#575: Gears of War 2 (2008, X360)

It feels to me like Gears of War 2 kind of forgot what it was that was good about Gears of War. In their quest for Bigger, Badder, and More Badass - coming in the form set-pieces and 'variety' - they almost lost sight of their core, basic gameplay.

This is not to say that Gears 2 is bad - far from it. But Gears of war was a triumph of the 30 seconds of fun school of gameplay design - the idea that if you can make your most basic interactions fun, everything else will be gravy. A good example of a success in this was the original Halo - simply running around with the assualt rifle and some grenades, fighting a group of enemies was fun enough that it sustained the rest of the game. It took some steps to shake things up - vehichle segments, for example - but for all the additional weapons and such it would throw at you, you were going back to that assualt rifle (and maybe the shotgun) mixed with some grenades. By the time Halo 3 came around, they forgot about this, never providing enough ammo for the weapon you wanted to use (the assault rifle) in an attempt to more or less force you to use all the other dozens of weapons available - forgetting that those weapons weren't as fun - and throwing more and more set-pieces and such at you - forgetting that, by their nature, these segments never give the player the level of control or choice that the regular gameplay does.

Gears 1 was similarly successful on the 30 seconds of fun maxim. Stick the player in a room with some cover, give them a lancer, and throw them against a few locusts. Boom. That sustained the entire first game quite well - it was probably 90% of the first game, but you didn't care.

Gears 2, however, brings this ratio way down so that it can either toss you in neat-looking (and boring) on-rails and vehicle sequences (oh look, I'm in a tank, but it's so powerful it renders the sort of tactical gameplay that makes Gears fun pointless), or so it can toss you variety in the form of new enemy types that are just obnoxious to fight (little exploding things, guys with chain-guns, guys with sheilds, big flying things that sit on the ground and shoot at you instead of flying around and shooting you, &c).

Also - glitches. Somehow I went through all of Gears 1 without really encountering many glitches (though I am aware it was called Glitch of War by... well, many). No such luck here, where I had the pleasure of dying a few times from scripted events in the environment simply sort of happening on top of me (I'm not referring to things that obviously were meant to be dangerous, by the way, I mean stuff like doors).



Multiplayer-wise, they added bots, so I no longer have to deal with Live-types. Much thanks for that.

Gears 2 at least has the good sense to go out on a very strong note - the last few levels are very back-to-basics, under the idea that they've introduced you to all the new stuff, now you can bring it all together (I'll use the lancer, thank you very much) and also ends on at least the most fun of the on-rails/vehicle sequences (the Brumak) - I just wish they'd done this sooner in, or perhaps cut some of the fluff (Gears 2 is much longer than Gears 1, which would be fine if it didn't feel to bloated).

Gears of War 2

Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Epic Games
Released: November 2008
Obtained: 12/25/2008

8.5/10

#483: BioShock (2007, X360)

BioShock is perhaps best described as a tale of two different games. One is the competent first person shooter, perhaps a bit light on enemy variety but big on providing a lot of fun ways to do combat, and with some good character building elements to boot. Now, this game is, by itself, pretty damn good for roughly the same reason that Gears of War and the first Halo succeeded, namely the 15 seconds of fun principle. The 15 seconds of fun principle holds that, basically, if your core gameplay mechanics are fun, it doesn't really hurt you all that much to not spend much time shaking up the gameplay. In Halo this meant that since it was simply a lot of fun to go around tossing grenades and thwacking grunts and elites and whatever, it didn't matter that it turned out that that was all you'd be doing for the next 8 hours (and it didn't matter, at least not to me).

For BioShock this means that, in large part due to the huge number of plasmids at your disposal, you are bound to find at least a few combat methods that you find yourself enjoying the hell out of and this fun is enough to pretty much carry you through to the end of the game, despite the enemies being all very similar and there being very little in the way of big changes to the core gameplay (nothing even at the level of Halo's vehicle segments). For me specifically, it was a combination of telekinesis and using plasmids to boost my wrench power to the point where it became the only weapon I needed (of course, when all you want to use is a wrench, it becomes pretty damn useful). Others I'm sure liked to use the alternate ammunition for their guns (like setting tripwires with the crossbow), or to use a wider variety of active plasmids (like fire, or ice, or BEES). The point is, there is enough available to the player that they can adjust things to suit what methods they are finding the most fun to play. Furthermore, if the 15 seconds of fun begins to wear out, it gives them the option of switching things up. So, again, by a purely gameplay centric perspective, BioShock has a whole hell of a lot going on for it, and we haven't even touched on the setting, story, and characters that actually wind up making the game what it is (that being the best game of 2007 this side of Super Mario Galaxy).



