Multiple day-one purchasers of Splinter Cell: Conviction are seeing the game freeze on its second level and at other moments. Publisher Ubisoft tells Kotaku the issue is being investigated. Please note: There is a temporary fix. [UPDATE: Ubisoft resolves problem?]
The freeze has been reported by Xbox 360 players who have been playing the game with an Xbox Live connection. They reach the game's second level and it freezes. (The example above is from Kotaku reader SanjiX).
UPDATE: A Ubisoft representative tells Kotaku that the game should now work fine: "The issue has been resolved, you should now be able to play without further problems. You can download the update now and be able to play the game without it freezing or needing to be unplugged from Xbox Live."
Some of those players, according to comments published under Kotaku's review of Splinter Cell Conviction, say that clearing their 360's harddrive cache and then re-booting their 360, with Xbox Live disconnected, allows them to bypass the freeze.
On the official Ubisoft forums, a member of the company's tech support team walked through the steps to apply that temporary fix:
Steps to clear the system cache below.
1. Load to the Xbox 360 dashboard
2. Choose "System Settings"
3. Choose "Memory"
4. Highlight your hard drive
5. Press "y" for device options
6. from here just choose to clear system cache
Ubisoft does not have a long-term fix ready for gamers yet, but a company spokesperson told Kotaku "We are aware and looking into it."
At this point, the freeze seems to be related to a day-one patch issued for Conviction. That patch, according to an earlier conversation between Ubisoft and Kotaku, corrects a system-freezing problem I and fellow games reporter Russ Frushtick of MTV Multiplayer encountered while playing the game's co-op campaign together. As noted in my review, a frenzied moment late in the co-op campaign triggered an unusual alert message that indicated that the consoles we were playing on were running out of available memory (4 MB left, 3 MB left, etc.). Frushtick and I had been playing a review copy of the game on special "debug" Xbox 360s and could not be certain the issue would be relevant to store-bought copies of the game played on regular Xbox 360s. But Ubisoft indicated that the problem warranted the title update that is automatically applied to the game when a person puts Conviction into an Xbox Live-connected 360 today.
Kotaku will have more on this as we hear about it.