I was struggling all month trying to come up with some high-faluten subject about Gamer’s Guilty Pleasures. You know something really analytical, that made me look smart, about how Guilty Pleasures are all over gaming or some bullsh*t like that. Needless to say I was stumped. The problem is there is pretty much nothing intellectual about guilty pleasures. They usually fill our base needs for something and thus we are embarrassed by them. And then it hit me. What is the one thing in all of popular culture that has survived for decades filling the most basic needs of every male in the world? The answer is simple. Bond, James Bond. Sex, violence, drugs, gadgets and fast cars. That is Bond and also a pretty good check list for most guy’s (and many girl’s) guilty pleasures.

Now I am a massive Bond fan and proudly display my affection for the series by buying every DVD set that comes out for it. I would never call Bond in itself a guilty pleasure, nay, I believe people should shout their Bond love from the hill tops because, well, he is awesome incarnate. In fact it’s hard to find any part of the Bond world that is still considered a guilty pleasure. In fact despite being an amalgamation of guilty pleasures the original Fleming books are experiencing a sort of literary renaissance at the moment, the films are both culturally significant and still relevant (thank you, Casino Royale) and for a while Bond basically defined what multiplayer FPS gaming was. But GoldenEye was 11 years ago, you say. Yes it was. And so we come to my gaming guilty pleasure: James Bond games after Goldeneye 007.

That’s right my love for Bond overrides my need to not spend 50 bucks on a game that will most likely disappoint. In my opinion Bond sort of makes things better. You can excuse some crappy gameplay because that gameplay features James Bond. I practically forced Rev. Anthony to write a “Games Time Forgot” on Everything or Nothing and wept bitter tears when, instead of gushing over the game, he pointed out it’s pretty obvious flaws. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, there are a few games between GoldenEye and Everything or Nothing we need to discuss and that’s what we’ll do here. It won’t be all the games as I sadly never played 007 Racing or Tommorow Never Dies and while I have played the handhelds that have been released I’m going to skip over them to for the sake of length.

So let me set the stage. Rare is no longer developing the Bond games and EA has snapped up the exclusive rights to all Bond game development. Eager for the same success that GoldenEye had EA works on the next film tie in with a game based on Tomorrow Never Dies. Instead of making a sequel of sorts to one of the greatest first person shooters ever they take it in another direction and go third person. The game doesn’t fair that well which can be indicated by the fact that I have never played it. So we move on to:

The World is Not Enough


Having seemingly learned their lesson with the relative failure of Tomorrow Never Dies EA brought Bond back into the first person. They say mimicry is the best form of flattery but when the biggest innovation in a game is the fact that the N64 cartridge is blue instead of gray it doesn’t always work out that way. OK, I kid, this game actually isn’t that awful despite the fact that it is basically EA trying to be Rare. Actually that is the big problem with it. EA is trying to cram their Bond game into Rare’s Bond game and it makes for plenty of awkward moments. It is like if Bond walked into a place with one woman and ran into another one he had just had a very successful shag with last night. Awwwkward. You can actually see some of the stuff I love about the EA games in this one like more emphasis on being smooth and pulling off Bond like actions. However, it doesn’t have that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that GoldenEye had and while you might argue the ‘je ne sais quoi’ isn’t something that should ever be brought up in a conversation about a video game’s quality in the case of Bond it must be because in any discussion explaining Bond’s success it always comes down to his ‘je ne sais quoi.’

Anyway, the point is that Tomorrow Never Dies lacked it. Maybe it was because of the movie’s plot being stretched a bit thin but more likely it’s because by this time people were still heavily playing GoldenEye so the mimicry only emphasized the games flaws in comparison to the classic everyone loved. In my opinion it didn’t even control as well. Still I remember some good times shooting through this and the heavier dependence on gadgets made it a bit more fun and, in my opinion, closer to the Bond of the current films (now is not the time or the place to argue about gadgets in Bond). And in case you’re wondering, having plugged the game back in for this piece, it does not stand the test of time at all, which is odd because I think GoldenEye still does, thought it could just be my overly fond memories of the game influencing my replay. I also tried the multiplayer and it is really disappointing. The levels aren’t as clever as GoldenEye’s and everything just seems kind of overly complicated because of the whole control scheme.

