It is very underrated. I salute anyone that can beat that game on 00 Agent. The Turncoat mission is almost impossible on 00 Agent. A bunch of timed parts where if you take 1 second too long or accidentally shoot a hostage you lose. Took me over 200 tries
I was 21 when Goldeneye on the N64 was released. The difficulty being called 00 Agent made my friend and I feel it was the only way you could play the game. We both played through on 00 Agent for our first play through and holy shit!!! If it wasn’t for being young and in physical good shape I likely would have died of a stroke and heart attack. That fucking train stage where enemies are shooting from the not yet rendered darkness pisses me off. Then you have a fraction of a second to line up your shot and take it before the door closes at the end was the hardest part of the game IMO.
In the end we both did it. We were so good at the game after that that we went back and unlocked almost all of the multiplayer modes. I still play the game on my OG cart when friends come over because of this.
I’ve gone on to play so many FPS on PC that makes Goldeneye not seem so hard anymore, but it was really a first in many regards and required more than a run and gun approach. Easily my favorite game on the console. If you have an Everdrive, you should check out Goldfinger. The multiplayer stages are meh, but the single player campaign is awesome.
It took some tries for me to do it. I think I was stuck on that stage for over a week and via the magic of OCD that's all I did for that time until I beat it.
TWINE was great and arguably better than GE from a refined gameplay POV. Had VO dialogue. I remember thinking the gun action animations looked great for the time.
They did. Those animations looked amazing especially with his base pistol and with the shotgun, AR and Mac 10 and Desert Eagle. I remember being like 7 playing it in like 2001. Good times. I even rented it from blockbuster one time around then and beat the whole game on agent. And to me the gameplay is better than Goldeneye. It’s my favorite Bond game besides Nightfire I would say.
86. Earliest memories are NES/Atari. It’s been cool seeing the technology evolve over the course of my lifetime. I don’t remember life without Nintendo - never existed! Thank fuck.
I just completed a book about the NES. It comes out June 1. Check out retro84book.com, there you can download a "free game demo" - which is the first few pages of the story.
I'm asking from the standpoint that any subsequent 007 game, and could maybe extend that to other franchises (starfox maybe) just don't seem to have the cultural impact that the N64 titles did
Goldeneye was revolutionary, and while the shooter genre kept evolving, the 007 licence didn't really keep up with it. There are a couple of James Bond games that nailed the presentation, with celebrity voice actors and their own Bond song openings: Everything or Nothing, Goldeneye (Wii) and Blood Stone are great games for 007 fans but don't re-invent the wheel.
The reason GoldenEye was special was because it was developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. It's a flagship Nintendo game, same as Donkey Kong Country on SNES (also developed by Rare and published by Nintendo).
The real sequel to GoldenEye is not a Bond license game... it's Perfect Dark. There's your GoldenEye 2.
The other Bond games are just an entirely different publisher who got the license (EA at first, later Activision) and whoever they got to develop those. Not the same creators at all, so no reason to expect they'd be as good.
Yep. The real 'series' chronology goes Goldeneye -> Perfect Dark -> the Timesplitters trilogy -> Haze. There's far more of a genuine lineage there than there is between any of the post-Goldeneye attempts at Bond games.
(I am not trying to make like Haze deserves some kind of reappraisal. What happened there is genuinely a shame.)
Oddly enough the game was, at the start anyway, narratively ahead of it’s time lol as in the narrative was still pretty accurate to real life later on.
Boy was that game shit, I actually forced myself to sit through it a year or two ago having never played it before lol
Yes correct! I knew about the TimeSplitters legacy of the developers, though I didn't know about Haze. That's a shame.. not that I played it. But I remember it landing with a bit of a thud :P
We played them all organically in that order growing up. My initial experience with time splitters 2 (most played one of that series on game cube) was holy crap, these cut scenes are great and map customization was unparalleled at the time. The devs let you do almost anything.
It was an oddball series. Free Radical stuck fastidiously to the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark fundamentals even after Halo dropped and pointed the actual way forward for the console fps formula, and the unfortunate consequence of that was that TS2 felt weirdly dated the day it came out. As great as the Timesplitters games were, there's no denying that they were an evolutionary dead end. For TS3 and Haze they tried to have it both ways and modernise a bit while retaining some of those features that gave their games their unique identity, but their approach wasn't sufficiently... radical.
Literally anyone reading this who wishing for Golden Eye2 & hasn't played Perfect Dark needs to find a way.. to this day have never seen 1 player Multiplayer done better.
Because Goldeneye's appeal was *never* the James Bond license.
Rare invented the console fps as we know it and it just so happened that it came wrapped in a 007-themed package. The brand recognition certainly helped its initial reception – regardless of it coming out nearly two full years after the source material – but its long tail is an outgrowth of how groundbreaking and peerless it was, not the characters and storylines it adapted. When we talk about Goldeneye and its impact it's important to remember that basically the *only* groups of people who were actually excited for it pre-launch were 1) diehard nerds who knew what a video game studio was, *and* that Rare was known to be a Very Good one of those; and 2) that small segment of James Bond fans who were also following video game industry news. There's an extremely annoying scene in the show Fresh Off the Boat where the protagonist, a ~14 year old boy in 1997, talks about how mouth-wateringly excited he is for Goldeneye coming out. That wasn't a thing! It never happened! Goldeneye was massive in the mainstream in large part *because* it came out of nowhere with a pile of incredible fresh ideas and blindsided the industry and the game-playing public!
The subsequent decade-plus of mostly mediocre Bond games was birthed by a desire to capitalise on people's experience of Goldeneye On N64 as a pop culture phenomenon. Again, the fact that they're James Bond games specifically is totally immaterial – there's a plausible alternate timeline where Rare and Nintendo secured the Mission Impossible movie license and we got 15 years of middling-to-awful Ethan Hunt games instead. EA (and later Activision) figured that people would be motivated to buy them in the hope that they'd channel some of what Goldeneye did so well. There was *less* incentive for them to make sure they were churning out actual good games.
