Splinter Cell: Double Agent Comments by Kristan Reed

@freedumb

The fact the PS3 was meant to be out almost a year ago suggests to me the initial software line up should be immense, why there haven't been playable titles for the last 9 months is bizarre. I for one can't get excited about a single one of the games.

I only played the first game on xbox for about 2 hours and was royally bored by it. I read the ign review (again 9/10) of this which sold me completely so bought it thursday and it is indeed a fantastic game. Also going on the xbox360 official forum R6V is looking great too, the yanks have got a covermount demo of it on u.s. OXM, and they all love it.

christ november is gonna crease me

"Sorry kids, santa couldn't afford much this year!"

Liking this game a lot. The subtle change in the music as danger nears is beautifully done.

My only gripe, and I have this with all SC games, is that the gorgeous graphics have to be sacrificed for green screen half the time so you can see where you're going.

"Good. Good. Chaos Theory was the first Splinter Cell I couldn't myself motivate to play through... "

Wow..I thought it was only me! Clearly the middle age crisis isn't for another few years!

/bangs on Double Agent and grins

EDIT: AN APPEAL TO EVERYONE TO KEEP PLAYING THIS ONE ONLINE UNLIKE CHAOS THEORY WHICH WAS A DEAD DUCK AFTER A FEW MONTHS. IF INTERESTED ADD MATHM0S (o=a zero) AS MY FRIENDS DON'T LIKE SAM :)

Are the graphics really as sweet as they look in a few of those screenshots?(The shootout in that courtyard in particular)Because a few of them,to me anyway,make it look like one of the sexiest 360 titles in long while.
Any framerate issues,or god forbid screen tearing on this one then?

I've got no frame rate issues and yes it is sexy!!!!! @ Rambaldi, I'll stick you on my list later (My good one).

Nice review Krudster. This was one of the few games I bought before reading the Eurogamer opinion and I must say so far I agree with it. Very similar to Chaos Thoery and if the constant reloading from your last save to avoid detection doesnt bother you then its top class.

Tho I must agree with other forumites here on teh save/load thing, 10secs max to save and about 5 to reload on my 360.

Brilliant game, but way too short. In fact (it's probably my imagination, or the fact that I was utterely addicted to it thus destroying any true concept of that thing called 'time') I felt it was a hell of a lot shorter than any of the previous Splinter Cell games. In fact it took me less than a day to finish, which I very rarely manage, and that's including the constant reloading (and it was a lot) after being seen/shot, and the fact that I played it on the 'normal' difficulty level (being notoriously shit at games, I normally play on the 'easy' level, so that actually says a lot).
Not counting the 4 JBA missions (and the first and last missions are way too short to count either), there are only about 5 'proper' missions in the entire single player campaign. Fair enough, one of them (Kinsasha) is three parts long, and another is two parts long, but that is still ridiculously short for any kind of action game and was I felt that side of it was a massive disappointment.

It did make up for it though with the gameplay, and I'll definitely be replaying it again for the other endings, because although it was brief, it was massively enjoyable.

Don't agree with the save times though. Where you got a minute from I'll never know. A minute now lasts about 20-30 secs now apparantly...........
Fully agree with the loading though. Not only does the loading take longer than fucking OBLIVION FOR CHRISSAKES, the game also feels the need to load each bloody menu screen. I don't remember that on the fucking PS1 for crying out loud, why the hell it's like that on a next gen console I'll never know. I mean it's not like there's anything special in any of the menu screen anyway, just your usual bog standard menus.

*EDIT - gen

I am going to get a stopwatch out for the loading times, I swear to god they aren't past five seconds

@somaticsense

I agree. For anyone who's played SC before, Normal is too easy. After completing the first three levels in around 2 hrs (with all objectives) I've reset it to Hard.

Loading/Saving....

Saving: takes between 20 - 30 secs

Loading: about 5 secs if it's your last saved game, and 20 - 30 secs if you're picking a older saved game. Brand new loads are 20 - 30 secs. On my system anyway. Maybe different 360's perform differently?

I have always played SC games on the highest available difficulty, so I can't comment on how long the game takes on Normal. I've put about seven hours into this and I'm on the mission after the 2nd JBA HQ, however far in that is.

I also tend to avoid saving outside of the default checkpoints, so maybe that makes a difference to longevity too

@snick

that may be so but its still the launch. The 360 didn't especially have a cracking launch, none of it's games were must buys. A year down the line would be much better to see what the PS3 has come up with, rather than rushed launch games.

Splinter Cell on hard is a must. At least. Personally, I think experienced Third Echeloners shouldn't be starting on anything less than Expert, if you ask me. That's when the game is at its most difficult, tense.....and fun.

Well I just went and bought it,and after my turkey burger sandwiches I will begin playing....And with a 9/10 it had better bloody blow my mind,i'm skint as fuck now :)

With Colonel 'the former president in 24' Lambert popping up from time to time, there's even more of a '24'-style feel to it.

Error. Dennis Haysbert was only in Pandora Tomorrow. The other 3 games have all used the same (different) voice actor for Lambert.

I'm finding it very difficult to stay stealthy in the lighter levels! The snow bit was a nightmare!

