J.D. Spy & James Bond: Everything or Nothing

By Indy Studios & E.A. Games

Review by Paul Kostock & Paul Kostock

Game Information

This week I began work at the newest in a long string of temporary assignments, updating the marketing database of an IT company that apparently does a lot of work with overseas businesses. This, in and of itself, is unremarkable, but check out the nationalities of my new bosses’ "associates" (in order of frequency): French, Saudi, German, Russian, Egyptian, Turkish, and South African. So I can only conclude I am currently being employed by a front company for terrorists. I don’t know, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but my (white, middle age) boss has a whiteboard over her desk on which is scrawled about three paragraphs of Sanskrit and a single word in Latin characters: "Inshallah". That is so fucking cool.

This, in a nutshell, is the precise reaction I’m looking for when I fire up that wretched symptom of Western decadence, the video game. I’m not particularly looking to solve puzzles or challenge myself or best my friends at some arbitrary, essentially useless set of skills. I want to do and experience things that aren’t part and parcel of my human experience. Preferably fun, interesting, and/or exciting things. Both Indy Studios’ J.D. Spy and E.A. Games’s James Bond: Everything or Nothing open with the promise of just that, of drawing you into the life of a secret agent thwarting the plots of the very same terrorists I now find that I have thrown my lot in with. And then both games fall flat on their face, for surprisingly similar reasons.

Okay. That’s a bit unfair. We’re really talking about two high quality wares, obviously designed with love, that just don’t quite come together when all is said and done. They both start so unbelievably well. J.D. Spy in particular has an opening that is so essentially bold and inspired that it propelled me through essentially the entirety of the game.

You start up the program, a Visual Basic style Gui window appears on the desktop. You hear a bit of music, you see a few buttons that look like they might be related to some sort of neat espionage related activity. Eagerly, you pull down the file menu and start a new game. Up pops a little profile window, asking for your name, your spy alias, your email address, and your home city. Fearing, ever so slightly that this spy ware is in fact spyware, you input your information and hit the start button… and then you get an error message and the game crashes. You fire it back up, go through the same rigmarole, and crash again. You stop just short of sending an angry email off to Michael Jacobs (I’m sure an unfortunate number of people didn’t stop short, causing Mr. Jacobs no end of headaches), but then you take a closer look at the error message.

Buried inside the error message, a few lines down, is a desperate, anonymous plea for help. It requests you perform a few actions to validate your receipt of the message, and then you’re off and running; dragging you - the "real" you - into its world of CIA agents on the run and terrorist plots. Granted, this isn’t the first game in history to attempt to blur the line between player and PC, but this particular gimmick does the trick better than I’ve ever seen it done. It presents you with a real world problem, one any Windows user is used to encountering, and then segues seamlessly into game play.

And the game’s full of brilliant little moments like that. The first time I solved a puzzle and suddenly started receiving threatening IMs from someone with the screen name "Dragonfire", well that’s about the strongest mimesis has ever been for me. I mean, okay, granted, I realized that the IMs were simply a script and, if I wanted, I could just type in gibberish and things would proceed apace. But I wanted to believe in that magic, so I played along and was rewarded with immersion.

So yeah, the game requires you to meet it halfway like that. But it does everything it can to encourage you. The use of a customized email address and the occasional reference to your real name and location help keep the fantasy alive. If you send an email off that doesn’t contain the required keywords, you get a response that’s about as sensible as you could reasonably expect. The NPCs provide more or less plausible reasons why you have to send them information in the very specific format the game is programmed to recognize. It’s all smoke and mirrors, and mimesis is always on the very edge of breaking, but Michael never runs out of the ingenuity necessary to keep the façade in check.

Or, at least, he wouldn’t, if I didn’t have to consult the walkthrough before literally every single puzzle. Now, I understand that, based on the second paragraph of this review and my own experience with Interactive Fiction puzzles, I’m probably not entirely credible when I tell you these puzzles are difficult and unfair. But these aren’t interactive fiction puzzles. This isn’t the type of game where you’re provided a locked door and an arbitrary collection of items which you have to combine in some logical fashion to get to the next room. And that’s good, in the sense that it keeps up mimesis. I’m fairly certain that, if I actually were drafted into the aid of a CIA agent being hunted by terrorists, the challenges I faced in this game would be exactly the types of challenges I’d have to deal with. On the down side, you’re cast adrift in an unfamiliar sea and at no time is it ever clear how you’re supposed to approach the problems set before you.

