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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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 (You are now seeing James Bond having his smile extend past his gun. Manually. Like a carny freak)
CLASSIC GAMING
GoldenEye 007
Developer: Rareware
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: First-person Shooter
Year: 1997
System: Nintendo 64
It is almost accepted as a rule that videogames cannot be made into films perfectly, and the same applies to the opposite. But every true rule must have an exception to this to prove it as a rule, in a sense.
Videogames have their exception of films being made perfectly into games by the notable case of a masterful adaptation of one of the films of everyone's favourite secret agent.
And because James Bond films are always shown around Christmas time anyway so this fits appropriately.
Story - The story of Goldeneye 007 is generally the same as the movie. You are James Bond, secret agent 007 of the MI6 Intelligence Branch. Your first mission is to deal with an illicit chemical plant inside Byelomorye Dam in Arkangelsk, Russia. On this mission, your ally, 006, is killed during the escape from the dam at the hands of General Gregorov.
Later on, the mission takes you to Sibera, where a lone radar station seems to have been taken over by Gregorov's forces to take control of a satellite called Goldeneye, a very powerful weapon that can obliterate nearly anything on Earth. The mission takes you all throughout Russia, France, Kazakhstan and eventually Peru.
With some notably exceptional missions, the game follows the plot of the film quite strictly so, if only shooting it up a bit with some more-action oriented gameplay and moments.
 (Uri desperately guards his box fortress of explosive Dog The Bounty Hunter DVDs)
Graphics - For 1997, the graphics are as blocky as expected with rigidly uncolourful walls, barely moving skies as flat as the ground below, rigid-as-hell backgrounds and marionette-looking enemies that have as much muscle in them as blow-up dolls.
But the real shine of the graphics is the action itself. Guns look quite real complete with differing glints of the light above them, and explosions are very nice with whooshes of flame bursting out like a cloud.
But there was one hugely innovative thing graphics-wise about GoldenEye 007 at the time. Enemy reactions. Back in the old days if an enemy was shot, they just died, usually, or flinched when it didn't kill them. But in this game, there came a wonderful sense of pain enemies had when you shot them in specific parts of their body.
In the arms, they would grab at their limbs in pain and run through the level with a broken arm. With legs being shot, they limp actively with slowed-down pace, even having blood patches on where they've been shot. Chests and head shots are usually quite fatal, but they can also be disarmed with by shooting their gun.
 ("What part of PRIVATE BATHROOM did you not understand!?!?")
Gameplay - Despite being more focused on shooting than the movie ever did, GoldenEye is a solid experience of awesome concerning its gameplay. Firstly there is the game itself of a variety of levels on three difficulties that increase enemy damage, number of objectives, AI to a certain extent and reduce the availability of body armour, which unlock secret missions for finishing each difficulty as well as fun cheats if you finished quickly enough.
The missions themselves range from rescuing a certain number of people to placing certain items in correct areas, or obtaining items to reach other areas. Screwing any of these up is an instant mission failure but it does not actually result in automatically ending the mission. Instead you can run around killing as many as you want until you die, finish the level (if you can) or quit the mission yourself.
Aside from that, there comes the most powerful selling point of the game itself. The multiplayer. With a revolutionary 4-player experience with a variety of characters to be and maps to play in, GoldenEye was one of the best multiplayer games to ever play as a straight-up console FPS deathmatch with inclusions of capture the flag and so forth.
Between allies and enemies there were several ways to handle enemies ranging from secret passageways to using three kinds of mines and a whole variety of weaponry from the trusty PP7 to the Moonraker laser gun to the sniper rifle, which at the time was incredibly innovative for actually having an adjustable sniper scope mode, something that wasn't in shooter games before then.
In fact there really is only one thing everyone can truly and utterly hate about this game. Natalya. We all hate escort missions, as a bane upon gaming when the ally is either completely useless, incredibly annoying, or both. Natalya is sadly both for the most part. She will be not so much of a hassle in the first time you're escorting her in an area of tight corridors and always behind you, but when she gets really cocky in the Jungle.....ohhh christ.
 (Guy on the left: "Yeah sure sure, do your badass pose in front of the spy with the rocket launcher, that'll stop him and keep you alive, no no I'm just gonna stand here uselessly harmless like any reasonable person should.")
See, she gets a weapon at this point, a rather lethal Magnum that can kill any enemy it hits....when it actually hits since she takes about three or four shots at an enemy before managing to hit them somewhere to kill them.
The Jungle, already a rather difficult mission for enemies being camouflaged with enemy turrets the same as well ready to turn you into diced cheese, is made more difficult by Natalya wandering ahead to promptly get shot in the head by you.
And then there's the mission after that in the Control center where she has to be protected from the hordes of enemies scrambling around to kill you while she bashes at the keyboard with square fists.
