Splinter Cell: Killing in Motion

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Sam Fisher is back in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, due for release in spring 2013. Now Sam's the leader of the Special Ops teams that reports only to the President of the United States and he's tasked with taking out "The Blacklist," a group of 12 rogue nations that band together to create a series of escalating attacks on U.S. assets.

Ubisoft premiered the game this week at E3 in Los Angeles and the on-site gameplay demo hypes the new "Killing in Motion" feature that allows Sam to accumulate Execute points in hand-to-hand combat and use those points to tag enemies and then kill them all in one fluid motion.

Every time Tom Clancy's name shows up on one of these products, you have to wonder: does Tom have approval anymore over the brand? Has he ever played Xbox? If so, why doesn't he use the webcam on his computer to record a Welcome to Blacklist video that Ubisoft can show at these conferences? Last, most important question: do any of the kids who learned his name playing video games ever graduate to buying his books? That's the kind of thing you wonder about waiting in lines at E3.

And, oh, what lines there are at E3. It's supposed to be an industry-only event, but there's thousands upon thousands of people waiting to check out the games up close. Even the queues for least-popular games make the roller coaster lines at Six Flags look reasonable, so we've been lucky enough to flash the Military.com business cards in a few places and cut the line.

There's no on-site WiFi for the attendees and I've had no luck getting an Internet signal anywhere within a 5 block radius of the conference, so look for more updates over the next week or so.

Here's the live gameplay demo of Splinter Cell: Blacklist.

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