Goldeneye 007

[Scourge]

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.

[Diff-chan]

Goldeneye came out in 1997.

[Scourge]

Funny you should mention that because in my first draft that's what it said. Then when I was doing fact checking I went to Nintendo.com and it said August 98 and I thought my memory was truly wonky. So I'll change it. Thanks.

--Scourge.

[Tsubaki]

I don't know... I heard about how great Half Life was... mourned the loss of the release on the Dreamcast... then finally got a chance to play it through on PC. It's a great game, definitely. But it wasn't the game I was looking for, which was basically another Golden Eye. They don't play anything alike. Half Life was more "shoot everything you see", and although you had perfect freedom to go here and there, I really longed for the variety of missions Golden Eye had you doing. Golden Eye had elements of stealth, requiring you to take out security cameras lest you be swarmed with enemies. Golden Eye had an emphasis on strategy, using silencers, knives etc so as not to draw a crowd. Golden Eye is sort of like a first person MGS, now that I think about it.

I actually had the chance to try out Perfect Dark yet myself... I'm hoping it's a worthy title of the same type, but after hearing some of the comments of PD here, I don't have my expectations too high.

Golden Eye 007 is truly the best FPS I've ever played, and unfortunately, I can't seem to enjoy any other FPS because of it.

[Scourge]

Well, I agree, and I don't think I emphasized much about the stealth aspect of GE007, tho I should have. I think the reason Half-Life was compared to GE when it came out was because Story Driven FPS's at the time were non-existent. You had GE, then you had Half-Life. And as far as the two go, HF integrated the story into the gaming experience better to a degree.

It's the same reason I played Red Faction; I was looking for that Goldeneye feeling, but tho I loved RF, it didn't satisfy that GE need in me. That's why I consider Goldeneye an unsurpassed [on the whole] benchmark for console FPS's. It is the deepest [with the possible exception of Perfect Dark] FPS to grace consoles ever.

The closest I've gotten to that GE feeling is the multiplayer in TimeSplitters2, on the Western level, with the only weapons Sniper Rifles. That's some good fun. I haven't played through the single player story mode in TS2 on each difficulty yet, so I can't comment on whether or not I think it's close to the GE single player experience. Playing through on easy is probably comparable to playing through GE on easy tho. Still not nearly as deep I don't think.

--Scourge .

[Diff-chan]

Originally posted by Tsubaki
I don't know... I heard about how great Half Life was... mourned the loss of the release on the Dreamcast... then finally got a chance to play it through on PC. It's a great game, definitely. But it wasn't the game I was looking for, which was basically another Golden Eye. They don't play anything alike. Half Life was more "shoot everything you see", and although you had perfect freedom to go here and there, I really longed for the variety of missions Golden Eye had you doing. Golden Eye had elements of stealth, requiring you to take out security cameras lest you be swarmed with enemies. Golden Eye had an emphasis on strategy, using silencers, knives etc so as not to draw a crowd. Golden Eye is sort of like a first person MGS, now that I think about it.

I actually had the chance to try out Perfect Dark yet myself... I'm hoping it's a worthy title of the same type, but after hearing some of the comments of PD here, I don't have my expectations too high.

Golden Eye 007 is truly the best FPS I've ever played, and unfortunately, I can't seem to enjoy any other FPS because of it.

Play No One Lives Forever (and not the piss-poor PS2 port) or, I guess, NOLF2. The original game makes Goldeneye 007 look like kiddie play. Its seriously so far ahead of 007 its not worth mentioning.

[Scourge]

Yeah, I'd love to check out No One Lives Forever also. But I have a piss poor pc. Plus, I'm a console guy. For me it takes a lot away from the gaming experience to sit at a desk two feet from a monitor a lot smaller than my tv and using a mouse and keyboard.

In fact, that's what I do all day, except I'm not gaming, I'm at work, so...

And I've purposely skipped the PS2 version for the reasons you stated.

--Scourge .

[MechDeus]

You all know my feelings on the subject. That said, I came here to mention a few other things:

The greatest thing about Half-Life were the soldiers. They were and still are the greatest enemy bots in any FPS, those guys rock and are smart as hell.

And as far as the two go, HF integrated the story into the gaming experience better to a degree.

In large part because HL "didn't stop". There weren't any breaks in the game, whereas GE was clearly divided into seperate levels with much jumping from location to location.

They don't play anything alike. Half Life was more "shoot everything you see", and although you had perfect freedom to go here and there, I really longed for the variety of missions Golden Eye had you doing.

Shoot everything you see worked pretty well for Goldeneye too. Of course, it also works pretty well in many areas in MGS2 (not as well in MGS), which is odd considering the focus...

[Adrian]

diffusionx- My PC is an aging 1GHz, Geforce 2 GTS, 256MB RAM system. Will it run the original NOLF ok at 30fps?

I loved Goldeneye but it is very overrated and always put on some bullshit pedastel. Great at the time but nowadays the FPS and AI are way off.

[Diff-chan]

Originally posted by Sidez
diffusionx- My PC is an aging 1GHz, Geforce 2 GTS, 256MB RAM system. Will it run the original NOLF ok at 30fps?

I loved Goldeneye but it is very overrated and always put on some bullshit pedastel. Great at the time but nowadays the FPS and AI are way off.

Yea dude. The game's graphics are not anything amazing special, but theyre certainly pleasant. I played the game on a 1.3ghz with 128 megs of RAM and a Radeon and it ran beautifully. In fact I originally played it on a PII-450mhz with 128 megs of RAM and a Geforce 1 and it played okay. Give it a try!