Bond, James Bond

GoldenEye 007 for the Wii is a strange game. It's based on a 1997 Nintendo 64 game that was based on a 1995 James Bond movie with Pierce Brosnan. This remake uses Daniel Craig, Bond for the current generation flicks, in a storyline that only hits the major elements of the previous game/movie. To say I played a lot of the original game is a bit of an understatement. That game and Mario Kart 64 were about the only games I played with my roommates at the time. Back then, split-screen multiplayer with only one analog stick was all we had.

Playing through the single player campaign after not playing the original for a long time was a bit strange. There were only a handful of times that I ran into a situation that seemed really familiar. The rest was mostly just generic shooter stuff. The exposition scenes happen mainly through a 3D computer display thing where M describes things that you need to do. Bond's smart phone plays an annoyingly central role in all of this. At one point I was walking around a dark nightclub looking at my phone's screen using a "facial recognition app" to find the person I was searching for. Snore.

I was intrigued by the Wii remote controls at first. It seemed to work pretty well, but I was having to try too hard on the first level to do basic tasks. Plus it forced me to hold my right wrist in a stationary position for too long. Propping it up on the pillow and leaving the remote pointed at the TV helped, but it was still a bit much. Then I spent a few minutes digging out my Gamecube Wavebird and controller plug ins. After some X and Y configuration in the settings, I had it functioning like pretty much any Xbox 360 first person shooter game. So, in short, I thought the Wii controls were neat, but to play the game for very long, I wanted something I was used to. And the ability to customize all of this to my heart's content was a really nice touch.

As I got towards the end of the campaign I started comparing the game to other shooters I've played on the 360 or PS3. As fun as this game is, it just doesn't hold up to even mediocre games on other platforms. The graphics suffer, of course, due to the Wii's less than favorable hardware. The AI of the computer players is pretty dumb. Or their movements are slowed down on purpose since the developers realized you'll have trouble hitting them with the Wii remote you're probably using. They pulled the classic trick at the end of the game: increasing the difficulty by throwing more dudes at you instead of adding any new gameplay mechanics or enemy types.

If I hadn't ever seen any 360 or PS3 games, this game would be pretty impressive. It even has a decent online multiplayer mode. And, as an added bonus, since the Wii has no voice chat you don't have to listen to squeaky-voiced 12 year olds going on about how they just pwned you. I don't know about you, but this happens to me a lot. My goal in an every man for himself battle quickly became to kill just one person before the round was over. My final count was something like 28 deaths and 3 kills. Woo hoo.

So it's a bit strange, but certainly worth playing. Even more so if you only have a Wii.