Every now and then you get a little shudder, the flap of a butterfly wing, about a Splinter Cell reboot. I think Ubisoft is pretty fuckin' good at reboots. Shit, they're good at rebooting a franchise into a new genre in the middle of the series, as it's going! Conviction is a great example of this. But their Prince of Persia reboot, and then their reboot of the prior reboot - were both inexplicably good. So maybe we're entering into a new era of Splinter Cell, and what better way to, you know, get it poppin', but to tantalize the senses with a BBC Radio Drama(?)
I love Splinter Cell; it's probably "my" series. Shit, man - I even played through the whole co-op campaign in Conviction, and the only person I know who has even played it is the person I played it with. I don't replay videogames, there's always enough to play, and I went back to Blacklist, which I could never find a co-op partner for. The new Sniper Elite feels very Splinter Cell for some reason, you'd think it would primarily be about snipers at or above a certain echelon of skill, but when I played through the whole thing with our own Dabriel he played it like Sniper Elite and I uncorked more than a decade of Sam Fisher skills which were terrifying to behold.
Because it is my shit, I thought that I would be able to endure a novel set in the Splinter Cell universe and I was incorrect. I couldn't choke down Rainbow Six really, either. Part of it is just that I've talked to men and women in real life and I'm not sure the authors of these books have. But this isn't based on the older books, nor is it an original piece - it's actually an adaptation of Splinter Cell: Firewall by James Swallow, who has written a ton of Warhammer books and a lot of genre tie in stuff generally. Not only Star Trek but also StarGate, Halo, tons. If you aren't a dork like me you don't know that Sam's daughter Sarah supposedly died, but she didn't actually, and Firewall is about Sam teaching a new crop of agents… and she's one of them. I don't hate this! I'm sure it'll be fine. An audio drama is basically like a podcast, right?
(CW)TB out.
