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.