For the Love of...Goldeneye 007

It was hard for games developers in the 1990's to truly create an immersive FPS (First–Person Shooter) game environment.  One of the most important parts of any game that tries to accomplish this is the lead character that you play as.  The main protagonist has to be a well-established action hero and someone you would want to be in real life... and who better than James Bond?

The release of Goldeneye in 1997 was probably one of the most important titles to come out in the FPS scene.  It was, for many console gamers, the first proper venture into a fully blown FPS game.  Nothing like it had been seen before on a home console.  It had jaw dropping graphics, a full 3D world for you to explore and a mega arsenal of all your favourite weapons and gadgets from the Bond universe.

From the second you slap the cartridge (remember those?) into the console, you are greeted with some eerie music and then the coolest rendition of the Bond theme begins to play, making it the coolest Bond theme in the world.  In any case, this buildup gives you the impression that you are in for something special.

The thing that makes Goldeneye so special is that it was designed by a very small team of developers with little-to-no FPS background at all, but they knew what they had to do.  Originally, the game was going to be an 'on rails' shooter reminiscent of Time Crisis just without a light gun but Rare decided much later on that they would rather give the player total 3D freedom in the game; this, as you can imagine, was a good decision.

Something you may notice about the game is how closely it resembles the movie – in some places it is almost identical.  Honestly the attention to detail is phenomenal.  They made the levels based on research from the movie and its locations, and then populated the levels with objects, obstacles, objectives and, of course, that all important element...enemies.  Compared to most game/movie tie-ins, Goldeneye is unsurpassed in the amount of detail.

Not only do they let you play as one of the coolest secret agents of all time, but they also let you loose in the world of one of his specific outings, and, because it looks so much like the movie, you believe it.  The levels are so convincing that even bits that they added in to each level seem real enough to make you think they could have been in the movie.

So after you stop admiring the scenery and actually start playing the game, you'll soon find that the controls are absolutely perfect – the N64 controller is pretty much the perfect FPS game pad.  The shoot button is located under the controller which is held similar to the way a gun would be, the strafe controls are buttons and not analogue, which sounds crazy in this day and age when you would think you'd prefer perfect digital precision, but it just works.  Also, because the strafe buttons are separate from the control stick, which you use to move (unlike most current FPS games), you have complete and total control of where you want Bond to go; the feel of the game and they way Bond moves is sublime.

Probably the most important part of Goldeneye is its mutliplayer mode. It fully utilises the four controller ports on the N64. The levels are a mix of shortened versions of the single player maps and some unique maps specific for multi–play.  Many gamers have frittered away hours with three mates on a split screen deathmatch.

Prior to the release of Goldeneye, no one thought that split screen FPS could have worked since it went against everything early PC FPS games tried to do.  If anything, this setup just adds to the excitement of each game as it can become part of your strategy.  If you know the levels well enough you can tell where another player is on the map and either go and attack, or if you have just re–spawned with crap weapons, you know where to keep away from. You can think of ways to get to where the best weapons are without bumping into Oddjob with a rocket launcher.

Goldeneye set the bar for console FPS games and will be forever remembered as a classic.  It gave console gamers proper FPS action, hours of multiplayer madness and proved that you don't need a grand's worth of PC to have an exciting and memorable FPS experience.