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Genre: First-person shooter

Format: CD

Developer: Gearbox Software

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media

Minimum System Requirements: 1GHz G4, Mac OS X v10.3, 256MB RAM, 64MB 3D graphics acceleration (ATI Radeon 8500/NVidia GeForce 2 or better), 56K modem or Local Area Network (LAN) for multiplayer

Review Computer: 1GHz Powerbook G4 12" 768MB RAM, 32MB GeForce FX Go 5200, and Mac OS X v10.3.3

Network Feature: Yes

3D Support: Required

Price: $29.99

ESRB Rating: Teen (suggestive themes, violence)

Availability: Now

Official Website: [url=http://www.eagames.com/official/007/nightfire/us/home.jsp]http://www.eagames.com/official/007/nightfire/us/home.jsp[/url]

Goldeneye was a milestone.

Yeah, the movie was okay. Personally, I thought it was a pretty good way to introduce Pierce Brosnan and all. Xenia Onatopp was pretty hot with the whole death-by-sexual-exhaustion/asphyxiation thing.

But the game&3151;oh, the game. Nintendo and Rare's Goldeneye 64 for the Nintendo 64 was probably the most popular game for the otherwise somewhat limited console. Besides that, though, it's one of the most significant shared gaming experiences of the modern generation of console gamers. Goldeneye 64 was Nintendo's killer app for the Nintendo 64; everyone who had ever touched a video game had to have played it at least once, and even though the game engine itself was sub-par compared to, say, Quake II or Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, it managed to provide an incredibly enrapturing single and multiplayer experience. This, incidentally, was my favorite part of the game; I was pretty hot, if I do say so myself, and routinely took on my friends in middle school in 2- and 3-on-1 matches successfully. I distinctly remember one game of Power Weapons concluded with my winning score of 21, which is rather bizarre considering the point limit was at 20. Turns out, my coup de grace shot with the Cougar Magnum was a headshot that went through one victim and into one standing slightly behind him, giving me a double kill award and a score boost from 19 to 21. (We preferred License To Kill mode, usually with power weapons, grenade launchers, or pistols.) Unfortunately, Electronic Arts has since then acquired the license for all 007-based video games, and they've been consistently disappointing in comparison to Goldeneye 64.

I'll keep it short and sweet: Aspyr and EA's latest offering, 007 Nightfire, is no different.

Nightfire was originally released as a console game a few years ago. While I'm not quite sure how well it was received by the console crowd, I doubt their reactions were much different from my own. While I have a rather low opinion of console first-person shooters in general (save Halo, Goldeneye 64, and a few others), it's hard for me to envision a market so heavily strapped for first-person shooters that it would welcome a mediocre title with open arms. Now, it seems that Aspyr has, with Electronic Arts' blessing, brought over the latest Bond game complete with all the mediocrity of the console port, and then some.

Nightfire gives you control of British secret agent James Bond, the slick, sophisticated literary creation of Ian Fleming who needs no introduction. This time, his prey is the renowned green industrialist Rafael Blake, a prominent character who appears to be decommissioning nuclear arsenals around the world for the development of a mysterious weapon named Nightfire. Just like the movies, Bond will have to travel through exotic locales like a European mountaintop fortress, a traditional Japanese mansion, a skyscraper office building in downtown Tokyo, culminating in an intense showdown on a satellite in Earth's low orbit. You'll even get to drive Bond's classic Aston Martin Vanquish if you think you can handle the killer wheels. Unfortunately, playing 007 Nightfire can be such a potentially frustrating experience that most gamers will either be unable or unwilling to make it that far.

My introduction to 007 Nightfire began by spending a good 20 minutes trying to complete the very first section of the first level in a satisfactorily Bond-esque manner. What Goldeneye 64 did successfully was reward sneakiness and stealth and secret-agenty behavior indirectly; if you make yourself too conspicuous, you'll end up getting trapped in a room facing manageable but difficult hordes of respawning bad guys. This ended up creating an extra element of dynamism for the player; while you could play through Goldeneye 64 like Rambo, if you weren't particularly gifted at sneaking around, you'd have to be a damn good Rambo to pull it off. 007 Nightfire generally tends to lack this, and it shows from the very first level.

