They say never judge a book by its cover.


People say a lot of stupid fucking things,
don’t they?

As we move forward with our replay of GoldenEye 64, after a brief excursion into totally off the map, extra canonical bullshit territory, with our trapesing through the terrifying terrain that troublingly terrorizes with titanic thermonbaric travesties that threaten the tragic tension tethered to toxic tribulations, thither and hither around the globe during the Cold War, which is a delightfully absurdist way to refer to level 6, the Silo, in the most long-winded but alliterative way I could muster. Now, we cease our terrying on queer, literary affairs and press on.

Level 7, mission 4, part i (even though there is literally no part ii to this mission, developer Rare still decided to label one off missions this way, who knows why, they’re British.) is the Frigate, which is not quite as extra canonical as the Silo, as no such area in the movie exists whatsoever, the Frigate *technically* has relevancy to the film, but Rare has taken extraordinary liberties in expanding the role of the Frigate in the game, as it only appears in a short scene for about three minutes in the film, with Bond being onboard the vessel for a grand total of 30 seconds, in what can only be described as the most ill conceived plan of interception in a Bond film that made it out of the post production editing process. We are talking Fox Mulder levels of stealth: running in broad daylight, directly into view of enemy combatants, with no weapon, and absolutely no fucking clue about what your plan is.

“Spooky kinds of quiet“, though ironically, nothing to do with ghost stealth. Mad, innit?

Carrying on with the nature of the mission structure, in that Rare was just totally developing by the seat of their pants, only improvisation on their mind when constructing the mission layout for the Frigate, they obviously only really used the ship’s design as a reference point, and then just did an elaborate ass pull for the other 95% of the rest of the mission, that ends up being delightfully dreamy gameplay. The movie portion of where this appears has pretty much nothing to do with what happens aboard this ship, outside of the Pirate stealth helicopter being on the deck. Though, just like our luck with the Silo, Rare’s creativity with off the script methodology is our benefit, as the Frigate ends up being lowkey one of my fav missions in the whole game.

The qualifying contents of the mission which engender such fervor within me, may be for reasons you weren’t expecting, though first, a bit of setup. The premise for the Frigate mission in game is that the Janus group (the antagonist crime syndicate that haunts the whole of GoldenEye) have taken over the ship, armed it with a bomb, and taken hostages, all in the name of stealing the Pirate stealth helicopter parked on the back of the ship. In the movie, Onatopp and Ourumov? (the other accomplices face is covered, possibly to make the reveal he is a traitor “more” shocking later? It doesn’t matter), do a good ole’ switch-a-roo, kill the pilots, and casually steal the helicopter in plain sight during a press ceremony, so that they can make a clean getaway once they activate GoldenEye (due to the effects of the helicopter having special anti-EMP defenses), all of which takes less time than finishing a martini, shaken or otherwise.

What’s a bit odd about the levels conceit, is that the mission brief implies Janus hasn’t yet commandeered the aircraft, for reasons not adequately explained in game. They don’t even stage a faux getaway, like the helicopter just barely taking off when you arrive, having to make an epic saving throw to get the tracker on. Nah, it’s just totally chilling in the back, not even guarded. You can just go right up to it, do some squats, do a funny little Bond dance if you like…all the time in the world really to leisurely place the tracker on. Obviously, that’s the super easy part of the mission. The next easiest part is defusing the bomb in the engine room, which, as a matter of fact, is so easy, it isn’t even a concern on Agent, so one less problem to check off the 007 to do list, no doubt only a few bullet points above going to rehab and getting tested for STD’s (Bond is so wreckless.)

On all difficulties, and where this mission truly shines, boils down to the hostage saving, which, you’d think would be a sure fire recipe for an instantaneous massive migraine extravaganza. In my opinion, that is probably only true for the most challenged of us that struggle within the anger management realm, as the Frigate has two things going for it: brevity, and levity. the brevity bit maintains relevancy throughout, as the whole ship is open to you from moment one, and it takes less than 20 seconds to get from one relevant end of the ship to another (going from the bow to the stern is unnecessary, as no relevant mission objectives lie at either extreme, being there for pure aesthetic).

