How do you make James Bond the video game character feel like James Bond the movie character?

That was the question I posed several different ways to Garrett Young, the executive producer of this fall’s first-person game “Quantum of Solace,” during a phone interview earlier this week. For instance…

* How do you make sure he doesn’t shoot so many people that he no longer seems like a suave super-spy?
* How do you make the player feel like a ladies’ man?

Well, it starts with making sure the developers adhere to the first official Bond commandment, the first item on a four-page document that Young was shown by the series’ franchise-owners so that he could know what is Bond and what isn’t.


“The first big one is ‘Bond’s greatest weapon is his mind,’” Young told me, referring to the first edict in what he calls the “Bond Bible.” This first fundamental principle, he had learned, was that “Bond is always outmanned, always outgunned and he always has to use his mind to get out of certain situations.”

“Bond is always outmanned, always outgunned.”

For the “Quantum of Solace” game, which will cover the movie of the same name as well as 2006’s “Casino Royale,” the thinking aspect of Bond will be represented by player choice. Young said gamers will be able to choose tactics for some of the game’s levels, opting for stealth instead of charging in with a machine gun.

But isn’t that the challenge with Bond games: that James Bond the video game character is more of a shoot-em-up action hero than he ever is in the movies?

This is the difference between action movies and action games, Young said: “A movie that’s an action movie is still not 100 percent action. The pacing allows it to not always be action.” In an action game, however, he believes the player is usually looking for constant engagement with game, perpetual action. “There are some games that do 30-minute conversations,” he acknowledged. “That’s not our game.” Keeping Bond from being seen as suddenly gun-crazy, the developers have chosen are some action scenes that aren’t full of shooting, like the parkour chase scene from “Casino Royale.”

(Read more from Source)