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C An age of remakes... but one in particular

Jonathan Stark Profile _ Twitter _ E-mail _ Homepage

My god. I just read that they are planning a revamp of the Spiderman movies. While I would agree that there's nothing else they can do with the Toby McGuire version, doesn't it seem a little... I don't know... soon to be remaking it? But then, we seem to be living in a world of remakes. In film, we often blame this on the success of the Dark Knight franchise, as well as the short sightedness of directors/writers/producers etc. who think that they can copy that success by just making everything "gritty." The phenomenon is harder to trace in the video game world. Is it related to the film industry's success with sequels and remakes? Does it rest on the same marketing principles of "when you have a known title, you have a known audience?" Or do people these days lack for imagination the way I lack for sex? Suffice it to say that we have seen remakes on every system, from the mostly-graphical overhauls of the Final Fantasy games on the DS to the complete re-imagining of X-Com. And you know what... I'm not even complaining. Especially not since I heard that they are remaking Goldeneye 007. I don't care how much Goldeneye you played back in the day. I played more than you. I don't care how good you were at multi-player. I was better. It's easy for me to claim such things. Remember, this was before games kept track of statistics and posted them to your facebook page. You have as little way of verifying my claims as I do of proving them. Regardless of that, I am not lying. People stopped playing Goldeneye with me after I memorized the order of the spawn points in every level. You might think the tactic of killing someone and then hot-footin' it to the next spawn point to do it again before they can get a weapon is a coward's tactic. Let me remind you that, in those days, your opponent wasn't a safe million miles away with no idea of who you were outside of a snarky username. They were sitting right next to you and you were well within punching range. My methods were not those of a coward. They were those of a goddamn martyr. I don't know what everyone else did to train themselves in Goldeneye. Me, I liked to give the other players the 200% extra life and turn my life down to -200%. Basically it meant that I needed several hundred bullets to take them out while they needed one shot to kill me. The amount of games I won on this mode (which was hatefully dubbed "Jon's mode" and, later, "let's play something else") could be indicative that my opponents were simply awful video game players (they weren't). Or maybe I was screen watching (I wasn't). Face it. My Goldeneye war stories are way more intense than your Goldeneye war stories. Okay. So I'm bragging a bit. But c'mon, give me my moment. This was before they had big video game tournaments and before games posted their statistics to Facebook. The only record of my skills exists in my memory and the memory of those of my friends who still care (ie. not many). And my sister. Ask her. She'll tell you of my mad skillz. And despite what you may be thinking of me from this article, I'm very grounded in reality. For instance, I don't expect that this new Goldeneye game will be able to inspire in me the same level of commitment that the old one did. I'm older, after all, and contractually bound by consumerism to spend most of my hours chasing after money and not, as I'd prefer, playing video games. The world is a different place. Even a remake of one of the most famous first-person-shooters of all time is still "just another shooter" in a sea of shooters. Our options aren't as limited as they once were. By the time someone could learn all the spawn points in a level, the next Killzone, Gears of War, or Halo will be out and the public interest will shift. Always the next thing, these days, always the next thing... And let's be honest. Abusing spawn point weaknesses just isn't the same when the danger of receiving a dead-arm isn't there. The adrenaline is gone. But, despite my realism, I am nothing if not a romantic. And there is nothing quite so romantic as revisiting the past. Even if multiplayer could never live up to the original, I'm still excited to see what Eurocom does with such classic material. Daniel Craig makes a great Bond and, from what I understand, the remake goes deeper than just graphics. The entire Goldeneye plot has received a modern overhaul, with added characters, surprising plot twists, and a (here it comes) grittier sensibility. That's all pretty exciting, in my nostalgic book, even if a part of me says it has no chance of ever touching the powerful nostalgic emotions the original inspired. Though I swear, if Natalia gets in my way in the goddamn jungle, they'll be coming close... Goldeneye is scheduled for release on November 2nd, 2010. It will be released exclusively for the Wii and will support split screen, as well as online, multiplayer.

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