I wish that there were more "directed moments", and the screen tearing is terrible (yet bizarrely not mentioned in the review), but it's a great game overall and the multiplayer is ace.

Sigh.

Another reason to buy a 360. Im depressed I can't afford one :[

save/load times, to my watch:

from the moment the disc drive closes to getting into your last save: just shy of 2 minutes
loading (from pressing start until getting back in the game): 8 seconds
saving (from pressing start, until back in the game, overriding an existing save): 10 seconds

I'm not impressed. If you didn't like previous games, this has NOTHING to change your mind. I enjoyed aspects of the others but found this dull. Also, if you've never played any of the others, you will struggle to get into this as it doesn't give you much of an idea how to do things. The tutorials are garbage too.

Screen tearing? That really surprises me. I'm someone who usually overlooks such things, but I'm still aware of them. I don't think I saw a single instance of it in Splinter Cell - and I've been through the entire single player once already.

And yeah, the reported saving times are a joke. Ten seconds *max*. Time to get your Xbox a service, perhaps?

I've had zero problems with excessive loading times.

Not very far in, very atmospheric thus far.

About the comment of being able to shoot your way through the three previous games: you could, but why the hell waste money on a SC game if you're not going to sneak around?

Just had a 3 hour go,was dissapointed initially,the first level seemed to drop me in the shit quickly and I had no idea what I was doing,but after persevering through that and the jail break it's definitely got a whole lot better.
Some of the graphical effects are bloody gooorgeous,textures and what not,and I especially loved the sneaky kills under the ice,great stuff.
Now just one question,how in the hell do I get to the captain on that big frozen cargo holder,I've looked at that 3d map 100 times,and I can't see how to get down to him :/...It's probably really simple.
edit:Ohh and clearly the loading and saving fiasco is console specific,saving a game for me takes 4 secs exactly,going back to that save after dying is no more than 5 seconds,the only fairly big load seems to be when you first start a new level,but that's no more than 20 seconds.Maybe it has something to do with how full your hard drive is.
Ohh and i'm getting slight tearing too :(

I really, really love the JBA levels. they're like beautiful little freeform puzzles

"I'm on a 14 (FOURTEEN!!!) meg line and I got some appalling lag in both the games I played tonight."

Common misconception. It's not how fat your cock is that counts, but how fast your jizz travels down it...

The 360's christmas season has finally begun.

But I must resist the temptation to buy this (along with pro evo, GOW, and all the other top quality titles) as this semester for uni is my hardest yet.

Cleary I need to do a YouTube video to prove the save load issue. I've even played it on two different 360s, with the exact same issue.

Also, I think some of you are misunderstanding my point.

Load last save is about 5-7 seconds. Fine - but often you don't want to load the last save or checkpoint.

Loading previous save takes - for me - over a minute to even show you the list of saves before you can select the save.

Saving the game also takes a bloody age. I'll literally have to film it to prove this.

For reference, my hard disk has 6GB left. I've no idea if this makes any difference.

For reference, my hard disk has 6GB left. I've no idea if this makes any difference.

I don't own a 360, but I heard that hard drive fragmentation affects games performance... Could it be your hard drive needs optimization?

Ok, that's quite likely, given the constant use over the past 11 months. How do you optimise the hard drive then?

Yeah that's definitely not normal. The loading isn't great, but nothing like that.

Come on, wasn't there once a dashboard update that gave this functionality?

I'm sure I remember reading a top secret way how to defrag the 360's hard drive on the net a while back,although I don't think its something MS want to be common knowledge,ooor the person who posted it was taking the piss.
But the reviewer's copy taking nearly a minute to save really isn't right :/ Mine has never taken more than 5 seconds.
Still need help finding that friggin captain if anyone can help :)

As for the save issue, I will say one thing: in case of both PS3 and X360, today's average high-end PC has TEN TIMES their RAM.

The average high-end PC has 5GB of RAM? I better upgrade.

@krudster

First time I loaded the game up, it sat at the loading screen for almost a minute. I figured it had locked up (although this didn't seem to be the case). After I reset the game and rebooted it, I had no problems at all. The disc's been in and out of the machine a good dozen times, and I haven't seen it hang like that since.

Perhaps there is some kind of flaky issue with loading... I'm actually rather impressed at how glitch free this game is.

re: defragging the HDD...this issue came up in relation to Oblivion where players experienced awful audio stuttering. It could be cured by holding A down during start-up all the way to the games start screen.

I saw it work first hand on my friends 360 but have no idea whether this works outside of oblivion.

I can see how with regular use the disk would get gradually fragmented but it's odd the MS haven't updated a Defrag option into the dash.

The article about defragging was on this very website a few months ago. If I remember rightly though it stated that you'd lose all your game saves and pretty much everything on your hard drive if you ran it.... :-|

>"The average high-end PC has 5GB of RAM? I better upgrade."

Apparently so. And this makes even harder to understand why MS & sony didn't include more memory.
After all, we all know how cheap it is to have large memories for consoles. I'm ure the extra 512mb or 1Gb would not have inflated the already cheap ps3.