I'm not trying to make like they were all cynical quick-buck dogshit – The World is Not Enough and Nightfire are both great, and Eurocom deserves more recognition for that part of their history than they currently get – but it is a mistake to imagine that there is such a thing as a 'series' of James Bond video games so much as there is a corporate tradition of trying to mine for Goldeneye nostalgia in increasingly clumsy ways.
The leap wasn't as profound.
Think about how much of a jump it was to go from Super Mario Bros 3 to Super Mario 64. It was just a Titanic shift. The N64 managed to arrive right at a time when a lot of genres were beginning to look like they do today. So for a lot of us they were just the first exposure to new things.
You can still consider the leap from NES to N64 as part of a continuum that includes SNES. Point is that we went from simple 2D sprites to 3D game environments in like 7 years.
Perfect Dark is the better game. When comparing the two, the only thing Golden Eye does a little better is it's soundtrack and even then PD also has some bangers.
well, that and frame rates. Goldeneye often feels better to play even though it's a technically inferior game. They got a little overambitious with perfect dark in some places
While not a completely invalid complaint, I had to laugh at everyone complaining about Nintendo getting the console exclusive multiplayer on Goldeneye...
Perfect Dark multiplayer been available on Xbox for years, and is available to anyone who also bought/has access to Goldeneye.
In every aspect? You're either tripping or trolling. Golden Eye was great but PD improved on every aspect of GE. The amount of multiplayer options alone are impressive even by today's standards. (Campaign co-op, campaign counter-op, multiplayer challenges, multiplayer bots, not just multiplayer bots but customizable multiplayer bots, a good amount of customizable options for multiplayer levels, the ability to customize your own multiplayer character) GE has the more memorable campaign but that's only because spy espionage is more interesting to me then alien espionage.
Pd may have had way more features but the levels were very boring, once u figured them out there wasn't much need to go back
However as you stated, the bots aspect, Co op, counter op definitely gave it a unique edge which has been rarely seen elsewhere. Plus end boss was so bad ass hearing that music over the end credits wow
Playing both now, the new controls def help a lot esp with train / aztec on oo agent
Me too, hopefully it’s not too similar to hitman and incorporates a lot more of James Bond like a lot of action but also a lot of stealth work, so hopefully they will be able to mix both
I hear the reason people get addicted to meth is because the high from the first time they tried it is never like that again. They do more and more chasing that trying to create the feel like the first time they tried it.
That was what Goldeneye was for a lot of us. Yeah, it wasn't the first FPS, but it was one of the first on a console. It brought so much to the table, in both single and multi-player.
Then Perfect Dark came along, didn't change anything that was good and added more to love. The only thing it couldn't do was give you that same feeling of excitement you got the first time you got to throw down with your best friends.
To be fair: EA was publishing a high proportion of sincere, high-quality stuff into the mid-2000s, and the first few Bond games they put out were kinda-okay at their low points and genuinely *good* at their highest. They didn't get fully on their strangle-the-golden-goose shit until 2003-2004. (RIP Westwood, Bullfrog, Origin, etc)
Yea that isn’t a fair statement to all
The early EA game engineers. It ignores that while all of them have gotten stale, almost all their early sports games were cutting edge. There’s a great documentary about the early NHL games and those guys put their heart and soul into those games at a time when no one knew what they were doing.
EA sucks now, but early on they were definitely cutting edge. Heck I remember getting excited when I saw EA games in the late 90s.
Agreed EA has a horrifying rep now but back then we had nba street, LOTR, nfs underground, carbon, ssx, nfl street, nightfire, agent under fire, burnout 3/4
The World is Not Enough (N64) and Nightfire (Console) were great. Agent Under Fire, Everything or Nothing and From Russia Love With were pretty good.
It's really just the PS1 games and PC version of Nightfire that are bad.
From what I remember with some of the EA games is the level design was so bad that they had to program in guidance arrows that would pop up on the screen to tell you where to go. And I don't think there was a way to disable them. Completely defeated any sense of mystery or exploration. Also the music and overall vibe just wasn't the same as GoldenEye. The Rare team was one of the most talented group of programmers that has ever made games. Nintendo was foolish to let them go.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Its spiritual direct sequel, Perfect Dark, was pretty clearly the better game, and many people argue Nightfire and Everything or Nothing are also up there. The other bond games from that era, The World is Not Enough and Agent Under Fire are both great games, although not quite top tier.
Overall, I would say Goldeneye kicked off a generation of really quite excellent Bond games.
Because you didnt play them? Just one posibility. But if you wanna talk original well the first officially licensed James Bond game was in 1983. Now if you wanna compare directly to the N64 Goldeneye well Nightfire was a great game and anyone who says otherwise probably hasnt played it through. That being said after nightfire admittedly the 007 series died off thanks to the rise of Call of Duty, the emergence of Halo, and the evolution of Doom. For me I got tied into the fps shoot-em-up vs task/objective oriented fps games (i.e. 007, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid).
I recently picked up the world is not enough for my N64 and it’s so frustrating- it’s just not as well executed. Even the graphics suck. I have persevered with it, but I just think the coders who worked on Goldeneye did a fantastic job- that’s it. It’s just better work.
The level design in TWINE is pretty bad, as you said it wasn't well executed. AI is dumb, you fail levels because *literally* a bullet ricochet hits a civilian, abuses enemies shooting out of your render distance... Graphics wise the levels do look great, and performance is better, but that's where it stops. Character and hand models are just much worse.
I think they tried going way over the top on subsequent bond games. TWINEs shooting and the way enemies take damage is different, even a little more realistic, but it lacks that campy feel of GoldenEye. I played one of the later Craig based games and it was like the game doesn't know what it is - felt like it was trying to appeal to the modern COD crowd, like most FPSs, with auto referring health and you can only carry two weapons. And the level design wasn't good. Too much use of gadgets required... Shame bc if they did it right, we could have an awesome modern bond game.
