Tweet
Posted by fastbilly1
Few games have caused as much awe and frustration as Rareware’s 1997 GoldenEye 007. Bringing four-player FPS multiplayer to a console was unheard of at the time to the vast majority of gamers.
Sure, there were the PC fans who had played through Wolfenstien 3D, Rise of the Triad, or Doom 1 & 2, but the casual crowd had yet been exposed to slaughtering their friends for fun. Predating Half Life by a year, Goldeneye provided us a reason to gather up the troops and stalk the halls of the temple. But how does it play today?
Simplicity was what made GoldenEye unique and special. While not as simple as Mario Kart 64, compared to other FPSs, GoldenEye’s control scheme was intuitive enough that even the very casual gamers could pick up the majority of the nuances with just a handful of games under their belts.
“Use the joystick to move and the trigger to shoot, blue button opens doors and reloads the gun” with that basic rundown of controls most anyone could join you until they either wanted to learn the more advanced controls or became bored of the game (this would become commonplace if you played with people who always hunted down the new players, you all know what I am talking about).
The controls are still spot on, and have been added into more modern games as optional controls (in Halo that is Legacy with the triggers in Southpaw). They may seem a little awkward at first, but after a couple games you will feel the groove coming back. And if you cannot get used to the single joystick controls, pick one of the 2.1 control styles and grab another controller. Sure it means on a 1 on 1 game but you will get a more modern control style.
Multiplayer:
GoldenEye's is not so much unique as it is an example of utter brilliance. The stage designs are nearly flawless. From the open breezeways of the Temple, to the labyrinth like Complex, to the harrowing halls of the Facility, the stages had the right amount of everything to make for epic battles of supremacy. Though after ten years of playing Temple it grows quite stale. The same goes for the Facility.
If you played the game to the extent that the majority of us did, you will still remember the hiding spots in the Complex, the high holes in the Temple’s main room, and o fcourse, the bullet proof glass in the Facility, they will seem like old friends.
But after playing them for a few hours you will remember that the Facility is bottlenecked at the bullet proof glass, the hiding spots in complex are nigh useless, and that still nobody remembers those holes in the Temple’s walls. Is this to say that the stages are bad? No, but I do not believe that most people will be willing to put in anywhere near the amount of time.
They were amazing, but by todays standards they are very plain, and lack gusto. Then again I started playing through GoldenEye again a couple weeks ago, and have enjoyed the spats of multi player quite a bit. But when compared to something like TimeSplitters 2/Future Perfect, Halo, or Half Life 2, there really is no fair comparison.
The weapons in GoldenEye were always a mixed bag. I knew very few people who actually liked getting the PP7 (commonly referred to as the PPtrash) and even less who liked timed mines. Mixed bag or not, the weapons still provide a nice balance that few games have replicated.
Weapon sets may have annoyed many players, something that Perfect Dark “fixed,” but it just kept with the idea that the game was made to be simple. I mean when choosing Automatics, all the guns use the same bullets. How can that be any simpler? Yes, simplicity is good to get new players, but the balance is what kept people coming back.
The most powerful weapon will always spawn in the same place, the RCP90 is going to be outside the bathroom door, but you have a clear shot to it from most of the way down the hallway if you are crouched, and a headshot with the Magnum will kill them. And while your RCP90 can shoot through that metal door, much like the Moonraker, my Magnum can shoot through the bullet proof glass AND the door behind it.
And for some reason fire can go through walls, 10 years and I still haven’t figured that one out. Ask any fan of the game two simple words and the stories will come pouring out, proximity mine. I could go on about games in Bunker, or the Temple respawn pattern, but that is not why y'all are here.
If you cannot tell already, I would say that apart from the Unreal Tournaments and possibly Red Fraction, there has not been a more balanced set of weapons, let alone weapon sets, in an fps. I just wish I would stop getting stuck with that daggum Klobb when we are not playing License to Kill.
Scenario-wise, GoldenEye pulled from its parents in the genre and ironed out a lot of the kinks in making a console version of them. Your standard death match is fairly straight forward. But adding in a one shot kill option, License to Kill, spiced things up some (then people actually want the Klobb).
Limited lives, You only Live Twice, was fun for tournaments but not so much for casual play, sans drinking games potential. Flag tag, The Living Daylights, was probably our least played game type, even more so than limited lives. The concept is that there is one flag, and you try to hold on to it the longest, timewise. It never clicked with my group of friends and family, so my exposure to it is jaded and boorish. Of course there are your usual team layouts, 2v2 and 3v1, neither all that profound, but a whole mess of a lot of fun.
Finally we have one of the best, The Man with the Golden Gun. This is a very simple one where there is one Golden gun, it forces the weapon set to be Goldengun, whoever grabs the gun is “it” and is the only one who can get points, everyone else is on a team to best them and grab the gun (best when played without a time limit).
