No One Lives Forever Had the Smartest Bad Guys

There were a lot of things to love about the No One Lives Forever games. The groovy music, the fresh-feeling 60’s spy motif (Austin Powers be damned!), the fearless, funny heroine Cate Archer. But even when compared to those things, the game’s writing stands apart.

The villains’ banter, in particular, stands out. In a day and age where we get things like Splinter Cell: Conviction‘s embarassing “Fisher-Fest 2010”, it’s amazing to watch the above video, made by our own Chris Person, of the best of No One Lives Forever and No One Lives Forever 2‘s enemy banter.

Check out the video above to see what I’m talking about.

I don’t even know which one is my favorite, but the insane beer monologue might be it. Like… the text has to start scrolling just to fit all the words! Some writer had a lot of fun with this.

Chris and I were talking about how one of the coolest things about the enemy banter was that it was a real, non-gameplay reward for effectively using stealth. For my part, I didn’t care so much about making it to the end without being detected—the real reward was that if I did so, I’d get to overhear conversations like these. That alone made it worth it.