The World is Not Enough (PS1) – Nostalgia is, also, Not Enough

There are several things that people think about when they hear James Bond. The action, the ladies, the gadgets and by extension of that, the cars. There is probably a larger portion of people I anticipate who remember and talk about the Bond Cars. So, on the surface, a racing game based on the James Bond Universe is… Probably not a bad idea, I can see it now, it would be an arcade style kart racer with different Bond cars and characters, heroes and villains alike, power-ups like missiles, oil slicks, etc. Perhaps throw in some quotes and taunts as you overtake people or hit them with a weapon!  It all sounds incredibly feasible! Heck, character kart racing is a sub-genre we can probably blame Mario Kart for.

Yeah, that’s not what we got.

007 Racing is, primarily, a mission-based vehicle game that has a scattershot of ideas, providing each of its 12 missions its own unique feel. Missions include destroying targets with your car’s gadgets, a checkpoint style time trial, a pseudo tailing mission where you are trying to download information from a series of cars whilst maintaining a certain distance from them. Heck there is even an actual point to point race! I guess that title wasn’t a lie!

With all that, there is something here that could be enjoyed. I say could because we need to address probably the biggest sin this game has and that is the control, when it works, it feels decent but a lot of the time you will find yourself wrestling with it. A few of the more time-sensitive missions are likely to test your patience more than your driving skills. Personally, I found the driving inconsistent, there will be runs you will have where you glide around corners seamlessly, and other times when you will spin out of control wildly costing you valuable time, prompting a reset. Graciously, most missions are relatively short meaning you aren’t losing a huge amount from those restarts.

Thankfully, most missions your car is quite sturdy to crashes, whether they be scrapes or head-on collisions. Your biggest threat to your health appears to be small arms fire, goons peppering you with gunfire proves to be far more fatal than crashing headfirst into oncoming traffic. Actually, that is not 100% true, there is a bigger threat, your own missiles and explosives seem to have an impressive amount of splash damage that on a couple of missions you may find yourself completely sapped of health because you weren’t a quarter mile away from your own missile explosion. Very annoying on missions where you need to actively destroy enemy vehicles or other targets.

The game also features the weirdest difficulty landscape I have ever seen. Not quite Driver 1 difficult or confusing for an introductory mission, but there is a lot going on and it can be quite overwhelming. It’s one of those missions that is easy once you know what you are doing and once you get a feel for the game. There is a lot going on, enemies shooting at you and explosions around you, but you can by and large ignore those. But anyway, after the first few missions it then becomes much easier, until the difficulty spikes again at mission 9 before ending on a rather polite downhill. I say that, the last couple of missions are less challenging and more head scratching, a situation of what do I do here? But nothing that I would deem taxing on gaming skills. Incidentally, the game does have two difficulties, but you do have to beat the game on Agent to unlock 00 Agent. The biggest differences can be seen in Mission 2 where the number of items to collect is doubled, and across the board you are required to get a performance score of 80% or higher to pass the mission, most of the time this is automatic, with only a couple of missions giving you hassle with that score target.

So, something I have appreciated about (most) James Bond games, are the unlockable cheats/bonuses. 007 Racing delivers on these, but they are all a bit… Meh. Some of them being alternative visual effects with only one of them being remotely useful, and that is double health. To unlock these, you need to achieve a challenge that the game graciously presents to you, one for each mission, and must be done on a specific difficulty. In a very similar way to how Goldeneye did it. Some of these are akin to pulling teeth, requiring a level of patience and masochism that I can’t endorse. Along with unlocking these bonuses, would be the best word for it, you are also rewarded with a rather cringey clip of one of the female characters praising your abilities. Perhaps If anything it just adds an awkward level of sleaze to the game.

As mentioned, when everything falls into place 007 Racing can be a lot of fun, it is certainly a game that has ideas. It is very much a curiosity, something that, frankly, I couldn’t recommend outside of those who really want to play a bit of an oddity. Your life is not going to be enriched by the experience, you are not missing out on some gem from the PS1 era if you don’t play it, and I am not just saying this because as it stands, I am on top of some leaderboard sections on RetroAchievements!

Tomorrow Never Dies (PS1) - But you do, again and again and again.

 

Tomorrow Never Dies Summary Toot

I wish I had a better frame of reference for going into this game, if I have seen the film of Tomorrow Never Dies it was a blur to me, a bit of a hazy Bond shaped blot on my memory. Perhaps I was too young when it came out. The frustrating thing is, I remember seeing The World is Not Enough! Going into a movie tie-in game completely blind might not be a terrible thing, these kinds of games tend to get a bit of a bad rap, seen as cash grabs that are devoid of ideas, where they don’t do the source material justice or by taking massive liberties with it.