Enough variety to keep most players happy for sometime, it is hard to say what kind of impact it made since most of these scenarios had been in games before it. But there is no question that even by todays standards the scenarios are worthwhile, and more importantly they are still fun. However the lack of being able to use more than one at a time is a sad drawback. Team License to Kill and a true Capture the Flag mode would have been choice additions, but sadly it just is not so (though the first can be accomplished through modifiying players health and/or using a gameshark).
With twelve available by default, 33 after completing the game, and 64 if you used a cheat, there is a character for everyone. Be it the cast of the movie, your generic bad guys, or even old Bond villains, the multi player characters are as diverse as the people who play them. Granted you will run into people who only will only play the short man Oddjob or maybe the Siberian Special Forces, but there is little to gripe about character wise. Newer games boast cast in the hundreds, TimeSplitters, but really how many do you really need? Granted I do have over 1,000 characters on my Mugen roster so I cant really talk.
Overall the multi player is still amazingly fun, even if the stage designs are a bit dated. All the tricks have been figured out and there are no secrets left, but with a little practice, and some good friends, GoldenEye can still dish out what you remember it doing back in the 90s. Sure it is dated, the characters only kinda look like the people they are supposed to represent, and there are no reload animations, but it can still dole out that sweet rush of days gone by.
Singleplayer:
GoldenEye may have been known mostly for its divine multiplayer, but the single player was no slouch either. Following the movie decently, good enough for a movie game, the storyline took you all over the world. Starting off with the dam with that big green truck that you have to out run and ending with a brilliant jump to the bottom of the Cradle. While there were slow parts, Statue, and parts that were over the top violent, Runway’s tank, the game played fluidly from stage to stage. However the storytelling dynamics are ruined by stock characters and a somewhat convoluted jump from part to part with bare reasons for such a jump.
While this can be construed to be just like the movie, or most Bond movies for that matter, it does not translated well into a ground breaking single player experience. In its time it was unrivaled, but now with brilliant retellings of the second World War, stories of intergalactic civil wars of racism and hate, and a lonely MIT graduate in the wrong place at the wrong time, GoldenEye shows its age. And while that is not a bad thing in some aspects, the single player game did not age anywhere near as good as the multi player. This does not mean it is a horrible game, just that it has been surpassed.
Few games have caused as much awe and frustration as Rareware’s 1997 GoldenEye 007. Bringing four-player FPS multiplayer to a console was unheard of at the time to the vast majority of gamers.
Sure, there were the PC fans who had played through Wolfenstien 3D, Rise of the Triad, or Doom 1 & 2, but the casual crowd had yet been exposed to slaughtering their friends for fun. Predating Half Life by a year, Goldeneye provided us a reason to gather up the troops and stalk the halls of the temple. But how does it play today?
Simplicity was what made GoldenEye unique and special. While not as simple as Mario Kart 64, compared to other FPSs, GoldenEye’s control scheme was intuitive enough that even the very casual gamers could pick up the majority of the nuances with just a handful of games under their belts.
“Use the joystick to move and the trigger to shoot, blue button opens doors and reloads the gun” with that basic rundown of controls most anyone could join you until they either wanted to learn the more advanced controls or became bored of the game (this would become commonplace if you played with people who always hunted down the new players, you all know what I am talking about).
The controls are still spot on, and have been added into more modern games as optional controls (in Halo that is Legacy with the triggers in Southpaw). They may seem a little awkward at first, but after a couple games you will feel the groove coming back. And if you cannot get used to the single joystick controls, pick one of the 2.1 control styles and grab another controller. Sure it means on a 1 on 1 game but you will get a more modern control style.
Multiplayer:
GoldenEye's is not so much unique as it is an example of utter brilliance. The stage designs are nearly flawless. From the open breezeways of the Temple, to the labyrinth like Complex, to the harrowing halls of the Facility, the stages had the right amount of everything to make for epic battles of supremacy. Though after ten years of playing Temple it grows quite stale. The same goes for the Facility.
If you played the game to the extent that the majority of us did, you will still remember the hiding spots in the Complex, the high holes in the Temple’s main room, and o fcourse, the bullet proof glass in the Facility, they will seem like old friends.
But after playing them for a few hours you will remember that the Facility is bottlenecked at the bullet proof glass, the hiding spots in complex are nigh useless, and that still nobody remembers those holes in the Temple’s walls. Is this to say that the stages are bad? No, but I do not believe that most people will be willing to put in anywhere near the amount of time.
