GoldenEye 007 (1997)
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 One of the greatest reasons to have an N64.
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GoldenEye 007 (also known as GoldenEye 64) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Rare and based on the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. It was released for the Nintendo 64 video game console in August 1997. The game features a single-player campaign in which players assume the role of British Secret Intelligence Service agent James Bond as he fights to prevent a criminal syndicate from using a satellite weapon against London to cause a global financial meltdown. The game includes a split-screen multiplayer mode in which two, three, or four players can compete in different types of deathmatch games.
Why It Rocks
- This was the first FPS game to go outside the design that was popularized by Doom (replacing it instead with a more linear objective-based design), kicking the term "Doom clone" out of the gaming lexicon, creating multiplayer split-screen, and so on.
- Huge arsenal, with over 28 weapons to use some of which you can dual-wield weapons (and even rocket launchers while using cheats).
- Melee and Pistols
- Unarmed
- Hunting Knife (Cheat Only)
- Throwing Knife
- PP7 Special Issue
- Silenced PP7
- DD44 Dostovei
- Taser (Cheat Only)
- Rifles and Submachine Guns
- Klobb
- KF7 Soviet
- ZMG (9mm)
- D5K Deutsche
- Silenced D5K
- Phantom
- US AR33 Assault Rifle
- RC-P90
- Ranged Weaponry
- Shotgun (Cheat Only)
- Automatic Shotgun
- Sniper Rifle
- Explosive
- Grenade Launcher
- Rocket Launcher
- Hand Grenade
- Timed Mine
- Proximity Mine
- Remote Mine
- Power and Cheat-Only Weapons
- Cougar Magnum (Cheat Only)
- Golden Gun
- Silver PP7 (Cheat Only)
- Gold PP7 (Cheat Only)
- Melee and Pistols
- There are gadgets you can use from the Bond films.
- Watch Laser: It can actually be used like a normal weapon; it is very strong with very rapid fire but has a short range.
- Watch Magnet: It can pull weapons, ammo, keys, and other some other collectibles to Bond.
- Great graphics for the time and animations are fluid by 1997 standards.
- It features stealth. Unlike Wolfenstein 3D where the player only had a knife to takedown enemies and every enemy would be alerted just by the sound of an enemy dying, the player can use silenced weapons and enemies don't have a hive-mind mentality.
- The game features 4-player multiplayer mode and you can chose any character from the game including other characters from certain James Bond films. Five scenarios may be chosen. All the scenario names, except Normal and Team: - vs - , are names of Bond films.
- Normal: Classic deathmatch.
- You Only Live Twice: As the name suggests, players only have two lives. The last person alive wins.
- The Living Daylights Flag Tag: One of the players must find a flag, and then pick it up, without being killed by the other player(s).
- The Man with the Golden Gun: One of the players must find the Golden Gun, and then pick up the gun, without being killed by the other player(s).
- License to Kill: One hit kills a player.
- Just like Perfect Dark, you can now finally play the game with a Mouse and a Keyboard thanks to the 1964 PC build version of the said emulator, which also features the Mouse Injector in order to work.
- Activision later published a full remake of this game for the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
- The AI was superb for its time. Whereas enemies in older FPSes were usually limited to "shooting or running after you when you walk into a room" along with some randomly-generated movement, the enemies in GoldenEye were a little more cunning. They dodge bullets, set off alarms if you make too much noise, react to where they get shot, etc. Along with Half-Life, this game set a lot of standards for enemy AI (though it's still rough).
- The game encourages speedrunning the levels by allowing the player to unlock a cheat by getting a specific time on a specific difficulty on a specific level. There is a total of 23 unlockable cheats that can be unlocked.
- Excellent soundtrack, which are unusually variations of the Bond theme. Frigate, for example, sounds like a combination of Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill" and Faith No More's "We Care A Lot".
Bad Qualities
- While the game was legendary, many spiritual successors such as Perfect Dark and Timesplitters, vastly improved on its, at the time, innovative mechanics and its objective-based mission structure.
- The frame-rate chugs when there is way too much action on screen (most noticeable on the Facility level).
- The game's default control scheme is considered baffling by today's standards, especially in regards to how Bond cannot move and aim at the same time due to the N64's controller design.
- While the multiplayer is legendary, it's barebones and doesn't lend itself to competitive gameplay all that much due to the game's heavy use of Auto Aim.
- The stealth is clunky by today standards. Instead of the enemies being alerted when the player has been spotted, the alarm will only go off if the player uses an unsilenced weapon.
- While the AI was unique for its time, it's pretty rough by today's standard.
- Enemies will not open fire unless they have a clear line of sight. Railings, glass, bottomless holes, and invisible walls count as obstacles for the purpose of aiming. This turns Xenia into much less of a threat, as you can gun her down as she crosses the bridge (she treats the bridge as a corridor). This also stumps Jaws, since he'll never fire if you simply run up and down the staircase.
- Enemy soldiers make no effort to take cover or even protect themselves against your fire, save if they execute a combat roll and end up rolling behind a wall. Their battle strategy tends to boil down to "get into line of sight with Bond and fire in full-auto". Depending on the difficulty, enemy soldiers also tend to have poor situational awareness, often not seeing Bond shooting their comrades a good 30 feet away in front of them. They tend to cluster into large groups and go through doors one by one, leading to easy kills. Also, they fire one burst, and then stand around defenseless for a short period of time.
- Enemies are simply not programmed to avoid explosions and will very likely get themselves killed when explosive weapons are used by either you or them. An example of this is when "Enemy Rockets" is enabled, enemies will not fire if you're less than 3 feet away from them and they fire, regardless of whether or not you're surrounded by their allies.