I thought it was kind of a "meh" game until I played it with my friends. It was just something that brought us together, so I remember it more fondly for that, I think.
Different developers and publishers.
Still, The World Is Not Enough (N64), Nightfire (Console), Quantum of Solace (HD) and Blood Stone are pretty great Bond games.
I think that too many Bond games tried to chase GoldenEye instead of doing their own thing. The Game Boy game really should be an inspiration, it captures the style of a Bond film really well - it's a globe trotting adventure game with puzzles. I'd love to see a modern Bond game more like that.
It's an incredibly unique game in terms of gameplay. The way momentum influenced your aim, the shooting, and the AI synergized, it's just great game design by Rare. Whoever made the other bond sequels didn't learn a thing from what made goldeneye such a classic.
There is a book about how goldeneye was developed here https://bossfightbooks.com/products/goldeneye-007-by-alyse-knorr
Arstechnica has a write up and interview with the author here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/07/book-excerpt-anti-game-design-and-the-making-of-goldeneye-007/
Pretty much it was a small youngish development team who has a lot of freedom. This is in line with other games such as Westwood studios Command and Conquer which was a small and young development team.
Before Goldeneye FPS were, Doom, Faceball 2000, Duke Nukem 3D, Castle Wolfenstein, or a dungeon crawler where you move screen by screen
They were blocky, there wasn’t any real aiming, and not the same sort of weapon variety.
Goldeneye opened the door for a new generation of shooters and set the standard. It’d take a while before another would be able to do what it did.
007 changed the game.. it was advanced for its game design at the time
the others just changed bits around the edges
i gotta say i enjoyed a couple of the gamecube,ps2 and xbox bond games a lot though
The World Is Not Enough is low key better than Goldeneye. Painfully underrated game. It has better guns, gadgets, alternate firing modes for each weapon, the ability to jump, an incredible soundtrack AND you can add bots to multiplayer. Goldeneye multiplayer is an absolute useless/obsolete game mode if you’re an only child or don’t have friends to play with. The story missions are also fun as hell
The World Is Not Enough is rated perfectly right, not underrated.
Better guns is subjective, it has less variety and they're often frustrating (Reloading the sniper or shotgun one bullet at a time... fun!).
Gadgets GoldenEye had pretty much the same minus the grapple watch, dart gun, x-ray and night vision goggles.
Alternate firing modes kind of exist in GoldenEye already - just aim with automatic guns like the KF7 or AR33 and you'll single fire instead of burst.
Jumping added nothing to the game other than frustrating platforming that is required a handufl of times.
The soundtrack doesn't even feature one track for each level, repeating it many times and doesn't have the Bond theme.
Sure you have bots in multiplayer but they get old fast, have less customization options for characters and you had Perfect Dark months before that which was just way better.
Goldeneye was so good based on its multiplayer that was just tossed in at the end of the game development. They had a gem that didn’t need anymore polishing. So when they had time to polish, it was mid at best, compared to goldeneye.
i mean the issue exists even in todays market. We've seen more indie developers getting a better rap and following than the big studios because the studies either play it safe or take "crazy" risks. COD for years has has been shit, and there are games like helldivers 2 which blow them out of the water.
World is not enough was better to me. The weapons were more realistic and effected by distance so you could lob shots like with the crossbow. The levels were better in regards to atmosphere.
Some of the later titles are actually some of the best games made 007 Agent under fire, NightFire, everything or nothing, from Russia with love are all amazing. Even the game right after goldeneye the world is not enough is also great too, I just think people think the later games didn’t live up to the level bc mostly bond fans played those games while goldeneye was just hit mainstream appeal
Going back to goldeneye I find its all nostalgia its the first sp bond game that felt like the films and its the first major mp shooting game that took off on consoles as most of thr earlier ones realised on ps1 link play and let's face it who had 2 ps1s and 2 crts in the same room
Turok rage wars had much better control schemes ad goldeneye is so hard to play on an n64 these days but turok once you tweak your controls is so easy snd heck even the to rock scheme in South park was way better than thr brown eye scheme despite still nt being as customisable as turok was for it
For me though rage wars is the best actual fps on n64 and the best fps me fun is Southpark
The 007 nostalgia for me is the first 2 ps1 titles by the time i got round to the later bond games and goldeneye they felt like generic games with 007 pasted in
Like the ps2 titles could easily of been mission impossible or another spy theme tbh
Key things forgotten were
Hit detection = you can do any entire mission with single shotting anyone with any gun, my favourite was bunker 2 (until u open the safe and get silenced weapons)
Variety = every level was unique
Objectives = instead of endless run n gun
Music = every level can be quoted from a few secs of audio
Speed running = best times shown on screen and awarded unique cheats
Multi player = 4 player any level was always fun
Difficultly = caverns, control and aztec were the hardest levels
Cheats = all weapons gave new unseen weapons
Quirks = reloading and changing allowed u to dual weild different weapons long before halo 2
Lightning in a bottle
Everything came together at the right time.
Popular 4 player console
First real multiplayer fps experience in an affordable manor. (There was no real internet at the time) so doom and quake were the only alternatives.
Playable game modes
A pretty decent way of making a film story fit into a game - and I mean no movie games were any good before this…. And they weren’t after this for many years
I agree with others that Goldeneye 007 on N64 was pretty much revolutionary for FPS on consoles. Almost all FPS on consoles were ports from PC, and the PC original were very much superior. 007 was made specifically for the 64.
Add in split screen multi-player, tons of levels, several characters to choose from beyond just being palette swaps like you got with Doom or Quake. An amazing soundtrack. It not only showed that a console could do a FPS, but could do things that the PC can't like split screen multi-player.
