PC Gamer Writer Doesn't Like James Bond and Thinks You Shouldn't Be Able to Play As Him Because of It

Welcome back once more to the most infrequent column series on the Internet. It’s time for The Riot Retort, last seen back in September 2024 when it returned for one outing following a five year hiatus. I gotta make these more frequent, I just don’t like reading the material to write them from.

Nevertheless, our subject matter this time around isn’t necessarily woke aligned, but the writer probably is. This one is more needlessly whiny.

So with the nonsense out of the way, here’s the Riot Retort to Joshua Wolens of PC Gamer on his editorial “What if James Bond just shouldn’t be in videogames?”

I played a good few hours of 007 First Light last week, and I encourage you to click that link and read all about what I thought of them.

Oh boy, I did, sadly, click that link. We may circle back to it towards the end, but I don’t want to spend too much time on this nonsense.

But my time with Jim Bond sparked other thoughts. Thoughts that probably don’t belong in a preview. Thoughts like: What if James Bond just shouldn’t be a videogame protagonist?

You’re right, that’s a thought that doesn’t belong in a preview. You know what else doesn’t belong in a preview article of a soon to release game? Spending half the preview whining that it isn’t some other game. Try previewing the game you’re playing and not the one you wish it were.

And what the hell kind of a thought is “well I don’t like this character, therefore the game shouldn’t exist” anyway? That’s some next level delusion. I don’t think IO Interactive should have race swapped characters in the game, but that doesn’t mean I think it shouldn’t exist.

Second, yes, GoldenEye for the N64 is a classic. You’re also not really James Bond in it. You’re a hand with a pistol in it and, sometimes in cutscenes, Pierce Brosnan’s face. The character of Bond existed as a lore reason for your gun to emit bullets.

GoldenEye absolutely is a classic. You’re not James Bond in it, but the character you’re controlling is. It’s very much James Bond, in first person. You’re never going to really be James Bond, first person or third person.

I don’t understand why you people have such a hard time understanding that you aren’t the character you’re controlling. You don’t have to relate to him, look like him, act like him, or anything else. Stop trying to self insert yourself into a game and just play it as its meant to be played… a damn James Bond game.

It doesn’t matter if a game is first person or third person, if it’s a set character then that’s the character. It’s not about you, and you aren’t meant to “become” the character. I never once thought I was Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, just as I never thought I was Agent 47 in Hitman. Or any character in any game. If you want to self-insert, play an RPG with a character creator and have at it.

But games that try to make you feel like James Bond, that put you in his actual shoes and attempt to embody him as a character? They fall down.

No game does this. Name the games that try to do this. This is that self-insert again. You’re not in James Bond’s “actual shoes,” what even is that? 007 First Light looks like IO’s attempt at an Uncharted with a little bit of Hitman. At no point in Uncharted, which I loved, did I ever think I was damn Nathan Drake. Nor did I ever think I was put in his actual shoes.

Admittedly, a lot of them are simply not very good videogames, but also: I think the very nature of Bond is that he is a creature of cinema. He just doesn’t quite fit into games.

Which ones? There has for sure been plenty of bad Bond games, but that had little to do with the character itself. James Bond could, in competent hands (which I know is rare these days), be a fantastic video game character. Every bit as good as a film character.

Part of this is, well, he’s annoying.

Well damn, almost every video game character made today fits that description. That’s been a thing for awhile. Kratos was miserable and almost insufferably whiny throughout God of War (and I mean the original good ones), but was still a badass character. But of course I never thought I was Kratos, so I guess it didn’t bother me so much that he wasn’t more like me.

This might scan differently to non-Brits or, indeed, to anyone who doesn’t share my particular brand of class psychosis, but James Bond is an insufferable public school dickhead. He’s a rowing club Tory boy through and through, and he comports himself like a man who has a right to the Earth and everybody on it.

