![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tirsdenHehe. Fun. Frustrating as all heck too. Here's some things I observed as I played through Splinter Cell (XBox) on Normal difficulty:
* Guards lose their hats every time you kill them / knock them out. And although you can move fallen bodies, you can't move the hats. They just sort of lay around as happy little markers of your murderous exploits. As for the rest of the guards you haven't knocked off yet, shouldn't they'd get suspicious as random buddies suddenly go missing, leaving only a few hats scattered around? Y'know, like, "Hey, where's that one dude who's been walking past that other dude every twenty seconds for the last several hours?" Heh. Nope. Apparently hats lying around and people vanishing are an everyday occurrence in the world of guarding stuff.
* Speaking of everyday occurrences, guards don't seem to give a shit about dead guard dogs with very obvious gunshot wounds. Dogs must come cheep. That and you'd think that the dead dog signifies that something dangerous is lurking in the shadows? Nah... probably just that damn American spy with the blaringly obvious yellow-green lights on his head and back.
* Head shots rule.
* Head shots suck when someone else sees you pull it off. And the game has bogusly high AI when it comes to guards knowing exactly where you are cuz you killed their buddy within their range of sight, even if you aren't within their field of view. And yes, I just said "bogusly."
* Why the hell can't these stealth games give you a character who can snipe decently? My mom can snipe better than Sam Fisher. And Solid Snake, for that matter. Different game. At least in Thief: The Dark Project you could aim arrows properly at long range, even if the aiming got shaky if you held it for more than a few seconds... makes sense your arms would get tired holding a bowstring back that far. But a gun? With a scope? GET SOME DAMN SNIPER TRAINING, VIRTUAL STEALTH OPERATIVES!!!
* The techie people who are sometimes at the beginning of the missions are fun to mess with. Gas them, throw bottles at them, stun them... what's silly is that anything at all seems to kill them, or at least knock them out. Even the temporary stuns knock them flat on their back. Oh, and the boss dude doesn't think much of you picking on the underlings.
* I found it amusing that the guards in the CIA building and the Chinese Embassy had a tendency to sound Russian. What really got me was the guy humming part of "If I Were A Rich Man" which is from Fiddler On The Roof and an extremely Russian thing to hum, like the guards had been doing in all the anti-Russian missions. Except the guy in question was smack dab in the middle of CIA headquarters. Oops.
* After the CIA mission I forgot I could actually kill people. Boy did it get easier after I remembered I could just shoot the sons of bitches.
* Wall mines are fun. *beep... beep... beep beep beep beep BOOOOOM*
* Most hated level: the "return to the Chinese Embassy" level, where you get to kill people (as opposed to the one where you don't). I had to redo so many checkpoints it was very difficult not to throw the controller. It's actually been a while since I've done that... hmm... Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Yup. LOL.
* Only level I had to go to the internet for help on: The one where you rescue the American hostages. I missed the hole in the floor that eventually goes to the basement. I spent a LOT of time redoing that checkpoint trying to see what I missed, or dying, or running around trying to figure out if I could open up any of the blocked doors. And I blew up a lot of shit with wall mines (or tried anyways). XD
* Most hated "minigame": the stupid garbage where you have to use the heat sensor goggles to try and guess what the keycode is on a door that a guard has recently opened. That shit is fucked up. I found it easier to kill the guard when possible while the door was open. This minigame happens to be part of the Chinese Embassy level I already said I hated.
* I found the Grimsdottir secret on my own. Yays. Funee.
* Jumping sucks ass. There's some sort of way to control a double jump (in which Sam jumps while standing next to a wall and then kicks off the wall while he's still in the air, propelling himself higher). But how you control the direction is, in the end, beyond me. I made a bogus game and tested jumping theories, which led me to believe that if you hit the left joystick in the direction you wanted to jump off the wall, it'd do it if you timed it right. Then I went back to the level where I was having trouble with it (the start of the final level, I got so damn tired of hearing how Cristavi is copacetic with the CIA). And I still managed to fall off the cliff a whole bunch more times.
* For what it's worth, copacetic means "completely satisfactory." I learned a new word. Now I'd like to forget it. I've heard it more than enough for an entire life time.
* The game I completed on Normal setting was actually a practice game I'd started the other day to hone my skills after not having played the game for a while. I did so well on the Practice profile that I just kept going. I think my other profile, called Riddick (*tee hee*), is still somewhere on the first mission. Maybe I'll redo that one and choose Hard mode. Like I need any more reason to hurl my controller through the French doors. >P
So. All in all, it's a decent game. I've been completely obsessed with it for the last three or four days. And I tell you what, it's a LOT easier if you invert the camera/look axis... most games I've played set you up where if you move the joystick up, you look down. And if you move it down, you look up. All flight simulators are like this, due to the way steering works on a plane. And it's really the best way for an FPS or stealth game to work, especially if you're used to it. The evil game designers hid the ability to invert the axis (which defaults to the WRONG SETTING) in the controller settings screen. You can scroll down two clicks to get to the "Inverted Controller" setting or whatever it is. Same controls for everything, just inverts the look axis to what is a whole lot more useful. Oh, and having a manual would most likely explain this without causing too much hair pulling... except I got the game used, and there was no manual. Note to all current and future game creators: include plenty of documentation on the actual game disk for those of us who are too cheap to pay full price for the game.
