Game: Goldeneye 007
Genre: First Person Shooter
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1 to 4
Release Date: August 1997
When Rare’s Goldeneye 007 was released, it was too easy to expect little from a game carrying a movie license, and, second only in opinions of suckage, a console first person shooter at that. In fact there was little if anything at all available at the time to disuade one from writing it off or ignoring it completely. However, a glimmer of hope was had based upon the developer’s pedigree. Rare was known to be able to tap into the powers of Nintendo's hardwares like no other developer. Their reverse engineering of the Super Nintendo for the Donkey Kong Country series to get everything they could from the machine was a testament to how dedicated they were as developers for Nintendo. But Goldeneye was no platformer, and as a rule of the time... Movie license/console first person shooter: Kiss of Death. Lo and behold, Goldeneye hit the shelves and proved the rule wrong. It wasn’t, however, an overnight million-seller. Over the course of the next few months after its release, word spread that it was Beyond. All Expectations. Thank god for the world wide web.
Certainly one of the key ingredients to the success of Goldeneye was the ability to play as a Secret Agent. And, of course, not just any Secret Agent: Bond, James Bond, thank you very much, the spy to end all spies. This angle was not merely cosmetic, thankfully. The spy game was what all the trappings of Goldeneye’s gameplay was hung on. Spies go on secret missions. Spies use cool gadgets. Spies are stealthy. They get the hot women. And, not least of all, they have a License to Kill. A frickin’ license! The structure of the game had to reflect all of these. It also had to follow the story of the movie as closely as possible. And, and this is the kicker, the player had to feel like they were the legendary 007. Not necessarily an easy task that.
The mere fact that you would hardly ever see your own face couldn’t possibly help in that matter. You as Bond would need to be debonaire, suave even. And lethal. Being lethal is easy in an FPS. Getting to play as Bond on her Majesty’s Secret Service could go a long way to filling in the rest. Add to that the compelling mission objectives, nice cut scenes, and music and effects that were pitch perfect for this franchise and for putting you “in” the game and voila, pure Gold. To add to the atmosphere, your save files were passports, your levels Missions, your difficulty settings Agent, Secret Agent and the ultra badass 00 Agent. As you would expect, you would be presented with a myriad gadgets and weapons as the story evolved. Just another day saving the world.
Until Goldeneye came along, FPS’s were corridor shooters with A to B gameplay. Kill, hit the switch, rinse, repeat. While technology kept getting better so textures of corridor walls were getting crisper and more polygons were being allocated to enemy models, the gameplay of the genre grew stale and in desperate need of an infusion of fun. Enter Mission Objectives. It seems so simple in retrospect: Give the player something to do other than kill everyone and unlock doors. Compel the player to move forward with varied tasks that would supply them with a true feeling of accomplishment at the end of a level, always pushing the plot forward. AND let them kill everyone and unlock doors, of course.
Each of the nine missions, broken into twenty levels, in Goldeneye consisted of several Objectives dependant upon your prechosen level of difficulty. It wasn’t uncommon to have to, for example, override the security system to gain access to an area, locate the blueprints of a different area, destroy all servers, take pictures of some great engine of destruction or the plans to it, and get out of the level before all hell broke loose and the walls started crumbling around you. And of course collect the right key cards to progress, and destroy the security cams so as not to alert EVERYONE to your presence. And hope like hell you don’t have that nuisance Natalya in tow. Jeez! Get your own A.I. why don’t you!?
The difference between playing through a single level on the easiest difficulty setting and the hardest was in many cases the difference between playing through two entirely different levels. “Well, I think I’ll just stroll on off this elevator and get to that computer to open up... Ouch! What the...!?!? Three rotating ceiling guns??? Four goons with a bead on me??? Oy. I’m dead already! I suck!” After the twentieth step out of the elevator, your new plan of action would start coming together. Shwoo! You’re a badass again, at least for the next sixty seconds.
Variety was truly the spice of life in Goldeneye. Not only could you play through each level several times for a different experience, each level itself was quite different than the last. True to Bond form, globetrotting and jetsetting was part and parcel to the experience, and the variety between stages never disappointed. From a snow field compound to an underground cavern, into the jungle, through a temple... Goldeneye was anything but repetitive. And the levels themselves were impeccably designed, making tracking down that needed item or finding your liaison a joy and not a chore. It was this varied nature and great design that helped make it so addictive and compelling. Replay value? Hell yeah! And I haven’t even mentioned multiplayer yet!
But to finish off my ecstatic frothing at the mouth on the single player adventure, let it be known that Rare left nearly no stone unturned. Once you completed the single player game on all difficulties, there was a whole slew of cheats to be opened by going back in to levels and completing certain objectives in certain times or ways. Big heads, invincibility, endless ammo, paint balls, ad infinitum... A lot of the cheats you expect today first surfaced in Goldeneye and instead of just accessing them through a debug menu, you really did feel compelled to go back and try to finish that level up in under a minute, even though up to that point, you’d never beaten it in less than seven. Of course, for the less skillful of us, I think codes were still surfacing for Goldeneye until about June of 2001 or thereabouts.
I think the single player adventure ate up about seventy or more hours of my time. I never said I was a gaming God... The multiplayer, on a safe bet, easily doubled that. You’d think that with the wealth of replayibility Rare provided in single player, multiplayer might have ended up a shallow experience tacked on as a second thought. Not the case in the least. As you progressed through the single player game, more and more multiplayer stages opened up for your amusement. With several modes of play, endless weapon combinations and a multitude of playable characters to choose from, the possibilities for customizing your multiplayer marathon were nearly endless. One shot kills with a single weapon? Man With The Golden Gun. Can you stay alive the longest without killing someone? Capture the flag and run like hell. One of my favorite combinations was Proximity Mines in the Underground Cavern. It was multilevelled and the joy of placing a couple of mines above head on the bottom of the second story catwalk just before the respawning box of mines was hardly ever surpassed for shear cruel chuckles. That and sniping in the Caves. Lining up a shot from a small opening along the walkway to get that head snappin’ action going is still a thrill I look for in today’s multiplayer FPS’s.
But things weren’t all rosy in Goldeneye, even if it remains to me the Gold Standard for console first person shooters. The framerate in multiplayer was anything but rock solid. And yet it really didn’t deter from the joy of the experience. Enemy A.I was questionable, but with the three different difficulty levels and the option to increase enemy A.I. to your liking after beating the game on each level of difficulty, this could mostly be overlooked. Also, Perfect Dark and now TimeSplitters2 allow for co-op play through the story mode, something sorely missing from more games, and Goldeneye is no exception here, though following the story of the movie, perhaps Rare didn’t feel they had the freedom to include such an option. And what about bots so you could play multiplayer alone? And certainly, there was NO way to add a mapmaker feature like in Tenchu 2 what with the limited ram of the hardware. Oh for the want of a 64DD... And geo-mod capabilities such as those found in next-generation FPS Red Faction were not even visible on the horizon.
But still, though Goldeneye has certainly aged technologically speaking and certain ideas that it created have since been done better to some degree in other console games like Half-Life or the Medal of Honor series, Goldenye is still two notches above most console first person shooters, and I’m still looking for a true successor on all levels of Goldeneye’s gameplay. I skipped Perfect Dark, heavily supporting my Dreamcast at the time, but one thing’s for sure Joanna Dark is NOT James Bond, even if I am quite curious about her future on the Xbox. Still, no matter what, I will always have fond memories of the hours upon hours of fun my closest friends and I had in the wee hours of the morning, hoarding the body armor and looking for a head shot. Cue Bond theme.
