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James Bond 007: Blood Stone

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/02/2011
Posted in: Microsoft, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox 360. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Bizarre Creations

Release Date: 11/2/2010


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Most movie-based games are disasters, but when you take a movie license and do something original with it, it can turn out for the better. Bizarre Creations (Blur, Project Gotham Racing) has taken the helm of the Bond license to create the third entry into the series, but this is completely original with no movie tied to it. You play Daniel Craig’s Bond, and you’re, once again, trying to stop some evil thugs from doing evil things. While the story borders on paper-thin, it’s the action that we want.

Since Craig took the spotlight as Bond, his style is more brutal, raw, and realistic instead of the campy, funny, and smooth-talking past Bonds. He’s all about melee, guns, and less gadgets, and whether you like this better is up to you. While Everything or Nothing is the best Bond game in recent memory, Blood Stone is pretty decent. There are car chases, gun battles, and stealth sections that balance out nicely.

The stealth areas consist of sneaking around cover and meleeing guys and shooting them in the head without getting caught, or it’s going to be a firefight. This can be very satisfying when you learn the patrols and execute them accordingly. You can earn Focus Aim by doing a takedown, and this is just a one-shot kill, but you only get three. This comes in handy during stealth sections when you have multiple guys to take down in one area or are in a bind with your health.

Shooting is solid enough with blind fire from cover, and the timing is solid, but all the guns don’t really pack a punch. They feel light and sissy-like and completely not Bondlike at all. There’s a good variety of them, but you won’t care because you can’t tell the difference between any of them! There are some fun set pieces, such as slo-mo sections, some cinematic camera angles when jumping around, and a lot of explosions, so it’s packed full of action.

The racing sequences are something to be desired because it’s just driven from A to B and chasing this guy. There are no attached weapons or anything, and the cars drive like crap half the time. The cars either have severe understeer, oversteer, or feel really floaty. Coming from a developer who specializes in racing games, this is a huge surprise.

The game looks decent, but not up to par with current games. The racing sections look nice, but the characters feel last-gen, and everything just looks meh and sterile. The sound is pretty generic, with pew-pew gunfire, and the voice acting feels stiff despite being from real actors. Blood Stone is a great weekend rental, and don’t even expect multiplayer to keep you interested for much longer.

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Keyboard & Mouse

007: Everything or Nothing – 6 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/16/2010
Posted in: Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, Microsoft, Nintendo, PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

Publisher: EA

Developer: EA Redwood

Release Date: 2/17/2004


Available On

I’m not really a James Bond fan, but I can’t help but pass up a good action game, no matter what the license is. Everything or Nothing is based on the film when Pierce Brosnan was still a famous spy, and Everything or Nothing is pretty solid. The story is pretty nonsensical and is your typical Bond plot with a bad guy (Willam Defoe) hell-bent on ruling the world. Diavolo has nano-mites that can eat through metal and plans on attaching payloads of this stuff to nukes. Bond runs into a henchman (Jaws) and a beautiful woman to stop the evil madman.

The best part is the vehicle sections, and the shooting sections are hard as hell and mundane. I’m going to throw that out there right now. The vehicle sections have Bond driving real-world vehicles with missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, and oil slicks attached to them. What makes the driving sections so grand is the sense of speed. Driving across a bridge, jumping through signs, and finding shortcuts to trigger “Bond Moments”. While these are hard to find (even in on-foot sections), they can be satisfying. Every driving section is different, from escorts to flying over rooftops to races. All vehicles handle very well, even at high speeds, and this is what truly matters.

The on-foot sections are mundane and extremely frustrating. Even in the easiest setting, the game throws dozens of bad guys at you, and ammo is a loot and hunt type thing. You start out with a puny P99 pistol, and the game throws about 10 bad guys at you. The lock-on feature is clumsy since you can’t lock on unless the camera is facing an enemy. If you get close enough to someone, Bond will put his gun away and start meleeing while other guys around him are shooting. This can make you die in very tight spots. The melee is pretty basic, with heavy and light punches along with counters. You can hide behind the cover, but this tends to be a problem if the cover is taller than Bond can shoot.

You can use a lot of gadgets, but they tend to be useless unless the level requires them. You get Q spiders, which are remotely operated spiders that can blow things up and go inside little nooks. The coin grenades are pretty straightforward but have crappy physics and bounce around like rubber balls. There’s the nanosuit that makes you invisible, but I never even had to use it since stealth in this game is very hard and almost not an option. The rappel gun is what I used most. Being a Bond game, I wish the gadgets would have come in handy, but they are if you really want to use them. The shooting sections are just so frustrating due to the unbalanced difficulty. I died over 10 times on certain missions, and there are no checkpoints. Some of the longer levels have one, but most levels have none, and this can make you throw your controller across the room.

