The only thing on fire around here is the dumpster I found this game in.

Everyone's favourite Pierce Brosnan film.

📖 Background Link to heading

007 NightFire is a EA-published game that appeared on several platforms, all versions of which were good except this one. The story is original to the game, and features James Bond attempting to thwart a terrorist attack on Paris during New Year’s Eve celebrations. The villain, Raphael Drake, seems to be behind the theft of a missile guidance system in connection to the plot. Bond infiltrates his castle in Austria, where the story kicks off.

Development of NightFire for the GBA was JV Games, a small company with a shockingly modern website. While their modern efforts have focused on business software such as time reporting and hotel room booking services, their back catalogue features such hits as Beer Pong and Christmas Clix. Beyond the modest collection of Wii, DS, and PSN shovelware titles however are some real games, mostly developed in the 90s and early 2000s.

JV is notable for having released the first ever FPS game on the Gameboy Advance, Back Track, which launched a whole 22 days before DOOM. JV also created their own engine for their earliest games, called the Entity Engine¹. As far as I can tell, this is the same engine used for all of JV’s 3D games, including NightFire. The engine feels sort of like an in-between sort of deal, after Doom but before Duke Nukem 3D in terms of its capabilities. You can look up or down (like in Build Engine), at the cost of severe warping (like DOOM if you hack in vertical mouselook). It runs poorly but that may be the fault of the hardware.

And oh boy does the game ever run poorly. The framerate is sluggish at the best of times, making fine control of any sort impossible. Enemies are frequently tiny smudges of pixellated garbage in the background of a scene, and the game expects you to aim precisely at them or suffer damage. The game also suffers from a cluttered control scheme, being on a system with only two face buttons. B acts as a modifier for three separate actions, and the triggers are another three themselves (not to mention their extra roles taken on in underwater missions). While you may have a wide array of tools to handle any situation, good luck using them in a pinch when the binding to swap weapons is B + L or R. It’s all too common to swap weapons while strafing because you tried to jump onto a table.

In fairness, the game is technically impressive for the Gameboy Advance, and it’s more stable than the GBA port of DOOM, but that doesn’t redeem its flaws. Which means it’s perfect for Kusogrande!

In space or underwater:

Thrust: R
Aim: D-Pad

🏁 Goal Link to heading

Mission 1: Austrian Castle Link to heading

Your first mission is to infiltrate a castle. Enter the front gate (but only after the truck arrives at the door) and make your way to the wooden door at the rear of the camp. There, you’ll walk right past two statuesque “villains” which I suppose counts as “eavesdropping” if you use your imagination.

In the room that follows, you simply need to fight your way out and meet your contact at the ski lift. Careful not to shoot her, or it’s mission over and you’ll have to restart from the beginning. The setpiece of this level is the fight with a helicopter, which is honestly pretty cool.

Mission 2: Mayhew’s Estate Link to heading

Protect Mayhew from his traitorous boss’s thugs! You’ll fight your way out of Mayhew’s estate and then save his servants who have been taken hostage. If you fail to save them or shoot an innocent (or Mayhew), you’ll fail the mission.

At the end of the estate, Mayhew will be assassinated and you’ll come face to face with his killer. Take out the assassin before moving on to the next level.

Mission 3: Phoenix Tower Link to heading

This is a stealth mission! Does the idea of performing a pacifist ghost mission with GBA graphics appeal to you? It sure doesn’t appeal to me! This level is already too hard with the clumsy and unresponsive controls, but without the ability to see around corners safely or easily identify a target’s facing at a distance, this level becomes downright unreasonable.

The strategy here is to use the keychain stunner to zap guards from behind, then sneak around any cameras near them. There are one or two who require a swift shot from the tranq pen, but four shots of that is just barely enough to cover the mission.

The level is fairly linear: First, you install a virus into three computers in the tower and then you climb through a vent to get to the balcony. After that, hack into a vault to get the maguffin and hack into the big bad’s computer before escaping to the roof.

Once on the roof, you’ll have to fight waves of enemies in order to get a door to open, allowing your to pick up a parachute and dive off the building.

📝 Notes Link to heading

The second part of Mission 2 features a green arrow hanging from the ceiling of a house. This is a grapple point and players will need to hit this grapple point with the cell phone to progress.

Vince Valenti @ LinkedIn ↩︎

007: NightFire (GBA)