By Nelson Schneider - 06/04/11 at 04:04 PM CT

I’ve been on a bit of a Bond kick lately, what with having recently played “GoldenEye Wii” and having revisited “GoldenEye 64” and “Agent Under Fire” for comparison’s sake. I have found that, despite bouncing around across three different publishers/developers, the Bond license has never really produced a videogame that lives up to the full potential of the movie franchise.

While anyone with any gaming experience and common sense should never expect a Bond movie game to be good (after all, movie games are NEVER good), original Bond stories (not even based on any of Ian Fleming’s original short novels) have proven surprisingly enjoyable in games. Yet for some reason we haven’t seen an original Bond game since 2002’s “Nightfire” (no, “Golden Eye: Rogue Agent” does not count). Instead we got an unfaithful adaption of “From Russia, With Love,” a game version of “Quantum of Solace,” and a redux of “GoldenEye.” Is this really the best developers can do with such a great license?

When I think of all the things I would like to see in the ‘definitive’ Bond game, the first things that come to mind are all types of fanservice: classic villains, classic gadgets, and timeless quotes and situations. Fleming wrote 14 Bond stories and there have been 22 films featuring the character. This body of work provides more than enough material to scrape-together into a fanservice game. The only thing lacking is a template for the unoriginal Activision (current overlord of the Bond license) to copy.

What game franchise could possibly serve as a nostalgia-laden fanservice-fest for Activision to rip-off… hmmm, I don’t know, maybe Nintendo’s “Super Smash Bros?!”

Yes, I’m proposing that the next Bond game should completely, and unashamedly, rip-off the structure of Nintendo’s premier fighting game… except continue to be a first-person shooter. What Bond games have going for them as one of their primary selling points is that they are multi-player FPSes that don’t feature space marines, World War II, and/or zombies. This alone makes them unique in the sea of other, generic FPSes. But most people who enjoy that genre don’t play for an engaging story or single-player experience, they want to frag other people. Instead of painfully stretching a 2-hour movie to fill 6-8 hours worth of gameplay, I’d like to see this ‘Ultimate Bond’ game ape “Super Smash Bros. Melee’s” Event Matches, with 22 single-player events, one taken from each Bond film, featuring the climactic moments from those films. And instead of an arcade mode, I’d be perfectly happy with some training exercises that put Bond into a VR playground to practice his spying and combat skills. Throw in a bunch of unlockables for completing these modes, and single-player is pretty much complete.

With this simple, but still content-packed, single-player experience out of the way, the developer would be free to make multi-player as amazing as possible. And what makes multi-player amazing? Options. This game needs a huge cast of characters (including every incarnation of James Bond himself), a massive arsenal of weapons and classic Q gadgets/vehicles, and a wide variety of stages… and it needs them all out of the box (NO DLC!). A game like this also needs ‘Bots, fully customizable controls, fully customizable weapon loads/map spawns, as well as a variety of ways to play: split-screen, online, and LAN. Simply adding LAN play to a title like this would extend its life indefinitely, as it would continue to provide the full multi-player experience after the servers go dark.

Finally, I’d like to see this game revitalize the entire FPS genre by taking the best features of the genre as it is now and tossing what doesn’t work. Dual analog controls are okay, but modern consoles are all mouse-capable.,, Why no mouse support? Even Wiimote/PS Move pointing is better than joystick aiming, so every FPS at least needs to support that. Regenerating health is great, so that needs to stay. But the one thing that no FPS (that I’ve ever played) has, yet they all desperately need, is a simple button press/combination to turn 180 degrees quickly. If a horrible game like “Resident Evil 5” can let characters turn around quickly, there’s no reason for FPSes to continue to force characters to trudge around like tanks with tunnel vision. Even the original “Tomb Raider” had a turn-around button! This feature is long overdue and would alleviate the primary thing I hate about FPSes: being shot in the back.

Will my ideas for ‘Ultimate Bond’ ever make it into production? I doubt it. As long as Activision can continue to sell games that rip-off and re-skin “Call of Duty,” the FPS genre will never change for the better.