I'm a big fan of Sam Fisher. He's a cool guy. Michael Ironside gives our protagonist a certain gritty laconic sensibility that I find highly entertaining. Also he can sneak up on people and break their necks.

Whatever, because his latest outing is a stinking pile of shit.

On the PC, at any rate.

Let's be clear on something, before I go on: I know my computer. I built it myself. As a plus, it's well protected from the various and nefarious nasties that can attack you on these here intarwebs. I know pretty much what to expect from my 7600GT. Not the fucking world, in other words. It's a decent video card, but I don't expect HD resolution, you dig?

So why, exactly, does my game run into a massive and totally un-fixable rendering bug during any mission I care to start with? I can't even SEE fucking Sam, let alone try to play the game. All I get is a box in the top left hand corner with all the shading, and the rest whatever background/colour happens to exist in the level.

Fan-fucking-tastic, Ubisoft. Who playtested this pile of shit? Because I happen to know I'm not the only one who's having the problem. This is a Series 7 GeForce GPU I'm talking about here, right? It's not some fucking dark-ages rubber band powered technology. It's got the shaders, it meets the system requirements. So why is it that I'm going to EB tomorrow and exchanging it for the 360 version?

Quite frankly, what the fuck is this shit? Where do you get off selling this to people? From what I can gather, even if I find some voodoo-majik way of fixing this up, I can then look forward to a game's worth of shoddy framerates and further fucking rendering issues. Awesome.

Let's not forget that if I wanted to try and circumvent the problem by turning down various graphics options, the game chooses to randomly forget my settings. So I have to set it all up again every other time I double-click the icon. Fucking fantastic work, that.

Congrats, because the only reason I'm buying this game again, ever, is because I enjoy the fucking franchise. Which would be where your profit motive comes in, I suppose. Because you can be sure that the good majority of us will end up playing Sam's latest adventure in some form or another, even if we do end up buying it for another platform. Do you really care, at the end of the day? I'm inclined to think that no, you just don't give two shits.

I hear that Ubisoft Montreal is back on the job for Splinter Cell Conviction. I hope for everyone's sake that it's a better piece of software than the one I'm currently pissed off with.

A question Ubisoft: HOW THE FUCK, IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING FUCKING REASONABLE, DID THIS SHIT GET OUT THE DOOR? WHERE THE FUCK WHERE YOUR QA TESTERS? WHY DID THIS SHIT STILL COST ME FORTY BUCKS ON SPECIAL AN AGE AFTER RELEASE AND STILL FUCKING SUCK BALLS?

We love Sam Fisher. He's an awesome character. Chaos Theory and Pandora Tomorrow are fantastic titles. Why fuck it up so much? Why after so long after release, can't you fix the massive and obvious rendering bugs a whole bunch of people are having?

Thankfully, dear readers, I picked up the special edition of Shadow of the Colossus for half price at the same time. Fucking. Awesome. Game. If a little difficult for newcomers.

These guys know instinctively how to build atmosphere. Even meeting just the first Colossi is worth the price of admission.

So I guess I'm 50% happy, or something. But I still needed caps.

(P.S. Anybody who's even considering the option of possibly buying Double Agent on PC, don't bother. Get it on 360 for the same damn game, or on the original Xbox or PS2 for a game that actually tells you what the fuck is going on through proper exposition of plot. That's right, apparently they cut out the cutscenes in the 'Next Gen' versions of this game. Woot, you fucking fuckwits.)