So Tomorrow Never Dies doesn’t quite work out the way EA plans since it doesn’t instantly garner them a classic to end all classics (I seriously doubt the Bond franchise will be doing that again anyway). In this case I would expect EA to play it safe and wait for the next film tie-in in order to cash in on that. However, the next film wasn’t coming for a while so, surprisingly, EA got some balls and decided to make their very own Bond adventure, eventually releasing:

Agent Under Fire


I really can’t applaud EA enough for branching out and making their own Bond adventures. For one it let them move away from GoldenEye which by this time they must have realized they would never top and for another it allowed them to shove in as much Bond-esque stuff as they could in a game. The best part is that they realized that Bond is an it not a person and that they didn’t need Brosnan’s likeness (though his later return is awesome too). In a move much like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when Connery left the series and Lazenby took over, the posters and box art shroud Bond in shadow playing on his iconic image instead of a single person. Once you get in the game Bond is a strange combination of Fleming’s original description, Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. It actually works surprisingly well.

The game works surprisingly well too, at least in my opinion, especially since they figured out a better way of sorting through gadgets or at least the new generation’s controllers were better at sorting through gadgets. Of course my opinion probably doesn’t matter that much since I’m usually blinded by Bond to much to notice quality. Still I absolutely loved that the put in driving levels and included another tank chase. I’m easy to please, especially since most of the driving levels played more like kart racers with simple driving. Of course this is Bond so it works perfectly - cars should be able to maneuver around insane corners while shooting homing missles…duh. The game did get a little long and the plot was right out of one of a late Connery/late Moore/late Brosnan film when bigger was better, but all Bond’s need these things. What I really loved in this one was the fleshing out of “Bond moments.” If you did something cool, or seduced a woman or killed a guy in some way you got a Bond moment and these moments would unlock secrets throughout the level. It was a great way to get the player into thinking like an over the top secret agent and upped the replay value plenty if you’re a completionist like I am. Multi-player was fun but not as well designed as it could have been.

Overall EA still had some kinks to work out as the story get’s a little long near the end and while you feel far more like Bond in this game than in The World is Not Enough that whole ‘je ne sais quoi’ is still a bit lacking. By the end of the game I felt I was playing with more of a Rambo than a Bond. It’s a hard balance to keep though so you can’t blame them. After Agent Under Fire I was pretty excited for what would come next hoping they would perfect the sort of over the top Bond action you could see them beginning to get a grasp on in this game. So I sat with my fingers crossed until:

Nightfire


Veering away from their made up Bond look, probably because EA realized they were rich and having Brosnan’s face would sell more copies especially with the success of the current Bond film, Nightfire brings Brosnan’s likeness (but not his voice) back to gaming. Nightfire was basically Agent Under Fire perfected…or as perfect as the game could get. Driving was tweaked a bit better so that open city racing and car shooting was way more fun and easy to handle, level designs were moved from slightly boring to pretty clever with plenty of variance in style (from riding on a snow mobile to sniping from a moving helicopter). Plus the Bond moments in this game all seemed just so right. My personnel favorite being after a car chase, driving my Aston Martin V12 Vanquish off a ramp, across a river and through a glass ceiling all to land in a large pile of boxes or something. But there were also levels where you were forced to use some stealth or simply walk around a party and mingle with gorgeous women. Perfect Bond.