@ The Bodybuilder

You owe me a new sarcasm detector. >:(

I'm a big fan of both Metal Gear and Splinter Cell, having played every installment (Also tried the first MG Acid game on the PSP, felt it was rather crap).

However, I wasn't really all that hot for this newest SC game, partly because of the whole "dark side" thing (Last time that happened was Jak & Daxter, and we all remember how badly that turned out...) and also because I expected it to be the same old, same old. Frankly, that would have totally turned me off.

But after reading this review, it seems that Ubisoft tried very hard to make this game feel different. After seeing this glowing review (and others), I'm getting it on Monday. I also thought it wasn't supposed to be released until the 27th, what a surprise!

>"You owe me a new sarcasm detector. >:("

Ask blerk. I'm sure he's got plenty lying around.

On the 'Trust' issue:

I'm half way in and starting to think this element of the game is exaggerated. All it means is that in each mission you have objectives to fulfil for both sides, and it's quite easy to fulfil them all. I have yet had to choose between one objective and another - just do them all and everybody's happy! Both my 'trust' meters are maxed out at the moment.

So far there has only been one instance, between missions, where you actually have to make a moral choice, and this didn't effect my meter much anyway, if at all.

Still, fine game though. I agree with the score.

Again, to clarify - it's not saving that takes ages, but physically accessing the save and load menus in the first place. Load last save is fine. It's when you click 'load' I have to wait ages for it to search the hard disk for my dozens of saves.

Maybe my hard disk is now so jumbled with save data from about 50 odd games that it's completely fragged to hell.

"I'm on a 14 (FOURTEEN!!!) meg line and I got some appalling lag in both the games I played tonight."

Common misconception. It's not how fat your cock is that counts, but how fast your jizz travels down it...

Best IT to normal person translation in some time. :D

Ok, that's quite likely, given the constant use over the past 11 months. How do you optimise the hard drive then?

A magnet? :p

re: defragging the HDD...this issue came up in relation to Oblivion where players experienced awful audio stuttering. It could be cured by holding A down during start-up all the way to the games start screen.

Iirc, this only resets the cache file that contains stuff for fast loading. Kick me if I'm wrong.

this might be an interesting read.

I loaded a previous save (on the same level) last night in JBA HQ 4 and it loaded at the same speed -- around five-ten seconds

AWESOME! Been waiting for this! The series needed a bit of refreshing (despite SC:CT being great) and Ubi have delivered as always! Fantastic!`

I finished my first game last night, and while the game itself is getting better all the time, there is still so so so much more they could be doing with plot, characters, themes, emotions etc. game feels hamstrung in crucial areas

Yeh, UBI has slowly been building into a AAA only title publisher over the past few years. EA, take note: It IS possible to make good non generic, non chav games and still make a profit.

Eighthours - "and the screen tearing is terrible (yet bizarrely not mentioned in the review), but it's a great game overall and the multiplayer is ace."

Bollocks. I know exactly what screen tearing is (about half of the 360 games have had it to my experience and first experienced it in Serious Sam on Xbox), and I've come across NO screen tearing whatsoever.
Maybe you are getting confused with framerate drops? Or maybe it's because I'm playing in HD that I'm not getting any probs, but then I would've thought that played in HD would actually make the problem worse.

On the issue of save/load times: I admit I didn't time it, I just came to the 20-30secs time as a compromise and an average based on what it seems like to me and on what times other people have mentioned. Although going back and checking it again, it only took me about 10-15 secs personally, although it will change from 360 to 360.
Load times though when loading a new level are stupidly long. They may not be a minute but are certainly longer than Oblivion. The sheer amount of loading is inexcuseable though, NOT what you'd expect from a next-gen console with a decent amount of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. GRAW had better graphics and more stuff going on in levels, but that game never had the amount of loading or the load times this game suffers, or any other game on the 360 for that matter, so there is no excuse for it. I mean it has to load each bloody menu screen for crying out loud. EACH MENU SCREEN!!!

"It IS possible to make good non generic, non chav games and still make a profit."

Maybe Ubisoft will try it one of these days then.

Bollocks. I know exactly what screen tearing is (about half of the 360 games have had it to my experience and first experienced it in Serious Sam on Xbox), and I've come across NO screen tearing whatsoever.
Maybe you are getting confused with framerate drops? Or maybe it's because I'm playing in HD that I'm not getting any probs, but then I would've thought that played in HD would actually make the problem worse.

I'm playing in HD and I've had tearing on plenty of occasions. Maybe you've just not noticed it?

Bollocks. I know exactly what screen tearing is (about half of the 360 games have had it to my experience and first experienced it in Serious Sam on Xbox), and I've come across NO screen tearing whatsoever.
Maybe you are getting confused with framerate drops? Or maybe it's because I'm playing in HD that I'm not getting any probs, but then I would've thought that played in HD would actually make the problem worse.

Not bollocks at all, I'm afraid. I'm playing it at 720p through component on a Samsung HDTV, and there's absolutely loads of tearing. Just stand still and turn the camera at a medium speed in one of the more visually demanding levels. This was also a problem in TDU and various other 360 games that don't have VSync enabled.