The second game here is the one featuring one of the most compelling settings I've ever seen in a video game - alternating beautifully between the disturbing and frightening and the majestic and inspiring. It's important not to underestimate how something like setting can dramatically enhance a title. BioShock could very easily of been set in some space station manned with space marines (like, oh, Halo) - the excellent gameplay would remain pretty much unchanged, Big Daddys could be robots, Little Sisters could be little Salacious B. Crumb type creatures or space imps or something, the pistol could be a space pistol, etc. It could still look pretty damn amazing too - Unreal Tournament 2004 and Gears of War showed that you can still do really interesting things with game architecture amongst a horde of space marines. All that said, to say that having as incredible and unique an environment as Rapture wasn't probably the single biggest factor in its success would be pretty disingenuous. Rapture's pull, such as it is, mostly comes from the way it manages to highlight at nearly every turn both how spectacular this world was (and still is) and how far this world has fallen. The player is presented at nearly every turn with gorgeous art deco architecture while simultaneously offering visions of the horrors that has befallen it. Perhaps most incredible is how beautiful this horror can be - in its own way - and this coming from a guy who is normally genuinely turned away from the grotesque - BioShock makes it work by having it seem to be so fitting amongst the splendor one sees.

The setting manages to, in its own way, tell a story and become a character which is itself more compelling than about 95% of what is on the market. The player feels compelled to explore every nook and cranny - not for the hope of discovering some new item or upgrade (not that these don't exist, but they are fairly sparse - except for the huge amounts of disposables like ammo laying around) - but for the hope of discovering some new hint towards explaining the background of this environment, in the form of an audio book diary, or perhaps some secret area used by Rapture's saner denizens before they too were attacked by the splicers who've taken over.

The audio books deserve a special mention - in general, I don't care much for cut scenes in video games. They strike me as a surprisingly lazy way to go about telling story - that rather than embracing the medium itself, developers are simply using the storytelling conventions of film. On the same plane of the uninspired is the scrolling text box (taking cues from books this time). Now, I'm not saying that having story told through these means is bad, of course, countless great stories have been told in these fashions - but I greatly prefer games that can tell their stories in ways that don't stop the gameplay dead in its tracks. The gold standard here is of course, the Half-Life series, but BioShock comes up with some interesting solutions as well. This is where the audio books come in - allowing for the rich backstory of rapture to be brought to life for the player without ever actually pausing the action - they simply play in the background. Add in some excellent voice acting, and you got yourself a stew going. Compare this to the likely alternative - written diaries, likely confined to some submenu or something. Not only would you lose the acting and the sense of the writer/speaker being brought to life, but more importantly, no one would ever read them - why pause the action to read some text?



Special mention should also be made of Andrew Ryan as a character compelling in his conviction and dedication to his strict moral code as well as in how this makes him at once both the most sane person in the city and the most insane at the same time.

BioShock
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Irrational Games
Released: 8/21/2007
Obtained: October 2007

9.5/10

#509: Solar Jetman (1990, NES)

I don't know what happened to Rare in high school, but for a development house that would eventually turn out the Banjo, Donkey Kong Country, and Perfect Dark games, they seemed hellbent on showing everyone that western developers could clobber the Japanese when it came to making the most impossibly frustrating games imaginable. Now, I could just as easily have been setting up a review for Battletoads there, but at least Battletoads has an easy first level - Solar Jetman is stupid-hard from the get-go.

The shame here is that, if one were to just tweak the difficulty here, you would have a rather excellent sort of space sim/shooter here. The idea is that you, Sol "-ar" Jetman (I'm making that name up), have to travel from planet to planet exploring and collecting spaceship parts (the titular Golden 'Warp'-ship) in your little pod. Along the way you fight robots and aliens, and also have to make sure you don't run out of fuel and such. Sounds a lot like Pikmin, which was awesome, right? The problem begins when it was decided that there would also be super-realistic physics modeling at play.

This sounds good - gravity will behave like real gravity, momentum must be considered and factored into movement, but the thing is they went much to far with this. In the earliest levels it is a rather large problem, especially whenever you're trying to tow something. By the end of the game, when the gravity is something like 6 times Jupiter, it becomes ridiculous, taking minutes to move vertically. Compounding this is that any contact with anything (including the swarms of enemies which are seemingly unaffected by gravity) pretty near instantly kills you. Basically, the fun exploration game goes out of its way to make this exploration as frustrating as possible.

