Flirting with disaster is always more fun when you’re the one holding the ace up your sleeve.

After I used the word disaster, Reagan popped into my mind. How peculiar…

As we continue on with our little soiree behind the iron curtain, and sally forth with our “Bonding Experience” as we replay Goldeneye 64, we finally move on from what is the introduction of both the film and the game, which have largely been running alongside adjascent to each other with accurate concurrency up to this point, save for the grisly desouling of the energetic premise that makes the Runway an exciting action piece in the film, and a long, breezy walk down a short fucking road in the game equivalent, and move on to greener gras….err, whiter snows, to stay on theme.

As is the case with GoldenEye, accurate recreations in the form of adaptations are not indicative of quality; there are too many to list in reference to the conversions of books to movies, movies to games, and vice versa, where exception is king, with understanding the vibe of the conceptual material taking priority, the golden standard relating to an effective metaphysical translation, one that speaks directly to adopting the virtues of imaginative merit via a worthy transmutation process, in producing the equivalent of a philosophers stone, with an appropriately modified alchemical conjuration methodology at hand. GoldenEye very much shines brightly with this in mind, even with the exceptions developer Rare takes in telling the same story, one bloody liberty at a time.  

Having said that, I figured to help refresh my memory and give the “gamification” of the film more context, I would rewatch GoldenEye, just to jog my memory about where it differs from the game. After the opening sequence of the movie, you get a lot of splashy flirting amid a sexy car chase of catch me if you can, as Bond creates an HR disaster waiting to happen by hitting on an evaluator his boss M has assigned to “qualify” Bond’s character and work ethic, who sits next to Bond horrified as he engages in a wild honking goose chase, racing femme fatale Xenia Onatopp (her last name is the cutest little quaintness of punniness because it means she’s going TO FUCK YOU)-down a mountain, in one of the most exciting car commercials that came out that year.

There’s a lot of other stuff that happens following this; exposition, cheekiness, intrigue…general Bond like things, of which, none of that makes it into a game, but again, there’s really no meat and potatoes gameplay stuff going on here, and we have a game to make god dammit, so in the name of not getting too far a field of our focus, we essentially fast forward about 15 minutes into the movie, where *cue GoldenEye 64*, we finally arrive at Severnaya, a top secret Russian bunker where the GoldenEye key is located. The mission in game is called “Surface” for some goofy reason, as if during development, Rare never changed the working title of the level when they were first conceiving of the conceptual stages to begin preliminary work on the alpha version, and then just said “we’ll fix it in post”, and just totally never did, so they stuck with the oddly vague name “Surface” at the end of the day after no doubt shrugging their shoulders and declaring “fuck it, we ball“. Whatever the reason, we’re here now, and it’s time to tiptoe through the tundra.

Rare does a sly job of contrasting each level with the last one, so that not just the pacing feels different, but you get an entirely new atmosphere to boot, so the ambiance shifts the mood directly into a different temperature, giving the player an excellent feel for how to slide into Bond’s shoes more meaningfully. All of this is easy to miss when you’re bolting through the level at 1000 MPH recklessly shooting off two RPG90’s at full blast, but if one is willing to slow down, there is a lot of work that goes into differentiating the levels, and that’s saying something for a 1997 N64 game.

Surface has a faux “sandbox” allure that a lot of early 3D games had, where you were given this big map, and only probably about, 10% of it really mattered, or “had purpose”, in a sense, involving where the mission objectives were, with the rest kind of being open air nothingness, with next to naught to really discover, nor anything of interest to actually do outside of the sheer act of visual exploration. In rare instances, you might get a fun Easter egg tucked away by a developer, but overall, it’s just one big god damn empty field. Even more noteworthy instances of games with exploration in mind, like Ocarina of Time, upon first launching, everyone was positively wowed by the immense size of Hyrule Field, made even better with the eventual acquisition of Epona with which to clomp through the meadows with, would be looked back upon in only a single generations time as being just this big empty space. Time and context change everything of course, as where I wouldn’t really waste a breath exploring what Surface has now, back when I first played it, going to the ends of the map just to be greeted by this blurry vagueness as I approached a distorted polygonal wall felt quite exciting, in a weird Scooby Doo demasking mystery ruining kind of way.

The combat in “Surface” is quite lenient in difficulty, due to the open nature of the level. Unlike Runway, where you are bottlenecked and surrounded on all sides by guys shooting at you, there are only ever a few guys at various distances gunning you down, and that is usually only if you eschew the stealthy option of the silenced PP7 they give you, and forgo the silent snaking that benefits the strategic. The openness of the level not only lets you easily evade gun fire with some wide side strafing, but also in creating distance, as with most shooters, enemies lose accuracy the further away you are, unless you are the snipers from Halo 2, which can hit you accurately from 3 light-years away with their eyes closed.

The only real mission objective is to “power down” (very important lesson on wording here) “communications dish”, which is in the building in the middle of the map with the massive wanking satellite on top. What is so hilarious about this mission objective, is how specifically Rare wanted you to do it, with almost troll like consequences if you did not read the instructions carefully. For in the satellite dish building, there resides a terminal, and upon entering the room, your first instinct is to blow it to hell, as you were instructed to “power down” the dish. Well, “powering down” seems as if a highly interruptible word, so the knee-jerk reaction is to shoot the son of a bitch. Hilariously, you will fail the mission if you do so, as Rare was quite specific in the brief preceding the mission (that you obviously read through thoroughly, right?), in that they *only* want you to power it down, as Q declares “no point in letting them tell the whole of Russia you’ve dropped in”. Nice little bit of call back work, and as so many devs like to do, have a little chortle at the expense of trolling players not paying enough attention.

On Agent, like most missions, it’s kind of a one and down dealie, as once you power down *and definitely not shoot* the hardware controlling the communications dish, you make all sneaky sneaky like by infiltrating a “ventilation tower”, as to continue to keep a low profile. All of this helps build off of the intuitively designed stealth gameplay interwoven into the Facility mission, as I detailed a little while back, and a gameplay hook that will continue to pay dividends as the game progresses.

Not sure I have any radically insightful takeaways to share about Surface, though I will say with 14 levels left to go, we’ve got plenty of time to talk shop about design, philosophy, and pop-culture nonsense in the coming weeks, and even a return trip to Surface not too far in the distant future to speak upon what I have not this day.

I suppose I will say I’m rather surprised about the bizarre double standard effort involved with critique on adaptations, as book lovers will most certainly make it known just how much the movie deviates from the source material, and so often in poorly ways, and many gamers will do similarly, in pointing out the canon inconsistencies of movie adaptations, but I never recall anyone batting an eye at the fact that in GoldenEye the game, absolutely no one seemed fussed about a change to the story as massive as the GoldenEye satellite not being activated by Onatopp and Ourumov, and therefore not dramatically exploding an entire Russian bunker, instead just having Bond and Natalya set a timer (not even on all difficulties!, mind you, so it absolutely doesn’t happen in an alternative way at all on Agent), and then both of them escaping before any destruction even occurs, or not at all, if on Agent.

Hypocrisy is a glass mask, it would seem.

~Pashford