If you are a video game publisher, you might want to write this down. In the fiery heat of late summer, when you are floating around your dock on an air mattress, drinking too many warm beers and working on your sunburn, you are contributing nothing to the economy and less to the happiness of the many bored schoolchildren your industry serves. You can do better. Lock up the cottage, put on your shirt, drive in to the office, and buckle down to the important task of getting some new releases out.

Really. You flood the shelves at Christmastime, and you flood them again in the early spring, and poor video game reviewers everywhere struggle to keep up. But now, when the sun is baking and it is too humid to go outside, those same video game reviewers must resort to covering games that came out more than a month ago, simply because there are no other options left. And if you can't care about the reviewers, think of the children. They are our future, and they are bored. Help them!

Now, you game players: The name Goldeneye likely rings a bell for you. It was the title of a 1995 James Bond movie, the first in the series to star Pierce Brosnan. More significantly, at least for our purposes, it was also the name of a Nintendo 64 game tied to the film.

Goldeneye, the game, was bone-crunchingly fun. It sold an astronomical number of copies and single-handedly rescued the N64 from being stigmatized as a toy for little kids. Goldeneye showed that first-person shooting games (whose natural habitat had been the desktop computer, controlled by a mouse and a keyboard) could be made great on a console. Without Goldeneye, chances are slim that there ever would have been a Halo.

Today, the word is stuffed full of brand value. Call your shooting game "Goldeneye," and the fanboys will give it the benefit of every doubt, even as they give you their money. But remember this: The brand is like a bicycle tire, and every release like Rogue Agent is like a truckful of tacks dumped on the road.

Here is the plotting behind it. We are a former secret-agent colleague of James Bond's. We have turned evil and are now working for Auric Goldfinger, who is plotting against Dr. No for control of the world. Years ago, Dr. No was responsible for the loss of one of our eyes. Goldfinger has made us a new bionic one, which is, yes, gold.

So no, this is not a James Bond game. It is just set, as fanboys like to say, in the James Bond universe. No, its golden eye doesn't have anything to do with the original Goldeneye, which was a doomsday weapon. If you find yourself thinking that the new game is straining just a little too hard to associate itself with past glories, congratulations. You are smart.

The play itself is not bad, although the control scheme is a bit of a puzzler. First-person shooting games excel when they employ precise aiming interfaces, and the Nintendo DS touch screen is an ideal candidate. Sadly, the execution is not strong. Using the default controls, you must tap one shoulder button to fire your gun, and the other one to toss grenades, which means either lifting your stylus off the screen or twisting your hands into ergonomic hell.

Other schemes work a little better, but all of them feel awkward and underthought. Surely, with a touch screen and this many buttons at their disposal, somebody could have figured out a smoother system. But we have corridors to roam and villains to shoot in the face, and as we play, we are mostly content.

Sometime in 2006, when the new releases are once again spraying into stores like water from a firehose, Nintendo will release Metroid Hunters. Judging from the preview version of the game (which comes packed in with the DS), it will be blindingly terrific fun. Until then, if you want a first-person shooter, Rogue Agent is as good as it gets. Maybe you should brave the heat and go outside.