The cruelest joke is the final-final level - after completing the most difficult planet yet, the player is instantly sent into a poor Gradius clone where a death (quite likely since this stage is also pretty hard, and importantly, completely unlike anything the player has just spent the last several hours playing) sends you back to the beginning of the previous planet. It's like the final bosses of Ninja Gaiden, if those last bosses consisted of dirtbike racing or Burgertime or something.



Luckily for all of us (or at least those of us that kind of like Rare, like myself) Rare would eventually learn the value of applying their gifts for making good looking games with good concepts to gameplay that actually worked (as opposed to say, Battletoads, which was literally impossible to complete in 2-player).

Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
Publisher: Tradewest
Developer: Rare
Released: September 1990
Obtained: March 2008

6.0/10

#508: Guerrilla War (1988, NES)

The idea of difficulty in video games has come a long way from the 1980s. Then, it was pretty hard to find a game where you didn't have a shitload of stuff flying at you at absolutely all times, in addition to having relatively weak attacks, limited life (or no life), and a very limited set of lives - the net result being that without either cheating, or a lot of patience and practice, you'd typically never see anything beyond the second level of most games. Later, as the idea of playability was emphasized and the idea of challenge was deemphasized, these tropes have fallen by the wayside. Good luck finding a game that expects you to play the whole thing in one sitting with one set of lives, for example. Hell, good luck finding games that still use lives at all.

So what makes Guerrilla War interesting is its surprisingly liberal approach to difficulty (or as surprisingly liberal anything in a game about Che Guevara can be). It is, basically, the same game as either Ikari Warriors or Commando - a straight forward top down shooter where you (the hero) shoot down hordes of enemies. Maybe you'll throw a grenade or something. These games are very hard, and so is Guerrilla War. But whereas those games will kick your ass back to the title screen when you've died enough, Guerrilla War lets you keep going without so much as making you start the level over. Literally the only thing stopping you from slugging your way to the end is whether you get bored halfway (luckily, it's pretty fun - and pretty short).

The idea of unlimited continues was pretty unheard of at that time, which is what makes it so refreshing to come back to this now. We, in these modern times, have little patience for things like lives or punishing difficulty, we want to play a game for as long as it takes for us to get bored of it, then toss it to the side. By removing the impediments to this approach, Guerrilla War feels almost like it was designed with the modern gamer in mind - down to the Cuban Revolution backdrop which is sure to please anyone in search of ironic entertainment.



Now, the game itself? Infinite continues aside, I still prefer Iron Tank in the world of top-down shooters, mostly due to Iron Tank's sense of scale and its boss fights, but when it comes to looking for some quick NES fun (with 2-player co-op, no less)? It's hard to find much to fault here.

Guerrilla War
Publisher: SNK
Developer: SNK
Released: 1988
Obtained: March 2008

7.0/10

#160: Team Fortress Classic (1999, PC)

I imagine it must be pretty hard to make a online-multiplayer title that can be fun to play even when you're completely and utterly overmatched by your opponents. Take something like Gears of War, which is excellent, and consider how boring it can get when one finds themselves completely overwhelmed by the opponents - I know I tend to feel a bit flustered in this situation and cease to enjoy myself. Yet I can play Team Fortress Classic, die roughly 30 times for every kill I make, and have a pretty good time doing it. My theory as to why this is I think lies in the relative amount of responsibility placed onto the player - Gears has small teams and lacks specialization, as such I know that I am supposed to be taking down my opponents at a roughly 1:1 pace, and I also know that if I don't, that puts a lot of pressure on my teammates (being at most 4 on 4). By comparison, in a 10 on 10 TFC match where I, being a Pyro or a Medic (as I usually am), have a pretty specific role or task I suddenly feel a lot less guilty if I do poorly. Suddenly I'm in a position where I know there are a lot more guys to cover my ass, and I'm in a role where I know my primary task is not to rack up kills, but rather to wreck havoc (pyro) or help out others (medic).

I'm not sure which of these two factors contributes the most to this feeling of liberation from the usual responsibilities of a team-shooter. On the one hand, I'm sure that the crowd factor is big, since I also enjoy playing Counter-Strike, where I consider my role as being that of a meat shield for my more talented teammates. On the other hand, the presence of roles, with the expectations for performance or style that come with them provide me with an excellent way to style my play in a somewhat guided fashion.

