Everyone probably knows I’m a bit of a James Bond fan, but if you were expecting me to say anything about the new Bond video game which apparently came out, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It isn’t only that I see such games as an infantile waste of time and would probably have no interest in playing them even if I had the dexterity to; more that I don’t see how such games can have any kind of relationship to the character or narratives that they claim to be based upon.
As much as certain teenage doofuses might want to pretend otherwise, video games are not films. Films, like the novels that they are often based on, are pieces of narrative art: they are the creation of a director, and, our personal reception notwithstanding, do not change each time they are watched. Like any other form of art, film has a definite, discernible meaning. Video games operate on an entirely different basis. They are basically distractions which players enter into to achieve a goal, changing every time they are played. To see the two as somehow on a par is thus meaningless: playing a video game is not effectively acting out a movie. That is why it really irritates me when all these numpties on YouTube, who have previously often posted some excellent James Bond film reviews, start playing games and talking as though they’re of the same order.
Of course I know that a lot more could be said about the relationship between films and games, and I realise I have plenty more to explore. When you start to think about it, the relationship between the two is not that straightforward, and could actually be quite intriguing. Yet I simply cannot deny that the cinephile in me finds the notion of 007 being turned into a computer graphic in a game and used to do little more than shoot his way through labyrinths, an absolute insult to the intriguing enigmatic figure I know Bond to be. The character Ian Fleming created was so much more than a man with a gun: to see him commercialised and rendered into an adolescent plaything in this way really does bug me.
The Ill-Informed Ramblings of a Cripple 
i think your wrong on this one mate. It might help to sit and watch someone play the game before you make a judgement. I haven’t played the new Bond game, but it appears to have been getting great reviews and the makers seem to be big fans. I did however spend a large chunk of my adolescence playing Goldeneye on the N64 and that ruled!
i also think that games offer something unique. I love Spider-Man. I have read the comics, watched the cartoons and the films. I have also played the majority of the games. They are fun to play (some moreso than others), they have a good story and it is exciting to web swing around New York City, drop it on a random crime and pummel bad guys.
I think to write video games off as infantile is really unfair. They offer something unique, like a film or a TV show or book or comic. They all offer something different.
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I think I know what you mean mate. I didn’t intend to write video games off completely, but rather say they function on a wholly different level to film. How can a computer screen compare to the enormity and aura of a cinema?
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