As a slight aside, movie tie-in games, what exactly is the expectation of them? Movies, generally speaking, do not translate well to video games. This is true of any kind of media, there is always something lost or some liberty taken during the adaptation process, either for expediency or padding. Is there a golden standard for how we should adapt movies into games? Because if we use Goldeneye as an example, we just need to look at the 2nd and 3rd act of the game to see we have gone way off course from the source material, that being said, Surface, Bunker, Silo and Frigate are all great levels! But we were talking about... Oh, yes Tomorrow Never Dies.

So, from the offset, there are a few things we need to address. No, I am not talking about the perspective, Third-Person Shooter is a totally viable gameplay genre for a James Bond game, not everything needs to be Goldeneye after all. No, something a little more egregious starts to come into effect very quickly in this game. But let’s talk about some of the positives first, because if you hadn’t of guessed, this isn’t going to be a glowing recommendation. Firstly, the game has a lock-on function for nearby enemies, that is polite. The game comes with a lives system, you start with 2 lives, and each stage has hidden extra life, some are hidden better than others. Losing a life means you just respawn back at full health exactly where you died, you only need to restart the mission when you run out of lives. Sweet. Also, lives carry over to the next stage, so you can stockpile them for the later levels. Awesome! You also can carry medkits, up to ten in total, and can be used with a push of the square button, if they are your actively selected item. Using a health pack heals 1 to 2 pips of your health, which is a little inconsistent. I think it is more on a percentage basis, a numerical health value would be better to understand the damage you take and how much you’re healing. But that is a minor niggle.

The healing is a minor niggle and I don’t think about it too much, as healing tends to involve me mashing the Square button in a blind panic, why is that? Well, something you might realise very quickly into the game, enemies can and will drain your health bar in seconds and your extra lives will very quickly drop. In fact, in the first level, there is a bunker very early on, the enemy in that bunker can take easily half your health in seconds. Almost every enemy in the game has a machine gun of sorts and will just spray you with bullets, sometimes with pinpoint accuracy and no amount of circle strafing will protect you. In this game your best defence is a good offense. Shoot first, ask questions later. There are a few instances where effective cover is given, but usually you just need to be aggressive and hope you kill enemies quickly. You want quick kills because sometimes damage is a bit wonky, sometimes an enemy will take 3 shots from your pistol, other times you need to unload about 10 bullets. Not ideal when there are multiple enemies all coming down on you.

You can use a first-person aiming mode in the game, to allow you to get headshots or snipe enemies who exist on the fringe of the games draw distance, but your crosshair moves sluggishly across the screen and really isn’t that viable outside of stealthy headshots, which the game does give you good opportunities for. But you won’t know when this is a viable option unless you have played the level multiple times over, which… If your first play is similar to mine, where I would die at least once per level, but also pick up the extra life, keeping my lives at a constant two throughout the entire eleven mission campaign. Campaign is a weird word to use here, military shooters certainly have had a massive impact on gaming lexicon.

Some stages also have some issues where enemies will not spawn until they are off camera, which can lead to you being flanked because they popped in behind you after you passed their spawn location. Once you know the location of these enemies, they are predictably inconsistent.

Graciously, most levels are relatively short, so retrying levels because you have run out lives or because you want to try and beat the level without dying to stock up on those lives isn’t that taxing. Though you can’t skip mid-mission cutscenes, these only start to grate if you have had to play the level numerous times. But, outside of there being two difficulties, Agent and 00 Agent, there is very little reason to replay this game once you have beaten it. The differences in the difficulties seem rather negligible, as enemies on Agent will still make you a bullet-ridden block of swiss cheese with deadly precision. There are no unlockable bonuses, no cheats to encourage replaying levels with special weapons or silly effects… Considering that the back of the game box calls it the Ultimate Bond Experience, it all feels a little lacklustre.

If it wasn’t for some of the achievements in Retro Achievements causing a bubbling desire of self-defenestration, I wouldn’t have given this more than a single playthrough and never looked back. Honestly though, not taking damage on Mission 9 was equal part the worst experience of my life and one of my greatest personal accomplishments in gaming to date, and I at least have an achievement as spurious evidence to say I have done it!

Honestly, I would say that is probably my least favourite Bond game of this generation, and that is saying something…