Heheee.
* Guards lose their hats every time you kill them / knock them out. And although you can move fallen bodies, you can't move the hats. They just sort of lay around as happy little markers of your murderous exploits. As for the rest of the guards you haven't knocked off yet, shouldn't they'd get suspicious as random buddies suddenly go missing, leaving only a few hats scattered around? Y'know, like, "Hey, where's that one dude who's been walking past that other dude every twenty seconds for the last several hours?" Heh. Nope. Apparently hats lying around and people vanishing are an everyday occurrence in the world of guarding stuff.
* Speaking of everyday occurrences, guards don't seem to give a shit about dead guard dogs with very obvious gunshot wounds. Dogs must come cheep. That and you'd think that the dead dog signifies that something dangerous is lurking in the shadows? Nah... probably just that damn American spy with the blaringly obvious yellow-green lights on his head and back.
* Head shots rule.
* Head shots suck when someone else sees you pull it off. And the game has bogusly high AI when it comes to guards knowing exactly where you are cuz you killed their buddy within their range of sight, even if you aren't within their field of view. And yes, I just said "bogusly."
* Why the hell can't these stealth games give you a character who can snipe decently? My mom can snipe better than Sam Fisher. And Solid Snake, for that matter. Different game. At least in Thief: The Dark Project you could aim arrows properly at long range, even if the aiming got shaky if you held it for more than a few seconds... makes sense your arms would get tired holding a bowstring back that far. But a gun? With a scope? GET SOME DAMN SNIPER TRAINING, VIRTUAL STEALTH OPERATIVES!!!
* The techie people who are sometimes at the beginning of the missions are fun to mess with. Gas them, throw bottles at them, stun them... what's silly is that anything at all seems to kill them, or at least knock them out. Even the temporary stuns knock them flat on their back. Oh, and the boss dude doesn't think much of you picking on the underlings.
* I found it amusing that the guards in the CIA building and the Chinese Embassy had a tendency to sound Russian. What really got me was the guy humming part of "If I Were A Rich Man" which is from Fiddler On The Roof and an extremely Russian thing to hum, like the guards had been doing in all the anti-Russian missions. Except the guy in question was smack dab in the middle of CIA headquarters. Oops.
* After the CIA mission I forgot I could actually kill people. Boy did it get easier after I remembered I could just shoot the sons of bitches.
* Wall mines are fun. *beep... beep... beep beep beep beep BOOOOOM*
* Most hated level: the "return to the Chinese Embassy" level, where you get to kill people (as opposed to the one where you don't). I had to redo so many checkpoints it was very difficult not to throw the controller. It's actually been a while since I've done that... hmm... Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Yup. LOL.
* Only level I had to go to the internet for help on: The one where you rescue the American hostages. I missed the hole in the floor that eventually goes to the basement. I spent a LOT of time redoing that checkpoint trying to see what I missed, or dying, or running around trying to figure out if I could open up any of the blocked doors. And I blew up a lot of shit with wall mines (or tried anyways). XD
* Most hated "minigame": the stupid garbage where you have to use the heat sensor goggles to try and guess what the keycode is on a door that a guard has recently opened. That shit is fucked up. I found it easier to kill the guard when possible while the door was open. This minigame happens to be part of the Chinese Embassy level I already said I hated.
* I found the Grimsdottir secret on my own. Yays. Funee.
* Jumping sucks ass. There's some sort of way to control a double jump (in which Sam jumps while standing next to a wall and then kicks off the wall while he's still in the air, propelling himself higher). But how you control the direction is, in the end, beyond me. I made a bogus game and tested jumping theories, which led me to believe that if you hit the left joystick in the direction you wanted to jump off the wall, it'd do it if you timed it right. Then I went back to the level where I was having trouble with it (the start of the final level, I got so damn tired of hearing how Cristavi is copacetic with the CIA). And I still managed to fall off the cliff a whole bunch more times.
* For what it's worth, copacetic means "completely satisfactory." I learned a new word. Now I'd like to forget it. I've heard it more than enough for an entire life time.
* The game I completed on Normal setting was actually a practice game I'd started the other day to hone my skills after not having played the game for a while. I did so well on the Practice profile that I just kept going. I think my other profile, called Riddick (*tee hee*), is still somewhere on the first mission. Maybe I'll redo that one and choose Hard mode. Like I need any more reason to hurl my controller through the French doors. >P
So. All in all, it's a decent game. I've been completely obsessed with it for the last three or four days. And I tell you what, it's a LOT easier if you invert the camera/look axis... most games I've played set you up where if you move the joystick up, you look down. And if you move it down, you look up. All flight simulators are like this, due to the way steering works on a plane. And it's really the best way for an FPS or stealth game to work, especially if you're used to it. The evil game designers hid the ability to invert the axis (which defaults to the WRONG SETTING) in the controller settings screen. You can scroll down two clicks to get to the "Inverted Controller" setting or whatever it is. Same controls for everything, just inverts the look axis to what is a whole lot more useful. Oh, and having a manual would most likely explain this without causing too much hair pulling... except I got the game used, and there was no manual. Note to all current and future game creators: include plenty of documentation on the actual game disk for those of us who are too cheap to pay full price for the game.
Heheee.
