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How Can We Fix James Bond?
James Bond is sexy, sauvé, and always cool under fire, just like my favorite Game Informer editor, Ben Reeves. Women want to be with him; men want to be him. Ian Fleming's classic spy has enthralled readers and moviegoers for over half a century. The character clearly works. So why are his games so broken?
I'm not going to lie. I love James Bond. I'm a big fan of the classic movies. Actually I love all of the movies. Sean Connery pretty much defines the character for me, but Daniel Craig is such a masculine force of nature that I'm pretty sure I have a repressed man-crush on the guy. Sure, at times, Bond as been an aggressive, drunk sexist, but he is a flawed character with a massive amount of internal strength. I think this is what has given the character such lasting appeal. Of course, he's also a badass spy who blows up a lot of s*** and walks away adjusting his tie. He's magnetic.
Unfortunately, a lot of that appeal has been lost in the transition to video games. People always point to GoldenEye 007 as the greatest Bond game of all time, and while that is a great game, let's look at that for a second. Almost everything that made GoldenEye 007 a great game had very little to do with Bond. It was a great shooter with inventive controls and an addictive multiplayer. It was a great game, but was it really a James Bond game? Sure, Bond used a few gadgets and it roughly followed the plot of the film, but it failed to capture any of the sophisticated charisma that Bond is known for.
Some of the games since GoldenEye 007 have done a better job of capturing Bond's style, but they have all failed to hit the watermark established by Rare's 1997 release. And some of the most recent Bond titles are just a joke. Why can't we have a proper Bond game?
What would it take to do Bond right? Personally, I'd like to see some of Solid Snake's combat experience coupled with Sam Fisher's sneakery and the creative mission design of games like Dishonored or BioShock. But what ideas do you have for a James Bond game? Check out this weeks Test Chamber on 007 Legends to see what Tim Turi and Andrew Reiner had to say about the franchise.
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