Up Is The New Down

You know the old saying “look before you leap”? Well, let’s just say I’m not a looker, I’m more of a leaper. I frequently irritate my wife by going out and buying things I want with very little shopping around or even research. My snap purchases drive her crazy, as she is a careful shopping planner.

So, the other day when I found out that HD remakes of the original Splinter Cell trilogy were available on the Playstation Store, I leapt. I didn’t just buy the first game, hell no, I leapt hard and bought all three titles, coming in at 8gb in size and about £20 in beer tokens. What with the hefty download size, and the rest of my busy life, I didn’t get a chance to play until the next evening after work.

Excited, I fired up part one of the trilogy, watched the opening cinematic, and started the training mission. As soon as it started, I realised that the “invert Y” setting was wrong for me so I popped open the pause menu and perused the options. There was no sign of the invert Y option. Puzzled, I returned to the game, only to realise that Lambert was telling me to look left at a light on the wall. Salvation; I was being impatient, and the up/down left/right calibration was about to begin. I looked left. I looked right. The next light was on the ceiling. I pushed down on the stick to look up at the light, and found myself staring at Sam Fisher’s feet. I released the stick, thinking the game needed me to let go to calibrate. I pushed down again. I was still staring at the floor. The only way I could get the game to continue was to push Up to look at the light, and then I could play. With my invert the wrong way around.

I’ll cut out the next bit to save time, but needless to say the next few minutes involved a lot of searching of options menu, repeated restarts, game reloads, starting new games and one hell of a lot of swearing. Beaten, I turned to Google to find a small army of fellow Y inverters with the same problem as me. The game does not contain an invert Y option. And neither do either of the other two.

I literally cannot play the game when every time an enemy comes around a corner I find myself staring at either my feet or the light fittings. It would be less Splinter Cell and more Mr Magoo in neoprene. It is possible that salvation is at hand, as Akshay Paul, Ubisoft’s International Product Manager made this comment on the EU Playstation blog:

Hopefully by next week I should be able to let you know if a patch would be made available to address this issue. I request that you be patient as even if there is a patch then the formalities, implementation, tests and arrangements for this in all 3 games will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks.

The part of that that worried me was not the delay, although that would put any patch right in the middle of AAA release date territory, but more the word “if”. If it is patched. Maybe. We shall see.

Either way, that was it, my nostalgic gaming trip down memory lane ruined by the fact that all I could see of memory lane was the actual bloody pavement.

Footnote: Out of interest, I’ve started a poll on our forum to find out how many people invert their Y axis. Vote here: The-Invert-Y-Question