GoldenEye: Rogue Agent - GameCube

The choice of name is all the more puzzling because the game has nothing to do with the film or, save the first person perspective, Rare's magnum opus. In fact the rather unlikely reasoning behind everything is that you are an evil ex-MI6 agent who after a fight with Dr No is given an, err… golden eye by Auric Goldfinger.

The game's premise is such that all of Bond's greatest bad guys are still alive and caught up in a sort of underworld civil war, in which your character seeks to be the real beneficiary. Ignoring such nonsense though, and looking purely at the game, the AI seems quite good and the replacement of Everything or Nothing's "Bond Moments" with scripted "Death Trap" sequences is fairly amusing. Unfortunately though the developers seem to have forgotten that the original game was as much lauded (at least a year before Thief or Metal Gear Solid) for its stealth gameplay as much for its shooting and this element seems total absent from Rogue Agent.

The multiplayer is also unconvincing with no radar and rather sprawling level design. It might turn out all right when it's finished but at the end of the day this is no GoldenEye. -- David Jenkins