Ah, Goldeneye. Where would console gaming be without you? One of the most visionary and revolutionary games, it brought multiplayer gaming to the unwashed console peasants, in a way that was affordable and easy for everyone to access. You just needed to have your own controller (preferably, if you didn’t have your own, then you could borrow the one controller that had buttons that kept sticking or the analog stick that always listed lazily to the left), and to turn up at the house where you were playing at the appointed time. Simple. No needing to drag monitors and PC towers around, or tons of wires and a whole sound system.
So it was with many fond memories of shouting at my friends about screenwatching, that they were cheating by using Oddjob whilst everyone else was normal sized, except for the one poor bloke who at times would be Jaws, on the assumption he’d find it easier to kill us all via headshots, the occasional amazing kill, and general franticness, that I plugged in my Goldeneye cartridge into my N64, and switched it on.
Bugger.
Blank screen.
You can usually tell how old someone is in a generation by how they respond to a system error. My generation, mid(ish)-to-late 20s, we take the cartridge out and blow on it. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one to slam the cartridge down hard after blowing a lung out of my chest to clear the dust, in the hopes that the shock would jolt it into life. I’m pretty sure that my younger brother is horrified by my treatment of my old games consoles, with them being blown on violently, and slammed around, and at times shaken to try and bring it to life, but here’s the thing. Unlike todays modern iterations, consoles back then were designed to be nigh-on indestructible. I’ve had 2 N64s over 13 years, which is not bad, considering I’ve gone through 3 Xbox 360s in as many years.
Thankfully, the blowing on the cartridge and inside the console did the trick, and the game launched up into its familiar spoof of the BBFC classification screen, entitled the Twycross Board of Game Classification, with James Bond as its president. Also said that it was for 1 to 4 players, in a style reminiscent of age ratings for films, which I may be the only person on the planet to find amusing, before launching into the spinning Nintendo and Rareware logos, before going into the classic Bond entrance of a white circle moving across the screen and then pulling back to reveal Bond, who then promptly shoots us dead. To my 9/10 year old self, this was the mutts nuts. Or whatever childhood replacement phrase I used back then.
Skipping past the title sequence, I discovered that my old savegames were still intact, thankfully having survived the years and movings from house to house, so I took great delight in loading up my 007 Save File, the one where I’d completed it entirely on 00 Agent setting, or Hard Mode for the younger members of the audience out there who can’t remember it/never played on it (and if not, why not?), and as a result, unlocked 007 mode, where I could fiddle with the settings for the enemies, making them either merciless goliaths who could snipe the wings off a butterfly from countries away whilst blindfolded and being shot in the back of the head repeatedly with, say, a fully automatic shotgun, or I could make them big pathetic wusses, being harmed by a mere glare, let alone being able to take a bullet to the kneecap, all the while firing wildly everywhere but at me.
Best not ask why this chap brought his assault rifle to the toilet...
Instead of making them seem like the Terminator is their younger, sissier brother who wets himself all the time, I opted to make the guards a bit harder than normal, but not too tough. Well, that was the plan at first, then I thought, bugger it, time to make them relentless death machines with steely red eyes, whilst I even the odds a bit by sticking on Invincibility and the All Guns and Infinite Ammo cheats, which were hard-earned by yours truly. Invincibility especially being hard-earned, involving a lot of skill and some luck, in that you need a randomly spawning character to be in a specific location in the Facility level, aka the place in the movie where Bond kills the guy on the toilet before sneaking around a bit, finding Sharpe, and then setting charges, before watching Boromir being shot in the head. To earn the cheat, you need to do a bit more than the movie shows, i.e. all the proper sneaking around and blowing stuff up and shooting guards in the head, in roughly less time than it took for Bond to place the charges and watch Christopher Da Silva be plugged at point blank range.
So, with all this in mind, I started the Dam level, and promptly leapt around the corner, running full pelt at the first guard, fists ready to slap him to death. He responded with an AK-47 burst that, had I not been invincible and chuckling away to myself at this point, would have happily reduced my head to something approaching Swiss cheese, or at the very least, made me a very unhappy bunny for the rest of the level. For you see, young ones, health doesn’t regenerate in this. Once you get shot, you lose health, and that’s it. You can get body armour along the way, but it only provides an extra layer for the enemies to shoot before it disappears, and you’re back down to non-regenerating health. You can’t go and hide behind some waist-high cover and wait for your wounds to magically get better, you have to press on and find the body armour or the end of the level, whichever comes first, to get back precious life before the next level.
