Originally posted on Of Carbon and Silicon, 17 January 2011
...So, if you're tired of me rabbiting on about GoldenEye, turn back now.
Right.
Well, I've gotten a bit further through GoldenEye Wii at this point. As I said before, it is a decent game -- after all, Wii doesn't get very many really good FPS games like N64 and GameCube did. The problem, I guess, is that Microsoft has stolen away the FPS market with the Halo series (of which I don't really see the appeal -- futuristic alien games are stupid cliches).
Anyway, action-wise, it lacks for nothing. You've got running and gunning in all the right places, plus, guards can't hear gunfights between Checkpoints (most of the time), so you can blow stuff up in one room, then sneak up behind a guy and snap his neck in the next. There's a wide array of weapons to choose from -- silenced pistols to full-auto shotguns and grenade launchers. Like I said before: blow up your enemies in one room, snipe them with a silenced pistol in the next.
However, there are a few things that have been brought to my attention which I didn't know about before. For example, a rather strange glitch.
Every so often, particularly whilst crouching, the floor will disappear and Bond will fall to his death, causing the level to restart from the last Checkpoint. Now, in a small area, such as the Facility's server room, this isn't such a great problem because, well, it's short -- maybe three minutes to get back to where you were. But, in a longer area or an area with a lot of heavily armed enemies all vying for your head, such as the Nightclub's kitchen, it takes a bit longer to get through (maybe ten or twelve minutes). Falling through the floor here will definitely be a "what the crap just happened?" moment where you may end up throwing your controller to the floor and shouting, "I quit!". Now, I've got to say -- in my 17 years of gaming experience, I have never played a game where the floor just disappears. I've found glitches where walls aren't clipped right and you fall through them, but I've never had the floor yanked out from under me before. It's quite distressing, going into a freefall for no particular reason. Plus, there's no way to avoid it, because somehow, the circumstances always change, so you can't intentionally cause the glitch ("testing the water", if you like)... it just happens, literally, at random.
Non-glitch-wise, there's the Tank. To leave the St. Petersburg Archive, Bond must take control of a tank, then use that vehicle to chase down Ourumov and Natalya. Remember the tank from GoldenEye 64? Well, this is not as easy to control. Someone at Eurocom decided it would be nifty if the tank's directional controls (forward, backward, and turning) were done using different control sticks! Rather than doing all the steering with the left control stick on the Classic Controller (like you would think would be logical), you only go front and back with it. Pushing the stick even in the slightest right/left direction and you end up swirling the gun around. You can only turn the camera left and right with the right stick! Now, what the hell kind of sense does that make? Though I am loath to compare GE64 with GE Wii, GE64's tank was much, much more user-friendly. Get in and go kick some ass. With GE Wii's tank: get in, read the instructions, press the wrong button, get turned around, crash into buildings, go nowhere, and don't kick any ass at all.
Next, the music. Written mostly by David Arnold, the composer for all but one of the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond films and both in the Daniel Craig era, his score is somewhat reminiscent of The World is not Enough... what can you do? That's his composing style -- his signature, if you like. However, though I have nothing bad to say about the music, itself, I do take issue with how little there is of it.
Again, comparing GoldenEyes: GE64 had at least a two-minute loop of distinct original music for each level (granted, the pause-screen and mission select themes were shorter than that), plus nearly the same amount of action music for several levels. GE Wii doesn't have that. It has, maybe 30 minutes of source music for the entire game. There's a bit of overlap between levels. There's pretty much only one action theme which plays when you've been spotted and the heavily armed special forces with annoyingly-accurate guns are after you.
Then, on the subject of music, there's the Nightclub level. This level takes place in Valentin Zukovsky's Barcelona nightclub. The musical score for this level is basically overpowered by two separate 30-45 second vocal loops: one trance, one sort of new age hip-hop (both apparently originated in DJ Hero). If you haven't played this level yet, take heed:
Once you hear these loop twenty times, you can't forget them!
As the level takes (me, anyway) about 25-30 minutes to complete, and about 12-15 minutes of that is spent listening to a 30-second pop riff, you'll be present for at least twenty loops of both.
Anyway, that's all I've found that really stands out as being unfortunate about Activision's new GoldenEye. Considering there are more pros than cons in this case, I recommend it for any Wii owners who pine for the bygone days when Nintendo was FPS heaven. I also recommend it for all PS3 and 360 owners who went over to the Dark Side after the fall of Rareware in 2002. On its own, it's not worth getting a Wii for, but there are definite compensations for owning a Wii console that you just can't get with the other two.
