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GP: Can you please tell our readers who you are and a little bit about yourself?

Émile: Sure thing, I am Émile Liang and I am the associate Producer for Splinter Cell Conviction. So, in the demo for E3, Sam was looking for the killer of his daughter. Today we are going to be looking at a part in the middle of the game. This demo takes place in Washington DC and Sam has realised that his personal quest has been involved in a more complex world conspiracy which will involve Third Echelon, his former government agency. So today he has to defuse a bomb - an EMP bomb to be more precise.

GP: A day in the life of Sam Fisher?

 

Splinter Cell: Conviction has just become one of my top three most anticipated games for early next year. Yesterday I went across the water to Sydney to have some hands on time with the game and meet with its Associate Producer – watch out for my interview with him next week.

As a quick refresher, Conviction takes place shortly after the last Splinter Cell game where Sam Fisher is no longer a member of the Third Echelon (the government agency he worked for) and is on his own personal mission to find the people responsible for murdering his daughter. I have already gone over what is new for the series in my last preview, so feel free to check there if you need to catch up. This preview is going to focus on my hands on time and how it actually feels to be one bad mofo hunting bad guys in the dark.

The demo I played is the same one from Tokyo Game Show and took place in a warehouse in Washington DC. Sam has to first interrogate a guard, and then rescue a scientist that some terrorists are using to build themselves an EMP bomb.

The actual interrogation plays out very well. It is actually quite shocking to see how much more vicious Sam is in this game. During the interrogation you get three moments to interact with the environment. The final moment will always involve Sam stabbing his hand into something (the hood on a car, a tree stump or whatever else you are near). But the first two "interrogation moves" are context sensitive to what you stand by when you press the interrogate button. So for example if you are standing near a car Sam will knock the guy to the ground and kick his head against the bumper. If I had a criticism regarding these interrogation scenes is that they may hurt replayability. I played through this same demo about five times and by the third time I was bored with the interrogation and wished there was a way for me to skip past it.

The rest of the level, however, I loved going through again and again. The levels are built like mini-sandboxes, allowing for different points of entry and multiple ways to deal with your problems. Right after the interrogation I moved into a large room that had about eight guards moving around. The first few times I played, I was spotted and had to run around using the last known position feature to play cat and mouse with the guards. By the final time I played, it took me a minute to plan out what I wanted to do and set everything up. Once this was done, it took me all of five seconds to execute my plans and kill everyone in the room without them having the faintest clue what hit them. I also would like to point out that I did this while hanging from a pipe and did not touch the ground until they were all dead. This was one of the most satisfying experiences I have ever felt in a game. To say that I felt like "The Freaking Man" is a huge understatement.

In Splinter Cell Conviction, an investigation into his daughter's death unwittingly leads former agent Sam Fisher to discover he's been betrayed by his prior agency, the Third Echelon. For more information, take a look at our preview published earlier this week.

 

Splinter Cell is finally coming back!

While the series has been MIA for a while now, Ubisoft Montreal has been tirelessly working on the latest addition Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game picks up where the last one left off with Sam Fisher (the hero and badass spy) no longer working for the government and on his own personal mission to find the person responsible for killing his daughter.

We were recently shown a private demo of the game and let me tell you, it is looking sexy! While previous games in the series are all about hiding in the dark and using somewhat more traditional stealth tactics, Conviction is upping the ante. Fisher is not only more deadly, but quicker... a lot quicker. While stealth still plays a bit part in the game, the player will now have more action-based options. That basically means if you don't want to play smart and sneak around, you can just go in guns blazing and kill everything that moves.