The Man with the Goldeneye (finally)

They left us waiting a while, but Nintendo and Microsoft finally released Goldeneye 007 for their respective consoles. The two releases come with some caveats... the Switch version requires Nintendo's online service and the expansion pack, you can't play the Xbox version online, and no matter where you play it, it's got what you might charitably call "vintage" graphics. Pierce Brosnan and most of the thugs you blow away look like stretched out Minecraft characters, which is disappointing considering that the project started with much higher ambitions.

007, now with polygons so sharp and angular
they could pierce your brosnan.
(image from Eurogamer)

Despite the creaky look, Goldeneye is surprisingly entertaining. I was never a big Nintendo 64 fan and I'm sure I never bought this particular game, but it's not hard to figure out why fans of the system were so fond of it. It plays well and sounds terrific, with a catchy remixed 007 theme in the first stage and a small but effective arsenal at your disposal. Pop the first Russian soldier with your trademark Walther PPK and you can pilfer his machine gun... climb to the top of the watchtower and kill the man standing guard there and you'll get his sniper rifle, invaluable for picking off enemies in the distance.

The whole affair feels like a caveman ancestor to TimeSplitters and its sequels... which makes sense, as members of Rare left the company to work on those games. The life bar is even the same, a segmented orange half circle that only appears when you've been injured or you've paused the action. Hey, why mess with what works?

First-person shooters aren't really my bag, but I played a few on the Saturn and Playstation (Alien Trilogy, Tunnel B-1, Powerslave), and Goldeneye strikes me as more advanced than any of them. The stages feel like tangible locations, in a way the flat texture mapped walls and floors of Doom don't. There are also fresh objectives in each stage that fit the espionage theme, instead of the boring status quo of hunting for keycards to crack open locked doors. 

I wouldn't recommend it over TimeSplitters: Future Perfect or even TimeSplitters 2, but compared to what console gamers were getting in the late 1990s, Goldeneye is the high watermark... the gold standard, if you will.

This is what the world is watching!

So yeah. I got a bunch of emulators running on my Xbox Series S, and it's suddenly gone from "exactly what I had before, just faster" to "exactly what I wanted in a game console." It plays Xbox games dating back to 2001! It plays pretty much the entire Xbox One library plus next generation games, whenever those happen! But thanks to some clever hackers, it also plays Dreamcast games, and Playstation 2 games, and PSP games, and possibly GameCube games when I can figure out how that works. So I'm pretty happy about that. I tend to be a pretty happy camper when I can play Capcom vs. SNK 2 without having to dig a twenty plus year old system out of the closet first.

So it's official, then.

The Xbox Series is the worst name ever given to a video game console. It is and shall remain unparalleled in its utter craptitude for many years to come. 

Look, I've been playing video games for a while, and I've heard all the dumb console names. The Gamate. The Wonderswan. The FM Towns Marty. The Pippen. None of these are brilliant, but the Xbox Series does the customer the added disservice of naming itself after a quantity of products, without telling you what that product is, or which product in the series it is.

Microsoft tried to give the Series an air of sophistication and enticing mystery, while just confusing the hell out of their target audience. It's like one of those damn Avant Garde commercials from the 1980s, which presents an avalanche of cryptic visual information to the viewer without explaining how any of it ties together. You think you're so clever, but my good sir, you've only outsmarted yourself!

You're going to have to give us just a bit more insight about your product than this, Microsoft. Can I buy a vowel or something? I just want to know what you're selling, because when you name it the Series, it could be anything in the upper-middle price range. An electric car! A premium razor blade! A whiskey that goes down smooth! But a video game system? In particular, the cheapest next generation video game system you can currently buy?

I don't get it. This thing plays Pac-Man and several varieties of game where the world's sexiest swamp creature battles a Frankenstein's monster, named Victor just to twist the nipples of pedants. This is not a damn Lexus.