GoldenEye Rogue Agent was most definitely a shallow attempt by EA take advantage of the GoldenEye name, but I wouldn't say it was a quick and easy cash grab. It has a cool concept and a surprising amount of likeness and voice licensing taken from classic James Bond films, so the efforts to try to make it special are readily apparent, but they kind of blew it in the gameplay department and made a boring mediocre shooter. Click to read more and watch gameplay.
I reviewed GoldenEye Rogue Agent back when it came out and then immediately forgot everything about it, apparently. I was surprised by the effort they put into the presentation and the impressive number of character likenesses from the Bond movies - Pussy Galore, Xenia Onatopp, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, M, Dr. No, Oddjob, and more are all present - and they even got Judy Dench and Christopher Lee to do voice work for the game. The plot of a rogue MI6 agent joining the bad guys and working with, and against, this rogues gallery of villains was interesting. They put actual real effort into this thing.
But the gameplay is just boring and mediocre. It's as bland of a first-person-shooter as you can get. It's sort of fun in a blast everything you see sort of way, but it doesn't do anything particularly special. It's what a 5 or 6 (if you really love the Bond villain cameos) out of 10 was made for.
The only reason why I have any memory of GoldenEye Rogue Agent is because it is one of a handful of Wikipedia pages I'm listed as a reference on. I was a real games journalist once upon a time, after all, though the majority of my work, including the pages Wikipedia links to, are lost to the ether because IAC bought About.com and ruined it and fired everyone and deleted almost everything and killed the brand entirely. Fuck them.
Anyway, GoldenEye Rogue Agent is just sort of whatever.
Because this is October 1st, I also want to add that I will be doing horror games for this month, but I couldn't scrape up 31 I really wanted to do and actually had any stories or input about, so it won't be a whole month of horror games. It'll be like 15 or 20 or so instead. That seems fair to me. Then November will be normal and December is going to have a whole lot of Star Wars.
