Sam Fisher is a walking, talking action movie cliche in Splinter Cell: Conviction. The super secret agent set free from all of the restrictions placed on him by his controlling agency, using his skills for selfish reasons, driven-by-passion and revenge, et cetera, et cetera. Luckily he's a cliche that we'd really like to play as, or our delicate sensibilities would be offended.

Whatever it is, it's part of Academy of Champions' charm right from the menu screen. The cartoony soccer game opens with a giant castle where soccer legend Pele beckons youngsters to join is academy and master the fundamentals of the sport. He's got an effective sales pitch, too: if soccer's cool enough for Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher to play, why shouldn't you? Other Ubisoft characters also appear though out the game, like the Prince of Persia and Assassins Creed's Altair. If you stare at that opening menu screen of the academy long enough, Rabbids start popping out from behind the towers.

What Is It?
Academy of Champions is a soccer game similar to Mario Strikers Charged as opposed to a soccer sim, like FIFA. Players can jump right into multiplayer quick matches or spend time building a team in story mode. In story mode, players can choose to be a boy or a girl – though it doesn't make much of a difference – and plow through an entire academic year of soccer training. Different days of the week and terms of the school year determine what kinds of things you do in a day – it might be a mini-game to build fundamental skills like shooting, a dialogue tree to recruit new players, or a scrimmage game against another team – and throughout the year, you can buy skill upgrades and special items to bulk up your team in multiplayer mode.

What We Saw
During Ubisoft's UbiNintendo press junket, we were given about half an hour of hands on time with the title plus some Q&A with product manager Carsten Myhill.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is due out September 2009.

What Needs Improvement?
Separate Tutorial Would Be Nice: For players that just want to jump into a quickmatch without fiddling around in story mode, it'd be nice to have an optional tutorial mode that just walks you through the basics. For the most part, the game is intuitive, but there are things that need explaining and maybe a little bit of practice. For example, each characters have special abilities that can only be triggered with a specific button under certain conditions and there's a tussle challenge during games where players have to press a sequence of directions on the Nunchuck's analog stick to steal or protect a ball from another player. These subtleties aren't the kind of thing you can really pick up while you're playing and they can totally turn the tide of the game once you master them.

There's No Dating Sim: Some of the 30 characters you can recruit in story mode require social interaction. Maybe you have to successfully navigate a dialogue tree or maybe you have to win a certain number of games before you join. The social interaction definitely feeds into the school feeling of the game – like a primordial version of Persona 3's social interactions – but without a more detailed friends system like maybe a dating sim, I wonder if it won't get dull after a while.

What Should Stay The Same?
Saving Throw Versus Sexy: There's a power meter that builds up the longer a player is in possession of the ball. This meter fuels both the special attacks – like Sam Fisher's stealth mode or Altair's flying hawk kick – and the basic dodge or sprint controls that you need to get from one end of the pitch to the other. This creates a sort of endurance contest whenever you get control of the ball where you're trying to see how long can you go without dodging or sprinting. It's a subtle, but spiffy game mechanic.

It's Fun: Once you get the controls down and start seeing Ubisoft characters in story mode matches (Pele vs. Jade from Beyond Good and Evil – so awesome), Academy of Champions evokes both a sense of gameplay satisfaction and nostalgic fondness for familiar Ubi characters. Even better, the story mode appeals to the collectors by offering a ton of unlockable characters, items and upgrades over the course of the academic year.

Final Thoughts
I get the feeling a lot of hardcore soccer fans with sniff with disdain at Pele's character model and other types of gamer will steer clear of Academy out of apathy. But this is pretty fun game that's well put together. I was sold after my second match and I recommend it for anyone who enjoyed Strikers or is just quasi-obsessed with fantasy British school systems like Hogwarts.

He was getting to way too egotistical about the project and extremely difficult to work with...He was also asking for a shit load of money... He pretty much tied his own noose.

