Playing every PS1 game - 007: The World Is Not Enough

I recently got hold of a Steam Deck, and part of the plan was (along with using it as intended for Steam games) to turn it into a sort of portable console emulator. I set up ES-DE and spent a couple of days digging up romsets of 4th and 5th generation consoles (then absolutely hammering the ScreenScraper.fr APIs to grab screenshots and box art). My main interest was in the Playstation 1 library (the only one I actually owned in the old days), with the view of finally being able to play the dozens of games I saw in Official UK Playstation Magazine and harboured hopes of getting hold of one day, despite knowing that in 90% of cases it was never going to happen.

So here we are. I didn’t get every single one on my spree, though, because let’s not be silly. I’m not bothering with (most) kiddie Disney games, annual sequels to FIFA (etc) and obscure half-baked titles that weren’t released outside of Japan (or all the random bootleg/budget titles). That means that top of the list is…

007: The World Is Not Enough

Before Call of Duty and before Halo - but after Doom - you had Goldeneye 007. Until that point, unless you had a well-equipped PC (and most didn’t own a PC at all), first-person shooters on console pretty much gave you Doom ports (of varying quality) and not a lot else. With fully 3D environments, full weapon modeling and animations, slick (for its time) controls and complex level objectives, Goldeneye 007 on N64 really was something people had not seen before.

TWINE is not Goldeneye. But it really, really wants to be; much like pretty much every console FPS did until the PS2’s conventional analog controls (and the likes of Timesplitters) arrived later down the line, following which the formula was encased in carbonite with Call of Duty 4 and twenty years on shows no sign of changing.

TWINE is notable for the fact that an entirely different version of the game was created by different developers for the N64. I didn’t even know this until I worked it out many many years later - I always thought that certain cheat codes and other details about the game I saw online didn’t make sense. The feeling seems to be that the N64 version was superior - I’d never played it myself until now, and I can say it is definitely more ‘polished’, and has specific levels in place where there are nothing but rather awkward gaps in the PS version’s plot, but I don’t know; it didn’t feel as fast paced and ‘enclosed’ as that of its sibling.

The level select screen clearly draws from Goldeneye.

Playing the game in the era of standardised console FPS mechanics means it suffers badly from the same disease which hobbles every other PS1 FPS (apart from Alien Resurrection, (in)famously) - non-analog control meaning directional buttons turn you left/right and strafing can only be done clunkily with the shoulder buttons. I’ll never get used to it and don’t know how I ever tolerated it. The game’s way of compensating for your player character moving like a forklift truck and being wide open in front of goons while you bounce into walls is simple - goons have the reaction speed of a drugged-up sloth and labour themselves very slowly into a firing position before firing with immense inaccuracy. Again, this was pretty much the approach for every console FPS in those days.

Enemies duck and weave, even dropping primary weapons and pulling out sidearms.

‘Aiming’ is possible with shoulder buttons - just like today - but it’s nowhere near as smooth as you would expect. Expect to get filled with lead as you slowly shunt the red targeting reticule over the head of your unfortunate chosen goon and fire for the one shot kill (and special ‘headshot’ animation and ‘UGH’ scream). It is simply not worth it most of the time. In the main, fighting is done by pointing yourself in the general direction of the enemies and hammering X (Shoot - It actually makes perfect sense!) to let the hidden auto-targeting handle them. Precise targeting is intended for shooting specific objects (like padlocks or CCTV cameras) or shooting enemies with body armour; a mechanic that comes into play a bit more later on in the game.

There is a fair amount of variety in the levels, despite some puzzling decisions around which parts of the film should constitute its own level and which should not - for example, two scenes in the film totalling to about 30 seconds between them get a pair of mostly-invented ‘chase’ levels (‘King’s Ransom’ and ‘Turncoat’), while ‘Night Watch’ is clearly an excuse to put a ‘stealth level’ in to tick a box in a rather jarring change of pace that thankfully isn’t revisited; the film’s showpiece ‘Thames boat chase’ scene is missing entirely from the game (though exists in the N64 version).

There is the odd ‘recreate this bit from the movie’ moment.

The level concepts do work, though, with a few exceptions. Level four has no combat at all - the only objective is to play casino blackjack until you win $100,000. It sounds stupid, but everything down to the jazzy background music, bright decor and gormless PS1-Hagrid-looking croupier wishing you ‘good luck sir’ at the beginning of every hand makes it my favourite level, despite being over in ten minutes. It’s a nice reward for completing the previous level, which has you trying to shoot at flying snowmobiles-with-guns while you clunkily slide around on skis, getting lit up in the process by goons because you’re trying to use the terrible aiming system to hit a moving target (aforementioned snowmobiles).

You find yourself chasing down the big bad by, er, redirecting oil flows in one particularly ridiculous level. I found that if you manage to make $100M, you win the level immediately. Interesting given the near-impossibility of such a feat without save-state abuse.

A few dodgy levels aside, it’s a pretty good console FPS for the era. There are lots of different weapons and they all have a suitably ‘chunky’ feel to them, and the enemies can take a few hits without turning into bullet sponges. You’re always on the move - areas being joined together by long corridors with nothing in them and ‘hold the forward button while mowing down waves of goons’ mechanics are kept to a minimum. It’s also satisfyingly hard - as a lad I never did get further than level 8 (there are 11 in total), and the final two levels jack the difficulty up considerably, mainly in terms of their length - Bond can’t actually take that many hits before dying, and there are no health packs (though there is an ‘armour bar’ which can be topped up with pickups). Having to restart the level from the beginning each time you die also gets highly infuriating on later levels, but once again, this was pretty common in those days. I like the game. Is it as good as Medal of Honour? No. But it’s not a million miles off.

Kept my attention for: A day or two
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10