Thursday, May 27, 2004
I know I'm supposed to wrap up my Japan trip and post the last day's diary, but there are two things I need to talk about first.
Firstly, the third season of 24 is over and I've seen all of it. I'm going to steer clear of most spoilers here and only speak in very general terms, but even then the sensitive among you (like er, myself) might want to steer clear of the next paragraph.
Overall, this season DEFINITELY wasn't as good as the first two. It had some absolutely brilliant stand-out moments, yes, but it also had some awful ones (including the dumbest subplot since Teri's Amnesia). It wasn't balanced too well, starting off so-so, getting steadily worse, then suddenly kicking into high gear and staying good right through to the end, which redeemed what was looking like an awful season at one point. My problem is that they don't seem to know what to do anymore. The season wasn't balanced properly in that plots and threads were all over the place, and the ending seemed rushed (good, but rushed). There were also too many twists -- yeah, 24's all about twists, but like Metal Gear Solid 2... you can only be tricked so many times before you stop taking it seriously. And here, there were just a few too many twists like that. My biggest problem though was that whereas Seasons 1 and 2 were closely tied together, Season 3 has very little to do with Season 2, which will surprise anyone who saw the ending to Season 2. Still, the last 8 or so episodes in the season were awesome, and they had a lot of good plots and some great moments. At the end of the day, I'd say it's like the Simpsons just after their peak: Not as good as the peak, but still good, and though the overall quality is down, you still get moments that remind you why you love the show.
The second thing is that I finally played Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow online with Mukund, and it's awesome. I'll try to explain it quickly, because it's a fairly complex game. Basically, it's 2 on 2, except each side plays the game in a totally different way. What I mean is that one team are the Spies, and the others the Guards. The Spies play the game pretty much like normal Splinter Cell: You're controlling an agile spy that can climb over walls and set traps and sneak around in the dark, and you have to accomplish goals like stealing items or hacking into a system. The other team, the Guards, have to stop you. Unlike the spies, they play the game in a first-person view (like a normal shooter, basically) and also unlike the non-lethal spies, they have access to a ton of weaponry.
It's cool because it's really well balanced. Each side only has specific items -- the guards for example have motion detectors, but the spies have thermal detectors. The guards have frag grenades, the spies have remote cameras. And the levels are also tailored for both, with lots of crawlspaces and climbing routes for the flexible spies to play around with, but also a lot of security doors that only the guards can go through.
This all leads to some awesome gameplay scenarios. In the Museum stage, the spies can clamber on to the ceiling panels and sneak silently above the guards' heads -- except if they walk a little too fast, the guards can hear and track them. And even though in general the spies are non-lethal (most of the time the worst they can do is put a guard to sleep), if they sneak up behind a guard they can snap his neck -- and brilliantly, once you have someone in a choke-hold you can speak to them!
And you can't hate a game where you can do that. In the Cinema stage, I just escaped from Mukund the Guard's clutches by running into a vent. At the top, I saw a pipe running horizontally along the ceiling of the main lobby, leading to another cinema on the far side. So I got up, put my feet up, and shimmied across the pipe. Half-way across, I spotted Mukund searching for me way below. I stopped in case he had a motion detector on. He kept searching. He couldn't see me! So then I unhooked my legs to hang from the pipe... dropped down to the carpet... crept up behind him... and snapped his neck. He later said that not once in the seven minutes we played did he see me. Which is just really, really cool.
PS: If you're wondering where the comments are, Blogger's just introduced its own (better!) comments system, and I'm still trying to figure out how to activate them. Should be up by the next time I post.
Posted at 5:31 AM