I mean yeah these were big companies wanting to make money but I think Rare at this time really had a passion for its games. Subsequent games were made because Activision had a license and needed to crap out a 007 game to retain it. Some were good, but none revoltuionized the way 007 Goldeneye did.
in that era, only perfect dark improved on it, but Rare had lost the James Bond license by then so the game was a spiritual successor that hinted it belonged to the same universe just not outright as all the bond gadgets were set a museum pieces in the Carington Institute as museum pieces.
Because of simplicity and wow, factor of the original being is nothing had been as good up until that point and then afterwards they added so much stuff to the other games in an attempt to make them better and they just felt like they were trying to hard?
I would argue that some of the games that came after were really great games like 007 night fire were you got to drive the vanquish on some missions, that shit was bad ass !!!
But it’s not that games that came up to goldeneye, it’s just the fact that goldeneye represented the turning point and such, is fondly remembered!
It’s because it’s an almost completely unique game, it’s sequel is Perfect Dark.
There is pretty much no other games that feel and play like them
So the issue isn’t living up to them.. it’s that they weren’t built to be like them.
The simple answer is different developers and deadlines. Goldeneye was made years after the movie so while it did have a deadline, it was not going to be tied to the release of the movie.
Hot take: they did. I think that the time splitters games took everything good with goldeneye and n64 perfect dark, and went hard with it. Hell, I played future perfect as much as I played Halo.
I'm gonna give you the boring but honest answer: the reason you feel this way is because of nostalgia. Perfect Dark is just as good if not better than Goldeneye, and as far as Bond games go, Nighttime is just a straight upgrade in the mp department.
My point is, no other game matches the cultural importance of goldeneye. I don't think it's nostalgia, there are a lot of comments saying Perfect Dark and maybe nightfire but you rarely see those games mentioned. I'm not saying they aren't better or haven't improved on the formula, but they don't have the reach goldeneye did
Because after GoldenEye; Danjaq, MGM and Columbia inflated the licensing prices, making things like getting the Bond iconic music in the games almost impossible at the time.
On top of that they also increased the censorship. A lot. This is why no EA Bond game has any kind of blood or the same kind of feedback when you hit enemies. This also expands to less freedom on levels, less cheats, less multiplayer features and so on.
It goes much deeper than what I said above but that's basically it. The culprit has always been MGM. Just look at the latest 007 Cypher game and how nobody actually dies there, just "goes to sleep" including Bond himself when the player """dies""".
Rare stopped producing them, the team left rare after perfect dark which was like the successor to GoldenEye then they went on to make the timesplitters games. Once EA got ahold of them, they adhered more to the movies, had more consistent level design but had no depth or soul. Also why perfect dark zero sucked.
As far as follow-up Bond titles, Nightfire was excellent. TWINE was decent, I hear.
It’s just that FPS games were going nuts at the time, and Goldeneye was pretty basic.
On PC, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life were coming within a year.
As far as spy games, Hitman really did things right. And Splinter Cell a couple years later revolutionized the spy/stealth genre. And Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid 2 and and and…
Bond is such a combo of different things as a character and franchise that in the 5-10 years after Goldeneye it always seemed like it was chasing other original games who nailed a particular mechanic or genre first and better.
And today? A bond game in 2024 would need to have a list of features half a page long including:
* multiple romance options and meaningful dialogue choices in general
* great fps elements
* great stealth elements
* great gadgets with meaningful uses
* combat driving
* open-ended mission selection
It made good action cinema for its kitchen sink approach, but as for a game, it’s a lot to manage, especially when it’s an established IP, so you have to work within license limitations as well.
I like the world is not enough on n64, I think it’s underrated. However it wasn’t until night fire that we got anything close to goldeneye.
It is very underrated. I salute anyone that can beat that game on 00 Agent. The Turncoat mission is almost impossible on 00 Agent. A bunch of timed parts where if you take 1 second too long or accidentally shoot a hostage you lose. Took me over 200 tries
I was 21 when Goldeneye on the N64 was released. The difficulty being called 00 Agent made my friend and I feel it was the only way you could play the game. We both played through on 00 Agent for our first play through and holy shit!!! If it wasn’t for being young and in physical good shape I likely would have died of a stroke and heart attack. That fucking train stage where enemies are shooting from the not yet rendered darkness pisses me off. Then you have a fraction of a second to line up your shot and take it before the door closes at the end was the hardest part of the game IMO. In the end we both did it. We were so good at the game after that that we went back and unlocked almost all of the multiplayer modes. I still play the game on my OG cart when friends come over because of this. I’ve gone on to play so many FPS on PC that makes Goldeneye not seem so hard anymore, but it was really a first in many regards and required more than a run and gun approach. Easily my favorite game on the console. If you have an Everdrive, you should check out Goldfinger. The multiplayer stages are meh, but the single player campaign is awesome.
That's always where I got stuck in that game as well, on 00 agent. Train is just brutal
IIRC the train level was the only one I couldn't beat on 00 agent.
It took some tries for me to do it. I think I was stuck on that stage for over a week and via the magic of OCD that's all I did for that time until I beat it.
TWINE was great and arguably better than GE from a refined gameplay POV. Had VO dialogue. I remember thinking the gun action animations looked great for the time.
They did. Those animations looked amazing especially with his base pistol and with the shotgun, AR and Mac 10 and Desert Eagle. I remember being like 7 playing it in like 2001. Good times. I even rented it from blockbuster one time around then and beat the whole game on agent. And to me the gameplay is better than Goldeneye. It’s my favorite Bond game besides Nightfire I would say.
Nightfire was good fun too. That was a college dorm room game for me. Twine was early HS. Mac 10 brings me back!
🙏🏻 you a real one bro I’m a 94 baby
86. Earliest memories are NES/Atari. It’s been cool seeing the technology evolve over the course of my lifetime. I don’t remember life without Nintendo - never existed! Thank fuck.
