8:27 PM, September 17
STASI Records and Research Facility
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic
A woman in a skintight leather outfit walks up to a man.
Man: "Gutten Tag, fraulein. Do you have sex with strangers?"
Women: "No, certainly I do not."
Man: "Then allow me to introduce myself."
Woman: "Why not introduce yourself to the police department and spare me the
trouble?"
Man: "Who makes up these ghastly code phrases anyway?"
Woman: "Someone in the cryptography department. Someone in need of a
girlfriend, apparently."
Welcome to No One Lives Forever, a computer game by Fox Interactive. It is
an Austin Powers meets Goldeneye. You are agent Archer, British
Intelligences only woman operative. Not because you are the best, however,
but because all the other agents are dropping like flies, and The Powers
That Be are getting rather desperate. But thats ok, cause you still get to
run around and kill things, and of course, assault any hapless bystanders
(or your superiors) with your sharp tongue.
Plot (As if getting to kill things isnt enough). This game is chock full of
it. It starts out with you finally getting tapped for a mission, and your
best friend, Bruno (who looks and sounds VERY suspiciously like an older,
bald Sean Connery), is there to help and guide. Your mission is to protect
an American Congressman (and a stone deaf one at that) from a bunch of
H.A.R.M (the evil badguy syndicate) assassins, while he is visiting Morocco
(Casa Blanca!!!) (Not really though.) (The Casa Blanca part, I mean).
Anyway, blah blah blah, kill some people, and viola, Bruno gets capped, and
youve been betrayed, and must fight for your life. Apparently this is the
same thing thats been happening to all the operatives; British Intelligence
has a traitor.
Graphics. Oh Yeah, baby! Do I make you horny? These graphics are worth
drooling over. And I dont even have the power to play them in the highest
detail. (Granted some console stations *might* have better graphics in some
parts . . . PS2 comes to mind, the graphics really are good, just in their
quality, and in the way they interact with each other. For Example, move
over Laura Croft, Archer is in town. Not only is she packing, and has a
license to maim and kill, she wears tight, form fitting clothing, and has
cleavage, cause it likes to give you camera angles that *ahem* draw
attention to it. Also, its got other spiffy effects like blood and gore, and
when people speak, their lips move accordingly, so realistically, you can
nearly lip- read them. Of course, you can also expect all the other usual
spiffy stuff, like scenery, clouds, explosions and the like.
Sound. Very groovy, baby! Not a whole lot to say, other than it rocks (but
not in the rock music type way). It has great 60s music a la Austin Powers,
and the sound effects are great, walking over different surfaces, running
walking, shooting and hitting various objects and people. Go read the
graphics section again now.
Gameplay. Fairly straight forward, made for simplicity of use. In your right
hand you have the mouse, your left on the keyboard. "AWSD" keys move you,
1-9 select weapons, couple other buttons do various things, and you point,
click, and kill with the mouse. If you have one of those cool page scroll-y
wheel things on your mouse, you can use it to zoom in.
Other Spiffy Things. As per the Bond movies, you have a secret research
facility, dubbed the "Toy Factory," and they produce all sorts of cool
things, like C-4 lipstick, a lock picking barrette that also shoot poisonous
darts, body dissolving solution, and a QUARTER. Thats right, an average,
run of the mill American twenty five cent piece. (Why the British Secret
Agency uses a quarter instead English money is beyond the scope of this
article). You can do absolutely fabulous things with the quarter, like THROW
IT ON THE GROUND. Yeah, baby! Thats awesome, right guys? Okokokok before
you run away in disgust, they give you the quarter so that you can chunk it
down the hall a bit in front of a badguy, so that he is distracted and goes
to pick up the money . . . kinda like in Star Wars: A New Hope when Obi-wan is
sneaking about and makes the clicking noise to distract the stormtroopers
who were guarding the tractor beam core. Spiffy huh? Ok then . . . To sum things
up, this game has a lot of work put into it, and the went for a lot of
realism as far as the physics of interaction of things goes.
Final Ratings.
Graphics: 9 out of 10
Sound: (93/100)*10 out of 10
Gameplay: 10 out of 10
Replay Value: 7 of 10 (unless you were a Doom fan, then 10 out of 10)
Difficulty: Challenging
Spiffiness: 8 out of 10 (some things take multiple tries. Like trying to
navigate a minefield without a detector.
Spiffiness - 12 out of 10 (and yes, I CAN do that)
Overall: 9.3 out of 10 (and no, they dont average)
MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
OPERATING SYSTEM: Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000/ME
CPU: Pentium® II 300 MHz
MEMORY: 64Mb RAM
HARD DRIVE SPACE: 400MB free hard drive space
CD-ROM SPEED: 4x CD-ROM
VIDEO: 8 MB 3D accelerator card with Direct3D support DirectX 7.0 or higher.
AUDIO: DirectX compatible 16-bit sound card
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