And let's not forget the absolute insult to injury where if you happen to kill Boris (who at this point is someone you WILL want to kill and he did die in the movie), Natalya goes "that wasn't very nice :( " and fucks off back to the elevator like a fucking angry housewife.
Of course this mission is over by then and you kill her anyway, because she's an incredibly fucking stupid bitch, and everyone who ever played this game wished horrible horrible gulag-style rape upon her blocky tits.
Music/Sound - Most of the music is somewhat missed over other than the epic James Bond theme itself redone as a bitchin' rock theme, but each level has its own music to perfectly give the feeling of the mission, from the amazingly frantic but epic Cradle to the sombre and eerie St. Petersburg Statue Park.
However you will mostly not give a shit about the music despite its rather kickass rock-techno feel because of the sound. The sound is just awesome for its time, the guns all making their own unique firing sounds, the enemies' realistic sounding grunts of pain (until they start recycling after the 10th limb shot), and of course, the explosions. Everytime you hear an explosion, it ALWAYS sounds fun.
 (James Bond, for once, was speechless to add an insulting quip after killing the gay Soviet mantrain in the back offices)
This was a game that represents the highest point of love for the movie it was based on. A game that barely deviated from the movie's plot despite being a shoot-em-up, was intensely fun to play for multiplayer and single player, and yet kept everything true to the awesomeness that is James motherfucking Bond.
Even if Perfect Dark perfected this graphics engine to have more vocal cues, actual reloading animations for each weapon and excellent lighting, this was where it began. And everyone who ever played it, had fun somehow.
Except Natalya. Fuck her to soviet hell.
Fun and Innovation - 5
Replayability - 5
Gameplay - 5
Presentation - 4"Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto  Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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Rank: Fecal Impaction For the Win!
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FFFFFFFFFYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSS. This was one of the games I got when I opened the N64 on Christmas, 1996. Call three friends. Monopolize the TV for the next five hours. Yell at the guy that kept his auto-aim on, fight for P1. It was a good time to be seven. Safety + Peace
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Rank: Fecal Impaction For the Win!
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This game was super well received by everyone who didn't own or experience a pc at the time. Back in '97, I thought it was "okay". It was basically the halo of its day. The console masses declared it the best multiplayer FPS, ever .(as they do now with the halo franchise), but really only because they had never had a decent split screen multiplayer FPS even available to them before it came along. It was all they had...so it was the best. I distinctly remember coming over to my friends house after playing a few games of quake DM, and quake TF...to be utterly disappointed in the multiplayer awesomeness he promised me. The speed was slow, the movement was methodical. The graphics were decent for the time, but still pretty far behind what PC's had on the horizon. (quake 2, halflife). I had fun playing though some of the single player...so it shined there. Its objective based gameplay was refreshing. I just never saw anything "revolutionary" in it other than the designers finally found a way to translate FPS (specifically multiplayer) to consoles and really popularize the genre on the platform.
Quote:
"Who the fuck is Leon Switch and why does he know we have a dog?" - Mrs. Giller
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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Giller [GwDR wrote:]This game was super well received by everyone who didn't own or experience a pc at the time. Back in '97, I thought it was "okay". It was basically the halo of its day. The console masses declared it the best multiplayer FPS, ever .(as they do now with the halo franchise), but really only because they had never had a decent split screen multiplayer FPS even available to them before it came along. It was all they had...so it was the best.
I distinctly remember coming over to my friends house after playing a few games of quake DM, and quake TF...to be utterly disappointed in the multiplayer awesomeness he promised me. The speed was slow, the movement was methodical. The graphics were decent for the time, but still pretty far behind what PC's had on the horizon. (quake 2, halflife).
I had fun playing though some of the single player...so it shined there. Its objective based gameplay was refreshing. I just never saw anything "revolutionary" in it other than the designers finally found a way to translate FPS (specifically multiplayer) to consoles and really popularize the genre on the platform. Fair enough, I do remember hearing how....Quake was it, revolutionised a lot with an online multiplayer deathmatch experience before GoldenEye, but of course, back then the divide between PC and Console gamers were like two entirely different worlds. "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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Rank: Fecal Impaction For the Win!
Groups: {pDs} Member, Registered User, Server Admin
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Giller [GwDR wrote:]This game was super well received by everyone who didn't own or experience a pc at the time. Back in '97, I wasn't seven. I think this sums up your critique. Giller [GwDR wrote:]I just never saw anything "revolutionary" in it other than the designers finally found a way to translate FPS (specifically multiplayer) to consoles and really popularize the genre on the platform. Some call that "minimizing the accomplishment." I'm just gonna call it--  Safety + Peace
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Rank: Taco Technician
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Where have I seen this before? also, DUDE CHECK IT OUT I SPELLED ASS ON THE WALL WITH PROXIMITY MINES WHERE? BOOOOOOM I played goldeneye for a million billion hours.
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