First of all: Yes, it was INCEDIBLY short, the "hey, let's scream every 5 seconds" thingy is really annoying and the "only jump here, and only here, or you'll open a door" screwed me over too, only in my case they played Scrabble.

But secondly: Yes, you mentioned your novel on your Twitter. 5 times. Maybe more, I'm not a regular.

Malakashii:
Great review as ever.

Though the thought of Yahtzee actually performing a terrorist attack on the White House is an interesting thought.

He did visit the place last summer. Maybe he really is up to something :D

I guess you can't really appreciate Splinter Cell if you're not a fan of that kind of high tech spy stealth. I like stealth games, especially on their hardest difficulty. And I like Conviction because it's not like any other stealth game I played. I can shoot everyone but it feels more rewarding this time to actually sneak around. In previous games it was the most obvious option, the only option if you wanted to live. And taking guards down silently is awesome with those cool animations you can pull of. The biggest problem I have with the game is that deniable ops missions are actually more fun then story missions.

KingPiccolOwned:

Yeah, normally that'd be true, but personally I'd have to agree with Durian here. Even I usually get a laugh out of the times when he does that stuff, like constantly portraying Americans with cowboy hats, or what have you, but here it didn't really seem funny.

Yeah, same here man. I find his America jokes funny most of the time. This was just a flat out insult. No real joke to hide behind.

Hungry hungry hipo =)

:D Little Yahtzee! :DDDD

TMNT reference made me literally fall out of my chair laughing.

Eh I laughed a few times but I felt the "America sucks ahahahaha retarded tossers" joke was not well done. I can laugh at a good joke at my country or political ideology but if it was well done. Like the cowboy hat in the space ship from last episode was funny. Even in I forget what review when at the end everyone is slaves and the republican is like "Why do you hate freedom?" I cracked up and I'm conservative. I just wish he would take some shots at Liberals every once in awhile if he feels so inclined as to make political jokes and no making fun of Hilary Clinton once does not count. This just seemed more like just plan hate for America more so than anything else. Of course this is just how I merely interpreted his words so don't go all flame war on me will you? Still good review and the hungry hungry hippos thing was pretty funny.

I found it so easy it wasn't funny, he was right there.

I have pretty much the same views as Yahtzee on this one. After playing games like Thief and Hitman that are extremely fun and open-ended stealth games, Conviction is absolute garbage. I went into it expecting a stealth game, and it was an appeal-to-the-lowest-common-denominator action game. The most disappointing thing has to be the supremely awful AI. Co-op was fun with a friend, but a short co-op game with just as retarded guards isn't worth $60. It kind of sucks because I absolutely loved the first 3 splinter cells, didn't like double agent very much, and thought this one would be the great comeback. I was wrong.

Hehee awesome video.

Those 'tard eyes' will never fail to make me laugh :D

Great review, wonder what is going to be next.

RyoScar:
Spliter Cell isn't a good 'steath game' it's more of just a shooter with steath elements.

I seriously don't know what game your playing but Conviction is only a "shooter with stealth elements" if you suck at finding an alternate sneak point or never use gadgets.

Also the AI is only really retarded when your playing on rookie, which is same for all other games on the easy difficulty.

Kross:

tburke0:
All I'm asking is, if there's a rule that all posts before 12:05 are pulled, why not lock the thread? And yes, I waited until I could post in the first 5 minutes on a Wednesday to make my point... hurr durr...

Well, one part of the reason is that letting people get banned for things easy to catch means we have less people who ignore rules getting banned for harder to find offenses.

And the rule isn't that they can't post within 5 minutes, the rule is "no first posting". However, mods are human, and sometimes may ban before reading in the case of ZP threads. I think we've mostly stopped that these days though.

When you post something like "I enjoyed/hated this review" before it was physically possible to enjoy the review, then the only reason you are posting is to be a first post, or for something else equally inane.

If you post something legitimate and on topic (Random example of a rare post that actually contributes some discussion to a zp thread) then it doesn't matter when you post it. The end result is it is a very rare post outside of a problem report with the video that can be considered to be anything other then a "first post" in this context.

