GoldenEye and Black Ops could learn from each other

If you’re a rational consumer who thinks about purchases before making them, you might find that you have to choose (gross) between GOLDENEYE 007, a re-imagining of the 1997 classic for the N64, and CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS, the seventh mainline entry in the venerable shooter series.

If you’re like me, you begrudgingly bought both. They are games, after all, and they came out. What was I supposed to do?

Based on my limited time with both titles (these are not meant to be proper reviews), I don’t think I wasted any money. Not this time.

But playing them side-by-side has been tremendously instructive. One game excels at thoughtful gunplay and sprawling, mission-based levels; the other puts a premium on genuinely thrilling spectacle and moment-to-moment violence.

Each has its merits, and each could stand to learn a lot from the other.

I’m as pleased as anybody that GOLDENEYE turned out so well. What originally sounded like a spectacularly misguided cash-in has shaped up to be one of the finest console shooters of the year, equal parts loving update and clever homage. The Wii exclusive isn’t the technical treasure that BLACK OPS is, but developer Eurocom has milked a surprisingly attractive experience from the hardware.

You once again control James Bond as he tracks down rogue agent Alec Trevelyan, but for whatever reason, you’ll pilot Daniel Craig’s likeness this time. Where Pierce Brosnan’s Bond leaned on gadgets and charm, Craig is all fists and firearms — a change you’ll feel in the level design, too. Every stage feels tailored for chaining together the game’s terrifically satsifying hand-to-hand takedowns.

Wherever stealth is an option, it’s the route you’ll want to take. The shooting feels great when you’re dealing with one or two enemies, but on the frequent occasions when you set off a dozen foes or more, the action slows to an unacceptable, occasionally unplayable chug. It’s an especially disappointing distraction given Eurocom’s technical success with last year’s DEAD SPACE EXTRACTION, which also was shackled to the Wii.

When you aren’t running and gunning, GOLDENEYE is a treat. As in the N64 game, most missions task you with a handful of spy-flavored objectives amid bouts of head-shotting and pistol-whipping; these sidejobs pile up and become increasingly mandatory as you raise the difficulty. They lend each mission a surprising amount of replayability, and they do a commendable job of tricking you into thinking you’re doing something other than shooting dudes. (It stinks that the game’s handsome in-engine cutscenes appear to be completely unskippable, though.)

Pointing and shooting guns are just about the only things you’ll do in BLACK OPS, but the game plays so well that you might not notice.

It’s precisely this kind of variety that would flesh out the increasingly staid single-player campaigns in the CALL OF DUTY games. Treyarch has delivered a fun, occasionally mesmerizing adventure in BLACK OPS — a prison-yard rebellion early in the game stands out as one of the most exciting moments in the franchise — but it’s guns-blazing from start to finish. You take breaks from shooting people just long enough to bring down Soviet rockets and North Vietnamese tanks. It’s a loud game.

Cranking up the difficulty in BLACK OPS just emphasizes the monotony. As in every CALL OF DUTY title, the “Hardened” and “Veteran” settings simply make you more fragile and enemies more trigger-happy. It can get suffocating, and because you’ll be dying every 10 paces, it’s never truly rewarding. Let me snap a few recon photos or sabotage a spy plane or something! Make me veer off the beaten path once or twice!

The tedium is never game-breaking, though. On the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, BLACK OPS is so technically sound, so packed with (scripted) surprises and (choreographed) explosions, that you’ll probably be too busy admiring the scenery to get hung up on your tiring trigger finger. If GOLDENEYE could borrow some of that technical mastery — the rigid insistence on an unshakably smooth framerate, for instance — it would be one of my favorite games of the year. As it stands, it’s a great shooter with bummer-inducing performance problems.

(I’ve only dabbled in both games’ expansive multiplayer suites, but I can tell you that GOLDENEYE, whose framerate issues are magnified online, doesn’t exactly recapture whatever magic you remember from the 1997 game. It is a functional Internet shooter, though, and that’s a feather in the Wii’s FPS-starved cap.)