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Splinter Cell: Conviction Teaser Coming Next Friday

The instruction booklet for Splinter Cell: Double Agent describes 29 different actions Sam Fisher can perform. There are individual sub-sections later on dealing with hacking, safe-cracking, mine assembly, email decryption, and bomb-defusal. Overall, the game uses every single button on the Xbox 360 pad several times over.

Splinter Cell: Conviction apparently uses three.

One's for Aggression, one's for Stealth, one's for Interaction. The idea is that these three functions can account for a range of actions as broad as any other game in the Splinter Cell series. Producer Mathieu Ferland argues that far from constraining you, the new approach "opens more possibilities". The example he gives is that if your instinct is to strike an enemy, using the Aggression button, Sam might not simply whack him but could reach for an object nearby and use it to batter him senseless. "It's not exactly what you wanted to do as a movement," he says, "but is exactly what you expected as a result." There isn't even a crouch button, and you certainly won't be doing any split-jumps.

It's not just you - we could do with some more convincing ourselves. "We realised it was possible to make things more contextual," says Ferland. The team - one big team this time, in Montreal, rather than a pair of teams working separately on single and multiplayer components - envisaged a concept analogous to a sports game in terms of its philosophy. Conviction would be a game of "scripted situations with unscripted solutions". "If you're in a café in front of a table, you can press the Aggression button to flip it over; if you press the Interaction button you grab the table and pick it up; if you press the Stealth button you hide underneath it," he says.

GameGuideDogs: Splinter Cell Conviction Walkthrough, Splinter Cell Conviction Walk through Handbook