Posted 29 October 2010 - 01:14 PM
GoldenEye is WAY more than just a guy blowing dudes up. It's absolutely everything a Bond game should be, the entire action moulded and altered to fit the character, thus changing the entire face of gaming forever. It did absoluely everything that could possible be done with the available technology, FOR THE TIME. And still, the best parts of the game have gone entirely uncaptured by the army of imitators.
You get a mission in GoldenEye, you're told your objectives and let lose to acheive them. LIKE BOND. Bafflingly, all the other games persist in having you drip fed instructions or outright told everything. NOT like Bond. Thus, GoldenEye is the better Bond game. It's deeper than appearances. Most of GoldenEye's levels give you a choice of approach, route and direction, letting you strategise and pick the best approach, maybe clearing out one half of the level before trying the other. Thinking. Strategy. LIKE BOND. The imitators just throw you down a corridor with goons coming at you and tell you where you can and can't go. NOT like Bond, despite how pretty you make the corridor.
I could go on, but in the face of the fact that a lot of GoldenEye's best features have been implemented into other games (immersive FP action- COD, intellegent level design- Hitman ect.) and the fact that today's technology lets us do so much more than GoldenEye could ever dream just makes it all the more stupid that no Bond game since has come close to equalling it. And no Bond game has made you feel like anything more than a rat in a maze, a spectator. GoldenEye is still the only Bond experience, and even now is so old it's not quite passing anymore (after over a decade). Right now we have a museum piece and some lacklustre wannabes.
Saying that we should be more please because there's no film coming soon is insanity. It's not our fault there's no film, so why should we lower our expectations for the games? The game WON'T be a cinematic Bond experience, beause games are never cinematic. They're games. Interactive. Cinematic games are less interactive and therefor not good games. However much they pretend this will always be the case. See: The Force Unleashed, for example.
Linearity will always kill Bond games, because Bond is not a linear, straight line kind of guy. GoldenEye captured this and thus captured Bond, which no other game has. Until we get a game that recognises that it has to let the player both think and act like Bond in any given situation we won't get a game that can call itself a Bond game in any but the most superficial sense.
GoldenEye is, beyond question, the best Bond game. And while there was a time where beating it seemed impossible, that time is past. We're waiting for a worthy succesor. The technology is out there, the minds are not.
didn't Max Zorin survive when he fell to the water from the Golden Gate in A View to a Kill and Bond does here when he falls to teh water from a Dam who seems to be even HIGHER than the Golden Gate
?
