The 007 Faces of Pierce Brosnan

Oh Pierce, you were the very best of Bonds and yet the very worst of Bonds. On the one hand, we have Goldeneye. On the other, Die Another Day. How one Bond could run from one of the best Bond films of all time to easily the worst Bond film of all time is beyond us, and yet we never get up on you. After Bond finished, we traipsed along to see that Matador movie and all those Irish dramas you did that had orphans in (although we didn’t make it to the end of them, the mere fact we tried to should give us points for effort, surely?). We like you, y’see. You’re a decent feller, and we think you’re funny and witty and revitalised the Bond series way before Daniel Craig came along. And even though we say Sean Connery was our favourite… in our heart of hearts, the flame burns for you, Pierce Brosnan.

Which is utterly fantastic, considering you only have seven different facial expressions.

This first came to our attention while watching the godawful-looking trailer for ‘Mamma Mia!’, which you’ll be starring in this summer with the oddly hot coupling of Meryl Streep and Julie Walters (it’d be wrong to find them attractive, but yet it feels like the right thing to do). Like we said, the trailer looks like a mess of a film that all but the most fanatical and mad of ABBA fans could ever love, and you’re dead in the centre of all of it. In fact, we have reason to believe you might even sing a song or two, which shows commitment to the material at least. But… how come you have such a limited array of facial expressions? We love you anyway, but after some rather thorough research on Google images we realised that – yes – you only ever wear one of seven different facial expressions. And here they are.

1: The ‘I’m Suffering For My Art’ Look. You’ve been run through the mill. Your tank has run out of petrol, you’ve been shot at, and you can’t for the life of you remember what you’re doing out here in the field when all along you just wanted a nice lie down. Life must be tough sometimes, eh? Don't worry, I'm sure that you'll stop being wet/covered in smoke sometime soon. You're close to giving up right now, but we're sure that you won’t give up, because... well, that’d be a very Irish thing to do now, wouldn't it? Oh, wait…

2: The ‘Sweet Jesu, I’m Suffering For My Art’ Look. For when the previous look just doesn’t quite convey how much you’re suffering, you open your mouth a little wilder and shake your head from side-to-side a few times. Whoo-whee! At this stage the only thing that’s keeping you going are the startlingly perky breasts of your female companion, who at this point has shown several indications that she would like to sleep with you but has not yet given in to your charming, charming smile.

3: The ‘I’m Having Sex! I’M HAVING SEX!’ Look. You sly old fox, Pierce! You’ve finally gone and bedded the girl after exchanging a series of increasingly dirty, neurotically challenged and downright odd entendres, and you’re really enjoying it. You grab her shoulders, you stare blankly into her eyes, you make no effort to kiss her at all, because you’ve already had the sex and you don’t need to anymore. Your hair isn’t one strand out of place, and you are da man.

4: The ‘What?’ Look. Not everything that happens to you makes sense, and it just so happens that they’ve blown a bomb up right in front of you or assassinated someone you like. This prompts you to raise a quizzical eyebrow just like Roger always used to do, before darting your eyes from left to right as quickly as possible. If you have the time, you’ll wipe your mouth with the sleeve of your jacket and look at it for a short while. Verbal communication is minimal – everything you need to say is being said by the state of disrepair that your dinner jacket is in.

5: The ‘You Betrayed Me/I’m Being Tortured!’ Look. Every time! Every single god-damned time someone betrays you, and this somehow means that your shoulders have to start dancing. Once they get bored of this they start a simultaneous war on your neck while you keep your head at a jaunty angle and squint/stare concurrently at your betrayer. If you have a gun, you put it unnecessarily close to their face and try not to blink, while your cheeks contract and your mouth shrinks. You are annoyed!

6: The ‘I’m In Complete Control’ Look. Things eventually go according to plan, and James Bond is allowed to start relaxing. So this means, Pierce, that your shoulders drop down to where your knees are and you start focusing on things out of picture. Generally you then let your co-star do all the talking while you fix a steely gaze on anything that moves – which will always pay off, because there was one more guard walking around than you originally expected, and you’ll have to take him out in a minute. This is the opposite of your ‘You Betrayed Me’.

