Review: GoldenEye 007 - 05/05/2008 by Michael
First Person Shooter
Is it possible to say enough about this game, I think not. Goldeneye is the most influential fps since Doom. This game allowed you to become one of the coolest, most badass characters ever. James Bond. Every boy and mans dream is to be Bond, high flying action, stealthy spy stuff with good ol' fashioned stand and deliver madness. This game has it all.
Alrighty then, lets step back to 97, I'm 17, and headed over to a mates place to give his n64 a workout, he just bought Goldeneye. After moving up the first tower on the Dam level, shooting the guard with the pp7, then taking out the sniper rifle and lining up the guard in the tunnel. Boom, Headshot! Thats it I'm sold. I proceed to spend every day at his place perfecting the art of Bond untill I can afford my own n64 and the game. That's my story and I know there are millions more just like me.
Now Goldeneye came at a wonderful time for Nintendo, as after SuperMario 64, there was a lack of a defining blockbuster game. Nintendo needed more than just the usual mario spin-offs to make this viable, as Playstation had such a vast catalogue of games in comparison. Along comes Goldeneye 007, and now everybody needs an n64. The game itself follows quite closely to the hit movie, with only Silo and the bonus missions really straying from the plot (so much so that when watching the movie recently I had flashbacks to the Facility level). This makes its success even more remarkable as games that copy films are usually rushed and awful.
But lets talk about the game. The new analogue stick and trigger combo for the n64 controller gave the game a very natural flow as for the first time it felt like you were pulling the trigger on a real gun, kind of. This combined with great new AI, great variety of weapons and some traditional problem solving made this game a joy to play over and over again. In regards to its longevity, the game designers added in some ingenious ideas. For starters there was the 3 regular difficulties with 00 being quite challenging at times. Then there was the two bonus levels Aztec, a tribute to Moonraker, including Jaws, and Egypt, a montage of several Bond films, most notably Live and Let Die, and The Man with the Golden Gun. Add to this the 007 difficulty where you could adjust all the game settings, and finally all the cheats to unlock by finishing certain levels under a certain time. A special mention to Facility, 00 Agent, under 2:05, almost drove me mental. Respect.
Then we come to split-screen multiplayer and the joy of sitting round for hours shooting all your friends. I may have enjoyed this more than some of my friends as I practised a lot and used to camp the body armour. Forgive me, I was a dick and have corrected my gay camping ways. But yes, the variety of maps, characters and sets of weapons leads to long grudge sessions.
But perhaps the most revolutionary part to this game was in the double control. Joy. This was the first game to have dual analogue stick controls. If you changed the control settings, you could use 2 controllers in single player mode, one moved forward and back, and looked left and right. The other strafed and looked up and down. Now after mastering this skill, your immersion into the game was complete, as you could hit head shots all day long, but most impressive was the amazement on other peoples faces when they saw it for the first time. And of course this was the first step to the controllers of the future, and permanant thumb damage.
A quick note to whoever started the All Bond cheat rumor. Not funny. Myself and others devoted way too much time looking for that cheat in the hope of getting Sean Connery in his suit from Goldfinger. But no time spent playing Goldeneye was ever really wasted....
Goldeneye's legacy is with us still today, in the modern controllers, the sniper rifles, and the joy of sneaking up behind someone and shooting them in the head with a silenced gun. My only regret is that it is very hard to play now as the regular stick layout is now different and going backwards means untraining your reflexes. This game revolutionized fps gaming, and we have all enjoyed a few great headshots because of it. (Final challenge: at the Dam, stand at the yellow line and snipe the guy in the 3rd tower. Nice.)