The World is Not Enough
Having seemingly learned their lesson with the relative failure of Tomorrow Never Dies, EA brought Bond back into the first person. They say mimicry is the best form of flattery but when the biggest innovation in a game is the fact that the N64 cartridge is blue instead of gray it doesn’t always work out that way. OK, I kid, this game actually isn’t that awful despite the fact that it is basically EA trying to be Rare. Actually that is the big problem with it. EA is trying to cram their Bond game into Rare’s Bond game and it makes for plenty of awkward moments. It is like if Bond walked into a place with one woman and ran into another one he had just had a very successful shag with last night. Awwwkward. You can actually see some of the stuff I love about the EA games in this one, like more emphasis on being smooth and pulling off Bond like actions. However, it doesn’t have that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that GoldenEye had and while you might argue the ‘je ne sais quoi’ isn’t something that should ever be brought up in a conversation about a videogame’s quality, in the case of Bond it must be because in any discussion explaining Bond’s success it always comes down to his ‘je ne sais quoi.’
Anyway, the point is that The World Is Not Enough lacked it. Maybe it was because of the movie’s plot being stretched a bit thin but more likely it’s because by this time people were still heavily playing GoldenEye so the mimicry only emphasized the games flaws in comparison to the classic everyone loved. In my opinion it didn’t even control as well. Still, I remember some good times shooting through this and the heavier dependence on gadgets made it a bit more fun and, in my opinion, closer to the Bond of the current films (now is not the time or the place to argue about gadgets in Bond). And in case you’re wondering, having plugged the game back in for this piece, it does not stand the test of time at all, which is odd because I think GoldenEye still does, thought it could just be my overly fond memories of the game influencing my replay. I also tried the multiplayer and it is really disappointing. The levels aren’t as clever as GoldenEye’s and everything just seems kind of overly complicated because of the whole control scheme.
So The World Is Not Enough doesn’t quite work out the way EA plans since it doesn’t instantly garner them a classic to end all classics (I seriously doubt the Bond franchise will be doing that again anyway). In this case I would expect EA to play it safe and wait for the next film tie-in in order to cash in on that. However, the next film wasn’t coming for a while so, surprisingly, EA got some balls and decided to make their very own Bond adventure, eventually releasing: Agent Under Fire.
