GoldenEye
For Wii Is A Remake With Some Asterisks 
The news today that a new version of Nintendo
64 classic GoldenEye 007 was met with cheers at today's Nintendo E3
press conference. I played the game. It's good but it's not the remake
you may have thought it was.
The James Bond game is being developed by Eurocom and Activision, not
Rare and Nintendo, the companies that made the original Nintendo 64
GoldenEye. That's not a surprise and not necessarily a problem. Eurocom
can make a good game.
It is a first-person shooter, based on the fiction of the 1995 Pierce
Brosnan movie. But the story of that movie has been changed. GoldenEye
is now the adventure of the Daniel Craig version of James Bond and plays
up an international banking crisis angle rather than a Cold War
problem. Both games, however, send the player, as Bond, around the world
to locations important to fans of movie and games: A dam, a statue
park, the streets of St. Petersburg, where a chase involving a military
tank will occur.
The levels of the new GoldenEye are not necessarily recreations of
the original game's. The locations have been changed in some cases the
developer told me. Happily, the game's opening dam level gets some
loving care in being updated for a modern audience. It opens in similar
fashion with a camera swoop that brings us into Bond's point-of-view. It
starts with a scramble past some guards into a guard tower (which
contains a sniper rifle, of course) and then through a tunnel inside a
truck. That's the spot where differences become abundant. Did you play
the original GoldenEye dam level and hide behind that truck? You'll be
in it, riding shotgun (Alec Trevaylan is behind the wheel), getting
stopped by guards and suddenly in an on-rails shootout. You'll be
shooting your machine gun through the front window as guards try to run
you off the wall. You'll be blowing up a tanker truck that is in the way
and out to the dam you'll go, as a rocket launcher flips your truck.
As with the original GoldenEye, the game will require players using
harder difficulty levels to complete more mission objectives. New to the
game will be forking options to turn the game more into an action
shooter or into a stealthy hunt.
Many of Bond's classic weapons are back, including the Klobb, which
has been renamed the Klebb. The health system has changed, now using the
same regenerative system seen in most shooters.
Multiplayer is presented in four-player splitscreen or eight-player
online, with an experience points system that unlocks perks. Maps will
be drawn from familiar locations, but the layouts will not be the same
as they were in the Nintendo 64 version of the game. After watching the
dam level, I was able to play a round of four-player split screen. In
the mode we played, the first player to 10 kills won. I got seven and
found the gameplay to be smooth. I used a Wii Remote and Nunchuk set-up
which used the pointer to aim and mapped a melee move to a shake of the
Nunchuk (probably will be changed to a button press, I was told). Other
players used the Wii Classic Controller Pro.
I didn't see but was told that sticky mines will be back. I think
people will like that, yes?
GoldenEye will be out exclusively for the Wii in November. It was
fun, but for better and worse it is not a slavish remake of the original
GoldenEye. They are doing the reinvented-for-modern-times thing. Let's
hope that is the right thing. The re-imagined dam level had enough
callbacks to the original game to make me smile and just enough
high-action set-pieces to remind me that we are not in a 90s video game
world anymore.
Be optimistic about this one, but pay attention to the pitch.
Buy
