I remember when this game came out in 2002. My friend Ed Byrne, now a lead designer at Zipper on the SOCOM franchise, and one of the first 'real' game developers I ever met and chatted with about working in the industry, at that point was working for Ubisoft as a level designer for this game.

About a year prior to this, when I was employed as a technology writer for Kaydara in Montreal, I had responded to a Ubisoft job at in the local rag (the Mirror) for 'a writer familiar with video games and an ability to incorporate geo-political content into storylines'. At the time, I had no idea that this job was for Splinter Cell. I also met another guy, Chris Smith, when I was living in Victoria who had worked as a contract level designer on this game. I often wonder how my game career might have turned out had I actually landed that writing gig.

And finally, my colleague Clint Hocking, well-known in the industry for his game design insights, was a designer and contributed to the script, and has since become a creative director at Ubisoft, instrumental in delivering the third Splinter Cell game -- Chaos Theory.

This is actually leading somewhere. It's interesting to me that I had so many close brushes with Splinter Cell, and knew so much about it's development, before I actually really immersed myself in the game, which I've been doing recently. About a month ago I picked up a handsome SC 'Collector's Edition' from Future Shop -- $79 for all four SC games (including the latest, Double Agent) and a bunch of schwag (t-shirt, belt, knitted cap -- yes I am a geek), which is a steal.

So last week I installed the original SC on my PC, thinking that if I'm really going to analyze what makes SC compelling, and if I'm going to understand how the concept has evolved over the last five years, I need to start at the origin. And I have to say -- the game is still a blast. It is a tight, tight experience. It brings some of my all-time favourite gameplay from Thief, Deus Ex, and of course, Metal Gear Solid. And it wraps it all up in this somehow very 'Western' sensibility that it's closest competitor (it's inspiration, some would argue), MGS, doesn't quite capture (understandably, since it is a Japanese game). Now don't get me wrong, I'm a huge MGS fan -- love the games -- but it's just refreshing to see how there is room for two great modern stealth-action games, each with its own personality and quirks.

Stealth games are interesting, in that they present a second-order level of gameplay above and beyond what you experience in straight shooters. Things like movement, body awareness, camera control, are heavily emphasized over the run-and-gun experience of a shooter. The basic mechanics of movement (keyboard/mouse input controls your view of the world and how you move through it) and combat (aim, fire, reload, etc.) are at their core the same as for a shooter, but highly emphasized.

The overall pace of the sneaker is much slower than a shooter, of course. In fact, it strikes me that sneakers inherently offer more gameplay value than shooters for the simple reason that you will get more actual play time for the equivalent amount of assets. Hiding in shadows, avoiding guards, shooting out lights, etc. manages to slow down the game, meaning I tend to take as much as two to three times as long to get through a physical environment than I would if the game was a straight shooter.

Sneakers really play on that primal desire to hide from predators, as well. And I suppose, you also get to feel like a predator, although (and maybe this says more about me than it does about the typical gamer) these games tend to always make me feel like I am one breath away from being discovered and taken out, which makes me feel like less of a badass than the typical shooter. This sense is emphasized by gameplay, which rewards avoidance over aggression, and in fact penalizes you for frontal assaults by making you physically weak.

Splinter Cell really built on the 'destructible lights' concept introduced in the Thief games (where you could use water arrows to extinguish torches, which created darkness and allowed you to sneak around undetected). I remember that the ability to shoot out light sources was one of the biggest innovations in SC, and it was a big deal at the time since very few game engines could handle this sort of dynamic light system. In SC, you use bullets to destroy light sources, which creates an interesting choice for the player, because you can use ammunition to take a more combat-oriented approach (killing guards) or to facilitate a stealthier approach (destroying light sources).

Just as in the Thief games, my typical tactic is to take out the lights and avoid guards as much as I could, but if I felt at all threatened that a guard might come back and find me later, I usually find a way to take him out. As much as I enjoy the exhiliration of getting past a guard undetected, I hate the fear that I will become discovered after the fact. It would be really interesting to see statistics on how other people tend to play these games and how they face these situations. Personally, I find neutralizing enemies without them knowing it to be a lot more satisfying they bypassing enemies without them knowing it. But maybe I'm just bloodthirsty...

A small update on my computer situation. Once I got back online with my laptop and did a bit of cursory googling for symptoms loosely matching "computer is blowed up", I came across a few useful posts from people who had observed similar behaviour from their own PCs. Generally speaking, the consensus seemed to be that if your system boots and gets stuck at the motherboard splash screen, this is indicative of either a massive motherboard failure, or a massive power supply failure. Neither condition really appealed to my deep sense of adventure.

After a couple of phone calls to hardware-savvy colleagues, I got a useful tip -- to remove and re-insert every piece of hardware plugged in to my motherboard.

I tried pulling out each piece individually, then rebooting, to see what happened, and voila! As soon as I pulled out 1 of 3 RAM DIMMs, my system was happy to boot up into Windows. Cleaned up the RAM, blew dust out of the slot, and everything seemed fine after that.

SO...the moral here is: keep your case as dust-free as possible, to avoid hardware Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure (sorry, Douglas Adams).

Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready for work, Hill announced, somewhat ominously, that there was "something wrong" with my computer. Resisting the urge to run over and see what particular component of my rig was on fire, I instead slowed down to enjoy the remainder of my morning preparations, as though through sheer force of will and calm alone, I could psychically reduce calamity to a simple virus warning or driver update message.

Alas, there really was "something wrong". My system would not boot, but rather parked itself dully at the motherboard splash screen, promising me, evilly, "Press DEL to Enter Setup". These few words alone are enough to send any hardware-savvy individual's blood pressure skyrocketing. Adding insult to injury, pressing 'DEL' didn't do anything. Nor did it do anything when I replaced the keyboard and tried again (laws of hardware troubleshooting say to replace cheapest link in the hardware dependency chain first).

Since I'm working out of a home office (admittedly, my choice, graciously permitted by my employer), not only do I have to do all my own IT support, it really becomes extra important that I don't spend entire periods of the day 'offline'. Facing potentially several hundreds of dollars of hardware replacement (mobo, CPU, memory, and possibly power supply as well), I elected instead to purchase a modest laptop.

And I was able to get back online within an hour of making the purchase.

I'll go back and fix up my gaming rig when I have the time, but for now, I will enjoy...no, appreciate...the simplicity of this little laptop, and the beauty of extended service plans, something you just don't get when you Do-It-Yourself.