Why Goldeneye 007 Wii was a completely unnecessary remake
GoldenEye 007 (2010)
GoldenEye 007 (2010)
When it comes to making fat stacks, it’s important for us little people to remember that in the world of entertainment, there is simply no such thing as a sacred cow. Nothing is untouchable, above the remit of cynical executives bolting the latest faces in entertainment onto an old work and shipping it as a “continuity reboot” or a “spiritual sequel”.
You saw all of this starting with the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. What’s the easiest way to conceal the fact that none of the old actors wanted to touch a new Ghostbusters movie with a ten-foot barge pole? That’s simple: you do a complete turnabout on the male cast, and instead bring in a whole new set of actresses that won’t make viewers ask “what happened to the other guys?”
Is that so cynical of me? Well, how about Dumb & Dumber To? We should have known that it was going to be a stinker. I even learned recently that they made a modern version of that old, classic, British pastiche, Dad’s Army. It was made into a film starring, of all people, Catherine Zeta Jones, with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon cropping up with their usual turns as obligatory old English gentlemen. Would you believe it?
Now I can take or leave Dad’s Army if I’m really being honest, but do you see what happens? Settings and characters get dug up ninety years later and turned into some sort of vanity project. It’s enough to make me do a big sad. They’re going to redo The Breakfast Club as well one of these days, and violate its orifices – I know it. You’d think a Breakfast Club remake would be impossible, but you mustn’t forget that they already massacred Robocop and Total Recall.
But who’d have thought that we’d see the James Bond series make a return to the 1995 Pierce Brosnan flick, GoldenEye? Actually, it’s not the first time we’ve seen the name of that wonderful film crop up again; we also had some six-out-of-ten effort called GoldenEye: Rogue Agent in the PS2 days, which passed all self-respecting gamers by.
I’m not looking down on the PS2 era though, because I have to say I’m an unashamedly big fan of those EA developed James Bond games we got around then. Well, not so much Agent Under Fire, which we’ll look at in less than glowing terms another day. But Nightfire and Everything or Nothing were triffic, warts and all.
For our purposes though, this new GoldenEye remake, initially for Wii and later for PS3 and Xbox 360, was touted as a much-needed throwback to those wonderfully misty-eyed days when you and three of your fellow Milhouses huddled around a tiny CRT screen, blowing each other away in the N64 GoldenEye’s hurriedly added multiplayer mode.
Only deal is, multiplayer in 2010 and to this day is unfortunately focused on online play against geeks, nobodies, homophobes and minority haters. Worse still, we’re on a Nintendo system this time. It may have been a Wii exclusive (for perhaps a year or so), but online play and Nintendo still go together like B.A. Baracus and planes.
Of course, the Wi-Fi Connection on the Wii is long gone, which takes away about half the game’s appeal. I must admit that I could only actually access the online mode a handful of times, stemming from some odd boob in the game’s programming. I don’t know, it just never seemed to let me online. For my own good, I suppose.
Whenever I did manage to get online and frolic with firearms among other avid riflers, I found myself getting chiefed by Brad, Corey and Tyler again and again and again. I’m not sure if I was even supposed to be pitted against players from across the Atlantic, but I was, and I was dangerously unprepared.
To do well in shooting games, I can exclusively reveal, you’ve got to be sufficiently tooled up. But when I came online and started running around some empty building site, trying to catch some scoundrels out and fry ‘em, I found my artillery woefully lacking.
I started with Bond’s trusty handgun, which might prove useful at swanky dinner parties and high-stakes poker games. But it’s hardly much use when someone’s fragging you with the Golden Gun from fifty miles away. Alongside that, I had some jelly-shooting submachine gun that spat out about 12 ineffectual bullets before it needed reloading.
To get better shooters, I’d have to perform well, gain experience points and level up, which more or less meant that I'd have to pick up a whole new career with the game. With my online gameplay being so time constrained, this was obviously a non-starter. I wanted to play as Oddjob, so I could throw his insta-death hat about. But to get him, I'd have to play for about seventeen years, which is two more than I was willing to give. Some pity.
We’ve got local multiplayer of course, which at least offers provisions for up to four-players, something which more than a few modern games are seemingly reluctant to do. But it still lacks AI bots. The word ‘bot’ probably wasn’t even in the old Oxford dictionary when the Nintendo 64 GoldenEye ruled the roost, so technically that’s not a stepdown.
All the same, having only ten multiplayer maps and four offline multiplayer modes falls pretty short of the multiplayer madness that this game promised, doesn’t it? Weren’t we looking for something that would build upon the original? As we’ve seen, Rareware sellotaped the multiplayer mode of GoldenEye N64 onto their game weeks before development finished, and that edition still ended up with more modes, more characters, almost the same amount of maps and a wide array of weapons.
So, apart from bar nicer graphics, what does this newer GoldenEye offer that we can’t still do on a Nintendo 64 and GoldenEye game, available for cheap? Or indeed, the versions finally available on Xbox and Switch. GoldenEye Wii really bigged up its multiplayer modes, but online was a mirthless rat-race and local was perfunctory at best.
This means that all we have to fall back on really, after we’ve disregarded the modes that never really got going in the first place, is the single-player. Now I know there’s many people out there who would buy an online-oriented shooter (inevitably Call of Duty) and never once deign to play through the single-player mode, never knowing whether or not the single player was a blockbuster story with killer gameplay. Compare that with GoldenEye N64, where every single-player level had a cheat to unlock, guards to mess with and different ways to get to the end.
Well, there may be more of an incentive for these types of players to play through GoldenEye Wii’s single player as, rather obviously, it’s loosely based on the classic film. I say loosely, because none of the characters resemble anything in the original movie. Licensing issues or some such, which forbade Bond from being depicted by anyone other than the top-notch Daniel Craig.
Moreover, once you get past the Dam and into the famous vent of the Facility, there’s fairly little resemblance to the locations of the film thereafter. The plot is modernised a little bit: the naff EMP plot is regurgitated, with face-turned-heel, newly-scarred 006 taking command of the GoldenEye satellites to steal himself oodles of cash and give London a jolly good rogering. The story twists and turns through exotic locales, and Daniel Craig and Judi Dench offer some decent vocals along the way, which is all you really need.
Ultimately though, the single-player mode is pretty typical Call of Duty fare – head towards some arbitrary point on the map, every so often slowing to a stand-still and taking cover behind a conveniently waist-high obstacle so that you can occasionally peek out to shoot the dozen or so crackshot guards who’ve suddenly spawned to take you down.
Obviously, any enemy bullets that go right through your canister can be healed very quickly by simply standing still and avoiding further shredding by any more bullets for a time. Makes sense, right? That’s all you need to do to get through the levels, with the occasional wandering out of cover to avoid thrown grenades.
Cover, peek out, shoot, recuperate, repeat. It all rapidly becomes repetitive, so much so that even the wonderful soundtrack, composed by long-time Bond composer David Arnold, can’t sustain the lengthy, samey levels.
With the big names on board, the wide range of control options, the online mode such that it was and the range of weaponry on offer, this isn’t a game that suffered from lack of effort. But I expected something that could offer a pretty significant step up to what we had 13 years previously - a little bit more than a now-defunct online mode.
A return to the classic multiplayer of old, they promised. Well, to deftly paraphrase a quote from the GoldenEye film by my supremely suave compatriot, "Game companies change, the lies stay the same". Stick to, I don’t know, GoldenEye Source. Or Perfect Dark. It’ll teach me to fund that Call of Duty guff.
16 May 2023