When you're a member of the United States' premiere fighting force, life is a constant barrage of other people's problems. Sometimes, you're just minding your own business, protecting the head of a foreign government like you're supposed to, when some chump with a rocket launcher comes along and frags your Blackhawk. Okay, so maybe that exact example doesn't happen in the game, but we don't want to spoil the plot for you. The point is, judging from our hands-on time with the single-player
Sam Fisher's heading off in bold new directions in Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Xbox 360 and PC, but the current-gen hardware just isn't strong enough to support his open-ended new adventure. So instead of simply trying to strip down the big, open battlefields and daylight runs of Double Agent for the PS2, Xbox and GameCube, the developers took an unusual route: make a whole new game.
The current-gen Splinter Cell: Double Agent shares its next-gen cousin's plot - secret agent Sam Fisher goes
Splinter Cell shares the spotlight with Metal Gear Solid as the other major force in stealth-action gaming - and the more realistic one of the two. It's also maturing as a franchise. Sarcastic middle-aged super spy Sam Fisher has only grown more short-tempered in each of the series' first three entries. Meanwhile, the Splinter Cell gameplay has in turn expanded to a more open-ended, replayable experience that culminated in last year's Chaos Theory.
In Chaos Theory, Fisher's character was much
We've talked plenty about Tomb Raider Legend in previous articles, but what we haven't done is given you a level-by-level description of it - until now. We'll keep the spoilers and the small talk to a minimum, though we will warn you that Eidos has made us promise not to show you every level yet, so the screens don't always match the levels. Also, we do reveal a few story details here, so consider yourself spoiler alerted. Clear? Okay. Grab your gear.
The first level is appropriately swaddled
Oh Lara Croft ... so hot, so brilliant, so starring in awful games for so long. The original Tomb Raider was an opus of Indiana Jones-style adventuring, puzzle-solving, dual-pistol wielding, and tank-top-staring that put Ms. Croft and the PlayStation on the map. But after Tomb Raider III, things got rough for our favorite feminine plaything. Cliches began to snake in, the baddies began to smack of caricature, while attempts at innovation had the distinct reek of gimmick. The nadir came with
Supergiant Games' next project, Transistor, was playable at PAX East. Check out our hands-on with the game...