Granted, this is still unconfirmed and Ubisoft apparently hasn't offered an official comment on this rumor. US? We're on the fence: Ironside is the voice of one of Ubisoft's biggest franchises, which is why it's hard to believe they'd let him get away. (That would be a total buzz kill for Conviction!) Then again, because he is so important, maybe he's become "difficult." Watch out, though, Ubisoft. Piss off Ironside and he'll totally scan you. KA-BOOM!

Ironside's Ego Demands [Sarcastic Gamer Thanks, Drew!]

Mmmmmm..BRAINS!

In honor of Halloween, "everything by everyone" website NewGrounds held an art contest. The rules were simple, draw your favorite video game character as a zombie. They ran it for a month and received so many sick submissions that they actually expanded the amount of winners and prizes. I saw zombie Chun-Li with her zombie nipples showing and zombie Lara Croft licking her own zombie nipples stripper style. And these weren't even the winners!

There were two first prizes: The first went to Deks for his truly terrifying zombie Pikachu while the other went to Steven-M for his Zombie Mario. Other winners included a zombie Sam Fisher, the entire zombie cast of Chrono Cross and zombie Sonic, zombie Knuckles and zombie Doctor Robotnik fighting MegaMan a la Army of Darkness.

Check out all the winners at the official contest forum. I would highly recommend checking out the entire thread and seeing all the entries. Believe me, you won't want to miss those zombie nipples! Zombie Flynn De Marco

[via Destructoid]

Pitch black footage from the new Splinter Cell, in which Sam Fisher murdalizes some bad guys using the power of stickymines, whistling, and cannonfodder fish. PETA is going to get all up ons. Eliza Gauger

Exactly when will Sam Fisher stealthily sneak up behind you and garrote you with his latyest adventure, Splinter Cell: Double Agent? According to jiggly pin-up girl turned Fragdoll Rhoulette over at the official Ubisoft Forums, October 19th.

Not only that, but demos ahoy. PC gamers will get both single-player and multiplayer demos. 360 single-player enthusiasts? You're boned: you'll only get multiplayer.

Of course, when are these demos coming? The way it should be done — before the game's release, so you can inform a first-day purchasing decision accordingly? Of course not: they won't be released any sooner than a month before release, to help keep disinformation about quality (or lack thereof) high. Marketing, don't you know. Florian Eckhardt

New Splinter Cell Gets Official Release Date, Demos [1UP]

Please tell me this is some sort of glitch over on GameSpot and not a sign that they sold out news-space to advertise the latest Splinter Cell. All of the top stories have pics from the Beware Sam Fisher site, but if you click on a link you get an error. Surely GS isn't stupid enough to allow a viral ad campaign to infect their credibility. I have an email into some Spot peeps to find out. I'll update when I hear back. My fingers are crossed.

Update: Greg Kasavin, executive editor over at the spot, was kind enough to get back to me about the news page. It sounds like the news section did indeed have some fort of major bug. I heard they lost (at least temporarily) a day's worth of news posts. Kasavin said they are still trying to figure out what happened. Thank god it wasn't an ad.

News [GameSpot]

The game-freaks over in the Gaming-Age forums dug into the recently launched Beware Sam Fisher website and found some very interesting nuggets. The official site only has a few images, newspaper clippings and some audio, but a GAFer went through the site and found a slew of images that likely were set to be released in the future.

Judging by the pictures, it looks as if our friend Fisher has been kicked out of his covert ops agency, lost his daughter to a drunk driver and taken up robbing banks.

While I think the sharp twist in the franchise plot is great, I m not so thrilled with the site s use of poorly written newspaper clippings and really bad mock-ups of FBI Most Wanted posters.

The poster doesn t include most of the typical most wanted info and says Fisher was robbing banks in Phoenix, AR and Denver, CO. AR? AR? He s loose in Phoenix, Arkansas?

They only reason I m being such a nitpicker is that I m a police reporter in Denver. I just wrote a big story about the huge upswing in bank robberies here, which so far has lead to one arrest.

SC4: Sam Fisher a bank robber? #1 [GAF]