I go back a good several years now with Mr. Sam Fisher. I loved his first outing and absolutely just had to have more. Pandora Tomorrow came out and still my appetite for destruction wasn’t satisfied, so I waited again for my next chance to hang with Sam. Well, then the third game came around and I was letdown. I mean, it looked better and still had that same winning gameplay, but it just didn’t capture me and I didn’t like the knife they incorporated into the game.

Now Splinter Cell: Double Agent is in the works and I had those fears of “Will this be like the third game?” And then came a playable version of the game at E3…and man oh man is this baby sweet!

First off…the graphics. Splinter Cell has always been known for its outstanding graphics and I’m proud to say this version has blown the other ones out of the water. Those spectacular lighting effects that always dazzle the eye are improved upon if that is even possible. The past games were known for these great environments, but you rarely saw in anything but night vision green. However, this game includes full daylight sequences where there is no darkness to hide the world. Instead, you’ve got one of the brightest places in the world, Antarctica (at least I think it was Antartica). If you’ve lived in the ice and snow before, then you know how bright it can get when the sunlight bounces off that pure whiteness. Now imagine you are Sam Fisher and you have to sneak through this startling brightness with enemies on your sides coming for you. Now imagine diving under the ice, swimming until you are under an enemy, and then breaking through the ice so you can drag the enemy under and drown him. You da man Sam Fisher!

Oh, and imagine before that, a beautiful cutscene that isn’t a cutscene…a skydiving incident that finds your chute getting tangled, and it is up to you to wiggle free of the wires and to pull your chord. It is an amazing moment! And it is also one only you can play here as the version on the regular Xbox is just a cutscene you can watch, not experience.

I also got to see another scene play in full daylight, and this time Sam was without his outfit and looked just like any other balding man in his - errr - don’t know how old Sam is to tell you the truth. Anyways, this level showed Sam having to race to the top of a water tower to complete his mission. On the way he shot guards like always, but he also hid in a particle dust storm (a new feature for the game) when a helicopter leaving kicked it up. But before that I found Sam crawling under a vehicle, hanging onto the undercarriage, and letting the vehicle take him right into the enemy camp like a Trojan horse of sorts.

Here is what I love above everything else: the story changes based on your actions. When you get to the top of the water tower you can choose to carry that mission out and kill the guy (another double agent like yourself) or you can choose not to. Depending on what you do here the story will change accordingly, so when you play the game twice and make a different decision each time, you are likely to see the dead man later on in the game if you didn’t kill him and that could either be good news or bad news for you.

Rest assured when I tell you that this next comment is the only one I think I can apply to any game I saw at E3. There isn’t a single complaint I have against Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Now that really is an endorsement.