While First Light might manage to change that for the current generation of gaming hardware, there’s another Bond game from back in the day that immediately comes to mind when we think of titles that made us feel like we were MI6’s apex predator.

If you guessed Everything or Nothing, pat yourself on the back. It’s a game we absolutely loved back in the day, and is one we’d be down to play if you ever brought it up in a conversation. But why is that? What makes this one so special? We’re happy to tell you all about it, so let’s jump right in.

Being Bond

Where other experiences could often feel like licensed Bond video games, Everything or Nothing took a different route: it made you feel like you were in a playable Bond film. The man’s always been a jack of all trades, and has even become a master at many of them. That’s a distinction that other titles before this one failed to capture, doubling down on one aspect of an expansive skill set over all others, or trying to implement them only to bite off more than they could chew.

But in Everything or Nothing, you get to do everything Bond can do, and do it quite well as you begin to find your footing controls-wise, and learn more about enemy patterns and how to exploit them. Perhaps you decided to save your bullets for later, and take on your enemies the old fashioned way? Good for you, the melee system was fairly good, and you could always try to catch lone guards unawares. You could decide to try taking them all out stealthily on a whim, before a mistake derailed that plan, and your guns and gadgets came into play.

You could decide that your gadgets were your best tools in the field, bestowed upon you by Q himself and in the flesh this time. That cleverly wove in a sort of continuity with the films of the time while remaining a separate story with a seasoned hand behind its writing. That was a viable approach but with the game’s mission design and levels being the way they were, unpredictability underlined your time out in the field, and you were presented with action that was as cinematic as the tech of the time could manage.

It was an experience that felt unique, with fresh camera angles and a new POV to play with, all of which were backed up by a level of polish and the notion that the developers had as much fun making it as we had playing it. It felt like it was made for fans by fans, and that’s always a recipe for great entertainment in our book.

But of course, great presentation, visual polish, and narrative framing all work only if there’s a gameplay loop that can sustain them all throughout the experience.

Locked And Loaded

All of the great stuff we’ve talked about so far would have been for naught if the gameplay wasn’t up to par with the game’s world-building and excellent characterization of Bond. Everything or Nothing, however, managed to make playing as Bond feel like a power trip without making him feel invincible. That’s a balance that could be hard to achieve even for the best of games, and it’s especially praise-worthy considering how iconic the character it was trying to tackle already was.

Bond’s entire skill-set was at your disposal, but this one did well to take him all over the globe, and into various situations where he wasn’t going to succeed with just his guns and fists. You’d spend a fair bit of time in a gunfight before finding yourself in a very well-implemented sequence where you picked a vehicle and rolled with it. Another switch would have you trying to infiltrate areas as quietly as you could for an important objective.

Everything or Nothing paid homage to the films that inspired it by mimicking Bond’s penchant for improvisation, and how those moments of inspiration often let to set-pieces and spectacle before he returned to the shadows and hunted his prey from there. You had to be the best, your tenacity to adapt to a situation matching Bond’s own ability to shift from planned warfare to improvisational chaos, all executed with precision in the interest of his goals.

This was a game that took you from one Bond fantasy or another, carrying you away on a story that was exceptionally on-brand, and quite riveting to experience. It was exciting and brought excellent pacing on the narrative front, and enough variation in its gameplay to keep it that way throughout its runtime. Of course, its multiplayer options gave it a fairly long shelf life too, for those players who enjoyed it.

And the level of polish it brought to the table made it so immersive, it became almost as legendary as the man himself.

Shock and Awe

We’re now at the point where Everything or Nothing bridged the gap between the experience it had to offer, and the media that inspired the effort. Games that tried to emulate the movies with varying levels of success were already around (remember GoldenEye?). Exciting gameplay and a solid story are great and all, but it’s in how they were presented to us as players that made the game stand out.

Great graphics were backed up by scenes written to utilize them, and the set-pieces you played through brought the gameplay variety on offer to a crescendo, often requiring you to flit between guns, gadgets, and your skills in ways that showed just how well it understood the character and how his adventures often unfold. It was a sublime balance of great pacing, with scenes that used their locations to create unique dangers and challenges, improvisation using all the tools in your arsenal to respond to threats, and dealing with sudden escalations that were designed for adrenaline rushes.

Spectacle and set-pieces were made even better by a level of polish that we found very impressive. It brought the entire experience together, making it akin to what a Hollywood production looked like at the time. It was hard to tell whether Everything or Nothing was a video game or one insane interactive film with Bond in the leading role.

It wasn’t all perfect, though, with the game’s camera being somewhat limited, while some mission designs felt a tad dated. A recurring annoyance was the cover system that would get finicky and have us on the backfoot in intense fights from time to time. We’d also say that combat could feel rather simple once you understood how to operate with precision against your enemies. That would make the ranking system feel like it worked too well in your favor, which further simplified combat.

