GoldenEye stuff

I've finished GoldenEye on operative. And do you know what I did immediately afterwards? I started again on agent. Yeah, it was that compelling. Course, this was a while ago, but I havn't had a huge amount of time to game recently, but that's cool, that's cool. Anyhoo, let's get moving.

GoldenEye 007 Wii is a remake of the original GoldenEye 007 on the N64,  a game which many people say was the best FPS of all time. But if you've come into GoldenEye Wii expecting the game to be just as you remember it, you may find your self interested. The game for Wii is very different to the N64 version, but that's not a bad thing. I can hear people right now going: What? Not the same game? What's the point of buying it? But if you wanted the old version of GoldenEye, then you've had 16 years to play it on the Nintendo 64. The gameplay and script are quite different from that of both the movie's and the original game's, but that's a good thing.

As far as how GoldenEye looks, it's impressive. The graphics are far from Metroid: Other M, but they are still cool. Daniel Craig looks like Daniel Craig and all the characters look like they should as well (except that Natalya has black hair) The story, while maintaining the general plot, is different to the movie's. Do you remember that meeting with Valentine in the movie at the nightclub? But did you remember it turning into a vicious gunfight for your life? Did you remember getting shot at by an RPG as you were driving along the road with 006? You shouldn't, and do you remember the bungie jump at the start of the movie? Ah...yeah, there's no more bungie chord. All the acting (except for Sky Briggs') is very good, especially from Daniel Craig and Judy Diench (am I spelling her last name right?) as Bond and M respectively. 

The gameplay is great. It's a mix of sneaking about and all out firefights. Most of the time, you are able to sneak around and take out guards silently while creeping towards your objective. If you get seen, then you will heat a rift, followed by James' heartbeat. Take out the people who saw you without making more attention and the heartbeat stops. They start firing, and more enemies will rush to your location to blow you to bits. But it's not game over. You can leg it to the next checkpoint (but that's not likely seeing as every one's shooting you) or fight it out. You have a ton of guns to play with: AK-47, Sigmus-9, standard issue P99 and my favourite gun of all time: The Masterton! But don't go and blow your cover all wily-nily (did I really just say that?) because it can be really hard, even on operative, to beat them. Of course, there are also lots of time where your only option is to fight it out. You can utilise cover, but stay in a place to long and it will break away and leave you exposed. If you find a place that has cover that doesn't deteriorate, then enemies can and probably will chuck a grenade, forcing you to move. The A.I. are really smart and fun to engage, except for the odd time where they think that hiding behind explosive barrels is a good idea. There are also some interactive cutscenes as well. I'm not going to call them quick time events. because they've been intentionally made really easy, so that you can enjoy the moment and feel like Bond. It is possible to fail them, but only if you screw up really badly. They make you feel like you're that secret agent 007 out there on the field. The only part of the campaign I didn't like was the boss fight. Keep FPS boss fight to Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime only...and I havn't even begun to talk about the awesomness of multiplayer...



There are some really cool things about the multiplayer modes in GoldenEye. In split screen, you can play as classic villains like Jaws, Oddjob, Scaramanga, Dr. No, Blofeld, Redd Grant and Rosa Klebb to name a few. For Split screen, there are a bunch of modifiers. Paintball mode (guns fire paintballs) Nick-Nack mode (all players are small) Melee only (you guessed it) bouncy grenades, sticky grenades, move your feet (where if you aren't moving for more than 3 seconds, you die) 
In online mode, you lose these modifiers, but have the ability to play with up to 8 people in a number of modes. Conflict and Team Conflict are pretty standard, but there are some really cool ones like Golden Gun. Somewhere in the map, there is a Golden Gun lying about, but it is marked on your map so you can find it. However picks it up can use it. It's cool, one shot one kill at any range. There are only two catches. The first being that once you fire it, you have to reload it and it only gives you one shot. That's okay though, because you reload it fast and it has infinite ammo. The other catch is a lot harsher. If you have the gun, everyone on the map can see you. That's why I've only ever gotten 3 kills with it, because everyone sneaks up behind me and shoots my brains out. There are others like Black Box (capture the flag with a small twist) and GoldenEye (base capture) and some more. 
The gameplay for MP is a lot like COD Blops (I can talk about it here because it was released for wii) which is a good thing because MP is fun in that game. That being said, it doesn't take much skill to play. In some thing like SSBB you are constantly in combat, battling your opponent fiercely to defeat them, sometime engaging them in battles that last for up to 10 minutes. But in GoldenEye it's a matter of: 
I has better unlocks than you, bang, dead.
I saw you first, bang, dead. 
I came up behind you, bang, dead. 
Something like this would normally turn me off a game because the question I found myself asking the most was: who killed me. But the reason I keep doing it is because it's so much FUN! And addictive...
Controlwise, you have a lot of options. Eurocom was very keen on giving the players the ability to use the classic controller as their control scheme, because it will let players get a bit closer to the good old days where you'd call your friends and ask them if they wanted to swing over to your house and play GoldneEye. But of course, only if they could be Oddjob. But I tried using the gamecube controller for a while. It works really well, but the annoying thing is that you have to press Z and B at the same time to melee and that feels a bit clunky and slow. After that, I stuck with the Wii-Mote and Nunchuck and am still using it. It's so much easier to make micro adjustments to aiming than with an analog stick. 


So there you have it, GoldenEye 007 Wii. A truly fantastic game