Still waiting for my Splinter Cell: Conviction copy to arrive, so what do you think I should be doing? Well, I think I definitely should be playing the shit out of the demo. First time I went through it, I was a bit pissed it lasted only 20 minutes. Now that I’ve finished it 50 times over, I just don’t care: who would have thought it’d be so much fun killing the same 6 guys 50 times over?

One thing I noticed though, is that Sam Fisher seems to randomly comment on your actions “Not bad”, “I see the training paid off”, etc. If I simply grab a guy and pull him over a ledge (an action that only requires me to press a single button), Sam just might comment on that.

I think it would be better if Sam only spoke out when the player’s actions deserve it: say, if the player takes down 3 enemies in less than 3 seconds and without anyone noticing, for instance. These comments could also be modulated by the level of difficulty, and possibly on how well the player has been doing so far.

The tools needed to estimate how well the player is doing aren’t that complicated: a timer, and simple frustum, alert and kill checks. And in return, players would have the satisfaction of having a skilled assassin commenting on their actions; a formidable form of reward that seems underutilized in SC: Conviction.

That said, I’m itching for my copy to arrive: switching from pure gameplay to cinematic moves and back with variable granularity simply feels so great; the re-playability of this game must be insane.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I just witnessed the freakiest thing I ever thought I would in a game: after I finished cleaning up a room, I noticed movement on my latest victim. “Wow, they even added the nervous twitch of a guy who took a bullet in the head”, I thought, impressed. But as I got close, I watched in horror the dead guy – bloody bullet hole in the forehead, dead eyes to the ceiling – move his lips in a silent and never-ending litany. Pretty please, fix those facial animations: it’s just too spooky for a Splinter Cell game.

A friend of mine told me about a great analogy between grading movies and dives (please bear with me on this). In fancy diving, the process judges have to take into account the difficulty of the dive the athlete set out to do before grading it.

This is tightly linked to what I once said about under-delivery in business-related matters, and it very much applies to movies as well : as long as a movie delivers on what it set out to do, it’s a good movie, period. It means that it can be nothing more than an action-packed flick without a “message” and still be really good.

This does not mean that any meathead movie gets a pass, though; even action needs to be a bit original to be off the hook.