This is usually a good sign. If both are gone, that's generally bad.
After slapping ineffectually at the guard for a while, I decided to mix and match my guns, ending up with an MP5K and a pistol, which I unloaded into the guard, managing to knock his hat off and adding some very touching red splashes all over his body, but ultimately, not doing much. The shotgun didn’t work very well either, nor did the rocket launcher (although he did go flying), and the tank cannon, seemingly fired from Bond’s forehead, did again send him skyward, he just merely picked himself up and carried on firing at me. So I pulled out the Golden Gun, and shot the bugger through the heart, where he dropped dead almost instantly at my feet.
I proceeded through the dam level, Golden Gunning everyone down as virtually every other weapon was useless (though sticking remote mines to peoples faces and watching them run together, before detonating them, was very satisfying, but more on this in the multiplayer section), until I reached the jump point, and promptly threw myself off the dam without an attached rope. Hardcore.
The rest of the singleplayer takes place over the rest of the film, following it mostly closely, apart from the jungle part, and indeed, the rest of the ending part. I don’t quite remember Trevelyan running from platform to platform, shouting out “No glib remarks? No pithy comebacks?” in the movie, before stopping to shoot Bond for a while, before deciding that he was going to run on to the next platform. Still, following Trevelyan around the cradle, shooting him at every opportunity is supremely satisfying to the psychopath in us.
Yes, you chase Trevelyan all over this bloody thing
Having picked out the best levels of the singleplayer to complete, I then turned my attention to multiplayer. I plugged in a second controller and had a wander around the levels, all the old classic levels that I once knew the layout like the back of my hand if not better, because I wanted a moment of quiet reflection. Each level was distinct, had its own unique features, chokepoints, sniper spots, frantic corridor battles and wide open areas. Nowadays, I can only remember the Temple, the Facility, the Complex and the Archives layouts, but those were the best levels anyway. Anyone who liked playing in the Caves was usually insane.
Later games, like the spiritual successor Perfect Dark, or the TimeSplitters series (ironically, both by Rare or ex-Rare employees), had a lot more customisation than Goldeneye in terms of multiplayer stuff. Perfect Dark had the ability to make your own “custom” character, where you could swap heads onto different bodies, so if you were so inclined to be ridiculously masochistic, you could put Elvis the aliens head on Mr Blonde’s body, making something akin to a tank moving through the hallways. TimeSplitters upped this by including a mapmaker in the latter two games, allowing you to make your own maps. But Goldeneye had something they both lacked. A soul, as it were. Perfect Dark’s multiplayer, whilst being in my opinion one of the best multiplayer experiences ever, just didn’t have the fun factor that Goldeneye does.
There’s nothing like making, say, James Bond, Alec Trevelyan, Jaws and Oddjob run around, say, the Facility, with the setting to Slappers Only!, and Licence to Kill for sheer ridiculous fun. Getting crotch-punched by Oddjob and promptly keeling over dead from it is one of the most ridiculous moments ever in gaming. And it’s fun. Having two teams of two, and sticking a remote mine to your mates face and ordering him to become an impromptu suicide bomber whilst you sit in the corner giggling like a hyena is funny. Cries of “Oi, stop watching my bit of the screen!” are commonplace in this situation.
This little bastard will end you
Yeah, the multiplayer bit of this review was tacked on the end. A bit like the multiplayer bit of the game itself, which was apparently started fairly late in development, and was made by one man sat in an office with the singleplayer code. Not bad at all for one of the most revolutionary console multiplayer games.
Despite the fact that the graphics haven’t aged terribly well, with the blood effects being a bit of a disappointment, the fun factor of Goldeneye is still there. Even if most multiplayer gun fights descend into a circling match whilst firing wildly. Just please don’t make me do Control on 00 Agent again. That wasn’t fun. Not at all.
