Quit yo jibba-jabbin!

Friendly NPCs don’t half go on and on.

The other day I had quite a long day out in company and I found myself thinking how nice it would be to have a Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls companion. Someone who never speaks unless spoken to, never “chats” or wastes a word on anything that doesn’t serve a tidy purpose, and provides a variety of services on demand with nary a complaint and barely a comment. People that carry your bags, go away when you tell them to go away without getting offended, and come back when you tell them to come back.

It had been a very long day.

Death to continuation!

This is why you avoid killing off satellite characters indiscriminately

I usually don’t pay attention to the plotline of Splinter Cell games because they can be a bit convoluted. Double Agent on the other hand, suffers the problem of starting too simple. So simple, in fact, it has as much subtlety as an adult entertainment version of EastEnders with a one-off wrestling theme.

I’m not even going to worry about spoilers. You would have to have the attention span of a gnat to think this is a spoiler, since it happens within the first 30 seconds of the game: in Double Agent, your character’s grown-up daughter is killed in the opening cut-scene. Not kidnapped, not murdered; hit by a speeding car. Why? Because your character Sam needs an excuse to Go Bad. Because you’re a double agent, you see.