I was in my local GAME yesterday (EB in America) and they had a PS2 booth setup with none other than a playable demo of Splinter Cell. I already own SC on the Xbox, but I figured some of you would be interested to know how the game has translated onto Sony' s box of tricks.

Controls:

What is there to say here really. I am one of the few fans of the Xbox pad (due to its similarity to the DC pad) and don' t really like the PS2 pad that much. However, I am in the minority and the controls for SC on PS2 have translated well. The layout is almost identical and players will have no problem switching between versions or controlling Sam Fisher. No complaints here whatsoever.

Sound:

Again the sound has translated well. However, undobtably the Xbox version will come up top here. The Xbox version has full 5.1 support whereas the PS2 version does not. A difficult area to review since I was in a shop and the booth wasn' t high quality sound wise. I wouldn' t see any major problems here.

Gameplay:

Short section here. This basically stems from the controls and as I said before they are identical. My only problem here would be that the graphical differences in lighting may make it harder to judge when you are hidden, which leads me on to......

Graphics:

Let me start by saying that I was extremely impressed by the early PS2 shots and despite initial doubts I thought the PS2 might just pull it off. I was wrong. If you have never played the Xbox version you probably wont mind or notice, but there is a big difference. The graphics are still good though. it is hard to pinpoint the differences exactly, but one glance and you can see that the PS2 version has had all of the polish stripped away. The goggles viewing modes (especially night vision) looks dreadful in comparison. The sharpness of the textures and graphics has gone, the Jaggies are out in force, but worse is the lighting effects. They have made a good stab at translating the lighting onto PS2, but it is far from perfect. You need to see it moving to fully understand. I walked past a fence and expected to see the fence shadows on Sam' s body. I did, but you would barely know it was the fence. It looked like a blocky, grainy, black mess. After the screenshots I was supremely disappointed by this.

Overall:

Despite the graphical issues this is still the same excellent game that Xbox users have been playing for a while now. Everything is in place and the graphics are still quite good. Just don' t go in expecting the same as your Xbox owning mates and you will love this game. A must buy IMO, based on what I have experienced from the PS2 demo and full Xbox game.

Thanks for the early review. I think I will buy it, just to check the whining of my Xbox owning friend... Splinter cel this, Splinter Cel that... Urgh... Sick.

http://webpages.charter.net/eae420/XboxvsPS2.JPG

Thanks you very much Rampage...

Sorry, I just spotted this in another forum and thought I' d post it here to better describe what Pierre2k was saying. I' m not the one that scanned it, just found it.

I was just kidding. Of course Splinter Cell on PS2 is gonna be as pretty as SC for Xbox. But the new level and the great gameplay have been converted quite nicely.

But still, I think it' s still not the game it could be for PS2. A lot of people will still be favouring MGS2 IMO.

Well, everyone has their own opinion.

You' d be surpised... At a lot of Dutch forums people are favoring MGS2 over SC for PS2.
It' s weird, but true.

Well that might be due to game difficulty? not played it much myself but MGS2 is mean' t to be far more flexible?

Yeah, the difficulty ranges from about ultra easy to ultra hard, so everybody can play it.

I have played the demo of Splinter Cell that comes with official Playstation 2 mag UK. And I must say I was terrible disappointed, for two reasons game-play and frame-rate.

The game-play is to quakish for my taste. Feels like a third persons game who wants to be a first person game. Sneaking and looking past corners and such felt cumbersome, not intuitive like MGS did.

The frame-rate is terrible. Maybe not terrible but it is lagging and far from full. And I would like to know why, the graphics are pretty but I have seen prettier graphics on PS2 that still manages to have full frame-rate. It should be against the law to release games without full frame-rate for consoles. Only varied frame-rate can be worse.

Well the framrate was never great on the Xbox version, this give it the feeling of a badly converted PC game to console. They probably feel extra work wouldn' t make a big difference to sales which will be great anyway.

To be honest, I never noticed framerate problems on either the Xbox version or the PS2 demo I played. I am usually a complete framerate junkie as well. I only playe the PS2 version for a short time though.

As for the controls? If you don' t like them thats ok, but I had no problems with them at all. They are identical though on the Xbox and PS2 versions.

I thought the controls were perfect! I never had problems with the framerate on my Xbox version... I haven' t played the PS2 version so I can' t comment on its framerate.