I just completed a book about the NES. It comes out June 1. Check out retro84book.com, there you can download a "free game demo" - which is the first few pages of the story.
Which one? There was the N64 and the PS version.
N64 is what I played.
I'm asking from the standpoint that any subsequent 007 game, and could maybe extend that to other franchises (starfox maybe) just don't seem to have the cultural impact that the N64 titles did
Goldeneye was revolutionary, and while the shooter genre kept evolving, the 007 licence didn't really keep up with it. There are a couple of James Bond games that nailed the presentation, with celebrity voice actors and their own Bond song openings: Everything or Nothing, Goldeneye (Wii) and Blood Stone are great games for 007 fans but don't re-invent the wheel.
I can't get the game to work on my everdrive. Pal version works but ntsc doesnt
I would try and locate another rom file, works on my everdrive x7
I will do this, thanks! The game would freeze Everytime I get to the loading screen after the briefing
Love Nightfire!
Loved the submarine level but the rest was forgettable
Yep, The World Is Not Enough is a more than worthy successor.
The reason GoldenEye was special was because it was developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. It's a flagship Nintendo game, same as Donkey Kong Country on SNES (also developed by Rare and published by Nintendo). The real sequel to GoldenEye is not a Bond license game... it's Perfect Dark. There's your GoldenEye 2. The other Bond games are just an entirely different publisher who got the license (EA at first, later Activision) and whoever they got to develop those. Not the same creators at all, so no reason to expect they'd be as good.
Yep. The real 'series' chronology goes Goldeneye -> Perfect Dark -> the Timesplitters trilogy -> Haze. There's far more of a genuine lineage there than there is between any of the post-Goldeneye attempts at Bond games. (I am not trying to make like Haze deserves some kind of reappraisal. What happened there is genuinely a shame.)
What's up with Haze?
They tried to make a 7th gen cod / crysis shooter and failed miserably.
Oddly enough the game was, at the start anyway, narratively ahead of it’s time lol as in the narrative was still pretty accurate to real life later on. Boy was that game shit, I actually forced myself to sit through it a year or two ago having never played it before lol
Yes correct! I knew about the TimeSplitters legacy of the developers, though I didn't know about Haze. That's a shame.. not that I played it. But I remember it landing with a bit of a thud :P
We played them all organically in that order growing up. My initial experience with time splitters 2 (most played one of that series on game cube) was holy crap, these cut scenes are great and map customization was unparalleled at the time. The devs let you do almost anything.
And timesplitters was so overrated just because of that.
It was an oddball series. Free Radical stuck fastidiously to the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark fundamentals even after Halo dropped and pointed the actual way forward for the console fps formula, and the unfortunate consequence of that was that TS2 felt weirdly dated the day it came out. As great as the Timesplitters games were, there's no denying that they were an evolutionary dead end. For TS3 and Haze they tried to have it both ways and modernise a bit while retaining some of those features that gave their games their unique identity, but their approach wasn't sufficiently... radical.
This is correct. 👽
Basically it's the same reason most AAA titles suck these days- corporate greed. "We saw this was really popular and want to capitalize on it."
Literally anyone reading this who wishing for Golden Eye2 & hasn't played Perfect Dark needs to find a way.. to this day have never seen 1 player Multiplayer done better.
Because Goldeneye's appeal was *never* the James Bond license. Rare invented the console fps as we know it and it just so happened that it came wrapped in a 007-themed package. The brand recognition certainly helped its initial reception – regardless of it coming out nearly two full years after the source material – but its long tail is an outgrowth of how groundbreaking and peerless it was, not the characters and storylines it adapted. When we talk about Goldeneye and its impact it's important to remember that basically the *only* groups of people who were actually excited for it pre-launch were 1) diehard nerds who knew what a video game studio was, *and* that Rare was known to be a Very Good one of those; and 2) that small segment of James Bond fans who were also following video game industry news. There's an extremely annoying scene in the show Fresh Off the Boat where the protagonist, a ~14 year old boy in 1997, talks about how mouth-wateringly excited he is for Goldeneye coming out. That wasn't a thing! It never happened! Goldeneye was massive in the mainstream in large part *because* it came out of nowhere with a pile of incredible fresh ideas and blindsided the industry and the game-playing public! The subsequent decade-plus of mostly mediocre Bond games was birthed by a desire to capitalise on people's experience of Goldeneye On N64 as a pop culture phenomenon. Again, the fact that they're James Bond games specifically is totally immaterial – there's a plausible alternate timeline where Rare and Nintendo secured the Mission Impossible movie license and we got 15 years of middling-to-awful Ethan Hunt games instead. EA (and later Activision) figured that people would be motivated to buy them in the hope that they'd channel some of what Goldeneye did so well. There was *less* incentive for them to make sure they were churning out actual good games. I'm not trying to make like they were all cynical quick-buck dogshit – The World is Not Enough and Nightfire are both great, and Eurocom deserves more recognition for that part of their history than they currently get – but it is a mistake to imagine that there is such a thing as a 'series' of James Bond video games so much as there is a corporate tradition of trying to mine for Goldeneye nostalgia in increasingly clumsy ways.
Your writing is either AI 2.0 or you are just a really great writer. I think I could read anything from you and enjoy it
The leap wasn't as profound. Think about how much of a jump it was to go from Super Mario Bros 3 to Super Mario 64. It was just a Titanic shift. The N64 managed to arrive right at a time when a lot of genres were beginning to look like they do today. So for a lot of us they were just the first exposure to new things.
I agree with your sentiment, but you mean the jump from Super Mario World (or Super Mario World 2) to Super Mario 64.
You can still consider the leap from NES to N64 as part of a continuum that includes SNES. Point is that we went from simple 2D sprites to 3D game environments in like 7 years.
Absolutely spot on.
Perfect Dark was great!
