Let's make a pact to play No One Lives Forever
Make me play a game I really want to play.
So I'm going to be real honest: I haven't been a participating member of the RPS site in a year or two. I got burned out on video game news and gamer culture and all of the like. It has been a nice surprise to come back here and find the RPS community exactly as I left it: chock full of good folks who appreciate terrible jokes. The somewhat expected side-issue of coming back to RPS is that my current PC rig is more of a quickly dying laptop from 2012. Being back here on the daily means reading up on games and mods and demos that just make me shout "I need a killer PC rig right now!" I'm not going to pull that off anytime soon, but maybe I can join you in a personal goal to finally do One Of Those Important PC Things that I've never done.
In 2000, Fox Interactive / Monolith Productions released The Operative: No One Lives Forever. Since then, no one has been able to play the game. The feminist Bond twist sees a swinging 60s spy take on a world of espionage. From ye ole Wiki:
A story-driven game set in the 1960s, No One Lives Forever has been critically acclaimed for, among other things, its stylistic representation of the era in the spirit of many spy films and television series of that decade, as well as for its humor. Players control female protagonist Cate Archer, who works for a secret organization that watches over world peace. In addition to a range of firearms, the game contains several gadgets, which are disguised as ordinary female fashion items.
No One Lives Forever, and its sequel, have long been praised as members of that top-tier of PC Games: The Must Plays. Look, I've got a Steam account action packed with games I've never played, despite knowing that it is Important that I experience them. NOLF has always carried that level of importance, but NOLF is also a well documented impossible reissue. In 2014, it looked like there was hope. And then there was a series of buy-out/merger type moves that left the IP in a forever damned zone.
And that's what bring us back to where this article started: I've been away from RPS for a bit. So now that I'm writing here, I keep seeing in-link suggestions for articles I've missed. And today, I saw that last summer we published a piece that fine declares: "Look, if no one owns it, let us agree that we can finally download the games in good faith." And that article with working download links is right here.
Uh. So I have. I made my PC work just enough to run these. And I know that it is time that I do so. So... fellow RPS friends, let's give it a spin this week? Let's meet back next weekend and if we're the type to have put this off forever, let's compare notes on a thing that we should have done a long time ago? At the very least, hold me accountable that I finally do this Game Lineage Thing. I want to do this and I'd love to do it with you.