7: The ‘Something Interesting Is Happening To My Right’ Look. This is by far the most common Pierce Brosnan look of all time. It comes out whenever a situation arises that doesn’t call for any of the other six looks, and at times sticks around for minutes on end before you move to something more comfortable. What is it that you can see above your head, Pierce? Do you have pet moths that fly in unison around you, or is this just part of an intricate game you’re trying to play with us. Whatever the answer, I do not like it Pierce and I demand that you get some new faces immediately, please! You’re acting next to MERYL STREEP, for goodness sake! You’ve got the advantage over Colin Firth’s three faces, but seven different looks are simply not going to cut it against the Streep. Why not try a ‘I’m feeling jovial’ look? In reality, you actually smile sometimes – could you try that perhaps? We’re sure you’d look lovely if you showed off that nice smile of yours once in a while. At the very least, stop looking at something above you if you aren’t going to tell us just what it is you can see. It’s not fair.

Moths? Tiny planes? What is it that you're looking at, Brosnan?

The Best Of Rareware

Who are Rareware? Oh, you poorly-read fools! Rareware happen to be the greatest second-party video games company of all time. Their first notable series of games came in the 1990’s when they helped Nintendo on the N64, creating several of the best games for the system, as well as a few which many claim to be ‘the’ best. After Nintendo moved on from their brilliant, underappreciated console and moved to the Gamecube, Rare were bought out by Microsoft and moved to the X-Box, where they’ve stayed in hiding for many years, releasing barely anything. The games that have come out from the Rare umbrella have traditionally been poor in comparison to their golden run on the N64, with only Perfect Dark Zero standing out at all to anyone. Their most anticipated title, Banjo-Kazooie 3, has not been seen by anyone since a short trailer released a few years ago, and generally it is accepted that Rare have gone downhill a little. Their Glory Years live on, though, and as I have a lot of love for the Twycross-based company I’ve decided to celebrate them for the ingenious, hilarious company that they were (and could be again!) Here, then, are the five games which represent the best of what Rare have given to the World. These are the top five Rareware games of all time (although only games from their period with the N64 are mentioned, because Battletoads was godawful).

5: Jet Force Gemini
Jet Force Gemini was a third-person shooting game where you took control of either Juno, his sister Vela, or their yellow space dog Lupus and went around killing giant bugs who had terrorised a planet inhabited by cute teddy bears. The fun comes not just from the ludicrous levels of gunge that spurts everywhere when you kill the baddies, but also from the easy gameplay, the brilliant weapons that were on display – including homing rocket launchers, machine guns, and (oh yes) cluster grenades – and the fact that if you wanted to, you could screw the “kill the bad guys” ideal and shoot the teddy bears instead. Rare seemed to anticipate that gamers would want to kill the teddies, as they were animated to have many more different death sequences than the giant space ants that made up the majority of the baddies. You could kneecap them, decapitate them, blow them into bloody chunks… it was fun. You just don’t get that sort of violence nowadays, and I think that’s an almighty shame.


4: Goldeneye 64
Known by many as the greatest first-person shooter of all time, in Goldeneye 64 you got to BE James Bond, running through scenarios similar to the film of the same name as you fought to kill off Sean Bean before he did something dastardly but ill-explained. The gamer was given the option for the first time, really, of choosing either to run through the level shooting everything, or instead holding back and using stealth to progress through the game, which slowly became more and more essential as you advanced through levels. The fun is from the weapons and baddies, again – this was one of the first games where you could shoot humans that looked vaguely realistic, and again Rare answered our more sadistic instincts with throwing knives, explosives, and a tank. Oh boy, the tank. You got to drive round St Petersburg in a tank! Genius. The multiplayer too, thrown in as an afterthought by the designers, has been the single greatest influence on shooting games ever since. It’s yet to be beaten, really.


