Goldeneye 007 (Wii)

Wii, Goldeneye 007 (2010) game

How, is the question. How could you? How could you even consider remaking one of the best games ever made? Because it's a guaranteed bait to hook a sizeable proportion of the potential customer base, to bring it down to marketing basics: you stand to make a packet, even if it's a poor game, based on the name alone (after all, isn't this what licensed titles have been doing forever, and isn't this one of the most amazing things about the original that it defied the trend and turned out better than the film it was based on?). Why they didn't simply do an exact copy of the original with improved graphics and enemy AI, with maybe the odd surprise thrown in ('hey, that corridor wasn't in the original Bunker,' that kind of thing), I cannot fathom. I suppose there wasn't much creativity in simply porting and tidying up an old, established title, but I suspect most gamers, especially anyone that ever played on an N64, would have preferred a direct port. At least include an exact replica within whatever monstrosity you deem to be worth tarnishing the name of a golden-eyed classic! But no, they wanted to entirely remake it in their own image. Not only that, but even more commercial interests meant booting out the original cast (other than Judi Dench's 'M,' since she appears in that role across both eras), and replacing Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, Robbie Coltrane, etc, with Daniel Craig, the guy that played Tanner, and a new voice cast. It surely can't have been expense that meant they couldn't get these old actors back to reprise their roles fifteen years after the film, so it must have been purely motivated by brand recognition: Craig's the current Bond so we must have him.

I know it makes sense from a business point of view, and perhaps the market wasn't quite as nostalgia-heavy then as it is now, but to me, getting the cast involved would have seemed like an exciting way to inject newness into an old property. Instead, they preferred their newness to be of a lesser quality, and I don't mean the acting skills of the replacements, I'm talking about the gameplay itself. The Wii wasn't best suited to first-person shooters, as I discovered playing 'Red Steel,' the sword and gunnery game that started it all. Aiming directly on screen is fiddly and no substitute for the immediate control and range of movement of an analogue stick. It's at this juncture I have to come clean and admit I didn't enter into the spirit of the game entirely, expecting it to be a fairly poor knockoff, a cynical cash-in on the love generated by the amazing original (still amazing - I played it earlier this year, which is what prompted me to want to tackle this version). So I didn't play it the way it was intended, with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. And I didn't start at one of the lower difficulty levels (Operative or Agent), I went straight to the toughest one, 007 (although that's debatable as 007 Classic, where you don't have the ability to regenerate health by standing still, is back to the original's style of health gauge that can only be bolstered by finding body armour, making the game a different prospect from charging around trying to find cover before you die).

My rationale was that I didn't want to spend months going through a game I didn't expect to like, pootling through each difficulty level until they were all done, much the same as I'd approached both 'Goldeneye' and 'The World Is Not Enough' earlier in the year, though in those cases I'd already completed them plenty of times and there wouldn't have been a challenge in wasting time on the lower difficulties. In this case it was purely a time-saver and my confidence was up after going through those former games with flying colours. I also refused to mess about with the ugly control scheme based on the Remote and went straight in with the option of the GameCube's controller. These choices didn't particularly endear me to the game, it must be said, because 007 is quite tough, and when you don't know exactly what you're doing or the idiosyncrasies of a game, especially one you're expecting to be a certain way, it makes things less accessible and you feel more aggrieved at certain changes in gameplay and style. The 'Cube pad also reminded me why FPS' on that system had never worked very well, unlike the N64 which was renowned for the genre (as well as 'Goldeneye' and 'TWINE' the Turok series and 'Perfect Dark' stood out). The main problem is the C-stick is no substitute for C-buttons that give that precise and immediate control. Then there are the terrible analogue shoulder buttons that must have seemed like a grand idea when first implemented for things such as 'Wave Race: Blue Storm,' but are not helpful when you're using them as the trigger of a gun!

