Deep pockets, 007

I was just playing the GoldenEye Reloaded demo on los Xbox - rather enjoyed it, I'd heard it was rubbish. (Although my enjoyment might be partly because I only played the N64 original for about two minutes fourteen years ago, so I didn't really have anything to compare it to.)

But something that amused me was that I got genuinely confused for a minute by the fact that Bondface could pick up more than two guns at once. Like, whoah. That odd little mechanic introduced by Halo has got so pervasive that it didn't occur to me that a recent major FPS release might not use it. I don't even like the mechanic! And yet I was startled by its omission.

It reminded me of the nice article in the Observer yesterday by Lucy Prebble - she pointed out that when playing L.A. Noire she was surprised by the fact that the player character, a cop in '40s Los Angeles, isn't corrupt and the game doesn't want you to play him in a corrupt way. It's a sign of how some tropes and concepts get so deeply ingrained for one reason or another that it's quite shocking when they're deliberately not used.

On a not-really-related note, I gave the Asura's Wrath demo a whirl too. Bit of a nutty game, eh? I'd like to have the ability to spontaneously grow four extra arms when I get really angry, mind.