A while ago I decided to venture into old games and decided to start with the SNES, I bought one and The Mask was my first game on the platform and it was an incredible experience...

The game oozes personality, just like the main character of the movie and comic book franchise, plus the pixel art is beautiful even for today.

Even with its control problems and high difficulty (which I had a really bad time, by the way), I still had a lot of fun playing this classic.

It was a great gateway.

The transition period between the 6th and 7th generation of consoles was a weird one. Many publishers and devs still saw the previous generation as a lucrative part of their revenue, leading to a lot of cross-platform titles that were, in actuality, entirely different games developed by different teams. This is only one such example.

Our story follows Sam Fisher taking on his most dangerous (and technically illegal) mission yet: infiltrate a criminal organization, get in good graces with their leader, and dismantle their greater plan from the inside. Now Sam must balance performing criminal acts to stay on the terrorist's side, while leaking intel or making decisions that benefit the NSA. The story is framed from the recollection of Sam Fisher on the run, on a phone call with the leader of the NSA. You get different cutscenes and equipment loadouts between missions depending on how hard you sway to either side of the meter, or due to the kinds of actions you take. It's not a bad idea in concept at all, but the execution is admittedly mixed. I feel like you're supposed to know these terrorists a bit better than you do. The ending caught me completely off-guard because some kind of romantic relationship had blossomed right under my nose, apparently.

Having the meter too far to either side can lead to moments where you may feel obligated to do evil/good objectives to balance things out. Letting the meter get all the way to one side is supposed to force you to do something drastic in order to swing it back, but this only happened to me once in the penultimate mission. All it forced me to do was reach a certain point on the map before a timer ran out, and I shit you not, that same location also happened to be the exfiltration point for that mission, so any potential inconveniences this may have caused were null and void. I was done there anyways.

As for gameplay, it feels just like Chaos Theory, with a few additions here and there. Story gripes aside, it allows for some excellent setups for missions, bringing Sam Fisher's espionage skills into criminal operations. You've got a train heist, a prison break, a hotel that's under fire and intermittently losing power, and more. It's a strong lineup, lots of opportunities for improvisation and usage of all your tools. Still didn't bother to use the split jump even once though. That thing is still fodder for trailers and the back of the box.

It's still kinda surreal to me that this game is considered the secondary version of Double Agent, because it was made by the series' A-team, Ubisoft Montreal. The primary version of the game was made by Ubisoft Shanghai, the series' B-team, and released on the 7th generation of consoles. It may be more of the same from his previous outing, but I think Ubi Montreal did a bang-up job with this one. Now I'm off to see what the advent of the HD era brings to Double Agent.