I am continuing with the rather futile task of playing all the video games.

I caved in... I have a copy of 007: Agent Under Fire for the PS2 arriving in the post, but I was in my local video game store on Monday morning and spotted that they had a 2nd hand Gamecube version on sale for next to nothing. So I bought a second copy, and played through it that afternoon. While I was at it, I also picked up copies of 007: From Russia with Love, 007: Nightfire, ordered two copies of 007: Everything or Nothing from Amazon (the Gameboy version is not just a port of the others), and I have just been notified that I won 007: Licence to Kill on ebay. I better make sure that my ZX Spectrum still works!

In a comment on my last blog, @MattyFTM pointed out that “there are a lot of terrible James Bond games [I’m] going to have to play at the start of this run...” Indeed, it looks as if around one third of all Bond games are listed as having titles beginning with “007”. Since I plan to be commenting on all of these games, I think that I should probably share my thoughts on First Person Shooters’ in general - just to provide some perspective for my thoughts on 007 games in particular.

The First Person Shooter is a genre that I am pretty indifferent to. I may end up picking up one a year if it comes highly recommended by a friend - but as a rule I find them fairly formulaic, and so tend to avoid buying them on a whim. Having said that, some of my fondest gaming experiences have come from being obsessed with online multiplayer for three FPS’ in particular. Namely, the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved, Battlefield 1942 and Team Fortress 2. There is something about the FPS that tends to draw a critical mass of players that many other multiplayer games cannot sustain. For me this created (the illusion?) of a community, which made me overlook the inevitable repetitiveness of the experiences for longer than I would have otherwise.

Of course the real question (as far as is my judgement likely to be clouded is concerned!) is did I play Goldeneye? Well, yes - I did... I really enjoyed it too (does that make me cool or clichéd?). Although not for the reasons most people seem to. I’ve never played the multiplayer - I hear it was revolutionary. Rather, the thing that kept me playing after the final credits was trying to unlock all of those “cheats” by beating the set times on each level. I was less than half my current age at the time, and I found some of these a real challenge. I guess that for much the same reason as why achievement hunting can become addictive, there was something about this meta-game which I found just as compelling, if not more so, than the main game itself.

Game 000002: 007: Agent Under Fire

This game was the fourth of eight Bond games to be developed by EA, and is one of only a handful of 007 games to feature an original story. Agent Under Fire was released for the Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube, and was the first Bond game to be released for this generation of consoles. The only real difference between these three versions of the game is that the Playstation version is lacking bots in multiplayer.

I played through this game from start to finish (not something I plan to do with every game), on the default difficulty setting in 3 two hour sittings. I was initially shocked by how unintuitive the controls were. I've always preferred a keyboard and mouse for this sort of game, but the button mapping adopted by most modern gamers where player movement is controlled with the left stick, and head movement with the right makes a lot more sense to me than this games default control scheme. (Essentially, the vertical axis remain the same, but the horizontal axis are switched.) Luckily the game allows you to choose from 4 different control schemes - so a few minutes later and I was away.

The first level started off fun enough, with some cool set pieces involving various gadgets and guns, and was quite reminiscent of Goldeneye. And, like Goldeneye, as soon as I finished the first mission, I immediately jumped in to play it again and again, trying to beat my high score until I unlocked the platinum medal and unlocked the cheats/ multiplayer maps for doing so. Too few modern games offer incentive to beat your high scores (or even offer high score tables) in my opinion. However, while there were a few missions I enjoyed enough to replay, the same can't be said for all of them.

The game has 12 missions of 3 different varieties. Standard, walk around and shoot stuff levels; drive around and shoot stuff levels and on-rail shooting levels. These latter two level types offered a nice change of pace every now and again, but were fundamentally uninteresting missions and felt like padding for what is otherwise a pretty short game... I'm still kicking myself for having to sit through a really easy level where you are in a tank following a set route around a city and get to operate the guns, only to find myself dumbly watching a big red train (which might as well have had the words "SHOOT ME" plastered on its carriages), travel across a bridge suspended over two enemy tanks - and failing the mission for not shooting it. The game rewarded my stupidity by forcing me to sit through the segment in its entirety once again.

One thing that games from this era are really missing... Autosave! What a useful idea that was. So nearly was my time with this game bought to a premature close when after 2 hours I bent down to power off the console before thinking "I should probably check that it has saved"... good job I did, as it hadn't - and I had to quit out to the main menu before I could work out how to.

At its core though, the game has a fantastically over the top story line, a novel array of gadgets and some competent (but not exceptional) level design. For the on-foot missions the game usually offers you a stealthy way to complete each objective - but gives you the freedom to go in guns-blazing if you prefer, but will punish you with extra guards to deal with if you trigger the alarms. The AI is predictable, but I don't regard that as a flaw. Much of this game is about learning how best to deal with set-pieces, and although many modern games have moved away from this approach for a good reason - I still think there is a place for more arcade style shooters. I was bored of it by the time I finished though!

Playing this game outside the context of time, I think that this game is technically as good as Goldeneye... but by this point I guess everybody had been playing Goldeneye clones for 4 years, and Halo had just been released. It's easy to see why this game reviewed poorly.

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So that turned out longer than I expected... perhaps a bit too long? Don't expect this quantity every time. For those of you who just skipped to the end, my thoughts on this game can be summarised as "meh - it's all right, I guess." Next time, 007: Everything or Nothing.