Review: Stiff Assed Brit’s Back
Bond first was unleashed on the Nintendo 64 back in the early years of the 64. I believe it was winter of 1997 if I’m not mistaken… Was it a hit!? Ah man, if you’re reading this, you know the answer! To this day, I still come back to play GoldenEye for the fun of fragging a Russian sittin’ on the pot! I mean, how much fun is that! Now it’s 2000 and Perfect Dark is released. Was Perfect Dark over-rated because Rare made it? Sure as hell! Everyone thought Perfect Dark was the next GoldenEye. When in fact, it was the next Superman 64. Nah, but it wasn’t close to the immaculate GoldenEye 007. Why? Hell, who wants to kill Skedar and little guys called Maians? Not me, I am sure of that! Now it’s almost 2001 and Electronic Arts has attempted something that no man has done before… Challenged Rare! How does it fare? Let’s see!
When I first grabbed the game off the shelves of Toys R Us yesterday, I looked at the back and said, “wow!” The back of the game makes it look like a PS2 game the graphics look so good. So I buy the game and run home excited as hell. When I un-rap it, I notice the blue cartridge like Tony Hawk was. Nice touch EA! Now I turn on the game and listen for something… What something am I listening for? Ah, the James Bond theme! Where is it!? Not there! Electronic Arts did not include ANY James Bond music in the game! A let down? You bet your ass! I was so upset, but then again, money issues probably were involved. So, trying to keep the steam in, I enter the first level. Not knowing what to do, I pull out a gun and shoot a security guard and if you know me, you know what I did next! Of course, I did the opposite of the objectives and killed innocent bystanders! Heh, I like to do that! Anyhow, after re-setting it a few times, I beat the level and slowly get deep into the game. What are the graphics like? Hmmm…
The graphics are far short from the hype I heard from IGN. They are worse than Perfect Dark and are definitely not the best on the N64. Characters are clunky and, well, ugly as hell. And yes, it will distract you of how ugly, short, and fat M is! It looks like some fat ass women that just ate at Denny’s! Sheet, am I that picky? Nope just stating the facts. Although the graphics pretty much suck, there has been no slow down in the game for me, yet. I hope that’s good for the future as I play 4 player death match with 4 bots!
Man, sound… It’s scary playing a Bond game with no, well, Bond songs! The Bond theme isn’t in there and most of the music is hand made. IE, I never heard any of it in the movie. Although the music isn’t official, I don’t count much off in this area besides the fact that there’s no Bond theme! So don’t fret over something that you’ll barely notice! But, on the bright side… There is voice acting! I believe all the voices are fake, but it’s funny to listen to Christmas Jones speak! Are those square boobs? Oops, sorry about that!
Time for the multiplayer! No one at my school has TWINE yet… So I can’t say that I will be having much fun yet! But I did manage to play some games with bots. The bots are surprisingly stupid as hell. I stood there and shot him with a P2K while he had a Meyer. I haven’t discovered the smart levels yet, though. But I doubt they’re all this dumb. The multiplayer levels are REALLY sweet! There are about 30 or 25 and they are fairly big and feature elevators and other moving objects to add to the fun. But I don’t know if there are extras you can attain. I hope there are though… They also have all the core characters available for play. I haven’t seen any guards or other people that you could play as, yet. Once again, maybe they’re extras?
Now the single player missions seem to have lots of depth to them. They follow the movie extremely well and a lot better than GoldenEye. Some parts have been tweaked but it stays on track to keep it a good game. Now forget what other sites told you, TWINE doesn’t have the dumbest missions. They are fairly challenging at points. Especially with the jump button. That makes it a not so classic first person shooter, but it’s still great! One more thing, when you press up on the control stick, it goes up. Not like on GoldenEye or Perfect Dark. When you press up, it looks down and the other way. This will definitely mess you up as it did me.
How’s the gameplay? In my opinion, it’s perfect for the game. Whatever Electronic Arts was shooting for, they achieved it! It’s unknown if they wanted to clone GoldenEye so to speak, but it’s unknown. I believe EA wanted to do their own branch to give another opinion on first person shooters. Possibly to create the new Rare? Nah, I know this game falls a whole lot short from my expectations, but can you blame EA for trying? Certainly not!