TFC also promotes a fast and imprecise style of play that makes it rather well suited for casual play. Unfortunately, it also boasts a number of quirks and glitches that lends itself just as well for obsessive and hardcore play - the exact kind that tends to intimidate novice players and discourage casual play. These same hardcore players insistence on limiting themselves to a single map (the relatively boring 2fort) which lends itself the best to these glitches also tends to discourage casual play.



Complaints about the hardcore TFC crowd should carry the caveat, however, that it is this same crowd that has kept the game relevant through the years, essentially keeping it alive for its exposure to new blood. Also, like I said at the start, I manage to enjoy myself pretty well in spite of the huge talent gulf - the core game itself is simply a fun way to waste some time.

Team Fortress Classic
Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Valve
Released: 5/30/1999
Obtained: Early 2002

8.5/10

#366: Star Fox Command (2006, NDS)

So, you know, all-range mode being probably the worst part of Star Fox 64 (it's either that or the sub and its sucky lasers), the natural answer to how to properly reinvigorate the series (after the dreadful Star Fox Assault) was obvious - make a Star Fox game that is nothing but all-range battles! And not the boss fights that actually worked, but the fights against dozens of targets, all spread out and hard to find. That's a brilliant idea, isn't it?

The funny thing is Star Fox Command, despite doing exactly this for some inexplicable reason, actually damn near succeeds. Yes, it's nowhere near as good as Star Fox 64, but it at least controls really well (stylus-only, in fact), which one certainly couldn't say about any time Assault left the damn Arwing.

What is so wrong, though, with going all-all-range? The answer lies, in level design. In short, Star Fox Command doesn't really have any. Yes, the 'strategy' sessions in between missions are well, levels that have been ostensibly designed, but the missions themselves? All variations on a single theme - shoot down enough enemies (and collect their delicious, delicious stars) to proceed. Occasionally there'll be a mothership or something, which means you shoot down enough enemies, then basically fly through some rings. Hoo-ray.

The strategy sessions deserve more discussion, basically the campaign is broken down into a series of 'worlds', basically maps where you dispatch your arwings (and missiles and the great fox &c) to attack bases and enemy fighters. It's turn based and it, while decent enough, just doesn't fit well with what I imagine anyone wanted out of a Star Fox game (I think people wanted like, levels). There's also a time limit for some reason, putting in a arcade racer style checkpoint/added time system that, again, doesn't fit.

Story-wise, someone decided that what Star Fox fans wanted, as opposed to say, Star Fox 64 style gameplay, was a hell of a lot more background on these beloved characters. So now we get, between every 'world', lengthy Golden Sun style blathering between our main characters. Also Slippy gets a love interest. Again, Hoo-ray (though I'm sure furries are ecstatic).



I'm being a bit hard on it here, again, it really does kind of work - it just doesn't work in any way one would expect a Star Fox game to work. Some credit must be given for reinventing the series into something pretty good, it's just such a development isn't that exciting when the original style had been so under-used to begin with.

Star Fox Command
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Q-Games
Released: 8/28/2006
Obtained: October 2006 (Gift)

7.5/10

#71: GoldenEye 007 (1997, N64)

When GoldenEye was released in 1997 I had my mom drive me out to Wal-Mart to get it on (or at least near) its release date, and I have absolutely no idea why. At that point I had zero experience with first-person shooters, I wasn't particularly familiar with Rare as a developer (outside of Donkey Kong Country), and I wasn't a particularly big Bond fan (GoldenEye had been the only one I had seen). I don't even remember if I knew that much about it going in, and I definitely don't recall finding the idea of being in a first-person perspective to be something that really blew me away - that is, I never looked at it and really recognized that it was showing things in a perspective that was all that different than what I had seen before - this strikes me as odd when I look back to it.

I assume that what compelled me to get it had to have been the glowing reviews in Nintendo Power - it made the top 10 of their top 100 games list a month or two before it even came out - which would imply that even then I'd been conditioned into running out and getting whatever Nintendo's big release was that quarter (it would certainly explain how I wound up with Diddy Kong Racing).