By way of example, the first puzzle is actually, in retrospect, not terribly complex. You’re provided with a series of forwarded emails from a missing agent, and asked to determine whom he was going to meet when he disappeared. Doing so is a simple task, or would be if you had any clue that the tools you need to use to solve the puzzle are a legal part of the game world. And maybe it’s my fault that I didn’t intuit that. I was inclined to believe that at first, but the tenth time I found myself in the same situation, I just said fuck it and went to the walkthrough.

And that’s the game’s primary fault. It’s secondary fault is that, to be honest, it’s kind of boring. When Dragonfire rears her head it’s chilling. But for the most part it’s just a bunch of fairly flat, dull characters sending you emails about all the adventures they get to go on while you sit at home scanning a fake website’s source code for hidden files. When you get to the point where you have to calculate the movements of a bunch of warehouse guards or the amount of liquid nitrogen necessary to fool heat sensors so someone else can do the breaking and entering bit, you feel just a little like you’re not so much playing a game as solving word problems while someone else plays a game. Or at least I did.

And the plot doesn’t help much. There’s a great initial hook, and a pretty big twist at the end, but the terrorists and their goals are ill defined, and there’s little in the way of building tension. Really, once Dragonfire is pacified, there’s no threat at all until the very end of the game. The evil, omniscient "them" your contact talks about turn out to be not much of a threat, which makes sense to some extent after the final reveal, but doesn’t keep you glued to your computer screen.

So, all things said, J.D. Spy is an experiment that almost works thanks to the author’s ingenuity but ultimately comes up short. So let’s talk about Everything or Nothing (The first Bond game that feels like a Bond movie!).

The question that seems to be on everyone’s mind is: "Is it better than Goldeneye?" Fuck if I know. I played all of ten minutes of Goldeneye once at a friend’s house years ago and wasn’t especially impressed. But really, this game goes a long way to doing James Bond justice. Like I said before, it opens well (Just like a Bond movie!) with a pretty cool cold opening. And by "opens with a cold opening" I mean just that. There’s no menu screen, just a couple obligatory logos and a brief cutscene to explain what the hell’s going on. And then you’re off. I thought that was neat: It drew me in immediately.

You sneak into the middle of a dangerous arms deal, instigate a firefight, and abscond with a nuclear device. In the process you rappel down a wall, blow up a helicopter with a rocket launcher, and shoot a bunch of guys in the face. Very Bond.

Then we get a drawn out, credit sequence in the style of the films featuring a customized theme song by some pop skank that’s probably coming to the tail end of her fifteen minutes. In addition to the Bond regulars, there’s William Dafoe as the chief villain, Richard Kiel as Jaws(!) and three beautiful women who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag lending their voices and digitized images to the game’s cast.

Okay, here’s the first ridiculously stupid move EA makes. Heidi Klume can’t act. We’re all aware of that. If she winds up in a movie or a TV show it’s because she’s good to masturbate to, and we all accept that and move on with our lives. But can anyone recall the last time a supermodel was hired as a voice actress? What the hell would be the point? So they can legally draw a picture that kind of looks like her? For a tenth the price they could have hired some overweight method actress who would deliver a competent performance and let the creepy guys in the animation department create a fictional woman around her voice and their own fertile motivations. Instead we have to listen to a bunch of supermodels phonetically mumble their lines and the best we get in return is that maybe we can imagine that their pronunciation is so bad because they’ve got a mouth full of cock or something.

But, really, that’s a minor quibble. Otherwise the production is great. Top notch. And the game play is good to, except… well, there’s always that except.

Take, for instance, the cold opening I mentioned. You’re dropped in the middle of a firefight without so much as a how do you do, told which button shoots and which button auto-targets and then pretty much left to fend for yourself. You get extra points for rappelling down a wall in this opening level, but at this point you have no way of even knowing that rappelling is implemented in the game. You have to locate a dropped briefcase, but there’s no map screen or radar to tell you where the hell it is. You as Bond have just seen it dropped and should know exactly where it is, but you as the player have been given a bunch of disorienting camera angles and pretty much just have to wander around the firefight until you happen to stumble across it. Then a hole gets blown in one of the walls in the compound and you have to escape through it. Except, once again, it’s impossible to tell from the cut scene what wall just got blown open, and the exit’s kind of in a corner that’s not visible from a distance. So I had to resort to jogging in circles against the walls for five minutes until I stumbled across the exit. I felt less like world’s greatest secret agent and more like the proverbial chicken with its proverbial head cut off.