Also, if we did a 5 minute lock, we would still have the same problem with idiots waiting for the unlock to spam the thread in pursuit of a first post.

Fair enough, thanks for taking the time to respond.

lol plug

Great Review

"Turns out she was in another castle"

haha

I just couldn't get into the splinter cell series.

wow, I never really bothered before, but skimming the comments, it just seems to me 4.5/6 pages of people sucking Yahtzee off.

In any case, as has been said, Splinter cell AI is only retarded on rookie, and the "playing for you" is actually necessary on realistic. Find me a person who is not an obsessive compulsive gamer who can beat realistic without insta-kill melee and executions, and he is a god of video games.

That said, the plot was complete crap

Loved the last analogy. As fantastic as always.
Imma definitely getting my hands on Mogworld.

I always thought a waterproof camel would come in handy somewhere.

After all the positives I heard about this game, I was quite surprised to hear such a scathing review. Then again, enjoyment is in the eyes of the beholder. I haven't had a chance to play this one yet, though I enjoyed the first Splinter Cell quite a lot, someone told me this one was very different, and it sort of put me off, like it was completely losing focus on the whole "stealth" thing (which drew me to the series in the first place).

Good review, I agreed with pretty much all of it. I've always liked Splinter Cell games, but the last two have let the series down. Conviction was okay but it was very short and didn't really have the charm of the first 3. The shadows bug me the most; in the first 3 Splinter Cells the Shadows were very prominent... you had a meter to tell you how visible you were, but in the last two they did away with it. Why? The little slider was perfect... how all we have is Black and White... you're either visible or you're not, nothing in between, it's very poor. Also, in Conviction, as with Double Agent (which I thought was absolute dog shit) the shadows are really light, I have no freaking idea how Sam can hide in them... he really must be the master of stealth to hide in these piss puddles of darkness.
Ubisoft have changed SC too much from the old formula I reckon... it's just a bland 3rd person shooter now. Innovation is fine, but don't dumb the fucking game down.

Five foot eight?!

With all the amazing graphics nowadays details on flesh so specific you can see people's old acne scars. Why do so many games still not get height? Speaking as a giant this hurts my feelings. There's so many games where there are only two heights 'man' and 'woman'. Height can be very important to characterization.

oh yeah... and I burrowed the first title from a friend way back when and added splinter cell to my list of 'games I don't understand why they're popular and I don't like it' maybe it's because I had played the much Superior hitman games so much before that.
Or maybe it's because I think Tom Clancy is one of the worst writers in American history. There are weirdos trying to get people to give 'feedback' to their half-assed two chapter novels on message boards across the internet that I can tolerate more.

Another over hyped title that's been stupidly simplified for the modern gamer. Well shit, and hear I was actually thinking of buying it.

Great review, but now i'm left wishing for a review on Hitman...

WolfmanNougat:

Wait, you've gone through the whitehouse many times in video games and nobody's kicked up a fuss (as far as I'm aware, at least), yet as soon as a humble church gets involved in a virtual firefight, the Christians roll out the "Videogames are teh sacrelige" banners?
I guess Obama really is the only level-headed person left in America, then.

Also, I'd say the reason America is always being taken over in fiction is because they're so in love with themselves that they think everyone wants a piece because they are equally in love. Of course, this game being made in Canada kinda derails that idea a bit.

First of all it wasn't 'Christians' that got upset about that. It was the bishop of the catholic church overseeing that cathedral. Which is to say a handful of powerful Catholics, not all of Christendom. Please don't be bigoted and lump us all together.

For good or for ill, at this time the USA is still a world superpower. That's the simple reason that people in entertainment MEDIA want to take it over as opposed to say... Burma, Peru, or South Africa. Though these may all be fine nations indeed they are not political or military superpowers and without sounding callous if you told someone that a megalomaniac had gotten the keys to Luxembourg's bomb cabinet I think you'd hear from most of the world populous a resounding 'so?' The only other nation accepted as many as a superpower is China and can you imagine the 'unfortunate implications' that would take place from someone attempting to take it over.

I'm not sure what difficulty he was playing but B will not take-down ppl in every instance. If they see you they will shove you back then proceed to hit you with an AK47 to the chest which is pretty much a 1hit kill.

