[Rockin Robbins]

Hooray for TDK! I'll take door #2 as well. We have all sorts of questions to answer before game purchase is in order for me:

• What is the copy protection scheme? Is it a "service" which runs 24 hours a day sucking resources from my computer? Is it something that will use me as a pawn to carry on a personal grudge against another programmer who just happened to catch them in a previous criminal act? Will it interfere with the operation of unrelated aspects of my computer? I won't accept unreasonable copy protection.

• What are the equipment requirements? I don't mean "what does the box say." I mean what does it really need. Others can be the pioneers and collect the arrows this time.

• Wolfpacks? No wolfpacks, no sale. SH5 without wolfpacks will be as realistic as SH4 without water.

• I'm looking for meaningful improvements in gameplay. Sub walkthroughs with natural looking crewmember movements and "interactive" speech don't count. They're eyecandy and earcandy. As such they're nice, but are meaningless to gameplay. I want gameplay first, candy second.

• The trailer's emphasis on surprise attack by forces that should have been easily detected before, with a captain who is touring his boat when he should have been attending to his responsibilities on the surface, plus the absurd artwork depicting the sub surfaced within a hundred meters of exploding merchies and attacking escorts make me wonder about the overall design philosophy of the game. Do we have an arcade game here? Does Ubi understand the buyer of a simulation? Or are they selling to FPS fans only now?

• And of course I want to know how it plays. It's not like I'm not having fun with SH4 and have SH3 as well. Many think SH3 is even more fun than SH4. I'm perfectly happy with the status quo and would consider buying a proven, realistic, smooth-running Silent Hunter 5 in several months.