And yet, when those complaints could also lead to awesome moments and great memories, we found ourselves learning to live with them for a greater good, in a title that has remained among our favorite Bond experiences. Of course, we’re quite curious to see if First Light has paid attention to what’s great about this one, and how it could utilize those aspects in a way that elevates what it’s trying to do with the character.

The version of Bond we play in Everything or Nothing isn’t the one we’re seeing in First Light, and the upcoming exploration of his early days needs to take an insightful look at what that could mean, and craft ways to showcase his inexperience in the field. This is a take on Bond where he’s potentially more vulnerable, and weaving that into the usual charm and charisma that the character brings could lead to some great moments in the new game.

Of course, First Light choose an entirely different direction for the character, but the fundamentals of presenting everything we know and love about Bond in ways that feel faithful to the character are important. There’s a need for a balance between familiarity and freshness in any Bond-focused video game, but we will say that what we’ve been seeing so far has been pretty impressive indeed. It needs to let its gameplay and narrative framing wrap around the feeling of being Bond on the road to becoming a legend, just as Everything or Nothing designed itself on presenting him at his peak.

And that’s probably this title’s biggest strength. It wasn’t great because Bond could do cool stuff in it. That was something so many other titles had already managed with varying results. It was great because it uses all that cool stuff to make you feel like you’re Bond himself.

Everything or Nothing took the effort to make its players not just play as Bond, but to actually feel like him as they went gallivanting around the globe on missions. And that made all the difference.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

EA’s support for the Nintendo Switch has been extremely lacking thus far. We’ve received two half hearted FIFA games from the publisher on the console, as well as the indie hit Fe. While a lot of criticism can be (rightly) leveled at the publisher for how it has handled a platform that is currently the fastest selling one of the generation, there are also actual technical reasons that have prevented EA from bringing more of their games over to the Switch.

Specifically—the Frostbite Engine. The Frostbite Engine is the engine that powers most of EA’s internally developed games, and thus far, it has not supported Switch, which rules out Switch versions of most EA games off the bat (even FIFA has to be built on a custom engine for Switch). However, going forward, that may be changing.

YouTuber Doctre81 has discovered an interesting snippet on EA’s LinkedIn page (you can see a screenshot of the relevant portion below)—specifically noting that software engineers at the company have been involved in engineering their software development pipelines for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC for the Nintendo Switch. Games that use said pipelines include, apparently, Anthem and Battlefield 5, both of which are Frostbite games, which leads to a pretty obvious conclusion.

If this is true, then there are several takeaways—more of EA’s games, especially their sports games, can now come to the Switch going forward. And, it seems like EA may finally be beginning to take the Switch more seriously. Perhaps two years of record breaking sales was all that was needed to change their mind in the end.

If you needed any more evidence on just how well the video gaming industry as a whole is doing, no matter how much certain quarters of the video games fanbase may want to get into pointless arguments about who’s “winning” and who’s not, the NPD Group’s newest report is just the thing for you.

In Q3 2018 (I.e., from July to September), customers spent a staggering $9.1 billion on video games in the US. The success is attributed to games such as Fortnite, Madden NFL 19, NBA 2K19, and of course, Spider-Man.

Hardware and accessory sales also saw growth, and according to NPD analyst Mat Piscatella, this increased spending bodes very well for spending on video games come the Holiday quarter this year (which we are right in the middle of right now, as a matter of fact).

“The video game market in the U.S. continues to thrive with compelling gaming content expanding the market, driving higher spending of hardware, accessory, and software,” said Mat Piscatella, games industry analyst at The NPD Group, in a statement sent to GamesBeat. “And with the sales strength of recent releases such as Marvel’s Spider-Man and NBA 2K19, combined with cross-platform titles such as Fortnite, there appears to be no slowing down as we head into the final stretch of the holiday shopping season.”

On the whole, it’s great that, in spite of not too uncommon assertions decrying console gaming, and proclaiming it was at an end, the market seems to be doing just fine now, with three healthy consoles, and a whole lot of great games for everyone to enjoy.

Yesterday, we reported that EA were apparently looking at developing a remaster for the Mass Effect trilogy, or that they were at least considering it- given how famously averse to developing remasters the company has been, this came as a bit of a surprise. So what changed?

The short answer- the market has spoken. Speaking in an interview with Game Informer, EA’s executive VP Patrick Soderlund said that the company is now actively exploring the possibility of making remasters going forward.

“What’s changed is that there is proof in the market that people want it, maybe more than there was when we spoke,” said Soderlund at Gamescom this week. “There were some that did it before, but I think there is even more clear evidence that this is something that people really want.”

That said, EA are still being very careful with how they approach remasters, instead of adapting the scattershot approach to releasing them that most other companies seem to have.

“We have to be careful in choosing the right brands for the right reasons at the right time,” he said. “A remaster is something that you can just do or do it really well. I want to make sure that if we were to do it, we would do it really well and that people feel that it’s the same game but it feels so much better in this new shape and form.

