Now some people might just say, oh Harrison, you nostalgic little brat, you have fond memories of Goldeneye 007 on the N64 just go back and play that...and I might just do that, but I think this is more than just comparing the past with the present. The game Goldeneye Reloaded strips the game of it's Pierce Brosnan face and puts Daniel Craig's on there, I'm fine with that. Eurocom didn't have the license to use Pierce's face, blah-dy blah-dy game politics and licensing blah.  What I'm really worried about is how the first level of the game is presented.

The opening of the original N64 game and the movie is just you going through a dam level and then jumping off a bridge. Shoot some guys here, infiltrate a base there, done and dusted. The new game starts you off on the outskirts of that base and hey, I'm cool with that, it's like a tiny little prologue. The game starts with 006 talking to you and I'm like oh hey, Alec, yeah, you'll betray me later on, totes cool with that. Then I start playing and I get used to the controls and then I walk around and I'm all stealthy and kill some guys.  Then I get into a truck and things get weird.

Alec drives a truck to the base and there is a struggle with the guards and things get chaotic. The game then consistently pulls the controls away from you like a bratty older brother who doesn't have the guile to ask for a turn or wait till you die. The game removes half the fun.  To be honest, I'd like to be driving the truck through a group of Russian Guards rather than shooting out the side with a gun. The game then pushes stuff in your way and more often than not gives no direction what you should be shooting at, unless it's shooting at you.

A problematic point came when there was a tanker in front of you and the dialogue in-game and a large base with guards coming out of it made me think, oh hey, we might stop.  But nope, just plow right through it. The game threw me a curve-ball, I admit that, but this isn't Mega-Man.  This isn't a learn by trial and error type of game.  This is- as I thought to myself and then spoke aloud to my kitten - this is just like in Modern Warfare 2!

The stop and start pseudo-gaming cutscenes, the random Russian enemies, the removal of the player experience. All of it! I didn't play the entire game and my criticism on the game could easily lapse, but the opening of the game is often meant to set a tone and create an atmosphere. Thematically the game does this well, but gameplay wise it's dead in the water. It's incredibly un-game like and I wouldn't continue to play it unless under a good recommendation.

The definition of un-game to me is more about having the game pull away from you when you want to interact with it, like a girlfriend who breaks out in hives when she comes into skin contact. The game is frustrating at the least and while I didn't stick around to play the whole thing, I felt left in the wind, like, are these what games are going to do now? Then I played Portal 2 and all was right in the world.

What games need to do more of is to tell us the story with the world around us rather than make us shift uncomfortably and stuff our faces every time the controls are yanked from us. You could easily have a loud sound or someone saying, hey look over there and then you could look and the next bit of dialogue happen. It just pulls me out of the game each time this happens and I simply want it to stop...

I mean, I've come to the conclusion of doing film theory over the years that genre's of all kinds and aesthetics can exist, as long as they know what their doing. The guys at Activison know what they're doing - a billion dollars confirms that...daily. But I think whatever they do next, they will need to really think of something new otherwise they may end up copying themselves in a turn for the worst.

The problem is that Activision and game producers have not caught on to the fact that freedom is key and the ability to slaughter is always a choice. As the creators of Postal 2 pointed out almost a decade ago, a game is only as dangerous as it's player and while this quote was quite tongue-in-cheek and covering-their-asses, I've appropriated it to be more about freedom in games. If you look at Postal 2 you will have menial tasks to get you through the day, but you will still have the GTA-like freedom to do whatever the hell you want. Piss on someones face then blow it off with a shotgun or even throw around diseased cows head, why? Because you can and that's what games like Modern Warfare forgot.

That player freedom and telling a story can work well together, but only if the player is telling that story. This is why people have enjoyed games like Minecraft and Left 4 Dead because the shared player experience, even when it's in their own world is different, fun and expansive. Sure, with L4D you may be on a set path each time, but the AI director makes sure that path is filled with heaps of different zombies.

There are post-modernist FPS games which use the classic design aesthetic of the past to create something new in the future. Minecraft and Serious Sam have both made incredible efforts to push forward the first person perspective, but no one except HL2 has really told a story in that way since. Of course, this is just a personal opinion and I heard a lot of people were incredibly touched by Gears of War 3.  But it took three games to build up that trust and I don't own a 360.

Props to those who cried at the end.  Games are making people emotional, this is good, we have to strive for this. An emotional response in light of making an artistic statement on the nature of man is what can make art. Games could be art...even First Person Shooters, but the point is to embrace the medium and use it to tell the story without breaking the player experience.

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