I played a good few hours of 007 First Light last week, and I encourage you to click that link and read all about what I thought of them. But my time with Jim Bond sparked other thoughts. Thoughts that probably don’t belong in a preview. Thoughts like: What if James Bond just shouldn’t be a videogame protagonist?
I know what you’re thinking, and first of all I’d like you to stop calling me those names. Second, yes, GoldenEye for the N64 is a classic. You’re also not really James Bond in it. You’re a hand with a pistol in it and, sometimes in cutscenes, Pierce Brosnan’s face. The character of Bond existed as a lore reason for your gun to emit bullets.
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Which is quite fun for 90-to-120 minutes of a movie, where he is surrounded by numerous other people who can roll their eyes at him whenever he opens his mouth. In a videogame for 10, 20, 30, 40 hours? Less so, and especially less so in something like a First Light, where a lot of his cocky one-liners and general swagger are delivered to empty rooms and enemy corpses, where no one save the player can tell him to give it a damn rest.
But also, part of his charismatic arrogance is that he is suave and unflappable. Well, great. Good for him. I am not suave, and I flap at the slightest inconvenience. I simply don’t… fit into him? Should probably reword that. Whenever I, as Bond, fumble a counter, miss a shot, or try to duck into cover only to fling myself headfirst into a desk lamp, I break the entire spell of the character.
I’m not singling out First Light for this; it’s just the Bond game I played most recently and, if anything, does a good job realising him as a character. It’s just that, again, maybe that character should not be a videogame character.
One moment in particular in my time with First Light made me think this: 007 is doing righteous battle with a villain. Normal thing for 007 to do. During the fight, he grabs a teacup from the sideboard and drives it hard into his opponent’s face.
At this point he says something which I did not write down because I was in the middle of fighting a guy, so my recollection may be fuzzy, but I believe James Bond, 007, on His Majesty’s secret service, said something along the lines of, “Time for tea.”
I posit to you: is a man who will say “Time for tea,” or something close to it, upon assaulting some sort of international terrorist with a cup, the kind of person in whose head you want to spend 40 hours? He is not. But turning him into a man who doesn’t say that would make him not Bond.
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