3: Donkey Kong 64
Nintendo had a history of lending out their Donkey Kong license to rare, which resulted first in the good but tremendously irritating Diddy Kong Racing, which featured almost every annoying Nintendo character ever created in one game (Slippy Toad from Starfox was absent, thankfully), and then this. Donkey Kong 64, a superb, visually stunning platformer that picked up from where Mario 64 left off and was one of the few games to come close to matching it. No game ever will though, of course. With Donkey Kong 64 you took on all five of the characters above as they fought against the evil King K. Rool (the plot was mostly played for laughs, a characteristic of many of Rare’s games) whose giant weapon of destruction had broken down. To fix it, he stole all the bananas from Donkey Kong’s island home, thus motivating a truly bizarre plot which culminates, I kid you not, in a boxing match. So much is packed into this mammoth game, including but not limited to: jetpacks, guns, swordfish, rapping, ghosts, and a fairy. How could anyone not love it?


2: Perfect Dark
Superior to Goldeneye, the sequel to one of the most beloved games of all time managed to prove itself even in the face of staggering expectations. Perfect Dark is, quite simply, the best first person shooting game of all time, taking you on an extraterrestrial adventure that starts off on Earth and ends on a far-off planet populated by lizard aliens. The Goldeneye gameplay engine returned, but was vastly advanced, creating more baddies and weapons, hoverbikes, blood, and conversation. This enhanced the need for stealth, because if you got caught by a guard he would invariably run off and tell his mates where you were. Perfect Dark took everything that was good about Goldeneye, and everything that the public demanded it have, and put it together in a game that feels as fresh and entertaining now as it did when it was first put out. And in the process, it helped men across the World access their feminine side – your character is called Joanna. Also, you have a boss with a Scottish accent. Brilliant.


1: Banjo Kazooie
A left-field choice for the best Rare game of all time, Banjo Kazooie squeezes more creativity and fantastical humour into the opening scenes than most games can muster in the whole of their existence. A witheringly sarcastic bird and a dumb, lazy bear team up when the bear’s sister is stolen by an evil witch (who only talks in rhymes). They’ve aided in their mission by a wise mole who has an intense hatred for Kazooie, the bird, and a shaman called Mumbo Jumbo, who’d rather be sleeping, really. In the course of their journey the heroic duo fight giant ants and crabs, steal oranges from a monkey, visit a haunted house whilst disguised as a pumpkin, and free a giant mechanical shark from his job as a recycling machine. Through every step of the journey, Rare punctuate things with irony and sarcasm, usually from Kazooie, and deliver gameplay that equals that of Mario 64. You get to fly, and actually fight a boss whilst doing so. The enemies are varied and brilliant, making fun of you even as you kill them, and towards the end the game gets seriously difficult, but never too hard for it’s own good. The music and visuals complement proceedings perfectly, the background music changing slightly as you run through the level select area (a castle) depending on where you are. As you visit the entrance to the beach level, for example, the music turns into a hula, whilst an accordion plays the tune as a sea shanty when you reach Rusty Bucket Bay. Everything about Banjo Kazooie is entertaining, and it more than earns it’s place as Rare’s greatest achievement… thus far.

Why Goldeneye Makes Halo Look Like Frogger In Comparison

Every time some crazed bastard says that Halo is the best first person shooter of all time, the collective soul of the nation is corrupted a little bit more. Let us state this clearly: Halo is no match for Goldeneye, which is the best shoot-em-up game of all time, and has never been bettered. Reports suggest that even before Goldeneye was created, it was in fact already the best FPS around, as the doddery Quake was the only thing which could come close to rivalling it. And as we all know, Quake has only one good thing, and that’s the railgun. Goldeneye doesn’t have said weapon, but it makes up for that with bucketloads of awesome. Here are five of the most obvious reasons why Halo doesn’t even come close to beating Goldeneye.


1: No aliens.

In Halo you have to shoot at aliens and stuff with big tentacles with stupid names, meaning that in any conversation about Halo, you have to make some mention to “killing the Flood aliens”. It’s just not as cool as saying “yeah, so I snuck round the back of the building and shot the guy in the back of his freakin’ head with a silencer.” The main thrill of FPS games is that you get to shoot people, because this is somewhat frowned upon in the real world. The chance to get rid of stress by shooting a whole bunch of evil guards in stupid green hats? Who could resist such fun. Goldeneye has no aliens in it at all, which is also what distinguishes it from the otherwise slightly superior Perfect Dark. You can shoot someone in the leg and they start limping! Shoot an alien in the tentacle, and… who cares?


