GameCube owners wanting to sneak around in a skintight suit with night-vision goggles and a silenced pistol need wait no longer -- and I'm not talking about the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is available already, and it contains more than enough tactical espionage action to tide you over until Metal Gear. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, your anticipation for Metal Gear might eclipse your enjoyment of Splinter Cell -- and that might not have been such a problem, had Splinter Cell been polished just a little more.

The comparisons to Metal Gear are warranted from the second you pick up the box, on which a top-secret operative, shrouded in darkness, stands ready with a pistol and glowing goggles. The comparisons grow heavier when you open the instruction manual and read that you're about to play as agent Sam Fisher, aged and tough as leather, brought out of semi-retirement to don a high-tech suit and sneak into the former soviet republic of Georgia, where two CIA agents disappeared a week before. Any gamer, moviegoer, or viewer of recent news can very well hypothesize what evidence trails, embassy-crashings, scuffles in the Middle East, back-stabbings, and oil-related international incidents might follow. And for the most part, story-wise, Splinter Cell will live up to your moviegoer expectations.

It's once you put the little disc in your GameCube and turn on the power that, presentation-wise, Splinter Cell starts to lose something. The opening computer-generated movies are marred by muddy textures. The first movie, which features a fake news broadcast, knocked the wind out of me in shock: the news anchor's lips were flapping so horribly out of tune with his words, his head bobbing so wildly, that I swore the graphics couldn't have been rendered by anyone who'd ever observed live humans in times of casual conversation.

Okay, so the front of the game's box doesn't say "Awesome CG Movies" -- it says "Stealth Action Redefined." If the box said "Awesome CG Movies," I could accuse it of lying to the player -- the movies look like they're from a later-generation PlayStation title. Ninety-five percent of playing a videogame about a super-spy is doing super-spy stuff, and in that regard, the stealth action is truly redefined. "Redefined" implies that "Stealth Action" had been "defined" before, and I'm guessing it was "defined" in Metal Gear Solid. Therefore, the game's self-proclamation as being "redefined" is, for the most part, correct: the game does differ from Metal Gear Solid.

On the widest level, Splinter Cell differs from Metal Gear Solid in its linear structure. Metal Gear Solid is an adventure game where you're welcome to suddenly stop progressing and backtrack all the way to the beginning, if you want. Splinter Cell is played out in a series of episodes, starting with a training session in the USA before sending you off to travel the world. On the narrowest level, Splinter Cell differs from Metal Gear Solid in its 3D over-the-shoulder perspective -- which necessitates much jumping and climbing and perception of space.

The training session will help you get your bearings straight and introduce you to your moves: walking, running, crouch-walking, wall-jumping, climbing, grabbing, choking and threatening guards, forcing enemy faces into retinal scanners, and even doing a split-jump that props you up between two walls. Using these techniques, you're to accomplish every mission the game throws at you in its nine campaigns: retrieve some data, question an informant, kill someone important, or simply proceed unseen and unheard through a series of platforms.

Being unseen and unheard is very important in this game of "Stealth Action." You'll learn to walk quietly on loud metal surfaces, and how to hide dead bodies in shadowed areas so they're not spotted. By remaining quiet and hiding all evidence of your existence, your cover is safe. If you slip up with regard to sight or sound, enemies will trip "alarms" that call more enemies to investigate. Some levels allow you three alarms before the mission is aborted. Some missions allow two. Some (difficult) missions allow none.

Silence and shadow are noble concepts, yet, in the context of the "alarm" system, they're sometimes pulled off questionably. For example, in one mission, you begin in a storeroom with one open door and one jammed door. The remainder of the mission consists of one long police-patrolled alleyway. The only way to accomplish the mission is to knock out one police officer at a time, and drag him into the shadows. You'll know by the "light meter" in the corner of the screen if the shadows are dark enough. What strikes me as odd is that I can lay a guard in the middle of a bright alleyway next to a dumpster, and no patrolling guard will see him: the light meter near the dumpster shows a rating of zero. Yet, I can drag the same guard all the way back into the storeroom, lay him in the second-most-shadowed spot, close the door, and leave, only to be alerted by my commanding officer minutes later that a dead body has been spotted, and the enemy alarms are increased by one.

