Retro: No One Lives Forever and Nintendo's Handheld Legacy
Eurogamer has a pair of retrospectives on tap for you this week. The first one was written by John Walker, covering Monolith's spy spoof FPS, The Operative: No One Lives Forever.
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There's a genuine choice of how to approach the game. While some levels will fix specific completion criteria restricting your options, often you're left to decide if you want to go with all guns blazing or stealth your way through a mission. The weapons and gadgets you bring with you can determine this too - take lock-picks and silenced pistols and you can be a lot more subtle than if you're carrying lipstick bombs and machineguns. Often you're tasked with avoiding the eye of security cameras, which trigger level-wide alarms. But grow tired of this and you can just trigger them, and put up with the noise and attacks from all-comers.
That screen was an important piece of the puzzle too: crude even by the standards of the late eighties, it was central to Yokoi's low cost, low battery consumption plan. At times, getting the unlit screen to reflect any light at all could be extremely annoying, but at least you could play the Game Boy for longer than two hours in any one sitting.
Yokoi's gambles paid off: while a handful of other companies were starting to think about moving console experiences out from under the TVs and into players' hands, Yokoi was the first to truly understand that the technology didn't have to be good, it had to merely be good enough. Nobody looked at the Game Boy's urine-coloured display and thought: "Ooh, this will be nice to stare at for the next 10 years," but it didn't matter. The software would take care of that kind of thing, and all the device itself should do is make sure that the software runs, and that people can afford to buy it.
Great articles! That handheld retrospective was fun...i remember i got Donkey Kong jr. Game and Watch in a gold clamshell for christmas one year. It was the bizzle! I wish i could remember where i put it...
I think N.O.L.F. is interesting because it came out at just the right/wrong time to be a unique game. It was enough of a contemporary of half Life 1 that it hadn't been spoiled by the "storytelling is everything! We need to try to be first person movies!" thing that ahs ruined FPS games to some degree, and yet it was new enough to have definite "there's more to this than just what Doom and Quake gave us" gameplay.
I hope they make a sequel. The industry needs it to save us from the "doom is everything"/"Halo is everything" mindsets .
"The software would take care of that kind of thing, and all the device itself should do is make sure that the software runs, and that people can afford to buy it."
If only sony would have thought of this before launching the PS3.
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I don't care how good the game is. I care how much lube is required to enjoy it. -Gamers against DLC
I really enjoyed both No One Lives Forever games... Particularly because I prefer stealth games like Thief and Deus Ex, and it was fun having the choice to play that way. Plus the art style and humor were unique.
Sadly, I never had a chance to enjoy NOLF, either one. It's my opinion that at this point the graphics would lose me, but, ya never know.
You know, i still go through the first one for an hour or two...it really was ingenious. Definitely worth a try, especially considering the alternatives at the time. (Unreal, UT, etc...) The only tarnish is that Deus Ex came out around the same time if i remember right and was, well, AWESOME. But i still love NOLF.
NOLF 1 and 2 were great PC games; I never got around to playing Contract Jack though. Going back even further.. shooting druids with the flaregun in Blood just to watch and listen to them burn. Good times. I still have the Blood Shareware CD with the Type O-Negative music video on it.
What does HARM stand for anyway? Lol.. FEAR would have you think it stands for "Heating and Refridgeration Manufacturing" funny easter egg there
