Shaken, not stirred
Peter took me through several levels, all of which show off Bond and all his moves, which, though obviously impossible to motion capture off Mr Connery now, have nonetheless been copied as closely as possible from the movies. Now throw in the environments with all the variety of the film itself, from England to Italy, Istanbul and Venice to name just a few and all as colourful and detailed as the film. Top stuff.
Some areas of the film have been expanded to create standalone levels. In Peter’s words, “We want you to feel like you’re playing the part in the film, not just playing your way through the film” Of course, this means that some sections of the game are based on just a few minutes of footage. But if cleverly done, EA should be able to sort of ‘fill in the gaps’ from moving from one area in the film to another… And so we get ourselves a nice little driving sequence in the Aston Martin, naturally.. with mounted machine guns and rocket launcher for taking out the bad guys trying to run us off the road… Then it’s a quick cutscene, a pun and a wink and we’re back on foot, scaling a wall to skirt around a tank and somehow shift it out of the way to progress.
Now if all this Bond goodness wasn’t enough for you, EA have even worked a few RPG elements into the game too. Now you might wonder why they’d want to bother trying to let you upgrade and improve the already excellent Bond. That’s tantamount to saying the Cisteen Chapel could do with a touch up, but Peter soon eased my worries. Taking out bad guys, completing missions and secondary objectives etc earns Bond points which you can then either spend on improving Bonds abilities or sorting him out with better kit to take into a mission. How well you manage this will have a direct effect on the gameplay and with three different endings, it really does make a difference how well you do in your previous missions.
And one last little titbit of info that I can’t help but mention. The Music… that’s Music with a capital M. The Bond theme has to be one of, if not THE, most recognisable theme tunes in the world. John Barry's backing and Lionel Bart's theme tune, with that orchestral background and blaring brass over the top was a piece of musical genius and EA are keen to do that justice. But what do you do? Do you take the music off a CD and cut and splice it to your needs? Do you get a couple of digital music guys to synth the whole orchestra? Neither of those options really feel like you’re doing Bond justice though, do they? No. So if you’re EA you take the third option. You take the original score, re-work a little to give you incidental music that fits the gameplay, then bugger off and blow a huge amount of cash on a full blown orchestra re-recording the whole score just for you and your game!
Another EXCLUSIVE screenshot, this time of the iconic Aston Martin, complete with machine guns and rocket launcher... (CD player and air-con optional)With James Bond: From Russia With Love set for a November release on PS2, X-Box and GC, you can forget about settling back and watching a Bond movie on Christmas Day, how about playing one instead?