My point being: if you somehow mess up this mission so bad you die or too many hostages get nixed, which by the by, one almost has to put deliberative effort into doing on Agent to reach either fail state, as the way the whole thing is setup is ridiculously charitable in terms of leniency. To “moonraker” laser my point in on the imminent truth involved; the Frigate has a Super Meat Boy like quality about it, so if one fails, you’re only a handful of seconds away from being back in the game, so the turn around time in trying again is phenomenal, and quite encouraging to hone your craft.

The second part of this, the levity portion, comes up due to the hilarious number of ways this mission can go absolutely batshit crazy pants wrong, though on Agent, it grants such charity of forgiveness on this front, as I said, it would be as if someone is going out of there way to accomplish said feat, which you know, your business is your business, whatever freaky shit you’re into, live and let live, yeah?

Regressing slightly to my point, you remain in close quarters the entire mission, to ridiculously claustrophobic degrees, with a surprising number of objects that can explode with just a little bit of random gunfire, and a group of hostages that are paper tigers in human form, and one stray bullet can send them to the next life. The number of times I burst through a door just to cap an innocent square in the dome is an uncountable metric, and I think by the end of my repeated follies, I had taken more hostage lives than the enemy. With Janus being so familiar with how Bond operates, I wouldn’t be half surprised if there whole plan was to just maintain the hostages, knowing Bond would haphazardly take them all out by accident himself.

That’s why I love speed running this one, as the margin of error is ridiculously high, between the bite sized, micro proportional stakes that the levels layout leans into, combined with the Murphy’s Law like hilarity that ensues when you inevitably unload an entire clip of semi-automatic weaponry directly into one of the poor bastards face you were meant to save, the only silver lining you can claim immediately afterwards is there is now one less hostage to worry about. This mission also has a hilarious number of computer terminals that can explode with very little provocation, usually entailing stray gun fire setting off an explosion that sends you flying across the room straight into some enemy combatants that are now unloading half a metric ton of bullshit into your junk, it’s hard not to metaphysically face palm while laughing at how horribly awry your attempts at being the hero turned out to be this day.

Though all of this misguided misstepping and bodacious bungling all adds up to an amazingly engaging level to speedrun, as getting everything just right is quite difficult, but getting it wrong a 100 times in a row before that moment still remains a hoot. One of my runs on this baby was a scant 1:16…I was really cooking with gasoline that day. Though, I suppose a level like this does bring into focus some of the problems of game design, in that a level like this alone might have taken many months of theory and execution to get right, from conceptualizing a schematic, to designing the layout, to rendering the graphics, enemy placement, mission design, testing and debug, etc, and then a player comes along and beats it in less than two minutes….probably not the most ideal turn around in terms of time invested vs player interaction. Though, considering how much I enjoyed the level and replayed it, and I certainly can’t be alone in my perspective, I’d say an effort well spent at the end of the day.

I’m not sure if this is an underrated level or overrated level, quite frankly, I never actually talk about GoldenEye with anyone in real life, nor do I peruse any of the relevant forums with others banging on about it, so I am unable to qualify my own seal of approval vs the vast majority, but based on the achievement associated with the level “Calm Seas”, less than 10% of players even got this far in the game, so the grand majority of the base, at least on Xbox Live, haven’t even an opinion on it, as they didn’t get this far, which is kind of mind blowing, cause Agent is truly a walk in the park in terms of where difficulty is concerned. I’m wondering if there were similar numbers back on the N64? Ghastly statistic, if true, which is also a crying shame, as top to bottom, from the music that absolutely slaps, to how the ebb and flow of the mission structure turns out, this level is a banger, to be sure.

That about wraps it up for the Frigate, I’m afraid. Not much in the way of the philosophical to imbue my critique with, nor sly film absurdity to reference, with me also lacking in any behind the scenes fun facts to speak of, and I have not come bearing poetry this day.

Just a fucking ship, really.

~Pashford