Edge: Though founded on the individual lethality of team Rainbow's bullets, Tom Clancy's videogame brand is latterly better known for spectacle – the name indicating a certain competence of bombastic action that mixes meaty gunplay with a smattering of credible tactics and near-future gadgetry. But developers have done little with the fiction.
It's hard to be inspired by it.
More often than not, Clancyworld is a towering carbuncle of forgettable acronyms, geopolitical name-dropping and technobabble, slotted together with the same nihilistic abandon as Star Trek's quantum torpedoes and subspace conduits. There are precious few memorable characters. Ghost Recon's Scott Mitchell is a spectral personality, while HAWX's David Crenshaw would struggle to claim greater charm than an unmanned aerial drone.
Enjoy the cathartic thrill of a great stealth exploit? Here are five games that defined the genre.
Probably the most important and influential ones:
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Thief 1
Splinter Cell 1
Metal Gear Solid
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins
Commandos
Honorable Mentions (Came before/Expanded on the genre):
Castle Wolfenstein
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Hitman: Codename 47
System Shock 2
Deus Ex
Bonanza Bros.
Sam Fisher has had some great adventures over the years, and MP1st rates 'em all! Here's all the Splinter Cell games ranked..
Easy. Single player? Pandora Tomorrow, Chaos Theory, The original Splinter Cell, Double agent, Dumpster Fires then on.
Multiplayer? Chaos Theory, Pandora Tomorrow, Dumpster Fire A, Then dumpster fire B. So on.
Blacklist had some really good gameplay though i just didn't care for the voice actor of Sam Fisher.
My list would be SP - Chaos Theory, Black List, Original SC, Pandora Tomorrow, Double Agent, then Conviction. Conviction is by far the worst game by far.
Never played the MP since i never cared for it.
Conviction was fantastic and definitely better than Double Agent. Can't argue with the rest of the list though.
Yep agree here. Conviction was always tagged as Hobo Sam but it was a fantastic game.
You forgot Double Agent on the Xbox/PS2//Wii its a completely different game to the Xbox 360/PS3/PC version.
It’s mentioned in the write up for Double Agent. But we just combined both of them into one entry since only the 360 version is story canon.
I actually agree with this list somehow. Chaos theory and then conviction. It’s very much up for debate.
Darren writes: "When writing this piece, the urge to play through Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory once again has been impossible to ignore. It didn’t simply just possess all the components needed for a great game, but combined them in such a way that made it totally irresistible to play."
