These two things made the characters appear more stupid than they should’ve since over the span of *chapters* I already knew how they could end their suffering and was incredulous that they couldn’t see the same solutions.

Here’s a list:

1. It was obvious from the get-go that Michael was Rahl’s ally.

2. When Rahl told Richard near the end that a spell had been cast on him which made him appear the enemy to his friends, it was obvious what the witch Shota’s prophecies were about.

3. One of the main obstacles of the book was that the Confessor would not be able to truly have a lover since she would inadvertantly use her power on him when she relaxed in love-throes, which prevented Kahlan and Richard from being together. In fact, the book almost hinged on this fact, as when I said the author did a great job of describing emotions, one of those emotions was love (the others being hate, rage, fear…) But another item of note was that each time a Confessor used her power on someone it took a while for her power to regenerate. Furthermore, the power could be used on animals, too, though it had little effect. Well, obviously the solution was for a Confessor to touch an animal before going to bed with her lover. Duh.

4. Another weird turn of events towards the end of the book detailed how Richard was tortured by Mistress Denna and how he wished he could kill himself but had no power to do so. Well, he still had the night stone and if he had been as smart a character as the author intended, he would’ve used it.

5. The Bird Man could not teach Richard how to use the bird whistle. Well, duh, try letting Kahlan learn how to use it instead.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of the series unless you say they get better, G.

Before this I read 2.5 books of the Manifest series by Stephen Baxter. Partway through the last book, though, I realized that the problems of the first two books, namely that he has some great ideas but isn’t a good enough author or thinker to think them through to their logical conclusions, was also in this last one, so I put the book down.

On to David Eddings. He’s a Reedie. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean the books will be drawn-out and esoteric.