2: Exploding tables

In tribute to the Bond series, just about everything explodes in Goldeneye. Take your rifle into a room of crates and start shooting, you’ll create an explosive chain reaction that blows up the whole room. Likewise filing cabinets explode, for whatever reason, when you shoot them. Don’t get that in Halo, do you? Best of all were the exploding tables and chairs – boy, them Russians really do live a different life to us, don’t they? In what context would inventing a table that explodes when you shoot it seem like a good idea, Russia? Those guys be crazy.


3: Knee sliding

Ducking to avoid gunfire is a standard convention in shooting games, but Goldeneye went around things differently. Instead of having the characters bend over and crouch, they would instead get onto their knees and start sliding around magically, unencumbered by friction or gravity. This was video game gold, right here, a glitch that became a legend. I still don’t know why other games don’t have knee sliding, or why it has yet to be recognised as an official sport, because it looks brilliant. The best thing is to get down on your knees and start spinning round, shooting wildly in all directions. This manoeuvre is called “The Jerd”. But, uh, only by me.


4: The RC-P90.

The greatest gun in the history of video games, ever. And nobody can quite say what it is that makes the thing so god-damn-awesome-awesome. Perhaps it’s the way it can shoot 90 bullets in each magazine without reloading, or perhaps the zipping noise it makes as it unloads said bullets, or the way it tears through each guard you hit. Then, it could be the way that when you describe the RC-P90, you sound like a total badass. There are very few guns you can drop into a conversation and not be ridiculed as the uber-nerd to end all uber-nerds (and there’s strong competition for such a title), but the RC-P90 is one of them. It doesn’t even shoot explosives, but it’s still way better than anything that Halo could offer. So good in fact, that it returned in Perfect Dark under a different name – and it was STILL the best gun there (and that game had a rocket launcher where you could control the missile after you fired it!)


5: James Bond

How can we put this lightly? …. YOU ARE JAMES BOND IN GOLDENEYE. More specifically, you are Pierce Brosnan, in a game based on one of the very best Bond films ever made. You get to jump off the dam in Russia, drop down into the toilets and shoot guards on the crapper, and meet Robbie Coltrane and Sean Bean! In a manner of speaking. Bond travels the world, from jungles to underground caverns in Cuba, the streets of Russia… Siberia (not the best thing, admittedly), gets with girls, and cracks off witty one-liners at random. And during this whole thing, you control him! And then let’s compare this to Halo. In Halo, you play… wait, I forgot who you play. Nobody cares anyway, it’s a random guy in a suit of armour. Compared to Bond – doesn’t stand up. Bond is Boss.

Which Is The Best James Bond Film?

People across the internet go on and on about which is the best of the James Bond spy franchise, picking their favourite and then saying that their choice is obviously the correct way. However, nobody ever goes to say why the other films aren’t as good as their favourite. In one of my frequent online experiments with culture, I’m going to work out once and for all, which is the best Bond of all – by eliminating the other films for single acts of rubbishness they commit. I thought up nine questions, designed to test the series. If a film does not live up to the question I ask it, then it loses and will be eliminated. The film left standing after my nine questions shall be the winner. Let the elimination commence!


Question 1: Can You Remember What Happens?
Thunderball has something to do with submarines, and For Your Eyes Only had a Greek dude who was the villain. Octopussy has this one scene where one of the allies gets killed with a buzzsaw thing, which is cool, and I think Roger Moore dresses up as a clown. The Living Daylights was the first Timothy Dalton one, and he was a good Bond. These are the sum remembrances I have for any of these films.

Eliminates: Thunderball, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, The Living Daylights.


Question 2: Who Plays Q?
If Desmond Llewelyn is not playing Q, the film is rubbish and must be taken out back and shot. I’ll let Casino Royale off, because Q doesn’t actually appear in that one. However, he is played by someone else in Dr No and Die Another Day (John Cleese, natch), and I refuse to let those films off so lightly.

Eliminates: Dr No, Die Another Day.