I’m not a Brit, and could be misreading this (I don’t speak wanker) but that’s kinda the point of James Bond. He’s a rich playboy with a license to kill that’s very good at his job. That’s kind of his appeal to pretty much everyone who considers themselves to be fans of James Bond. It’s a certain fantasy. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t translate to video games. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he could translate very well to video games.

But the gist of this seems to be you don’t like him to because his of luxurious lifestyle or class politics. Weird reason not to think a character shouldn’t exist in a certain medium.

Which is quite fun for 90-to-120 minutes of a movie, where he is surrounded by numerous other people who can roll their eyes at him whenever he opens his mouth. In a videogame for 10, 20, 30, 40 hours? Less so, and especially less so in something like a First Light, where a lot of his cocky one-liners and general swagger are delivered to empty rooms and enemy corpses, where no one save the player can tell him to give it a damn rest.

This has nothing to do with James Bond. That’s the majority of games nowadays and even for awhile. Developers love to have their characters yap to no one and throw out witty lines. I agree it’s annoying, but let’s not pretend it’s a problem because it’s James Bond. Constant yapping and attempting witty one liners is one of the reasons I didn’t play Forsaken very long.

But also, part of his charismatic arrogance is that he is suave and unflappable. Well, great. Good for him. I am not suave, and I flap at the slightest inconvenience. I simply don’t… fit into him? Should probably reword that. Whenever I, as Bond, fumble a counter, miss a shot, or try to duck into cover only to fling myself headfirst into a desk lamp, I break the entire spell of the character.

This goes back to that self-insert shit. You being a dumbass and bad at the game (I half jest here) doesn’t break the spell of the character. James Bond in a book and a movie, like any character, is always going to be portrayed better. It’s controlled. You fumbling a counter, or missing a shot, or whatever, isn’t James Bond doing it, it is the nature of the medium.

Nathan Drake was a world class climber and had the grip strength of a god, but when I missed a jump and plummeted to death as Sully screamed “NATE!” it didn’t “break the spell of the character.” It’s a game, that kind of shit happens. Like punching or grappling air in a WWE game. It’s just what happens when you’re playing a game. It’s not an issue with James Bond as a playable character.

I’m not singling out First Light for this; it’s just the Bond game I played most recently and, if anything, does a good job realising him as a character. It’s just that, again, maybe that character should not be a videogame character.

Based on what exactly, that videogame Bond is like every other videogame character? I’m not understanding the logic here. The game does a good job of realizing him as a character, isn’t that good enough? You don’t seem to like James Bond, but maybe Bond fans are looking for that?

There’s enough going on with this game to give me doubts about its quality, but James Bond being realized as a character can’t possibly be a bad thing to James Bond fans.

But here’s where Wolens really goes off the rails.

One moment in particular in my time with First Light made me think this: 007 is doing righteous battle with a villain. Normal thing for 007 to do. During the fight, he grabs a teacup from the sideboard and drives it hard into his opponent’s face.

At this point he says something which I did not write down because I was in the middle of fighting a guy, so my recollection may be fuzzy, but I believe James Bond, 007, on His Majesty’s secret service, said something along the lines of, “Time for tea.”

Sounds like something modern James Bond would say, along with any handful of game characters. Again, with the Uncharted comparison, Nathan Drake says shit like that quite a bit. It’s common in these types of games.

I posit to you: is a man who will say “Time for tea,” or something close to it, upon assaulting some sort of international terrorist with a cup, the kind of person in whose head you want to spend 40 hours? He is not. But turning him into a man who doesn’t say that would make him not Bond.

Sure, why not? There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I wouldn’t necessarily claim to be “in his head,” by controlling a character in a scripted game, but sure. It’s very Bond. It’s very Drake. It’s very modern Croft. It’s very gamey for the majority of characters in a game these days.

And maybe I’ve missed something about 007 First Light, but why in the world would this game take 40 hours? There’s no way the story is remotely that long.

But yeah, I’d rather spend 40 hours hanging with the person who assaults terrorists and says “time for tea” while doing it than I would four minutes with the type of person who whines about it.