The Game’s Bond. James Bond. Which means that you will be Bored. Majorly Bored. Agent 007 should be perfect video game character. “Kicking ass with the latest fun gadgets” is his actual job description. So it’s a shame that almost every Bond game sucks. Not even Blofeld got to betray Bond this many times and come back to do it again.
Domination is not nearly as much fun to play as it sounds. It has holographic 3D graphics and is based on satellite laser weapons and nuclear warheads, but Largo explains that it’s just a simple target game: shoot the things when they light up. That’s less gameplay than Minesweeper. It’s also badly designed, because it’s a crosshair shooting game controlled by a joystick. Which, if you’ve played twitch-shooters, is like trying to control a scalpel while riding a unicycle. And it’s still better than most real world Bond games. Why are they so bad? Because Bond might be perfect for great games, but he’s also so incredibly famous that he can sell shit ones. The Bond license has been shoved onto everything from text adventures to a side-scrolling “bouncing car getting blown up by spaceships and scuba divers” simulator.
I’m not exaggerating.
Rare Ltd finally realized Bond’s potential in 1997 when Eon Productions smartly licensed GoldenEye to a studio that actually knew how to make good games. The resulting product wasn’t merely good — it was one of the most important console shooters of all time, because it proved that console shooters could actually be good, which they weren't until GoldenEye.
One of the most successful N64 games ever made, GoldenEye combined accurate shooting with an unbelievably faithful rendition of the movie. (The split-screen multiplayer mode remains one of the fondest gaming memories for an entire generation
You didn’t just recognize parts of the movie in the video game, you recognized parts of the video game when you re-watched the movie.
Rare understood that simply printing “007” on the cover of a regular action game wasn't enough. Being Bond meant being smarter, sharper and simply better than everything else with guns. And it succeeded"
The game was stuffed with love for the franchise. Not only was it an incredible recreation of the titular movie, but bonus levels brought in Moonraker lasers, Jaws, the Golden Gun and Baron Samedi. It was originally meant to be the best multiplayer ever made, with a mode where four players could each be a different Bond — Moore, Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan. But, as further proof that the lawyers of the world are sucking the fun out of life, this mode was removed from the final game.
Unfortunately, Rare really did grasp the nature of James Bond — and moved on to the next mission without looking back. It turned down the chance to make Tomorrow Never Dies, instead building the spiritual sequel of shooting excellence in 2000 with Perfect Dark. Stuffed with stylish shooting and cunning gadgetry, it would have made the perfect 007 game. But Rare was so good it didn’t need the license to succeed.
From that point on, almost all Bond games were shooters, but they never mattered. Where Rare had been the elite double-oh agent, the others were an army of uniformed minions wildly spraying machine gun fire and missing the point. They took bog-standard gun games and put some Bond sprites on top. There was less passion and spark than a morgue during a power outage (except there are people who would actually enjoy that).
As the games got more desperate they tried to replicate Goldeneye’s success, the results were more disastrous than Dr. Frankenstein’s attempts to replicate life. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent literally put GoldenEye in the title of a totally unrelated shooter. The 2010 GoldenEye 007 remake rewrote the original with Daniel Craig, improved graphics, and blew more than that compressed air pellet Bond used to kill Dr Kananga.
You just can’t re-skin something from 13 years ago and expect it to be impressive. The remake was aimed at exactly no one: retro fans were aghast at the altered level structure and models, while contemporary fans were turned off by the incredibly unimaginative level layout and zombie-grade enemy intelligence. Like all Bond technology, the original GoldenEye game was revolutionary at the time but almost unusable now. A true Bond game needs to be smarter, sharper, simply better at being Bond than everything else on the market, and we finally have the technology to make that happen.
In the old days every shooter was the same game with different sprites. Now we can build entire game mechanics around the character. Batman’s Arkham City is the greatest character game ever made — everything from the graphics to the combat system flows perfectly from the character. Get it right and you’re unstoppable, but even one mistake and you’re in deep trouble. The Hitman series proves that we can build interesting worlds with multiple paths to reach our goal. Bond isn’t an Arnold Schwarzenegger shooting machine. Games which set him up against an endless wave of enemies don’t even know who he is. Bond is the elite. Bond is the best. The original GoldenEye understood that, offering amazing unlocks for not only completing the level, but doing it at maximum difficulty in record time.
A Bond game should be a razor-sharp shooter in a sophisticated world. We don’t need another automatic-fire grinding chore like Gears of War. We don’t want another hallway shooter, where we run down pre-set pathways and the most amazing cut-scene — with helicopters crashing through skyways as we parachute to safety — are just glorified loading screens. All we did was “Press A to jump.” That’s less gameplay than an elevator and with the exact same function.
Imagine replaying old levels to beat your high score (and earn more equipment), optimizing your strategies, trying out new things. Imagine working out how to beat your enemy in then fastest, coolest way possible, then realize that you’re not just controlling Bond: You’re playing as him.
Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet.
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