I agree about not controlling him, and disagree about everything else.
Remember how Sam's old co-worker is now a mole and is second in command to the evil leader? Are you trying to say she wouldn't just go "That Sam Fisher guy knows about everything." or something to that extent to get him involved? And did you ignore how it was the Vice President (who was in the pocket of the same organization that Tom Reed was) that was going to become President, not Reed? And I'm pretty sure Americans would like to take over their country sometimes, especially since the only foreigners were in the first level (with the possible exception of some of the mercs).

Turns out that the Princess was in another castle...

If I ever hated reading something... it was that... over and over and over; nice doing.

Godd review but i do disagree i like the game makes me feel kinda like an action hero in some ways besides whats wrong with killing all the bad guys anyway? :)

Yesterday I said to myself, "Hmm...I hope Yahtzee reviews Splinter Cell Conviction."

Funny review! Made some great points - not least of which is the enemies AI and speech routines, which was always a bug bear for me.

I personally dont find that the automation of the mark and execute mechanic is a bad thing - just a different approach to taking down multiple enemies. Loads of games coming out have this type of idea but its presented in "bullet time/focus mode" type excecution, which is kind of old hat. For me M+E is just an evolution of that, closer to Fallout 3's VATS system though.

The insta-kills automation is indeed a bit too uninteractive, but I suppose the focus was to keep a fast pace during the game. Though, I played older splinter cell titles with awful controls for things like taking an enemy hostage etc - hopefully there'll be a happy medium reached soon.

Great review! Ugh, can't wait for the book...

I for one, adore the Spinter Cell series.

Imagine my surprise and bewilderment when it seemed like Ubisoft seemed to forget it was supposedly doing Splinter Cell, and switched to doing 24- The Extra Silly plot.
I don't get the fascination with assaulting the White House, like you pointed out.

I'll be honest, it was a disappointment. Despite claims by the liars from marketing, I feel like , like you, that I was controlling Sam even less than in other games. The execute system was interesting, but kind of distracted from the real fun of these games; the fact that you can dangle your balls into a goon's coffee from the shadows and get away with it if you're skilled enough. And if you're not? You knife him in the throat, like I did many, many times in Chaos Theory.
Still my favourite SC game... of course I really enjoyed Pandora tomorrow.

Is it me, or are the single player campaigns in games getting way too short lately?

Thanks again for shining the cold light of criticism where I feared to tread, O Yahtzee :P

I dunno about the rest of you, but I loved Chaos Theory. Who cares if it was linear, it added challenge an open map might have removed. Meaning you had to sneak around, learn guard's movement patterns, look for cameras in each room before moving. It was awesome. And I got most of the way through the game without killing anyone. Avoiding the temptation of pulling people off of lighthouses or throwing them off rooftops at certain points...

ace_of_something:

First of all it wasn't 'Christians' that got upset about that. It was the bishop of the catholic church overseeing that cathedral. Which is to say a handful of powerful Catholics, not all of Christendom. Please don't be bigoted and lump us all together.

Though these may all be fine nations indeed they are not political or military superpowers and without sounding callous if you told someone that a megalomaniac had gotten the keys to Luxembourg's bomb cabinet I think you'd hear from most of the world populous a resounding 'so?'

Very good point, glad someone made a distinction there. I for one have seldom agreed with any bishop's stance on , well, anything. But enough of that- to Luxembourg!

If someone took over Luxembourg, they'd probably last about 30 minutes. That's about the time that it would take either the Belgians, the French or the Germans, or a combination of all three to knock on the door and ask if any sane Belgians would like them to lend a hand in getting their country back.

Good ole security EU cooperation tends to deter things like that :P

Also- anyone else enjoy blowing out the Vice president's knees in Conviction? Seemed like a typically Sam Fisher way of "securing" a hostile VIP :P
Laughed my arse off at that part :D

I've only played a couple of splinter cell games but i have to agree, i just couldn't get into them whereas i have only played one hitman game and loved the thing even if i did only manage to do one mission stealthy and for the rest of them by the end of it i would be running away shooting erratically.