This is all relevant because I am pretty sure that it is because GoldenEye came in so under my radar - as the next big 'I guess I should get it' game - that it managed to create such a deep impression. Had I been introduced to FPS's on the PC via DOOM and Quake, I probably would have been turned off by it, since GoldenEye bears about as much of a resemblance to DOOM gameplay-wise as it does in aesthetics. The emphasis on GoldenEye was never really on shooting - that the auto-aim is so effective is a hint of this - but rather on completing objectives. Now, on the face there may seem to be little difference in going to point A to meet a scientist before exiting the level and going to point A to get a red key before exiting the level, and if that were as far as GoldenEye went with its objectives that would be an excellent point. GoldenEye does go further, though, with sections emphasizing stealth, through the use of Bond's gadgets to achieve these objectives, through the of character interaction.

Most important, I feel, is the style of level design GoldenEye introduced (remember - it beat Half-Life to the punch by a couple months). Rather than the emphasis on mazes seen especially in id's shooters (as well as contemporaries like Turok), GoldenEye leaned towards a more scripted style, funneling the player through the levels in a much more intentionally designed pathway. While I can certainly appreciate on an academic level what id and DOOM did for the industry, I greatly prefer this style of game, and I'd say that judging by the kinds of FPS's we see made today, I'm far from alone on this.

As I noted in my The World is Not Enough review, that title actually does a better job of feeling like a Bond game, but it can't really come close to matching the feel here. That superb feel is what makes the multiplayer one of the best on the system as well, and really was one of the few things that rescued the N64 from becoming a complete disaster. I tend to overlook GoldenEye when I remember the N64 because, for my money, pseudo-sequel Perfect Dark eclipsed it in nearly every respect - the only spot I can cede to GoldenEye is 4-player deathmath, where Perfect Dark's pushing of the N64 hardware finally comes to bite it in the ass. Luckily for GoldenEye, with that many combatants bots aren't necessary, and the use of the bond license adds quite a bit to the affair.



That Perfect Dark improved so dramatically on what GoldenEye started forces me to hold back on being as effusive in my praise as GoldenEye might deserve. It's absolutely spectacular, but only when judged for its time.

GoldenEye 007
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Rare
Released: 8/25/1997
Obtained: Summer 1997

9.0/10

#70: Star Fox 64 (1997, N64)

Part of the brilliance of Nintendo is how subtle the quality they put out can be. If you'd asked me back in say 2001, near the end of the N64's life, what the best titles on the system were, Star Fox 64 probably wouldn't of come up for a while. Looking back now, few titles hold up better.

That most N64 games don't hold up that well owes mostly to being the first 3D titles - naturally game design is going to learn from the mistakes of the predecessors in the same genre. No one will opt for Cruis'n USA over a Burnout Paradise, no one will opt for a GoldenEye 007 - as good as it is - over a Call of Duty 4 (although there is no accounting for rose-tinted glasses). So it is then pretty incredible that - despite two attempts (three if we count Star Fox Adventures) - no subsequent Star Fox title has come anywhere near close to matching Star Fox 64.

What's shocking is that it isn't even a remotely complicated formula. Provide some rail/corridor style shooting levels, provide different paths - this is simple stuff. [I'd say include some all-range areas, but these are easily the weakest parts here - putting the pacing in the control of the player ruins things. Too much time is wasted scanning the horizon for enemies to follow. Going all-range for boss fights works somewhat better, since the opponent is so much easier to find.]

The devil is in the details, however. Star Fox 64's success lies primarily in the nigh-flawless control (provided you aren't in a tank or sub, where the control is merely good) and in the excellent level design, where the stages show a remarkably eye for the pacing needed to pull this sort of game off. Star Fox Assault, the GameCube entry, actually did a pretty good job at this, but then it decided to also do some remarkably terrible on-foot (and in-tank) levels sporting shockingly bad controls (from a layout perspective - it's not like the 3rd-person shooter genre was not well established by that time). Star Fox Command featured no real level design to speak of. Star Fox Adventures wasn't actually a Star Fox game, though its Star Fox levels were actually the closest of all of these to really replicating Star Fox 64's precise control (what else would one expect from Rare - they are masters at mimicking what Nintendo has done before) - they just left out the the branching and bosses and such.

Presentation often cripples N64 titles when they are seen today - people complain when framerates dip below 30 today, they should see nearly any latter-generation 64 title. Star Fox overcomes this by not trying to push the limits of the hardware - much as Mario 64 did before it, and much like F-Zero X would do after it. This isn't to say things look bad here, but rather that later games would look, from a technical perspective, better at the sacrifice of performance. Looking at them now, as they all look pretty terrible, performance becomes significant. That Star Fox uses a fixed camera by default, when so many other titles of the day sported poor cameras also helps (and yes, a platformer then couldn't just do a fixed camera to fix this, but that still doesn't change that the camera is an issue).

