Take off the rose colored glasses people.
If you read about Goldeneye on the internet long enough you'll find that the majority of people agree that God came down to Mount Sinai and handed the game to Moses.
Everyone loves this game. Everyone agrees that this is one of the best games ever made. Everyone thinks this games STILL holds up to modern day games. Everyone but me.
Goldeneye was a great game. Goldeneye is not still a great game. Goldeneye is still an okay game.
I was very excited to replay Goldeneye, I enjoyed this game very much when it was released. I always enjoyed first person shooters and they were probably my favorite genre back in the day... but first person shooters rarely translated well to the consoles. Before Goldeneye the only FPS that I remember enjoying at all on the console was a Sega Genesis game called Zero Tolerance. I was pretty much raised as a PC gamer, until recently I would say that I was almost exclusively a PC gamer. So I had a wealth of great first person shooter games to choose from. So when I first heard about Goldeneye I was very intrigued about how good everyone seemed to think it was. And it was! Goldeneye was a very good console FPS, and was probably a lot of peoples introduction to the genre.
For it's time. Going back to it now I really started to notice Goldeneye's many flaws. The problem I have is that I'm not sure if the flaws are the games problem or if it's a technology problem. I could go on about how the graphics seems absolutely archaic now, but I know that it's not the games problem it's a technology problem. So I don't know if that's something I can legitimately complain about.
But there are things in it that turned what could have been a fun game from the past into a frustrating mess.
The AI is hit or miss in this game, I understand that this is most likely a technology problem, but there's times in the game where it feels more like a game issue. Mostly because there is times where the AI is spot on, in fact I will say throughout the game the AI is good for it time... but at other points it absolutely awful. There were times that I could stand five feet in front of a bad guy and he wouldn't even notice me... however there were also times when I'd be getting shot and had no idea where it was coming from because the guy was so far away the N64 couldn't even render out to that distance.
I thanked God for auto-aim in this game, that actual aiming in this game was just too non-responsive for it to be very helpful. The auto-aim really helped. Sometimes. It was hit or miss... quite literally. There were times where the auto-aim was spot on and worked wonderfully, but there where other times when I pointed my gun at the person and managed to shoot an entire magazine without even hitting the person.
This game also loved two of my most hated things in video games. Escort missions and timed missions. There weren't a lot of timed missions, but the few that there were turned out kind of annoying. There were however quite a few escort missions. I'm not sure who's genius idea it was to invent a mission in a game that paired you up with a horribly underpowered person that had a tendency to be killed, but I hate them. I hate them with all my heart. If Natalia got killed one more time in the control room mission I swear I was going to throw my controller through the TV set.
The objectives. Each mission you had certain objectives that you needed to complete before you would successfully finish that mission. The problem being that the objectives weren't always all that clear. There were times when you had to talk to a certain person, but unfortunately a lot of the people looked alike. There were several occasions where I would walk into a room and shoot the person I was supposed to talk to because he looked like a bad guy, hell occasionally the person I was supposed to talk to had a gun. You could also finish the missions without completing the objective, which would cause you to fail that mission. This wouldn't have been a problem except that occasionally to finish a mission all you needed to do was walk through a door. So if you hadn't finished all the objectives and you just happen to see a door that looks like all the other doors, that might be where the mission ends. It doesn't give you any warning about not finishing the objectives, it just lets you fail the mission making you start again from the very beginning. Which leads me to my next point...
Normally I hate save points, but ANYTHING would have been a nice. A save point, a checkpoint, something to save my progress in a level. There's nothing more frustrating than dying at the end of a mission and realizing you have to start all the way over from the first. There were levels that I had to play several times to beat, you know what's not all that awesome? Having to start at the beginning each time.
At the end of the day Goldeneye was fun and still holds a bit of nostalgia for me, but people really need to see it for what it is. Occasionally I'll hear people talk about how kids today should really play classic games before they start into games nowadays. We need to get over that. You know what? Some older games still are good, but for the most part the reason they're good is because you remember them being good. For someone who has never played them there's no sentimental value to them. To these people they're just old games that can't compete with new ones. Sure new games owe a lot to old games, if there wasn't Wolfenstein there might not have been Doom and without Doom they're might not have been Half Life, but that doesn't need you need to play Doom to appreciate Half Life. Was Goldeneye a great game in its time? Very much so, up until Halo was made it was probably one of the best console first person shooters. Is it still a great game that everyone should have to play? No. It just doesn't hold up to the test of time. Now it's a good game that is surrounded by way too much nostalgia.
Let the hate mail begin.
Squid.
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