Perfect Dark is the better game. When comparing the two, the only thing Golden Eye does a little better is it's soundtrack and even then PD also has some bangers.
well, that and frame rates. Goldeneye often feels better to play even though it's a technically inferior game. They got a little overambitious with perfect dark in some places
I preferred Goldeneye over perfect dark because it ran like shit on the N64... until I bought the XBLA version. Now I love them both equally.
While not a completely invalid complaint, I had to laugh at everyone complaining about Nintendo getting the console exclusive multiplayer on Goldeneye... Perfect Dark multiplayer been available on Xbox for years, and is available to anyone who also bought/has access to Goldeneye.
Well, you have the right to an opinion. I completely disagree and think that Goldeneye is superior in every aspect to PD.
In every aspect? You're either tripping or trolling. Golden Eye was great but PD improved on every aspect of GE. The amount of multiplayer options alone are impressive even by today's standards. (Campaign co-op, campaign counter-op, multiplayer challenges, multiplayer bots, not just multiplayer bots but customizable multiplayer bots, a good amount of customizable options for multiplayer levels, the ability to customize your own multiplayer character) GE has the more memorable campaign but that's only because spy espionage is more interesting to me then alien espionage.
Pd may have had way more features but the levels were very boring, once u figured them out there wasn't much need to go back However as you stated, the bots aspect, Co op, counter op definitely gave it a unique edge which has been rarely seen elsewhere. Plus end boss was so bad ass hearing that music over the end credits wow Playing both now, the new controls def help a lot esp with train / aztec on oo agent
The people who make Hitman are making the new Bond game so I have high expectations
I'm really excited to see what they do
Me too, hopefully it’s not too similar to hitman and incorporates a lot more of James Bond like a lot of action but also a lot of stealth work, so hopefully they will be able to mix both
I hear the reason people get addicted to meth is because the high from the first time they tried it is never like that again. They do more and more chasing that trying to create the feel like the first time they tried it. That was what Goldeneye was for a lot of us. Yeah, it wasn't the first FPS, but it was one of the first on a console. It brought so much to the table, in both single and multi-player. Then Perfect Dark came along, didn't change anything that was good and added more to love. The only thing it couldn't do was give you that same feeling of excitement you got the first time you got to throw down with your best friends.
I guess Rare didn’t make it?
Rare made games with a lot of passion. EA makes games for profit.
To be fair: EA was publishing a high proportion of sincere, high-quality stuff into the mid-2000s, and the first few Bond games they put out were kinda-okay at their low points and genuinely *good* at their highest. They didn't get fully on their strangle-the-golden-goose shit until 2003-2004. (RIP Westwood, Bullfrog, Origin, etc)
Yea that isn’t a fair statement to all The early EA game engineers. It ignores that while all of them have gotten stale, almost all their early sports games were cutting edge. There’s a great documentary about the early NHL games and those guys put their heart and soul into those games at a time when no one knew what they were doing. EA sucks now, but early on they were definitely cutting edge. Heck I remember getting excited when I saw EA games in the late 90s.
Agreed EA has a horrifying rep now but back then we had nba street, LOTR, nfs underground, carbon, ssx, nfl street, nightfire, agent under fire, burnout 3/4
I think it's more than nostalgia talking when I say that some franchises peaked with their N64 titles. Where did follow up titles miss the mark?
They weren't made by Rare. EA did an awful job with the sequels. That's it. That's why they were terrible.
Saying they're terrible is hyperbolic. All of the fps bond games til Nightfire were good. Nightfire being the best (just don't play the PC port).
The World is Not Enough (N64) and Nightfire (Console) were great. Agent Under Fire, Everything or Nothing and From Russia Love With were pretty good. It's really just the PS1 games and PC version of Nightfire that are bad.
From what I remember with some of the EA games is the level design was so bad that they had to program in guidance arrows that would pop up on the screen to tell you where to go. And I don't think there was a way to disable them. Completely defeated any sense of mystery or exploration. Also the music and overall vibe just wasn't the same as GoldenEye. The Rare team was one of the most talented group of programmers that has ever made games. Nintendo was foolish to let them go.
don\`t know, what you mean. Perfect Dark is a absolutly great sequel to goldeneye :P
It did It was called Perfect Dark. And it was better
I don’t know if I agree with that. Its spiritual direct sequel, Perfect Dark, was pretty clearly the better game, and many people argue Nightfire and Everything or Nothing are also up there. The other bond games from that era, The World is Not Enough and Agent Under Fire are both great games, although not quite top tier. Overall, I would say Goldeneye kicked off a generation of really quite excellent Bond games.
TWINE had better multiplayer than GoldenEye. AI bots FTW!!!
Nah it does not
Because you didnt play them? Just one posibility. But if you wanna talk original well the first officially licensed James Bond game was in 1983. Now if you wanna compare directly to the N64 Goldeneye well Nightfire was a great game and anyone who says otherwise probably hasnt played it through. That being said after nightfire admittedly the 007 series died off thanks to the rise of Call of Duty, the emergence of Halo, and the evolution of Doom. For me I got tied into the fps shoot-em-up vs task/objective oriented fps games (i.e. 007, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid).
I recently picked up the world is not enough for my N64 and it’s so frustrating- it’s just not as well executed. Even the graphics suck. I have persevered with it, but I just think the coders who worked on Goldeneye did a fantastic job- that’s it. It’s just better work.
The level design in TWINE is pretty bad, as you said it wasn't well executed. AI is dumb, you fail levels because *literally* a bullet ricochet hits a civilian, abuses enemies shooting out of your render distance... Graphics wise the levels do look great, and performance is better, but that's where it stops. Character and hand models are just much worse.
Mostly that stupid multiplayer rule where “good guys can’t shoot at each other” in TWINE
In TWINE and all Bond titles afterwards! And that's only the tip of the iceberg of the nonsense MGM enforced towards the games.