Shocking also is that the voice acting manages to not be terrible - it's cheesy, but in a compelling way (as opposed to a distracting way). Yes, Slippy and Falco are annoying, but I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be, my point is that it doesn't have the sort of stilted feel other voice acting of the time had (probably owing to the avoidance of proper conversations, save for the mission briefings - which no one listens to anyway - and a rare exchange or two).



So what makes Star Fox 64 so easily forgotten, yet simultaneously so fondly remembered? Probably a variety of factors - it didn't actually reinvent anything from Star Fox for the SNES, it was then - as it is now - a pretty low tier Nintendo franchise (although Smash Bros. Brawl would have you believe otherwise). It is even enough of a low-tier franchise that Nintendo hasn't even seen fit to do a followup themselves, passing it out like some cheap whore to whoever wants to try their hands at it. But, hey, why bother trying to recreate something they perfected already?

A quick tangent - I had forgotten that Star Fox even came with the N64 Rumble Pak until I saw it featured prominently on the box-art above. Now, I enjoyed the rumblin' well enough at first, but it really becomes distracting to the point where I just left it off and forgot about it. That it was heavy and sucked batteries didn't help either. By the time the WaveBird came out, I was glad that I wouldn't even need to bother turning it off in the future. In the present generation, I've been pleased to discover that rumble is used much more subtly than in the past - unless there's an explosion in a cutscene, at which point developers find it important to encourage me to watch my controller dance across a table (because damned if I'm holding the fucking thing as it rumbles for 20 uninterruped seconds, Halo 3 or Gears or whoever it was).

Star Fox 64
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: 7/1/1997
Obtained: Summer 1997

8.5/10

#117: The World Is Not Enough (2000, N64)

Why not begin with the obscure - or perhaps more aptly, the forgettable?

Forgettable in this case doesn't even mean bad or mediocre, it is just that - especially in a genre as, well, dependent on oneupsmanship - as the first person shooter. It is difficult for a single title, unless really well received at the time of its release to really remain relevant to today. Something like GoldenEye 007 may still be well-regarded and well-remembered, but good luck remembering the other titles it competed with in its day - did you even know Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom all saw fairly high profile releases on the N64? People may recall Turok, but did you know there were four of them on the N64? Perhaps even more forgotten than any of these is GoldenEye's own 'brother-from-another-mother', EA's The World Is Not Enough (TWINE).

You probably didn't know this, but TWINE was actually quite well received in its day. This is pretty surprising when you consider how the public opinion pretty quickly denounced it as some sort of GoldenEye impostor. That is not to say that such a claim was not true - EA, after obtaining the Bond license in time for the terrible Tomorrow Never Dies (terrible referring to the movie itself) put out a Tomorrow Never Dies videogame, of which I am very unfamiliar with (not having owned a PlayStation at the time) - but I do know it was not a FPS like the very excellent GoldenEye 007, and also that it wasn't especcially well received. For their second-go-around, EA decided (as they often do) to go with what others had proven to work. This isn't even to say EA's method here should be denigrated - there is much to say for the ability to turn out quality gameplay, even if it's as uninspired as EA's work tends to be. They also opted to hand it off to the independent developer Eurocom - master of the art of the liscensed property, who would later be responsible for the overlooked Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.

In some respects, TWINE even exceeds Rare's seminal effort. While it doesn't quite match the fluidity of control that GoldenEye achieved, and while the graphics seemed somehow more jaggy and less refined (shall I say, PS1-looking), EA still managed to produce a more polished single-player campaign. It simply felt more, let's say, Bond-ish. It certainly had a better idea of what makes a good Bond set-piece.

Still, GoldenEye remains more fun to play, and the better game. And in multiplayer there really isn't much of a contest. Granted TWINE may have a better selection of options, but what it already lacked in graphical 'smoothness' and in quality of gunplay becomes only more pronounced once we get more people involved in the shenanigans. This says nothing about the map and level design.



The World Is Not Enough is at its best being what it was in its own time - a rather good diversion for those of us waiting for the forthcoming Perfect Dark (and also as a nice blue cart to add to ones collection). But this doesn't change the fact that, given Rare's twin titans of the genre on the same platform, there simply isn't any reason to come back to, or really, to remember it.

The World is Not Enough
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Eurocom
Released: 10/18/2000
Obtained: Christmas 2000 (Gift)

7.0/10