I have to admit I played the shit out of this game and in all honesty it might be my favorite Bond FPS, yes, even over GoldenEye which I always sucked at for some reason. The game was seriously just fun and full of that Bond ‘je ne sais quoi.’ This is a Bond game that feels like you’re playing through a Bond movie and it also hints at the third person games to follow by continually taking you out of the first person perspective. It might also be one of the best 1-on-1 multiplayer shooters ever. Or at lest I remember it that way since my roommate and I played the multiplayer against each other non-stop. Multiplayer levels were set-up amazingly well, mostly ignoring size and complication for smaller and easy to understand levels. My favorite was ‘Ravine’ (I think that’s what it was called). Basically it was two buildings on either side of a gorge only connected by a thin strip of land. This level made for some great distance shooting especially with the games surprisingly un-cheap hand controlled missile launcher. In my mind this was one of the last games to design their FPS multiplayer around smaller groups of friends playing together than massive online battles.

So I’m ecstatic. I’ve got a new Bond game where I love the multiplayer, love replaying the levels for ‘Bond Moments’ and can actually stand the not-as-stupid-as-it-could-have-been plot. I figure EA has it down pat, they couldn’t really do much better. So imagine my excitement when I first read about:

Everything or Nothing


As I mentioned before I begged Rev. Anthony to do a ‘Games Time Forgot’ on Everything or Nothing. Then, when he finally did it, he tore apart the controls but basically summed up everything pretty well. I didn’t remember the controls being as bad as all that partly because I played it on the GC where the controller worked better and partly because I was blinded by the fact that the game was basically a big budget Bond film. Opening credits sequence, big name actors and every frickin’ gadget you could possibly imagine. Really, all I needed to hear was Willem Dafoe would be a Bond villain, something I had been dreaming about for years. What EA did with Everything or Nothing was make a Bond movie (think Moonraker or The World is Not Enough not For Your Eyes Only or a Dalton film) into a game and I couldn’t have been happier.

I had always thought that Bond would function better in a third person perspective. The man is meant to be seen doing cool stuff. You don’t want to walk around being Bond (well, everyone wants to be Bond but you can’t be), you want to walk around seeing Bond do cool shit and third person allows for so much more cool interactive shit. While the ‘Bond Moments’ are gone you’re still rewarded for doing cool Bond stuff and can unlock lots of things by completing challenges in each level, some of which I am absolutely positively sure are impossible. While the shooting levels were fun (I love the lock on and then aim system personally) I loved the driving levels especially when on a motorcycle since you could slide it onto its side to go under low hanging archways or something. At one point you slide under a wall only to come out the other side and pull of a massive jump. Awesome. Repelling was also a really neat trick since you could do it at multiple locations not just in repelling levels but it did get a little repetitive. That is until I got to the sky diving level where you basically had to jump Bond off a cliff and guide him around ledges while shooting bad guys. Awesome. Stealth levels were also a fun touch and something that was never well executed in FPS Bond games, they got especially cool when you could use the robotic spider to crawl up behind enemies and explode. Awesome. Needless to say I said “Awesome” a lot while playing this game simply because of the cinematic feel it had during many points.

Multiplayer was actually an interesting experience in the game since it wasn’t an FPS. The was a co-op mode which was fun but had nothing to do with Bond but the battle mode was more interesting. You ran around booby trapped stages shooting opponents in a fixed camera angle much like Power Stone 2. It was fun but I was never sure how well it worked because I only unlocked a few of the stages since the others were unlockable only be completing some of the more impossible co-op mission goals. Despite the lack of true quality multiplayer, if the goal of making a Bond game is to make the player feel like they’re in a Bond movie than Everything or Nothing is really the pinnacle of EA’s Bond game making. This is incredibly obvious when you compare it too their next attempt at making a Bond franchise game:

GoldenEye: Rogue Agent


So remember when I said EA realized that they could never top GoldenEye? Well that was a lie. In fact the were arrogant enough to try to make a “spiritual successor” to the game by producing GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. Well screw you EA. I don’t need both one of the greatest FPS games ever and the history of the Bond franchise bastardized because you want to cash in on their names. Still I’m weak and I bought the game. I mean Oddjob was in it, what was I supposed to do? The premise was actually pretty interesting. Instead of playing as Bond you play as a Bond villain, who has a golden cyborg eye thing (thus the game’s name). But instead of actually playing as a Bond villain EA decided to instead make you play with other Bond villains not only creating an idiotic plot where Dr. No and Goldfinger are fighting each other but completely and totally bastardizing Bond cannon which has been bastardized plenty by the films and non-Fleming books and doesn’t really need anymore help, thank you very much.