You begin with Bond parachuting into a guard checkpoint in front of Blake's mansion during a dinner party, and you're instructed by M, Bond's superior, to sneak on to a delivery truck, if possible. While it isn't exactly made clear, you're supposed to jump on to it from the checkpoint you parachuted on. The first time I tried, I ended up attempting to chase after it because I didn't jump down, and I was forced to engage in a brief gunfight with the guards. No big deal, but it's not very Bond-ish. So I replayed the section, this time jumping down in front of the truck while it's stopped at the guard post to try and pull a Grand Theft Auto 3 style carjacking. No such luck; I got hit by the truck when it started up again and lost half my health for my trouble. My third attempt got me a little further; I didn't catch the truck this time, either, but I managed to find the back way into the castle after a little bit of investigating. I also stumbled across some guards manning another guard post, and during the ensuing firefight I jumped down a small cliff face to cover myself from gunfire; much to my surprise, even though the fall distance wasn't far enough to cause Bond to take any fall damage, something about jumping off a 5 foot cliff face makes the game kill you off. I don't get it. Finally, on my fourth attempt, I missed the truck again, but managed to enter the rear entrance successfully.

This kind of game experience is par for the course in 007 Nightfire. While it's not necessarily flawed gameplay in and of itself—the shooting part is okay and the sneaking part is okay—Nightfire doesn't naturally reward the player for being slick. Where Goldeneye 64 rewarded the extra work put into stealthy movement by allowing the player to pick and choose his battles rather than get caught by a horde of Spetznaz troops, 007 Nightfire creates an artificial incentive—so-called "Bond Moves" that are tallied up at the end of the level—that makes the path of least resistance through the game pure, outright violence. Essentially, the game rewards you for playing too aggressively because the work and time required to play like Bond is gargantuan in comparison to the relative ease the average first-person shooter gamer would have going through guns blazing. In order to compensate for this, Nightfire incorporates heavy-security levels like the Tokyo office building that require Bond to progress without lethally dispatching security guards or setting off alarms. Should Bond set off an alarm (by getting caught by a security guard, tripping a laser, or getting caught on camera), the game ends instantly. Not only are these levels extraordinarily frustrating, as Bond has no way to disable cameras, but they're insulting to the gamer who knows full well that he or she could most likely take on a whole platoon of the security guards if the alarm were to be set off. At this point, the delicate balance between secret agent and psychopath that you can walk in Goldeneye 64 has vanished; you are just bouncing between one and the other at the designer's whim. It really doesn't feel like you're playing as James Bond, which means it won't make you think like James Bond. Rather, it feels like you're re-enacting scenes in a movie with no will or whim of your own.

And a pretty crappy movie at that. Not only does Nightfire fail at being a Bond game, it fails at being a semi-interesting first-person shooter, too. The behavior of your enemies, either multiplayer bots or single-player characters, is downright stupid. While they don't frequently run into open areas, they don't really move much when they shoot so much as just hunker down behind some cover, or, worse yet, just stay standing in an open area instead of finding something safer. They also tend to be fairly awful marksmen, for the most part. Also, they're generally not as sensitive to the sound of gunfire as they are in Goldeneye 64, and they're certainly not as perceptive; you can kill their nearby companions with an unsilenced weapon and they often won't notice. Even the dramatic boss battles, like the fight against a ninja (with an automatic rifle, I might add) end up being somewhat anti-climactic.

The sad part is that the flat, uninteractive gameplay described above is the best-case scenario for 007 Nightfire. At its worst, the game is exasperatingly buggy and downright unplayable at times. Part of this seems to be built into the nature of the game; gunfights, for one, are particularly annoying as the collision hitboxes of the character models feel poorly defined. At times, I can pick off unsuspecting guards with precision headshots from the standard PPK pistol at 50 yards. Other times, though, I'll be taking fairly heavy fire and unload clip after clip of assault rifle ammunition into a bad guy and it still won't be enough to drop him. While this does have the effect of playing slightly more conservatively in gunfights, as running into a room guns blazing can have nil effect at times, it also makes for a downright ridiculous game. Other miscellaneous bugs I experienced have left me unable to deactivate Bond's see-through/infrared/Predator-vision sunglasses (which would have been a beneficial bug had it not left me completely unable to use items or weapons). Another would either start a particular wall-scaling sequence by not setting the game's camera to third person (making it impossible to complete the section successfully, as you're unable to see the windows above you, meaning you can't tell where the guards are) or spawn Bond in a location already visible to the nearest guard, making him set off the alarm and instantly end the mission.