The graphics are pretty decent for a 2004 PS2 game. The textures are solid, the audio is nice, and there are only slight framerate problems due to the PS2’s limitations. There is an online co-op, but this will never be tested since the servers were shut down. There are a lot of missions in this game, and it will keep you busy for a good 8–10 hours, depending on how many times you die. The game is pretty solid, and you won’t be disappointed. Even people who don’t like Bond can enjoy this game, and that’s the beauty of it.

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007: Quantum of Solace

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/05/2009
Posted in: DS, Microsoft, Nintendo, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Wii, Xbox 360. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
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Publisher: Activision

Developer: Treyarch

Release Date: 11/4/2008


Available On

Well, here we are again sitting around the Bond fire (LAWL!), but seriously, who still likes James Bond after five different actors and twenty different movies? Does Bond ever age? Does he ever get a vacation without it turning into a firefight? How many mysterious foreign chicks does he need to bang before he realizes he should retire and get married already? Seriously, no one will be as good as Sean Connery, and Daniel Craig can’t even pull off Bond to save his life. This dude is a serious joke, but thankfully you won’t even care when you play this stupid yet fun game. This is one of those sleeper hits that has a retarded story and gameplay, yet you still finish the whole thing because it’s just stupid fun. Kind of like bathroom jokes; they don’t do any harm or good, yet they are still fun to say and laugh about over and over again. Quantum of Solace is like the bathroom joke of a sleeper hit FPS; you have your basic follow-up, and the punchline is what keeps you laughing. While you can completely forget about the retarded story about Bond and some terrorist dudes who are doing this and that I have no freaking clue and I don’t care, Daniel Craig has bits of his voice in the game, and his model has one expression that never seems to change.

While this game is seriously flawed, there are a lot of good things to keep you playing (rent it only!). The game looks really good; while not superb, it can pass off as an above-average next-gen game, which is a plus. Secondly, the game has super awesome guns, and they all feel really powerful. While they have more acronyms than a NASA space launch, you have your pistols, silenced pistols, submachine guns, sniper rifles, etc. While they aren’t anything new, they look cool, feel powerful, and sound cool, and they all go BOOM! You also have grenades, which are kind of retarded since you only get to carry one grenade at a time! The game actually has a semi-useful cover system that is both great and flawed at the same time. While you can sprint around and stuff, you can hit A to dash into cover (think Gears of War), and you have your typical blind firing and all that covering crap. The flawed part is that when you get hit by a grenade, you suddenly stand up. If you aim too far to your sides, Bond tends to stick his head out, and you can easily get killed this way.

Basically, the gunplay is your typical standard FPS stuff with retarded AI to boot. You’ll have swarms of guys coming after you, and they just stand there and let you blow them apart. Speaking of blowing apart, the game has an “environmental damage” system where you can shoot flashing objects to damage enemies (like we haven’t seen that before!). This actually does help when you have seven guys under a wooden platform full of explosive barrels. Shooting those support beams is just oh-so-awesome. The game is full of adrenaline-pumping sequences like your OMG!! button-pressing cutscenes (which are actually fun), and this is where you really feel like Bond, so that’s always a plus on the cinematic side. Since this is a Bond game, you can use stealth in a lot of the levels, but it’s very shallow and not implemented well. It really feels like an old PlayStation or an N64 game where you just hide behind a wall, dodge this camera’s spotlight, disable that camera, and shoot that guard. The cameras don’t even notice when you pop some lead into a guy’s head right in the camera’s view. I don’t know what the developers were trying to prove except for the fact that using old mechanics in 2008 doesn’t work too well.

A lot of times you’ll not know what to do, and you’ll blow your cover due to trial and error (again, a 10-year-old thing), and you have to restart all over again (if you want to stay stealthy). So, you can sneak around, but it feels really old and doesn’t really work out too well. Of course, you have to have some Bond moves to perform, and this is done by pressing the L stick and pushing the on-screen button and watching a 2-3 hit instant kill! While this is cool, the animations get repetitive. When the camera pulls back into first-person mode, you get disoriented since sometimes the game will flip you around, and it’s too easy to do. It’s cool sneaking up behind a guy and pulling off a Bond movie, but after about twenty times, you’ll get sick of it. Another thing I didn’t like was that there were no driving sequences. What’s a Bond game with no driving?! There is, however, a cool train sequence that is pretty cool, with you decoupling cars, jumping from decoupled cars, and just all that cool Bond stuff. While that’s the basic gameplay, you can see there is a lot missing that should have been in here.

With the mechanics feeling about 10 years old, this really drags the experience down, and after a while, the game feels more like a chore that you’re forced to play. Thankfully, the game isn’t very long at all since you can beat it in about 6–7 hours. The multiplayer is OK, but nothing super special—just your standard FPS online action—and you won’t be coming back for this often since the mechanics are somewhat flawed. I really loved this game, though, since there were a lot of explosions, shooting, sneaking, Bond moves, and cool locales. If you want an awesome weekend rental, pick this up, and you’ll have a blast.

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