Agent 47, who is obviously the main character in the Hitman games,  has always come across to me as a complete badarse. I mean, he’s got a barcode tattooed on the back of his head for god’s sake. That’s not the sort of thing that someone who goes to bed early during the weekend and has toast for breakfast does. Really, it’s not.

He’s genetically engineered, too. which obviously makes for a good assassin-type person and this week, Square Enix announced that he’s coming back in a new Hitman game called (drum roll please) Hitman Absolution.

I’m quite excited by this, actually. I’ve played two Hitman games in my gaming life: Hitman: Silent Assassin (PC) and Hitman: Blood Money (PS2): both are bloody good games but Silent Assassin is starting to show its age a little. I’ve reinstalled it and I can’t help laughing when I see Agent 47 dragging a naked corpse along the ground, the arm he’s dragging them from sticking out in a funny angle.

According to the blurb that’s on the Hitman YouTube channel, Agent 47 faces his most dangerous contract yet in Absolution: “Betrayed by those he trusted and hunted by the police, he finds himself at the centre of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world, in his search for the truth.” So I guess that means he’s going to garotte people then steal there clothes.

The trailer is tantalysingly brief and while it reveals very little about the game itself, there could well be some information hidden within it that points to when we’ll find out more information.

There’s  a snake wrapped around what appear to be Agent 47’s favoured silver baller pistol (is it entwined in the shape of the hitman logo?) and a simple barcode. But wait? Are they just random numbers at the bottom of the barcode or are they some clever code? The numbers are: 110706, seemingly random if read left to right, but read them right to left and you get: 06/07/11 – June 7, 2011 (if read the American format which is month/date/year) – which is the week of this year’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles. Has Square Enix hidden the date for more information in the barcode itself? Yes, I think they have.

If Hitman Absolution has brilliant moments like Blood Money’s sequences where Agent 47 had to make his way through the throng of people in New Orleans (I said throng, not thong) then the game’s already a winner in my book.  I love that part of Blood Money.

Should Sam Fisher, another hardarse stealthy type,  have anything to fear from Agent 47? I bloody think he does.