The Operative: No One Lives Forever

Monolith Productions

 

images c/o MobyGames

Austin Powers has a lot to answer for. 

Have you ever been the only person to not like something? To look at something that everyone else is hype over, and wonder what all the fuss is about? That happens to me a lot. Those who know me know that I have a propensity for unpopular opinions. I'm always liking or disliking the Wrong Things. I don't adopt these opinions to be contrarian (usually); I come by these views honestly. Sometimes things just don't click; that's perfectly normal, except when I do it apparently. Nobody was more surprised than me when I bounced off of The Operative: No One Lives Forever, the satirical espionage action shooter from Monolith Productions, after years of seeing it glazed by the kind of people who generally tended to like some of the same things I liked. Well, it's been almost two decades since I played it last; do I like it any more now?

No.

The 1960s were having a bit of a moment in the late 1990s as Boomers, who were entering their fifties, started reminiscing about their youth. For a minute, the 1960s was all over the pop cultural milieu of the 1990s: a revival in the popularity of the Beatles (another thing I don't get — I'm more of a Bob Dylan girl); The Parent Trap got a remake; the original, top-down Grand Theft Auto got an expansion set in 1960s London; and of course, Austin fucking Powers, a biting parody of 1960s Eurospy film that not only explicitly acknowledged the gap between the swinging Sixties and the Nineties, but served almost as a rebuke against the James Bond franchise (another 1960s property recently revived by 1995's GoldenEye.) No One Lives Forever (its main title is usually dropped in discussion of the franchise, and indeed the sequel is titled simply No One Lives Forever 2) follows in the Austin Powers mold, that is to say that it is pretty profoundly a parody of the glamorous, glitzy, swinging Sixties spy movie popular in Europe in the wake of James Bond. The twist here is that the protagonist is a woman, whose gender is a frequent object of discussion and derision in the game, the heroine forced to prove herself in a man's world of espionage.

No, it's not nearly as feminist as you'd think. A lot of hash is made of protagonist Cate Archer's fight to be taken seriously as an espionage agent. The assistant director in particular makes no secret of his contempt for her and her abilities, even as it becomes clear that she is surmounting almost impossible odds and her instincts are almost always correct. But it tempers this with quite a bit of overt sexism at all levels, including an atrocious running gag of someone in the spy agency writing code phrases that pretty plainly constitute sexual harassment. Nobody is happy about it, least of all Cate Archer, who has to listen to these hapless agents speak this nonsense to her. Goon chatter is equally rife with sexist commentary, rarely challenged by their fellow bad guys. The whole thing smacks of trying to get away with sexist jokes while being wink-wink-nod-nod about how sexist it all is. It's like Ken Levine making the art team for BioShock Infinite create racist propaganda so he could say "this is all bad stuff, respect my genius." For all the chatter about Cate's arc as a takes-no-shit feminist hero at a time when the game industry, especially the PC game industry, was almost exclusively a boy's club, No One Lives Forever, with an excruciatingly cringe sense of humor you really could only get from late 90s PC games,  remains nevertheless a product of its time.

So, leaving aside the obvious failings of its primary selling feature — that is, the notion of a sexy, competent lady spy in a man's world — how does it actually play? Badly. I often say that there are two kinds of stealth games: immersive sims, and bad stealth games. What passes for stealth in No One Lives Forever is profoundly infuriating. Your most frequent hazard is cameras, which have very inconsistent vision cones: more than once I was standing above what should have been the camera's field of vision only for it to notice me anyway. You'll also have to deal with human guards, who range anywhere from deaf and blind to noticing you from a mile away. Most stealth missions — and the game is mostly stealth missions — tend to require a specific course of action, treating the mission not as a puzzle you have to tease apart, but as a series of random opportunities for the AI to spot you. The game actually keeps track of how stealthy you are, including "disturbances," that is to say, upsetting civilians. There is seemingly no way to get around it: you will never be able to ghost this game, and trying to is an exercise in frustration. The game quickloads instantly now, but it was significantly slower 25 years ago, I couldn't imagine trying to play this game stealthily when it was new!

So, say the alarm goes off, and the bad guys are sending hordes of goons after you. Is the combat any better? Also no. You have access to a variety of ammunition types, but for some fucking reason, it always defaults to a specific one whenever you bring up your gun. I frequently used my silenced pistol, and every time I switched back to it, I had to manually swap it away from the phosphorous rounds to the dum-dums. Every time. Infuriating. Sometimes hitboxes break, too, and they don't fix themselves for a few quickloads.

Like any good spy, you're given a bunch of gadgets to work with, from a cigarette lighter that doubles as a welding torch, a barrette that pulls double duty as a poison knife (useless) and a lockpick, a belt buckle that works as a Batman-style grapple gun, latching onto specially-located hookpoints to pull you up, among others. One quirk of the game is that there are many points early on where you might face a situation where one of these tools is useful, but you don't have it yet: you're expected to replay the mission later with the acquired tools. Aside from being silly, it doesn't really do much except help achieve bragging rights, as some kind of correspondence (collect 'em all!) or equipment might be behind the item gate.

No One Lives Forever is not an immersive sim, and that's probably the most infuriating thing about it, because there are a lot of elements to the game that suggest it could have been a good one. If the stealth were less broken and the level design was more open, I really think there could have been something to this game. As it is, it's a frustrating, dull GoldenEye 64 clone (to be fair, I find most GoldenEye clones to be mildly irritating at best, except probably Return to Castle Wolfenstein) that makes big promises and just can't deliver on them.

It's a shame because I liked Monolith Productions. They made a lot of games I really loved, like Blood, F.E.A.R., and Aliens vs Predator 2 (hm, interestingly enough their best games tend to be in the horror vein.) But for whatever reason, it's No One Lives Forever that people most remember fondly, and I'm just left feeling like the only sober person in a room full of drunks, wishing everyone else would just stop making noise.

You can't legally play No One Lives Forever, nor its sequel, nor its prequel, Contract J.A.C.K., an action-oriented title largely derided by fans of the franchise. (I might actually like it better. We'll see.) While Nightdive Studios has expressed interest in dusting the franchise off, the rights are an enormous mess, with nobody quite sure who actually owns the game (is it Disney, since they bought Fox, the game's publisher? is it Warner Brothers, who owned Monolith before shutting it down last year? is it Activision Blizzard, who own what's left of Sierra Entertainment, publisher of the PlayStation 2 version? who knows!) and the entities who might own the game are resolutely uninterested in so much as finding out, let alone licensing or selling the IP. So you'll have to either rely on an abandonware copy, play it in your browser (if you know where to look, there's a site dedicated to just that, including the previously PlayStation 2-exclusive levels), or maybe track down a copy on eBay with a spare Benjamin or two. Once you get hold of the game, you'll still need to set it up. I had a bitch of a time getting it to behave: often times it wouldn't run, sometimes it would freeze instead. Eventually I put lithtech.exe on compatibility mode for Windows XP and that seemed to do the trick. You'll likely want to make use of the Modernizer, a fan patch meant to fix a bunch of stuff; you could also use the NOLF Pack, which includes everything from widescreen modes to the Modernizer. While the source code to the game does apparently seem to be publicly available, a proper source port does not seem to have materialized.

Honestly, the thought that most occurred to me while playing No One Lives Forever is that I'd really rather have been playing Monolith's other game in the same Lithtech engine: Aliens vs. Predator 2. Maybe I'll go do that. The rest of the world can continue to pine for a No One Lives Forever remaster: the nostalgia for this franchise, it seems, will live forever after all.

-june❤