Pile of Shame: Oct 08

I’ve had a personal pile of shame lingering for many years now of video games that I bought, played, loved and never got around to finishing. It seems to keep growing, and PC games seem to be ones that I am particularly guilty of leaving ignored for some time. So it was with that in mind that I started to delve into said pile of shame to actually finish some of them. Prior to this post, Divine Divinity was the game that kept me occupied. I remember when I first bought it, my PC wasn’t quite up to the job of running it particularly quickly, so that put me off playing it a bit. When I bought a more powerful PC, it was left on the shelf in favour of more fancy-pants games that showed off my shiny new processor and graphics capabilities.

Now I’ve got my even-more-powerful-than-that Mac happily Boot Camped up to the gills, I find I’ve been returning to the older games more and more. I think the fact that I can run said older games at 60+fps at 1920×1200 is one of the somewhat attractive aspects of this arrangement – especially when I consider that the intro to The Witcher, which I also picked up recently, ran at approximately 1.5fps at 1920×1200. Ouch.

Anyway, now DD is out of the way I’m going to talk about one game in particular which I’ve always had genuine affection for because it’s just so utterly charming. It’s moderately well-known in certain circles for many reasons, but I think there’s an equal or possibly even greater number of people out there who won’t be familiar with it at all. So what is it?

No One Lives Forever, of course; or, to give it its full title, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, hereafter referred to as NOLF for the sake of my sanity.

NOLF is a first-person perspective shooter from the era of games such as the original Deus Ex. DX is actually quite an apt comparison to this game as both proudly boast of the player’s ability to approach situations in a manner of their choosing (normally boiling down to either bursting into a room making lots of noise and shooting everyone in the face, or sneaking into a room quietly and then shooting everyone in the face) and the then-trendy “stealth action” elements.

Where NOLF shines is in its characterisation – both of the game world and of the people in it. NOLF’s world is a brightly-coloured Sixties-inspired caricature of the world of secret agents and acronym-based criminal organisations. Many have compared it to Austin Powers but NOLF’s humour is in many places far more subtle and less slap-you-around-the-face-with-a-vaguely-phallic-object-whilst-shouting-“Laugh dammit!” than Myers’ ouevre. The protagonist Cate Archer, for example, is far from being a wisecracking caricature. In fact, she’s actually quite a realistically-portrayed character battling against the sexist tendencies and chauvinistic attitudes of many people from the Sixties who just happens to get into some spectacularly over-the-top scenarious, including, amongst other things, falling out of a plane without a parachute and having to steal one from an enemy goon on the way down.

This is one of the brilliant things about NOLF – juxtaposition. Cate’s deadpan and sarcastic delivery of many of her lines (including some brilliantly cutting comebacks to aforementioned chauvinism) contrasts brilliantly with the absurdity of some of the situations she finds herself in. Couple this with the famous “overheard conversations” which few games have handled quite as brilliantly as this game, and you get a great spy tale with a wonderful sense of humour infused throughout.

One thing struck me while playing this game, and it was this: first-person shooters used to be fun. I don’t know what it is about recent FPSes but I just don’t enjoy the new ones. I’ve never been inclined to finish a Halo game since the first one, I have absolutely no interest in Crysis and don’t even get me started on Gears of War. Yes, yes, I know, it’s a third-person shooter but it might as well be in first-person for all the blood, gore, shooting, unimaginative gameplay and brown backdrops. (Yeah, you heard.)

NOLF and other games of its era (and earlier) were something else, though. I haven’t been able to pin down exactly what it is I find so compelling about them, though. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re more colourful. Maybe it’s the fact that the gameplay is more varied – for all the great set-pieces in Halo, you were still running around sci-fi themed areas for the duration, whereas NOLF sees you doing everything from diving out of aforementioned plane to doing a deep sea dive to heading to a brilliantly camp Sixties space station, with different gameplay conceits to take into account in each environment. Or maybe it’s the fact that the protagonist is an interesting, compelling character that you feel inclined to stick around with for the duration of their journey. I know I couldn’t give a crap about Master Chief as he’s dull as ditchwater as a character, at least in the way he’s represented in the Halo games – the books may be another matter but as Halo interests me so little I’ve never felt inclined to check it out. Cate, on the other hand, is intelligent, sexy, sarcastic and has a wonderfully dry sense of humour.

I think many modern developers and publishers could learn a lot from revisiting some games from five to ten years ago rather than churning out identikit shooters with pretty graphics. I’d love to see a modern sequel to NOLF. Who knows if it will ever happen?

Next on the Pile are the X-COM games and NOLF2, along with The Witcher, which I’ll post some thoughts on soon.