Just that the project was a giant mess.
I feel this view is simply too simplistic. Allow me to explain, and forgive me for partially repeating some earlier posts.
Nope.
There's no reliable source, and yes, that's a good point. There is this quote from a James Bond fan site:
They were released 2 days apart, but of course the Xbox/Halo hadn't had an opportunity to eat everyone's lunch at that point. AUF is an interesting game because it was originally a port of TWINE to PS2/PC, but it ended up becoming its own, arguably... not as good game. It's IMO a very stiff and clunky feeling Bond FPS.
Perfect Dark is a vastly superior game to Nightfire, IMO, but Nightfire did have some lovely nods to Perfect Dark, such as alternate fire modes for weapons, enemies surrendering, and a mission set in a skyscraper where a helicopter gunship circles the building and tries to strafe you sometimes -- an utterly explicit homage to Perfect Dark's Datadyne: Extraction. But while Eurocom were Rareware's successor (and Rare/Free Radical/Eurocom people all ended up at Dambuster in the end) they had a slightly different approach to game design, and with the exception of some of the missions in TWINE which is extremely close to GE in design, none of their games took the same mini-sandbox approach. Their GoldenEye from 2010 does feature objectives and side objectives, and all that -- but the objectives are generally found along the way. You don't go looking for them here and there. I think that's an extremely crucial distinction that made Eurocom's work feel less true to the spirit of Rare's work, even if they mimicked just about everything else to a T.
The PS1 TWINE was by Black Ops Entertainment, and while I don't like it very much, it is an interesting and ambitious PS1 title.
I recall Randy Pitchford saying that when they were developing their version of Nightfire, they were pressured to remove all guns from the game.
Yes, that is a factor most certainly. Not just columbine, but stuff like 9/11, too. One Acclaim Austin developer mentioned that there was a period when they'd be showing their work to executives, and there would be nervous murmuring when a planet exploded or something exploded in a manner that could be visually reminiscent of terrorism in some way, shape, or form.I honestly think all these mandates and restrictions that were forced upon the developers working on post-Goldeneye Bond games were probably because of the recent Columbine shooting. It was around this time that the video game industry became paranoid about being blamed for violence in the real world and started to appease the soccer moms and politicians. Obviously right now I'm not talking about the deadlines that required the games to release around the same time a Bond movie did. That's for a different reason. I'm just referring to the no blood or violence rules and stuff like that.
Both versions of TWINE came out in late 2000 which was not even two years after Columbine. All other Bond games like AUF and Nightfire were also a few years after Columbine as well. You also have to remember the whole Gameboy face-mapping feature that Rare had planned for Perfect Dark during development, but then it was mysteriously cancelled. At the time, Rare or Nintendo or whoever came out with some bullshit PR response about how they couldn't get it to work or thought the game didn't need it or something, but it was obviously because they were trying to avoid any potential controversy. PD also came out about a year after Columbine too. It was just the kind of environment and time period these games released in that maybe explains why certain things were the way they turned out to be in these games.
But maybe I'm just completely wrong about all this and am just making wild guesses.
It does right now on 360
They are also extremely mediocre compared to any of the aforementioned shooters.It kinda did, actually.
I know they were multi-platform (the last two games anyway), but I still maintain that TimeSplitters was basically the proper successor to Perfect Dark, in the same way PD was the successor to Goldeneye. They were developed by a lot of the same people who worked on those games and share many design and gameplay elements. It's a shame they kinda got overlooked.
In no universe are TimeSplitters 2 and 3 "mediocre." They're superb FPS titles.
This is like saying, "You'd be hard pressed to find a single film that takes cues from The Dark Knight. You'd be hard pressed to find a single action film that doesn't take cues from Michael Bay's Transformers." This isn't which game is more overtly "influential", which is honestly becoming super hard to quantify as time goes on and we run out of ideas.
You are aware that the XBLA remaster of Perfect Dark was both praised and quite successful for a 2010 XBLA title, I assume?
It's a very well executed FPS game. But it's also from an entirely different FPS subgenre. As I said earlier, it's like comparing Swat 4 to Modern Warfare and ignoring the fact one is a realistic police tactical shooter and the other is a story-driven cinematic FPS experience.
The irony being that GTA 3's predecessor Body Harvest was an N64 exclusive. Nintendo's cold feet over violence in their games really bit them on the butt.
PDZ doesn't "suck". It's a flawed game that got muddled up from a too-long development over multiple platforms without a clear design direction. Making a sequel to one of the most acclaimed FPS games of all time was a tall order, and they stumbled.
In what way, exactly? And what is lacking about TimeSplitters 2 and 3? I personally prefer PD because TimeSplitters was too much like GoldenEye for my tastes, but Free Radical made fantastic games.
