New 'Splinter Cell' debuts at Sundance event
By Marc Saltzman
Gannett News Service
Preview of the Week: 'Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow'
Ubisoft is unveiling the next title in its "Splinter Cell" action spy series at this week's 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
"Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow" is the first major video game to launch at a film festival.
"Movies and games have the same goal — to satisfy and mesmerize audiences — and a good one inspires strong emotions such as tension, fear, elation and frustration" says Tony Kee, Ubisoft vice president. "Sundance is the ideal forum to display the game's many strengths to an audience that appreciates great story lines presented in visual form."
Due out in the spring for the Microsoft Xbox platform, "Pandora Tomorrow" will be based loosely on Tom Clancy's fiction, and will bring back the covert operative Sam Fisher as the game's protagonist. In this sequel, Fisher wages a one-man war against an Indonesian terrorist network.
Game play in the solo mode will be familiar to fans of the original "Splinter Cell" — sneaking in and out of buildings undetected; scaling walls; strafing across pipes and ledges; donning night-vision goggles when necessary, and eliminating enemies with silent sniper guns and other spy weaponry.
Ubisoft says the game's A.I. (artificial intelligence) will be very savvy and will even detect when Fisher is too loud.
New to the series is a 2-on-2 player mode playable over the Internet (Xbox Live subscription sold separately for $50 a year); gamers can use a headset/microphone peripheral to communicate with one another.
Ubisoft says this international espionage thriller will enjoy some of the highest production values in a video game to date. The Shanghai-based game developers employed cinematic artists, scriptwriters, voice actors and a composer to create the original score.
Information: www.pandoratomorrow.com
Game of the Week: 'Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel'
Computer gamers may recall the "Fallout" series from the late '90s — a trilogy of strategy role-playing games that lured the player into a post-apocalyptic world of deceit and destruction.
Console gamers can get a taste of this grim sci-fi universe for the first time in "Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel" (Interplay, for Sony PlayStation 2 and Xbox, $49.99, rated "M" for mature, www.interplay.com/fbos).
The premise involves a nuclear war that wipes out most of the world. All that's left is this "Mad Max"-like civilization of mutants, radioactive creatures and renegade pirates. Players must join the daring "Brotherhood," the closest thing to law enforcement this world will ever know. The object is to keep the peace among the scavengers and to prevent a mysterious device from falling into the wrong hands.
"Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel" is a more action-heavy journey compared with its PC predecessors. Players have access to more than 50 melee and longer-range weapons, including fusion-powered dual pistols, flame-throwers and incendiary grenades.
The game also will feature a cooperative mode that lets two gamers play on the same TV screen.