They were amazing, but by todays standards they are very plain, and lack gusto. Then again I started playing through GoldenEye again a couple weeks ago, and have enjoyed the spats of multi player quite a bit. But when compared to something like TimeSplitters 2/Future Perfect, Halo, or Half Life 2, there really is no fair comparison.
The weapons in GoldenEye were always a mixed bag. I knew very few people who actually liked getting the PP7 (commonly referred to as the PPtrash) and even less who liked timed mines. Mixed bag or not, the weapons still provide a nice balance that few games have replicated.
Weapon sets may have annoyed many players, something that Perfect Dark “fixed,” but it just kept with the idea that the game was made to be simple. I mean when choosing Automatics, all the guns use the same bullets. How can that be any simpler? Yes, simplicity is good to get new players, but the balance is what kept people coming back.
The most powerful weapon will always spawn in the same place, the RCP90 is going to be outside the bathroom door, but you have a clear shot to it from most of the way down the hallway if you are crouched, and a headshot with the Magnum will kill them. And while your RCP90 can shoot through that metal door, much like the Moonraker, my Magnum can shoot through the bullet proof glass AND the door behind it.
And for some reason fire can go through walls, 10 years and I still haven’t figured that one out. Ask any fan of the game two simple words and the stories will come pouring out, proximity mine. I could go on about games in Bunker, or the Temple respawn pattern, but that is not why y'all are here.
If you cannot tell already, I would say that apart from the Unreal Tournaments and possibly Red Fraction, there has not been a more balanced set of weapons, let alone weapon sets, in an fps. I just wish I would stop getting stuck with that daggum Klobb when we are not playing License to Kill.
Scenario-wise, GoldenEye pulled from its parents in the genre and ironed out a lot of the kinks in making a console version of them. Your standard death match is fairly straight forward. But adding in a one shot kill option, License to Kill, spiced things up some (then people actually want the Klobb).
Limited lives, You only Live Twice, was fun for tournaments but not so much for casual play, sans drinking games potential. Flag tag, The Living Daylights, was probably our least played game type, even more so than limited lives. The concept is that there is one flag, and you try to hold on to it the longest, timewise. It never clicked with my group of friends and family, so my exposure to it is jaded and boorish. Of course there are your usual team layouts, 2v2 and 3v1, neither all that profound, but a whole mess of a lot of fun.
Finally we have one of the best, The Man with the Golden Gun. This is a very simple one where there is one Golden gun, it forces the weapon set to be Goldengun, whoever grabs the gun is “it” and is the only one who can get points, everyone else is on a team to best them and grab the gun (best when played without a time limit).
Enough variety to keep most players happy for sometime, it is hard to say what kind of impact it made since most of these scenarios had been in games before it. But there is no question that even by todays standards the scenarios are worthwhile, and more importantly they are still fun. However the lack of being able to use more than one at a time is a sad drawback. Team License to Kill and a true Capture the Flag mode would have been choice additions, but sadly it just is not so (though the first can be accomplished through modifiying players health and/or using a gameshark).
With twelve available by default, 33 after completing the game, and 64 if you used a cheat, there is a character for everyone. Be it the cast of the movie, your generic bad guys, or even old Bond villains, the multi player characters are as diverse as the people who play them. Granted you will run into people who only will only play the short man Oddjob or maybe the Siberian Special Forces, but there is little to gripe about character wise. Newer games boast cast in the hundreds, TimeSplitters, but really how many do you really need? Granted I do have over 1,000 characters on my Mugen roster so I cant really talk.
Overall the multi player is still amazingly fun, even if the stage designs are a bit dated. All the tricks have been figured out and there are no secrets left, but with a little practice, and some good friends, GoldenEye can still dish out what you remember it doing back in the 90s. Sure it is dated, the characters only kinda look like the people they are supposed to represent, and there are no reload animations, but it can still dole out that sweet rush of days gone by.
Singleplayer:
GoldenEye may have been known mostly for its divine multiplayer, but the single player was no slouch either. Following the movie decently, good enough for a movie game, the storyline took you all over the world. Starting off with the dam with that big green truck that you have to out run and ending with a brilliant jump to the bottom of the Cradle. While there were slow parts, Statue, and parts that were over the top violent, Runway’s tank, the game played fluidly from stage to stage. However the storytelling dynamics are ruined by stock characters and a somewhat convoluted jump from part to part with bare reasons for such a jump.
While this can be construed to be just like the movie, or most Bond movies for that matter, it does not translated well into a ground breaking single player experience. In its time it was unrivaled, but now with brilliant retellings of the second World War, stories of intergalactic civil wars of racism and hate, and a lonely MIT graduate in the wrong place at the wrong time, GoldenEye shows its age. And while that is not a bad thing in some aspects, the single player game did not age anywhere near as good as the multi player. This does not mean it is a horrible game, just that it has been surpassed.
Comment