“There have been titles that have come out that have done it really well, and there have been others that maybe haven’t done it so well. We just want to make sure that we stay in the ‘done it really well’ camp.”

All in all, I can’t say I blame EA’s take on how to approach remasters here, and I must laud them for not simply chasing easy money for once. That said- Mass Effect Trilogy remaster, EA. Please.

It has largely been held that Visceral’s new upcoming game is an open world RPG, being worked on by Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond. These indications have been based on some internal leaks, as well as job listings, which have all pointed towards the game being some kind open world action RPG.

However, if f the game’s co-writer, Todd Stashwick, is to be believed, then our implicit assumptions about what the game may be have been wrong. Speaking on a recent podcast from Geekleagueofamerica, Stashwick made some remarks that seem to discount the possibility of that open world RPG.

“If you believe the internet, the internet thinks that we’re doing an open-world, RPG, Han-Solo game, and none of that is anything that we talked about”, Stashwick said.“We have not released any details about our game.”

He does not, of course, explicitly deny an open world RPG, but he does very specifically bring it up himself to shoot down the idea, when it was not something he needed to touch- generally, companies and employees don’t even comment on projects and ideas currently under development internally, so that makes the context for his remarks that much more interesting.

What is this new Star Wars game, then? We don’t know yet- but hopefully we find out more at E3 this year.

EA’s Need for Speed reboot launched last month, and while reviews of the game have been tepid at best, the game has managed to race its way into the sales charts, selling reasonably well for a game that is, after all, an always online racing game with some baffling decisions under its belt.

EA and developer Ghost Games decided to tackle some of the issues with the game in the massive Need for Speed Legends update that they launched. The update is pretty big- big enough that there is a brand new video for you, which sees YouTuber Westie walk us through all the changes and improvements that the new update introduced.

You can watch the video for yourself below. Need for Speed is out now on the PS4 and Xbox One, and a PC release is set to launch early next year.

Do you own Need for Speed? What do you think? Let us know in the comments section.

Criterion has been among the most enthusiastic supporters of Microsoft’s backwards compatibility initiative for the Xbox One- they pledged that Burnout Paradise, their last Burnout game, would be made available for Xbox One via its backwards compatibility functionality, and they made good on their word. However, for a lot of fans of the franchise, Paradise is actually something of a black mark on the Burnout series- the open world structure in the game, many felt, detracted from what Burnout was really good at. Burnout 3: Takedown, and its immediate sequel Burnout Revenge were felt to be far superior, and the peak of the franchise.

Of these games, Burnout Revenge was actually released on the Xbox 360- so fans were probably not wrong in hoping for the game to eventually be released for the Xbox One via backwards compatibility, right? Well… according to Criterion, there are no plans to make the title compatible with the Xbox One any time soon. Which is a shame because I would play Revenge over Paradise any day (and Takedown over both).

Oh well.

The new Need for Speed game looks absolutely awesome- it looks like the perfect Need for Speed game that takes everything that is good about the series, and brings it all together. If it weren’t for the always online requirement, this game would be as easy a recommendation for any fan of the racing game as any has been- at least based on initial impressions.

If you wanted any more selling on this game, then the new video, which you can see embedded below, should greatly help. It’s a no bullshit, no frills, as is video showing us the first twenty minutes of the game. The game looks gorgeous, and more importantly, it looks like racing in it is thrilling and exhilarating.

Need for Speed launches for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 next month, with a PC version set to follow in 2016. Xbox One owners can get it early, right now, via EA Access.

Titanfall was hardly the generation and genre defining hit that many were hoping or expecting it would be, but it was a pretty fun game regardless. That said, its relatively limited success has been a matter for discourse for a while now, and many believe that the constrained install base on Xbox may have had to do with it.

However, Respawn stands by its decision, and says that the Xbox exclusivity was the absolute right thing for it to do. Speaking on Twitter, Respawn’s Vince Zampella said, “I felt we needed to do it. We were a small team starting from scratch. Not greed, it limited our market. +chance to finish.”

The fan that Zampella was talking to said, “to a lot of us you created the best console games ever (COD4/MW2), thought it was strange you alienated half your fan base.” Zampella responded, saying, “That will be fixed. We want as many as possible to play our games,” confirming, yet again, that Titanfall 2 will not be Xbox exclusive.

Hopefully it also addresses other things in addition to the exclusivity, that were wrong with the game.

Last year’s Need for Speed Rivals, which was the first game in EA’s flagship racing game franchise to be developed by Ghost Games, was actually a surprisingly good game, probably the best true entry in the franchise since 2005’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted, almost a decade ago at this point. But if, for some reason, you decided to sit out on the game, you don’t have to worry (nor do you have much of an excuse) as EA and Ghost Games are releasing a ‘Complete Edition’ that comes with all the DLC included, next month.

The DLC will mostly be all the cars and car packs that were made available over the last year, and the Complete Edition will be available on all the platforms the game was originally released on- Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and PC.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage and information on upcoming games and products.