Tea Leaves

I picked up the new Splinter Cell game tonight at the Target. I’ve only played through the level that was recently on the Xbox demo disk, but I feel that I have to give Ubisoft a big wet sloppy kiss for listening to the forces of light and goodness and implementing quick saves, save anywhere and faster load times all in one fell swoop. This one act of kindness removes the only tedious and annoying aspect of the previous Splinter Cell games.

The quick saves are so good that I can even face replaying a level just to see if I can finish it with a higher “rating” (more sneaking, less killing). I can do this because there is no hateful savepoint system making me replay the level five times just to get to the end. Basically, there is no downside, and anyone who says there is cannot be trusted as anything more than a raving lunatic moron.

Bravo Ubisoft. Let’s hope other developers follow their lead.

Recently, Thurston Searfoss, author of the superb strategy game The Lost Admiral Returns, dropped me a line. He’s considering adding some features to the game — online play, a scenario editor, more special missions — and wanted my opinion as to which of those features I personally thought, as a gamer, would help with sales. I like Thurston, and I love his game, and so I wrote a detailed response to his questions. After sending it, I decided it made interesting reading on it’s own, and Thurston graciously said he wouldn’t mind if I posted it here.
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This month the Official Xbox Magazine included a demo of Jade Empire, the upcoming RPG that Bioware has been developing since they passed the KOTOR franchise to others. I mention this because for the last year or so I’ve had the following conversation with Pete a few times:

Me: This Jade Empire looks cool, but I don’t know about this “real time” fighting system.

Pete: Don’t worry, this is Bioware. Every game they ever made has a battle system that is turn based underneath but animated in real time. I will bet a case of beer that exactly the same dice rolling is going on behind all those kung fu animations.

Me: Well, I guess you know more about this than me, but those gameplay movies really look like a fighting game to me.

Pete: Nah, it’ll never happen.

After playing the demo, Pete came to me this morning and said “I might have been wrong. It really is real time, and it’s like a fighting game, only no fun.” I could only reply, “Yeah, but at least they tried something different.”
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