- Natalya during the Jungle mission. If you're not aware of where she is while you're shooting with the AR33, she'll wander into your line of fire and end up getting a few hi-power rounds in the back of the head.
- Civilians or scientists running around will not be aware of explosions or a line of fire which makes it very easy to kill them by accident. The most infamous being Dr. Oak.
- Enemies will not open fire unless they have a clear line of sight. Railings, glass, bottomless holes, and invisible walls count as obstacles for the purpose of aiming. This turns Xenia into much less of a threat, as you can gun her down as she crosses the bridge (she treats the bridge as a corridor). This also stumps Jaws, since he'll never fire if you simply run up and down the staircase.
- The game's graphics have aged terribly, especially the character models. Bare in mind, this game came out three months after Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and that game had better graphics and models. This is mainly because Rare was trying to replicate the actual actors.
- When you destroy an object, no matter if it's a cardboard box or a camera, it will explode for no reason. This can cause the player to lose up to 75% of their health just because an enemy shot a random barrel.
- This is especially bad when playing Frigate. Because the hostage AI runs all over the place, they can easily get killed from an exploding console and thus causing the mission to fail.
- The game has a problem when it comes to balancing as many of the weapons (as well as one of the playable characters in the multiplayer) are broken.
- Oddjob in multiplayer. Because of his short stature, every other characters' free-aimed shots sail above his head, forcing other players to stop and manually aim down to actually hit him. If you play a one-on-one match between Oddjob and Jaws (the tallest character in the game) with slappers only, it's already over. It's so bad that the he's officially considered cheating by the developers themselves.
- The RCP-90 has huge damage, ludicrous rate of fire, absurd 80 bullets per reload, and has the ability to pierce through 3 enemies in 1 shot.
- The Moonraker Laser has Infinite Ammo, while doing nearly the same very high damage as the magnum, and pierce through 2 enemies.
- The Golden PP7, which is fairly easy to unlock (beat Cradle on Agent in about two minutes) and has the same one-hit kill properties as the Golden Gun while still being semi-auto. Unfortunately, this is only available through the cheat menu and you cannot score a legitimate victory while progressing.
- Proximity Mines. Due to the lack of detection on mines themselves and how small they are, it is very easy to hide the mines carefully. You can hide the mines in the mine boxes in case players decide to try getting them, only to see an explosion.
- Remote Mines. There is a glitch where you can remotely denotate them by pressing A and B at the same time without going to the detonation weapon option, thus saving you significant time to not waste on weapon switching. This is very effective in multiplayer where you can throw a mine; even if you miss the target, you can quick-detonate to do significant damage as long as the enemy is close to the explosion.
- Pausing the game is extremely delayed. When the player pushes start, it doesn't pause right away, Bond has to look at his watch which takes a while. Worst of all, the action isn't paused while he's doing this, risking the chance of death.
- Some cheats are not worth unlocking.
- The cheats - Invincibility, All Guns, and Infinite Ammo - are the hardest to obtain in the game, requiring beating 00 Agent levels with extremely strict time limits. If you're good enough to clear them with such strict time limits, you certainly don't need them.
- 007 mode is unlocked by beating every stage on the hardest difficulty. If you're good enough to beat every stage on the hardest difficulty, you aren't going to need a mode where you can set enemy health and damage.
- The Frigate's unlockable cheat is toggling the radar on/off in multiplayer. While this isn't bad on its own, it pales in comparison to the other unlockable cheats, and this cheat's exclusively for multiplayer, so it's useless to anyone who plays single-player.
- All the bosses are pretty bad.
- As mentioned, Xenia is pretty dumb and therefore easy to kill. All the player needs to do is stand to the side of the bridge and just fire away as Xenia approaches.
- For Trevelyan's 1st phase, he only takes damage when he is not running, so 1 explosion or a weapon as strong as the golden gun (or Gold PP7) can kill him once in this phase. Mooks can be goaded into throwing a grenade towards his position by accident, possibly killing Alec. If you somehow get lucky to collect a grenade, don't shoot him yet nor get too close, but throw it at him at the right spot to kill him.
- Like Xenia, Jaws has the same AI as Xenia because it treats gaps like walls. Drag him into the circle stairs and he won't shoot you if you and him are not aligned with the straight stairs.
- Baron Samedi. Sure, you have to "kill" him 3 times. Once you get the Golden Gun, Samedi still dies in 1 shot per each phase.
Trivia
- When you tilt the cartridge while it's in the slot, a glitch occurs where all of the models in the game will spaz out. This caused a meme trend to spread in Japan called Geddan.
Reception
GoldenEye 007 was critically acclaimed with critics praising its graphics for its varied and detailed environments, realistic animations, and special effects such as glass transparencies and lingering smoke; its gameplay for its depth and requiring more stealth and intelligence than earlier first-person shooters; and multiplayer with many considering it the best multiplayer game on the system.
Sales
Despite low expectations among the gaming media and an unsuccessful showing at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta in 1997, GoldenEye 007 turned out to be both a critical and a commercial success. In 1998, it sold approximately 2.1 million copies. By 2001, it had sold over seven million copies worldwide. Overall, GoldenEye 007 sold more than eight million units worldwide, making it the third-best-selling Nintendo 64 game, behind Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. According to a paper published on the website of the Entertainment Software Association, the game grossed $250 million worldwide.
Accolades
GoldenEye 007 received multiple year-end awards, including the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Games Award in 1998, and four awards from the inaugural AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards: Interactive Title of the Year, Console Game of the Year, Console Action Game of the Year, and Outstanding Achievement in Software Engineering; it was also nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics and Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Design. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it both Most Addictive Game and Best Movie to Game in their 1998 Video Game Buyer's Guide, and Game of the Year in their Editor's Choice Awards. Rare was recognised for its work on the game and won the BAFTA award for Best UK Developer.
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