All in all the control scheme, though I got it as close to the original style as possible, wasn't entirely satisfactory. In the interests of balance I should say that once I'd completed the game I did go back and try the first Time Trial with the Wii Remote setup, but quickly reverted to a 'Cube pad within a few minutes! All of this speaks to the fact I found the game harder to play than I expected and when you add in the irritations and changes I wasn't very drawn in by the game. What irritations, you may ask? Grenades. I get it, they're there to prevent the player from hunkering down and picking off soldiers one by one, forcing you to break cover or retreat to avoid these explosives all the guards seem to carry. They can be extremely frustrating, especially if you get caught on a piece of scenery. You can't run backwards, either (yes, there's a run button, but more on that later), and turning could be slow, so I found it frustrating to constantly have to deal with these grenades rather than playing through in my own way. Restrictive is the word I'd use for the gameplay. Sure, 'Goldeneye' had a lot of levels that were mostly linear, as did 'TWINE,' but within the structure you still had a feeling of empowerment, for the most part. You knew, for example, when a guard was about to throw a grenade, if you shot him before he pulled the pin, you could go and grab the weapon and use it yourself - there was that Mario sense of freedom and experimentation, things weren't locked in stone.

In 'Goldeneye' Wii (as I choose to denote it), everything is very much a rigid, programmed, linear sequence. Even levels that are versions of the N64 game's most freeform parts, such as 'Facility,' 'Archives' and 'Bunker' (and even the 'Surface'), are tightly controlled A-to-B journeys. And there's a personal radar! At first I really didn't like that aspect, why would you need what is essentially a multiplayer component in a single-player environment? But I did come round to it eventually because you do need to know roughly how many red dots (I mean enemy soldiers), are in the immediate area, and more importantly where you are to go. That's the biggest culture shock, really, as the levels are so disorienting by their graphical choices and uncertain options that without a map and compass it's easy to get lost, even though they are pretty linear: the smoke effects and sense of confusion of a battlefield are well worked, I will say that, but too many of the levels are so incredibly dark that if you play during the daytime you have to turn the brightness level to maximum and still it can be hard to see! It doesn't seem to affect whether enemies see you, either, nor is there the ability to shoot out lights (as in 'PD'), so it's not like they were taking 'Splinter Cell' and such, and bringing that side of gameplay into the tactics. Granted, a lot of it is knowing the levels, and if you play through on the easier difficulties that's how you learn the layouts and become familiar with where to go and what to do, so I had made it more tricky than I needed to, so getting bottlenecked and dying over and over again before eventually getting past a squad, was partly my own fault for trying to get through the game quicker.

Another issue is really just a common one in all games: consistency. Sometimes you can climb up or over something, other times the game won't let you, but I'm not going to rag on that too much since it's a common trope of games, and total freedom would be very difficult to achieve, especially within the confines of a story-led experience. The levels tend to be quite long, at least for first exposure, many taking over an hour on my first attempt so I couldn't imagine how it would be possible to get even close to the Time Trial times, giving me a sense of my own lack of ability. But again, knowledge is power... The addition of Checkpoints where progress is automatically saved, made things easier and the length of the levels made it seem an obvious necessity. But there were still other irritants to get my goat. For instance, yes, it's ridiculous that Bond (or anyone for that matter), can lug ten different weapons around with him, so in the interests of realism the makers limit the player to three in this game - you can't drop your PP9 Silenced Pistol, naturally, which means you have to decide which two weapons you find along the way are most germane to that particular point of a given mission. Do I really need a Sniper Rifle or is an automatic a better choice here? It's supposed to give you a sense of tactics in the real world where you can only carry so much, but it adds another layer of restriction on proceedings, though I did come to accept it as I got used to the idea.

Another bizarre concession to realism is that in certain levels you're forced to walk around at a snail's pace because in a public area people would be alarmed if someone started running around at top speed, I suppose. But in both the 'Nightclub' and the start of the 'Carrier' level it's supremely frustrating (especially in the Time Trials), when you've got used to slapping the A-button for a burst of running speed (a necessary addition to the style of gameplay), to be limited to ambling along! And while we're on that subject, the fact you have to sit through the cutscenes... Every. Single... Tiiiiiiiiiiime... is hair-tearingly annoying. Even the original let you skip them and they were short back then. These can go on for minutes and it's just another example of the lack of intuition for how people are going to play. It's possible it was done for technical reasons, that the game couldn't cope if you jumped straight to the action, or, and I hope this isn't the case, it was deliberate so as to increase your coiled springiness that when you finally get past a scene you want to burst out at top speed. I suspect the technical side, though - these weren't Rare coders, after all. The other thing that gets a bit old is how everything is geared towards throwing you into things, in the spirit of the Craig-era films where the camera was whirling around until you felt like you were right there in the midst of the action, taking part, rather than watching it from a superior vantage point. Again, I see why they were doing all this, and it makes more sense from the perspective of trying to integrate the Wii's motion sensitive, gesture-based controls, but it's all gimmick, mostly like the Wii itself.