If that weren't buggy enough, it seems that the port has some issues as well. While most of the above bugs happened during the gameplay itself, the application had it's share of irritating tidbits. Two major bugs made reviewing 007 Nightfire quite the challenge. For one, certain encounters merely force the game to consistently quit 5-10 seconds after they occur, making sure you lose whatever unsaved progress you have and potentially creating situations that render the hapless player unable to progress further through the game. Besides this, there seems to be an issue with resolution-switching; as I'm running the game on a computer just barely above the minimum specifications, I'd prefer to run the game in 640x480/16 bit color to minimize the work my poor graphics card has to handle. Unfortunately, the game is singularly unable to accept the changes I propose in the options menu. For some reason, it worked once or twice, and refused to work after that. Also, the video in the in-game cut scenes just flat-out refuses to play. The audio does play, and I can skip through the cut scenes whenever I want to avoid wasting my time, but it still makes it difficult to follow the story, characters, and the progress of the game if I can't even see what's going on.

Electronic Arts tries to recreate an authentic Bond experience; the characters are here, the settings are here, and, of course, the familiar gadgets are back. However, much like the rest of 007 Nightfire's level design, the inclusion of the Bond gadgets—a blowpipe pen, a cigarette lighter camera, a cellular phone grappling hook, a watch laser, and a few other neat doo-dads—feels just as contrived as most of the other Bond moments. Opportunities to use, say, the grappling hook are few and far between, and most of the other gadgets are intended for specific use in certain mission objectives, like infect the secretary's computer with this worm virus (which is cleverly hidden in a credit card for no apparent reason, meaning that most of the gadget use will consist of hunting high and low for little metal objects (usually padlocks) that you can melt with your watch laser. And for some reason, Bond has a taser that makes the enemy make hilarious convulsing noises but takes longer to knock an enemy out than his judo chop. It's as if (heck, this was probably the case) the lead designers for 007 Nightfire were just like, "Hey, let's take a shooter game and throw in a watch laser and a taser that makes the enemies look like they're having seizures. Oh, hey, don't we still have the license to make James Bond games? Gimme another raise!" It's the trappings of Bond—the car and the watch and the gun and the girls—without the innovation and cleverness that make James Bond a James Bond.

Nowhere is this more clearly revealed than 007 Nightfire's multiplayer mode, which consists of a handful of maps, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag. That's it. Gone are the tailored weapon sets, the innovative game rules like License to Kill and Man With The Golden Gun, the massive library of unlockable cheats like paintball mode. The one thing that Nightfire got okay was the model selection; multiplayer allows you to select from a veritable pantheon of Bond characters, including more recent entries like Christmas Jones of The World Is Not Enough (set yourself up for disappointment, guys; she looks nothing like Denise Richards) and classics like Baron Samedi and Jaws. Besides this, 007 Nightfire's multiplayer has nothing unique to offer. EA must really be banking on the single-player for this game; when the market has seen multiplayer-only first-person shooters starting with Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament to games like Battlefield 1942, releasing a game that copies Quake II badly is the key to complete failure.

For what it's worth, the graphics and sound pull the game up from a devastating disappointment to merely mediocre. Levels are generally fairly large and can be intricate, though often at the expense of dropped frames and loading times. The second mission places Bond in a watch tower several stories up with a sniper rifle to cover his CIA counterpart; while it's a nice view of the level, it was almost unplayable on my 1ghz PowerBook. Other levels, like the Japanese estate, are designed with attention to detail (the cooking products on the shelves look like products from a Ranch 99 or Marukai supermarket!) but since there's no clear linear design to the level, the player is forced to endure inconvenient load times quite frequently. Nightfire also includes a sultry rock tune and CG intro in the theme of most Bond movie intros—a lot of weapons and a lot of attractive-looking silhouettes flying around—and while it actually sounds pretty decent, you never hear all that much of it except the first verse or two when it plays in the menu screen. The voice acting is a fairly solid job...not too spectacular, and Bond and M are done pretty well, though Q kind of makes me grimace. Enemies will yell stuff that kind of sounds like Russian or Japanese or whatever occasionally, too.

It's kind of unfair to hold 007 Nightfire to the same standards that Goldeneye 64 established; after all, it is a different company with a different design team. However, Goldeneye 64 set down very clearly the kind of gameplay balances and designs that separate a Bond game from a typical first-person shooter, and Electronic Arts has done the unforgivable by ignoring what they should have learned from Goldeneye 64 and giving rise to a mediocre, boring first-person shooter that fails to live up to the Bond legacy. Furthermore, Aspyr's 1.0 release is so buggy that even the most desperate of Bond fans will most likely have trouble making it through Nightfire. No matter how you look at it, 007 Nightfire is a disappointing title that doesn't have the personality or design skill behind it to hang as a true Bond title, nor the solid gameplay, multiplayer, and polish to hack it as a regular first-person shooter.