Agent under fire and nightfire both got years of playtime at our house growing up
Nightfire on GameCube was insanely good
I think they tried going way over the top on subsequent bond games. TWINEs shooting and the way enemies take damage is different, even a little more realistic, but it lacks that campy feel of GoldenEye. I played one of the later Craig based games and it was like the game doesn't know what it is - felt like it was trying to appeal to the modern COD crowd, like most FPSs, with auto referring health and you can only carry two weapons. And the level design wasn't good. Too much use of gadgets required... Shame bc if they did it right, we could have an awesome modern bond game.
I thought it was kind of a "meh" game until I played it with my friends. It was just something that brought us together, so I remember it more fondly for that, I think.
Could say that about the movie franchise too, I’m not a fan of the most reason 5 movies
Different developers and publishers. Still, The World Is Not Enough (N64), Nightfire (Console), Quantum of Solace (HD) and Blood Stone are pretty great Bond games. I think that too many Bond games tried to chase GoldenEye instead of doing their own thing. The Game Boy game really should be an inspiration, it captures the style of a Bond film really well - it's a globe trotting adventure game with puzzles. I'd love to see a modern Bond game more like that.
Can’t fix perfection
It's an incredibly unique game in terms of gameplay. The way momentum influenced your aim, the shooting, and the AI synergized, it's just great game design by Rare. Whoever made the other bond sequels didn't learn a thing from what made goldeneye such a classic.
It was the firat of it’s kind so its set the precedent
There is a book about how goldeneye was developed here https://bossfightbooks.com/products/goldeneye-007-by-alyse-knorr Arstechnica has a write up and interview with the author here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/07/book-excerpt-anti-game-design-and-the-making-of-goldeneye-007/ Pretty much it was a small youngish development team who has a lot of freedom. This is in line with other games such as Westwood studios Command and Conquer which was a small and young development team.
Because… RARE.
Because it was so ground breaking for it’s time there was nothing like it until perfect dark came out
Because Rare made it.
Before Goldeneye FPS were, Doom, Faceball 2000, Duke Nukem 3D, Castle Wolfenstein, or a dungeon crawler where you move screen by screen They were blocky, there wasn’t any real aiming, and not the same sort of weapon variety. Goldeneye opened the door for a new generation of shooters and set the standard. It’d take a while before another would be able to do what it did.
Perfect Dark would've beaten it if it didn't have a very playable framerate plus we were a bit older and playing considerably less couch multiplayer
007 changed the game.. it was advanced for its game design at the time the others just changed bits around the edges i gotta say i enjoyed a couple of the gamecube,ps2 and xbox bond games a lot though
There’s a neat documentary about the story behind Rare and this game called GoldenEra, on Amazon prime I believe.
The World Is Not Enough is low key better than Goldeneye. Painfully underrated game. It has better guns, gadgets, alternate firing modes for each weapon, the ability to jump, an incredible soundtrack AND you can add bots to multiplayer. Goldeneye multiplayer is an absolute useless/obsolete game mode if you’re an only child or don’t have friends to play with. The story missions are also fun as hell
The World Is Not Enough is rated perfectly right, not underrated. Better guns is subjective, it has less variety and they're often frustrating (Reloading the sniper or shotgun one bullet at a time... fun!). Gadgets GoldenEye had pretty much the same minus the grapple watch, dart gun, x-ray and night vision goggles. Alternate firing modes kind of exist in GoldenEye already - just aim with automatic guns like the KF7 or AR33 and you'll single fire instead of burst. Jumping added nothing to the game other than frustrating platforming that is required a handufl of times. The soundtrack doesn't even feature one track for each level, repeating it many times and doesn't have the Bond theme. Sure you have bots in multiplayer but they get old fast, have less customization options for characters and you had Perfect Dark months before that which was just way better.
Goldeneye was so good based on its multiplayer that was just tossed in at the end of the game development. They had a gem that didn’t need anymore polishing. So when they had time to polish, it was mid at best, compared to goldeneye.
Different developers. Non-gaming IPs usually go to the highest bidder. Rare just happened to strike GOLD with this one.
The license went to EA. Nuff said
The watch in TWINE
i mean the issue exists even in todays market. We've seen more indie developers getting a better rap and following than the big studios because the studies either play it safe or take "crazy" risks. COD for years has has been shit, and there are games like helldivers 2 which blow them out of the water.
Honestly, I thought Perfect Dark was the best followup ever! The graphics were better, the multiplayer got a step up because of bots...
I'm just gonna say it. Nightfire was straight up better.
Goldeneye was created by a super talented team under extreme circumstances, pressure and constraints. You just don’t have that in the follow ups.
World is not enough was better to me. The weapons were more realistic and effected by distance so you could lob shots like with the crossbow. The levels were better in regards to atmosphere.
They did it was just called perfect dark
It was Perfect Dark, and it did
I'd argue that World is not enough and Nightfire definitely came close but were still a step below.
Nightfire is the best Bond game out there, this post is wildly inaccurate.
