Bond Legends
The shooter that started it all on home consoles is Rare’s and Nintendo’s Goldeneye. By taking an already famous franchise as the James Bond, OO7 franchise, and turning a recently released and popular movie into a platform video game, the set up for an instant classic was laid out for them. In the end though, it was not exactly the James Bond name that turned the game into one of the most all time recognized and esteemed games. Goldeneye introduced gamers to an all new genre now called the first person shooter, and allowed 4 players to have free for all death matches from the same couch. By bringing together gamers and friends into a popular universe and letting them have at it, the game was propelled to a hit. At the height of the craze, some gamers would not stop playing for such long periods of time that home cleaning services were needed!
Since Goldeneye’s time, Rare has no longer produced a James Bond video game. Other companies such as EA and Activision have since taken on the job, but with varying success. We have had The World is Not Enough, Agent Under Fire, Nightfire, Quantum of Solace, Goldeneye -Reloaded on the first person shooter end, and From Russia With Love, Everything or Nothing and Bloodstone in the third person shooter side of things, among the many additions. None of these though have come near the success of the original Goldeneye though, leaving some to ask if the James Bond video game franchise is near dead.
As soon as Goldeneye hit the shelves, other companies began copying their formula, and even Rare did a spin off franchise of their own called Perfect Dark. The market instantly became saturated with shooters, some series which have seen success for periods of time, while others barely made an impact. The simple truth of the matter is, gamers now had other options.
Each James Bond game offers something the others cannot, a familiar universe of characters, one liners, environments and weapons. The infamous Golden Gun, Jaws, Blofeld, the Red Express train, and of course the Bond women are just a minute fraction of what all the developers have to work with to produce an amazing game. In addition to that is real life actors that are generally quite receptive to helping out in lending their voice and likeness. With such a leg up on the competition, it would be thought that the Bond shooters would still reign over top of the rest.
At the moment though, Call of Duty seems to be on top of the shooter franchise. They did this after years of a near stagnant presence in the gaming community by offering something the Bond franchise had not offered- customization and good online play. Quantum of Solace was a decent effort in addressing some of these problems, but after all- it had some help by Treyarch, responsible for World at War and Black-Ops. In the end though, while a fun online game, it lacked in true customization and the online character models consisted of guys in ski-masks and guys in bike helmets, while also limited the level of control users had over their movement.
Despite knowing what must be done to address the problem, the next addition to the series was Bloodstone. The game scored extremely low by most reviewers and did not fare too well in the market. Instead of bringing gamers a good online experience with customization, they brought us a third person shooter with quirky controls and a bare minimum online scene.
Activision announced a few days ago that they plan on releasing a new game this year called, “OO7 Legends.” It is being hailed as a game to celebrate the anniversary of the franchise, which coincides with the launch of Skyfall to theaters, and as new story telling mode to the series that will take gamers through 6 classic Bond adventures, that all also have a unifying over-arching story to connect them as well. Story telling will not be enough to keep the Bond franchise fresh and turn it into a game that meets the success of the original Goldeneye. While it has already been released that the game will return to the first person shooter format, it will take bringing friends and gamers together through the internet and giving them responsive controls and exciting matches to allow the series to reclaim some of its former glory.