Question 3: Does Bond look past it?
James Bond is a superspy! And more than that, there is a policy that says all 00-Agents have to retire when they reach 45. Despite this, Bond looks pretty rough in Never Say Never Again and A View To A Kill. (Never Say Never Again, by the way – I only include that here so that nobody thinks I’m dissing Lord Moore. I don’t consider it a real Bond film, so don’t even GO THERE). Yeah, those two films are pretty much eliminated.

Eliminates: Never Say Never Again, A View To A Kill


Question 4: Is the Villain Up To Much?
From Russia With Love has a great villain – Red Grant – but sadly nobody remembers him, and he’s out of the picture long before the final act. Instead we have Rosa Klebb, a butch Russian lesbian who has a dangerous shoe. Ooh, scary. The Spy Who Loved me also has a bad villain, a really old guy who sits at a table and likes fish. There’s another old guy in Tomorrow Never Dies, a journalist who says “delicious” far too often and is no match for Bond. I’m also including For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights on this one.

Eliminates: From Russia With Love, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies.


Question 5: Is the death scene of the villain insanely stupid/bland?
Again with the Klebb – she spends a few minutes waving her leg at Bond before she gets shot – where’s the fun in that? Bond literally inflates someone to death in Live and Let Die, whilst Le Chiffre dies without Bond punching him once. Lame! The Man With The Golden Gun sees Bond pretend to be his own statue before shooting the otherwise badass Scaramanga, and nothing will ever remove the image of a fat German bloke getting sucked out of a fake window in Goldfinger. If I remember correctly, he even makes the noise a balloon does when you let go. Real classy, guys.

Eliminates: From Russia With Love, Live and Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun, Goldfinger, Casino Royale.


Question 6: Is Space Travel involved?
Moonraker has lasers. That’s about the only good thing I can say about it. Actually no, I’ll give you Jaws’ last line. That was pretty funny.

Eliminates: Moonraker


Question 7: Does Bond get the wrong girl?
Poor Pierce Brosnan. The role of James Bond offers you the chance to roll around with stunning women, and yet in every one of his films he ends up with the least appealing of the two women who appear. Why couldn’t Xenia reform in Goldeneye? Couldn’t they have found someone less irritating than Christmas Jones to be his lover in The World Is Not Enough? Whose decision was it to kill off Teri Hatcher, and WHY did Rosamund Pike have to be a villain? She’s so hot! Poor Pierce got a string of bad luck, it seems. Also Timothy Dalton’s Bond shows highly impaired judgement when he picks the CIA agent lady instead of Talisa Soto in License to Kill.

Eliminates: License To Kill, Every Pierce Brosnan Film.


Question 8: Does Blofeld not look like Donald Pleasence?
I can accept only two kinds of Blofeld: Donald Pleasence, or obscured Blofeld. All other forms of Blofeld are unsatisfactory, and towards the end they get really strange (Diamonds are Forever – what’s going on there? Face transplants?) I’d also like to take this moment to point out the weirdness of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s bobsleigh scene.

Eliminates: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever


Question 9: Are black people bad?
Self-explanatory.

Eliminates: Live and Let Die



The Lone Survivor: “YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.”!!

It has a kickass opening, a superb villain, a decent song, an underground hollowed-out volcano superbase, and people getting poisoned by string. Fantastic. You Only Live Twice has survived my nine questions, and proves itself to be truly the best Bond film of all time. Dispute THAT, fanboys!

Rejected Titles for Bond Movie 22

They’ve announced the title of the new James Bond film! Apparently the title for the newest chapter in the 007 saga will be called… “The Quantum Of Solace”. Catchy. It seems that the Bond producers have given up on giving their films cool titles in favour of making up long words and stringing them together with no real explanation. As always, our spies in the industry managed to get a copy of the titles that were turned down, and they prove to be just as... enlightened... and just as impossible to understand. Here they are:

"Confessions Of An Intuitive Raconteur"
"Succour To Rampage"
"The Scythian Bomb Removal"
"Fallen Mephistopheles"
"The Pilgrim Of Radical Expediency"
"Fundamental Calamity"
"The Transitional Rogues"
"From Rebellion Comes Exposition"
"A Confederacy Of Dunces"
"From Russia With Love 2"

The sad thing is? Every one of these titles is at least 14% more badass than the one they went with.