Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

Xbox, Ubisoft, £39.99, www.splintercell.com

By Phil Weir

IT’S 2006. The Americans, thoughtful and kind as ever, are helping East Timor, the world’s youngest democracy, find its feet. This involves the establishment of a military base on the South-east Asian island to train the Timorese army.

But certain factions in neighbouring Indonesia’s government no likee the Yankee. They finance guerrilla militia leader Suhadi Sadono, whose first move against the Americans is to seize their embassy in Jakarta, taking military personnel and civilians hostage.

Time for the States to wheel out one of its top espionage agents — Sam Fisher, of Third Echelon, a shadowy department of the National Security Agency. This is the sort of secret unit that is more secret than the most secretest of all the secret units that ever were, or ever will be. Third Echelon? My number’s probably up because I mentioned its name and you too should probably dash off a quick will and make your peace with your maker because you now know that name too. My apologies.

Anyway, as we first encounter Sam, like Ursula Andress in a certain James Bond movie, he is rising from the surf on a tropical beach. Unlike Ursula, he does not want to get noticed so is not wearing a white bikini — he’s enclosed in his usual, de riguer SAS-type suit and balaclava. He’s off to infiltrate the embassy, his first steps on a long, globe-trotting road to subvert and defeat Sadono and what soon turns into an international terror campaign featuring scattered smallpox bombs, an ‘insurance policy’ rigged to go off if the guerrilla leader gets the chop.

Yes, plotwise, it’s the sort of stuff that will only have lecturers in international affairs in a lather, but with this new, improved Splinter Cell, as with its predecessor, it’s the gripping gameplay and quite exquisite graphics that matter most.

From the very first scenes, as Fisher flits from shadow to shadow between the shacks on the Jakarta waterfront, keeping out of the moonlight and the lamplight, the player knows he’s up to his neck in one very good-looking game, where stealth not speed is always of the essence.

Get too trigger-happy and the balloon will eventually go up. The greater the rumpus, the more serious the alarms that will sound, and the more body armour the enemy will put on, until they are just about invincible. But, by then, their level of killability will be academic, as a weary voice from back at HQ will kick in on your intercom announcing the mission has been aborted. Plus, when needs must, it pays to be a tidy killer. Leave a stiff lying around in plain sight and, five minutes after the liquidation, a voice will chime in with “A body has been found, etc”, and the mission will be aborted again.

As adventure games go, Pandora Tomorrow is demanding and cerebral. All-in-all, this is grown-up, challenging gaming which looks and feels like an an interactive movie and makes so much else currently available for the consoles seem like shallow dross.

Pandora Tomorrow also has an online option via Xbox Live, which Ubisoft claims offers the first stealth action multiplayer game.

VERDICT: A wealth of stealth, an immersive atmosphere, and looks right out of a travel brochure make for an unbeatable combination. You’ll be trapped inside your Xbox, but you won’t be clamouring to get out — you’ll be fighting to stay in.

100%

By Derek Uchman

THE wait is finally over! Unreal Tournament 2004 is here — and it’s a beast of a game that’s bigger and better than its two predecessors.

You want plenty levels? Well, there’s more than 100 of them. You want new and explosive weapons? Take your pick from a devastating list of bone-crunchers, including anti-vehicle rocket launchers, Spider Mines and the return of the sniper rifle (last seen in the original Unreal Tournament). Finally, if it’s new gameplay that floats your boat, then get ready to take the wheel of buggies, tanks, hovercraft and even airplanes.

Lumme. This game has got the lot. But it’s also nice to see Atari haven’t dropped any of the basics that made the first two versions such classics. The fabulous graphics, solid controls and the crazy, hectic and extremely demanding action are all still present by the skipload.

If you are one of the poor unfortunates who hasn’t had the joy of experiencing the Unreal Tournament series, then let us elucidate. It’s a first-person shooter, and players get suited up to become gladiators from the distant future.

Action is primarily online where you can take on up to 32 other saps, but there is also an extensive single-player mode to hone your skills.

Should you take the plunge and decide to take on others, it’s advisable to use Unreal Tournament 2004’s integrated voice technology, so you can shout abuse and taunts at other players. It will also allow you to bark orders at the bots under your control. All this splendidness will make heavy demands on your PC (as you would expect) but nontheless we were a little surprised to find you’ll need 5.5GB of disk space to install the game. There’s so much data involved that Unreal Tournament is available on DVD as well as normal CDs.

VERDICT: You’ve read the review, so you know what we’re going to say next. Buy it!

100%

By Richard Bell

THE old adage that the ‘best things come in small packages’ is particularly apt when talking about Canon’s IXUSi digital camera and CP-300 photo printer. An irresistible blend of elegant form and impressive functionality, the IXUSi is Canon’s smallest digital camera yet.

Diminutive it may be, but that doesn’t mean that picture quality suffers as a result.

Boasting a whopping four megapixels, the images it produces are sharp, full of detail, brimming with colour and easily withstand being blown up to 8x10 inches when 5x7 (or smaller) is what you’d typically expect from processing labs.

Not content with excelling at capturing still images onto its bundled 32MB Secure Digital card, the IXUSi also does a nice line in moving ones too. Up to three minutes of video and sound can be recorded at any one time with the press of a button and then played and edited via the camera’s LCD display or through your TV.

Available in Platinum Silver, Piano Black, Classic Bronze and Pearl White, the IXUSi is fashion and function in equal parts.

There was a time, not so long ago, if you wanted to have your own ‘digital darkroom’ a PC was an absolute necessity.

Not so now. Making home printing much more accessible is the compact and lightweight CP-300 photo printer that supports Canon’s PictBridge system.

Married to an IXUSi, the time from taking a picture to holding the finished postcard-sized print in your hands is well under two minutes!

It’s this easy: connect the IXUSi to the CP-300 via the mini USB lead supplied; select an image; press print.

But what if I want to crop the image or rotate it? you say. You can do that too, all from the LCD on the back of the camera.

Utilising a dye-sublimation printing process, the way a photo builds is truly a wonder to behold. First the printer pulls the blank paper inside and then pops it out the other side. The paper goes in again and comes out coated in a yellow film.

Back in it goes, reappearing very magenta, but with recognisable subject detail. Then it’s time for some cyan. A final voyage and the addition of a protective high-gloss layer completes the process.

The battery or mains-powered CP-300 can also be configured to be used with a PC or Mac and it will support any camera that features the PictBridge system.

VERDICT: Fantastic bits of kit on their own, marrying the IXUSi and CP-300 together makes for a truly portable digital darkroom made in heaven.

90%

n EDINBURGH’S International Games Festival returns this year, with the backing of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. It ties in with the Edinburgh Festival, and runs from August 8 to 22.

n NOKIA is working on the new N-Gage, and admitted they will sort the two design flaws which plagued the first machine — the humiliating way users had to hold the phone (side-on) to make a normal call, and the removal of the cover and battery to load games. The next version will have a repositioned microphone, and a slot to “hot-swap” games. Oh, and it will also be backward compatible.