For most of the time I was playing I felt it was an average game, not one that I hated or was a painful chore to get through, so in that sense I was thinking 'two stars plus' as a rating (if I did 'pluses'), just under three stars, the benchmark of a good game. Like a few titles I've played in recent years (I think of 'Jet Force Gemini' and 'TWINE' as good examples), it was really once the main game was over that I started to enjoy it more and get into it - in this case the Time Trials. Where once I couldn't imagine getting close to the draconian time limits, I began to see that with careful use of speed and picking your fights, you could rush through many areas, which actually made the game a little easier, rather than getting bogged down in firefights before progressing. Learning a new way of playing and feeling more empowered through knowing what you were doing and where you were going gave the game a new lease of life and pushed it into the three star category for me. I'm not going to say it's anywhere close to being a great game as the original was, and still is, but it's a game I'll take fond memories of, and I can imagine in a decade or so coming back to it again. I'm tempted to try the 007 Classic mode if I can get through all the Time Trials, but the multiplayer is something I'm not likely to play, not having internet buddies, and the fact there's not a single Bot to play against, which is criminal when you think that as far back as 'TWINE'  and 'PD' they were able to have AI-controlled opponents.

There were occasional technical issues (one that stands out is in the 'Bunker' where if you crouch through a doorway at the top you can fall through into a part of the lower levels, but can't progress), but the artificial intelligence was certainly of a higher standard, enemies able to run and jump for cover, not staying in one place, but dashing around, firing as they went, even shooting from cover. One of the things that grew on me as I came to accept the game was the takedown option where you use a button combination to punch out an opponent silently, but it also meant the enemy could do the same to you. Unlike the slapping in 'PD' (one of the worst additions in that game!), which made the screen blur sickeningly, there's only the roller-coaster action of attack seen through your eyes, which is over in seconds, and it made a useful option in your armoury, for example, if you ran out of ammo or were suddenly surprised. There is still a partial emphasis on staying quiet and taking out the enemy silently where you can, though headshots can sometimes fail to be fatal, which is bizarre, but I think it's more to do with the inaccuracy of the game - sometimes you can be shooting at the enemy, aiming at them, but hitting the scenery in front of you, so it's far from perfect (though it is dark).

I didn't like the updating of the story, along with all the other changes, because you go in expecting 'Goldeneye' and that's what you want. Early on among my first thoughts were that it was a military grade slog, though I came to understand, in the ways I've highlighted above, that there were good things about the game, and while the early experiences were more of a challenge to my patience and forbearance than my ability, I came through and out the other side to be fairly positive about the game. I could even go so far as to say some parts were better than the original (not many, but the 'Statue' level in the first game was fairly basic, whereas it was a bit more involving in this version). But for every good thing there was something that annoyed - what about that screen blurring when you change clips in your weapon? Again, an attempt at realism, since your eyes wouldn't be focused on the background if you're looking down at a weapon, but it was just one of those things that really made life more difficult and seemed designed to annoy rather than improve the game! And while there were hints of the original's music (such as when you die, and the blood runs down the screen), I found myself thinking more of the 'Mission: Impossible' films than Bond, and talking of dying, you don't even get the satisfaction of seeing who or what killed you, and from where, something that mitigated the helplessness of wiping out in the original, and enabling you to learn from your mistakes.

It was fun to recognise a couple of names in the credits (Jonathan Aris has been in so many things, including 'BUGS,' and Alec Newman made an impact on 'Enterprise,' even though I hated Robbie Coltrane's Valentin Zukovsky being replaced!), I quite liked that the game hit the majority of the locations from the original, and most importantly, it was impressive that it grew on me rather than ending up being hated by me for daring to tread on the toes of a superb original. Because you can't redo the best things, and to try is to be arrogant and unwise. But taken as its own thing, putting up with the various niggles and flaws, I would say it can be a game to be enjoyed. As long as you forget about the original and don't try to compare the two. James Bond, in some ways, did return.

***