The game was incredibly bland despite the fact that you got to play at plenty of well known Bond locales and really the only thing that stood out was the golden eye itself which had been installed into your characters head. The thing had powers like a magnet that could disarm bad guys or reflect bullets and MRI vision. But the AI and level design was so bad it didn’t really matter you had these powers and, much like The World is Not Enough, the want to be GoldenEye 007 only made the game’s flaws stand out all the more. Especially since the designers decided the game should play like the now outdated original. Multiplayer was just as upsetting, with cramped and poorly designed levels that seemed to ignore the fact that your eye had frickin super powers! You could set traps for other players which were fun but not enough fun to rescue any aspect of the game from mediocrity.

When will developers realize that cashing in on a name does not mean your game will do well, unless of course that name is Sean Connery because Sean Connery makes everything better, which, of course, brings us to:

From Russia With Love


When I read about From Russia With Love the first time I immediately checked my bank account for ten million dollars magically appearing because I was sure that that day was the day that all my dreams were going to come true. Only through the wonders of gaming could Sean Connery ever reprise his role as James Bond and no other gaming company could of pulled that off except EA. So thank you EA for being a multi-million dollar, money grubbing, soulless, corporate company, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Of course reality is often a cold dose of water and while having Connery back as Bond was possibly the greatest moment in mankind’s history having old Connery’s voice coming out of young Connery’s face was immensely creepy. As far as loyalty to what many describe as one of the best Bond films ever, there isn’t as much as you’d like but, then again From Russia With Love doesn’t really fit into a shoot em’ up format at all since it is one of the more down to earth Bond films.

I was immesntly excited for this game since I liked Everything or Nothing so much and figured this would be that but with Sean Connery and thus instantly better. Sadly EA decided to revamp the engine and the new one just seemed to run a bit sluggishly and not as smoothly as EoN’s. While the new ‘Bond focus’ mode was great, allowing you to target a gun in an enemies hand or perhaps a grenade on their belt, I think it actually hindered the gameplay more than helped it. Thought it was always hilarious to shoot a grenade off a bad guys belt and watch them look around frantically before being blown up. The rocket pack, originally from Thunderball, also felt a bit crammed in and the overall feel of the game just wasn’t as Bondian as EoN which is sad because Connery still brought that ‘je ne sais quoi’ he always had to the character. I did like the hand-to-hand combat more in this game as it felt much more like brawler Connery than I expected it to. Plus the cut back on super high-tech gadgets, thanks to the time period, made stealth and shooting much more important and more fun in the game. Multi-player was a big pile of third person meh despite the fact you could fly around in jet packs.

Really, any complaint you may have with the game can be easily dashed away by pointing to the fact that it was Connery voicing Bond. Plus, the entire retro feel for a game is something few and far between and awakened a hope in me that we would be seeing many more classic Bond films made into games (you hear me Activision?).
Of course this will probably never happen again since EA has lost the license and while From Russia With Love didn’t exactly sell poorly I doubt the sales were strong enough to make it worth while cutting Connery another check.



So we move forward. EA has lost the rights to Bond games and Activision has picked them up. Hopefully the will give the games their own slant and not try to mimic GoldenEye yet again. The next reported game will be a tie in with the next Bond film Quantum of Solace. I’m very interested to see how the new more, shall we say, hard edged, realistic Bond will translate into a game. Will they make him into the classic gadget laden Bond of old, shooting left and right or try to tone the game down too? Activision has an amazing chance to take the Bond games in some very interesting directions and hope they do more than just cram out film based games. I’d love to see more original stories and ideas coming from the Bond franchise in the world of gaming. We’ll just have to wait though since Activision hasn’t released a single thing on the Quantum of Solace game yet. As they say at the end of every film, James Bond will return…