Not all missions are as simple as reaching the end of an alleyway, however. When the game moves on to the oil rig segment, prepare to find yourself sometimes hopelessly confused. One of the earliest missions requires you to "trail" a technician. He's on the other side of the bottom of the rig. You have to get over there, and you have a time limit. The only way -- the only way -- to get to the other side is to find a protruding beam in the deep shadows of the lowest part of the rig, and use your slow shimmy climb. Stumbling around in the dark looking for that beam occupies more than half of the time you'll spend in this mission, and that's time that a more fun game could use to let you shoot things.

Now, people have said Splinter Cell "isn't about shooting things," hence the box's description of "Stealth Action." Still, the game gives the player more than enough firepower to take out an entire army. The SC-20K Modular Assault Weapon System -- "acquired after a few missions," according to the instruction manual -- is your reward for wading through hours of hiding and walking quietly, and it's a fine reward. It's a sniper rifle. It's a grenade launcher. It's silenced. It can fire "airfoil projectiles" that incapacitate rather than kill. It can fire various "sticky" projectiles, like cameras or electric shockers or bombs. It's the ultimate all-purpose spy weapon.

Yet the game doesn't give you any opportunities to use it freely. Take, for instance, the "Sticky Shocker," which electrocutes any enemy hit by it. It can also, as the game takes time to explain, be fired into a pool of water to incapacitate multiple enemies. Now, you may hear this, and think, "Cool!" You may be like the kid I saw at my local game store a few weeks ago, telling his friend about a magazine article he'd read about Splinter Cell: "You can do a split-jump and hide up above the enemies, and jump down and break their necks, like, bwa!" And yes, these things are true -- you can hide above enemies using a split-jump. You can fire an electric projectile into a trickle of water, zapping a room-full of bad guys. However, you can only do so when the game wants you to. When two walls are located dangerously close together and a guard is wandering dangerously back-and-forth through that hallway, it's your only choice to do a split-jump and wait for him to pass beneath you. When a trickle of water runs into a room full of guards you couldn't beat on a one-to-one basis, and the mission has supplied you with the SC-20K and several Sticky Shockers, you know there's only one solution.

The question is, are those solutions fun? Here's where I have to say, rather excitedly, "Yes." Though I don't share the kid at the videogame store's enthusiasm when simply talking about the game, I feel quite cool when playing a mission that requires me to sneak to a roof, rappel down from a chimney, hang over a window, aim in at a man in a chair, take him out with my silenced pistol, kick in through the glass, upload data from his computer, shoot out the lights, hide next to the file cabinet, and shoot three guards as they come in. While the mission and its solution are exactly the same every time, and while you'll fail several times when trying to perform as the game asks you to, each time you retry, you might be amazed (as I was) with your increasing skill and precision in shooting, climbing, and hurrying to your objective. As you become tired of each mission, as you become frustrated starting over, you begin to speed toward the goals, playing with a refined level of skill. And that is what it means to be a super-spy. That level of precision skill is what makes a super-spy; not fun and games. So, in the respect that it trains its player to be a ruthless, detached killer, Splinter Cell deserves my highest commendation.

Because, when I finally beat a level, I declare, "I never want to do that again," Splinter Cell is docked a few points in its score. Gamers play games when they want to. Challenges should feel like things we want to do, and want to do over and over again. Splinter Cell, with its trouble-in-the-Middle-East, ripped-from-the-headlines story, flows with immediacy. Each storyline segment comes up because it has to. Metal Gear Solid is like reading a novel by Tom Clancy if Tom Clancy happened to be a Japanese comic artist. Playing Splinter Cell is like watching a news documentary directed by Tom Clancy -- even if the news is presented with picture-perfect light-sourcing and texture-mapping, it's still the news. Episodic, dark, strict, political, and maybe even educational, Splinter Cell is enjoyable as such -- just don't expect an enthralling comic-book spy-thriller adventure, or you might be disappointed.