My Day Off

Teachers' In-Service? Day off from school? Snow on the ground? Oh no! It's every parent's worst nightmare for a child with a video game console. However, I am not the typical child with a video game console: I'm a teenager with a Nintendo 64 who reviews classic video games. Nevertheless, at least I had an excuse to spend much of my day off playing N64.

I started out with 007: Goldeneye, a first-person shooter that's been out for almost my whole life; however, the game hasn't lost its entertainment value. Though the graphics are simply terrible by today's standards (the character's faces don't even move) they don't interfere with the gameplay one bit. The player is able to tell what a gun is, what an enemy is, what an explosive is, and what a door is; as far as I'm concerned, that's enough to make this game enjoyable.

Oddly enough, I didn't decide to play through the game again, but I just played my favorite mission, The Facility. This takes place nine years before the rest of the game, during Bond's last mission with Alec Trevelyan (006). I made my way through the bottling facility, killing guards and scientists indiscriminantly (I failed Mission Objective D: Limit Civilian Casualites within five minutes), and eventually arrived at that pivitol point of the mission in which the Russian general is about to shoot 006 in the main bottling plant. It looked as though the mission would proceed as planned, but I intervened.

I drew my golden pp7 (yes, it's a cheat option that I unlocked) and shot General Ourumov in the chest. He fell and died (he's unable to be killed with any other weapon in the game because the programmers wanted the game to run smoothly). However, an innumerable flood of guards pours into the room, and 006 and I fight to kill them. As I said, there is no limit to the number of guards that are spawned, for the game is programmed to keep spawning them until the player is dead.

Using a variety of weapons such as a KF7 soviet assault rilfe and a Cougar Magnum (yes, another cheat option) I dispatched scores of guards. I even took to playing with one hand just for the fun of it; however, I began to take a few hits because I wasn't moving at all, so I started playing seriously again and mowed down a trio of guards in a second. Yet because I had already used the mines that were supposed to blow up the tanks to take out the first wave of guards, I was now unable to complete the mission without shooting the tanks, which would require me shooting at something that wasn't the guards. Additionally, I had failed Objective D, so I could not complete the mission anyway. Oy vay!

I resolved to stand my ground for a bit longer, then returned to Trevelyan's side. He was firing at the single door, the choke point, from which the gaurds poured into the facility, but I was angry because he didn't seem to be killing them very quickly. Suffice to say, I drew my magnum and placed a bullet in his head. Yet Alec didn't die. Instead, he said "So the golden boy's a traitor," and attacked me. Now I didn't have anyone who even pretended to help me out.

Although I could have easily just shot Alec again to make up for the game's glitch, I decided to play with my food. Despite the advancing guards, I ran to a smaller room in the facility, 006 hot on my heels, and drew my silenced, non-golden pp7. As he opened the door, I placed one, two, three bullets in his right leg. He staggered. I laughed. Then, about ten guards lined up behind him and started to fire into the room, and becuase Alec just wouldn't get out of the way, I drew my magnum once more and fired straight at his head.

The bullet passed through 006, killing him, and also took care of three of the guards before bouncing off one of their helmets. I quickly dispatched the rest of them, but my shot hit one of the bottling tanks that had already been battered. The room proceeded to fill with toxic gas, and although I continued to hold off the guards for several more minutes, the gas overtook me. I died after killing 348 guards for no reason.