The next level is a tutorial, which I welcomed. It’s unskippable, which I suspect pissed a lot of more experienced players off. So now they’ve gotten on the bad side of everyone. And then two levels later and you’re driving a car, then engaging in stealth combat, then flying a helicopter and none of this is covered in the damn tutorial anyway. This was fine with Battletoads when you had two buttons and dodging the walls in your speed bike was an intuitive task. But not when M is telling you over the headset to get under a train and it takes you ten play-throughs to figure out that there’s only a seven second window when this is even possible. It’s not difficult once you figure out what you’re supposed to do (ride the train’s ass until the track dips, then speed up so you get in position before the bridge drops out), but up until then you’re replaying the level a bunch of times because you’re ramming the back of the train until your car blows up trying to figure out how to get underneath.

So you’ve mastered stealth and driving and a couple levels later you’ve got to face stealth driving, which is the dumbest concept ever. Basically it’s Grand Theft Auto after you’ve racked up a couple stars, only you’ve got a cloaking device, the map’s too damn small, and the fireworks store you need to blow up isn’t marked anywhere on the map, so you’re running around in circles again.

So what’s this mean? That I’m bad at video games? Maybe. But the problem from my perspective is that you’re thrust from unfamiliar situation to unfamiliar situation, so you never reach that point where you stop thinking about the controls and just experience the game. I still haven’t quite figured out the rules of stealth mode. If a guy spots you but you knock him out by chucking a wrench at his head then, so long as he hasn’t fired a shot, you’re still considered hidden. But if a guy spots you and you take him out a split second later with a flying tackle, then somehow a magical alarm gets raised and all the bad guys know where you are. Knock someone out with a dart gun and that works. Shoot them with your silenced pistol and that doesn’t. And then sometimes you’re fine indefinitely unless someone hits an actual alarm button. Inevitably, if you navigate all of this, the game eventually just arbitrarily decides you’re past the point where it wants you engaged in stealth and just has everyone empathically intuit your location.

There seems to be about a dozen different types of guns in the game which would be great if there was any appreciable difference between them. The sniper rifle and the rocket launcher are powerful weapons with specific uses. Everything else is pretty much on even keel. Sure it’ll take one or two less shots to kill someone with the Desert Eagle then the PPIII, but with auto-target and the way enemies respond to being hit (standing around "stunned" for a moment and grunting) makes this largely irrelevant. There’s not even any great advantage to using an assault rifle (thanks again to auto target and limited ammo, you’re not likely to just start laying down suppressive fire), except for maybe the larger magazine. And that wouldn’t be so bad if all the bad guys on a level used the same weapon. But instead you find that you start the level with a PPIII and most of your enemies carry a Desert Eagle but they only have three bullets in the clip apiece. A few of them carry various assault rifles (on the same level you might see a group of enemies with AKs and an essentially identical group with Uzis) and if you’re anything like me it’ll generally take you one or two more bullets to kill them then you’ll get off their corpses. So all this variation of weaponry pragmatically does is make you constantly pause the game and cycle through your arsenal until you find which gun you happen to have ammo for.

And all of this effectively takes you out of the game. Which is a shame, because the game has some excellent strong points. In addition to what I mentioned, the enemy AI is the best I’ve encountered in my (admittedly limited) experience. They go for cover, they use numbers to their advantage to flush you out where they can. They drop from the ceiling on lines and totally take you by surprise. If you spend too long turtling behind a wall, they’ll chuck a grenade at you. The game rewards you with extra points for doing cool, Bond-esque things like jumping a canyon instead of just driving around it. There’s reportedly a scened where you infiltrate the enemy bas and pause to give some random executive a massage. That’s cool. That’s what I want out of a game, but getting there is frustrating as hell.

Is there a lesson from all of this? Make your games too damn hard and people will feebly mule at you on an infrequently updated website? Don’t expect the player to think outside the box without adequate prior training? I dunno, I guess I’m just recording my disappointment for the record. I really wanted to play the hell out of both these games, but they both just kind of lost me after a while because they constantly keep you thinking about battling them rather than experiencing them.

As freeware, I have no problem recommending you at least give J.D. Spy a chance. Everything or Nothing might be worth a rental just to see if your opinion differs from mine, but my official stance is "Not Recommended".

          J.D. Spy

          James Bond: Everything or Nothing

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