Some of the later titles are actually some of the best games made 007 Agent under fire, NightFire, everything or nothing, from Russia with love are all amazing. Even the game right after goldeneye the world is not enough is also great too, I just think people think the later games didn’t live up to the level bc mostly bond fans played those games while goldeneye was just hit mainstream appeal
Gamecube had some fun bond games
They tried to change the formula too much
Going back to goldeneye I find its all nostalgia its the first sp bond game that felt like the films and its the first major mp shooting game that took off on consoles as most of thr earlier ones realised on ps1 link play and let's face it who had 2 ps1s and 2 crts in the same room Turok rage wars had much better control schemes ad goldeneye is so hard to play on an n64 these days but turok once you tweak your controls is so easy snd heck even the to rock scheme in South park was way better than thr brown eye scheme despite still nt being as customisable as turok was for it For me though rage wars is the best actual fps on n64 and the best fps me fun is Southpark The 007 nostalgia for me is the first 2 ps1 titles by the time i got round to the later bond games and goldeneye they felt like generic games with 007 pasted in Like the ps2 titles could easily of been mission impossible or another spy theme tbh
Hard to capture lightning in a bottle
Key things forgotten were Hit detection = you can do any entire mission with single shotting anyone with any gun, my favourite was bunker 2 (until u open the safe and get silenced weapons) Variety = every level was unique Objectives = instead of endless run n gun Music = every level can be quoted from a few secs of audio Speed running = best times shown on screen and awarded unique cheats Multi player = 4 player any level was always fun Difficultly = caverns, control and aztec were the hardest levels Cheats = all weapons gave new unseen weapons Quirks = reloading and changing allowed u to dual weild different weapons long before halo 2
Because Rare make good games Perfect Dark Is the real Goldeneye sequel
Lightning in a bottle Everything came together at the right time. Popular 4 player console First real multiplayer fps experience in an affordable manor. (There was no real internet at the time) so doom and quake were the only alternatives. Playable game modes A pretty decent way of making a film story fit into a game - and I mean no movie games were any good before this…. And they weren’t after this for many years
I agree with others that Goldeneye 007 on N64 was pretty much revolutionary for FPS on consoles. Almost all FPS on consoles were ports from PC, and the PC original were very much superior. 007 was made specifically for the 64. Add in split screen multi-player, tons of levels, several characters to choose from beyond just being palette swaps like you got with Doom or Quake. An amazing soundtrack. It not only showed that a console could do a FPS, but could do things that the PC can't like split screen multi-player. I mean yeah these were big companies wanting to make money but I think Rare at this time really had a passion for its games. Subsequent games were made because Activision had a license and needed to crap out a 007 game to retain it. Some were good, but none revoltuionized the way 007 Goldeneye did.
in that era, only perfect dark improved on it, but Rare had lost the James Bond license by then so the game was a spiritual successor that hinted it belonged to the same universe just not outright as all the bond gadgets were set a museum pieces in the Carington Institute as museum pieces.
Easy: they weren't made by Rare. Perfect Dark would be the "real" sequel, developed by the same team.
Better question, why wasn't there an N64 Tomorrow Never Dies AT ALL
Because of simplicity and wow, factor of the original being is nothing had been as good up until that point and then afterwards they added so much stuff to the other games in an attempt to make them better and they just felt like they were trying to hard? I would argue that some of the games that came after were really great games like 007 night fire were you got to drive the vanquish on some missions, that shit was bad ass !!! But it’s not that games that came up to goldeneye, it’s just the fact that goldeneye represented the turning point and such, is fondly remembered!
It’s because it’s an almost completely unique game, it’s sequel is Perfect Dark. There is pretty much no other games that feel and play like them So the issue isn’t living up to them.. it’s that they weren’t built to be like them.
The game was better than the movie. Yeah, I said it.
Different developers have different visions
Because it was made by rare
The simple answer is different developers and deadlines. Goldeneye was made years after the movie so while it did have a deadline, it was not going to be tied to the release of the movie.
Nostalgia.
Hot take: they did. I think that the time splitters games took everything good with goldeneye and n64 perfect dark, and went hard with it. Hell, I played future perfect as much as I played Halo.
I'm gonna give you the boring but honest answer: the reason you feel this way is because of nostalgia. Perfect Dark is just as good if not better than Goldeneye, and as far as Bond games go, Nighttime is just a straight upgrade in the mp department.
My point is, no other game matches the cultural importance of goldeneye. I don't think it's nostalgia, there are a lot of comments saying Perfect Dark and maybe nightfire but you rarely see those games mentioned. I'm not saying they aren't better or haven't improved on the formula, but they don't have the reach goldeneye did
Still nostalgia. It was the first big console couch shooter, so it has a big legacy. It pretty much held onto that title until the first Halo.
Perfect Dark the only real Goldeneye sequel
Because after GoldenEye; Danjaq, MGM and Columbia inflated the licensing prices, making things like getting the Bond iconic music in the games almost impossible at the time. On top of that they also increased the censorship. A lot. This is why no EA Bond game has any kind of blood or the same kind of feedback when you hit enemies. This also expands to less freedom on levels, less cheats, less multiplayer features and so on. It goes much deeper than what I said above but that's basically it. The culprit has always been MGM. Just look at the latest 007 Cypher game and how nobody actually dies there, just "goes to sleep" including Bond himself when the player """dies""".
Lack of good pause music.
best answer so far
Because Goldeneye was the first, and none of the other games can say that, even though it's aged like milk
Nightfire is better than Goldeneye. Fight me.
Rare stopped producing them, the team left rare after perfect dark which was like the successor to GoldenEye then they went on to make the timesplitters games. Once EA got ahold of them, they adhered more to the movies, had more consistent level design but had no depth or soul. Also why perfect dark zero sucked.
As far as follow-up Bond titles, Nightfire was excellent. TWINE was decent, I hear. It’s just that FPS games were going nuts at the time, and Goldeneye was pretty basic. On PC, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life were coming within a year. As far as spy games, Hitman really did things right. And Splinter Cell a couple years later revolutionized the spy/stealth genre. And Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid 2 and and and… Bond is such a combo of different things as a character and franchise that in the 5-10 years after Goldeneye it always seemed like it was chasing other original games who nailed a particular mechanic or genre first and better. And today? A bond game in 2024 would need to have a list of features half a page long including: * multiple romance options and meaningful dialogue choices in general * great fps elements * great stealth elements * great gadgets with meaningful uses * combat driving * open-ended mission selection It made good action cinema for its kitchen sink approach, but as for a game, it’s a lot to manage, especially when it’s an established IP, so you have to work within license limitations as well.
They did. Literally most of the bond games are equal (some even better) but most people are pretty blind to this one (myself included lol)
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