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 Bond...James Bond |  Guard Towers |  Chemical Weapons Facility |
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 Mission Complete |  Golden Gun |  Russian Computer Station |
You know the name, you know the number. Ready to save the world again, James? Then get to it.
Ostensibly the world's first FPS game to prioritise stealth over Doom-style bulldozing, GoldenEye's claim to fame was in its 4-player simultaneous multiplayer mode. Kids who had played Doom over DWANGO in high school could take their N64's with them to college and host an informal "bring your own controller" tournament in their dorm room if they wanted. The single-player campaign is nothing to sneeze at, though— taking the player to all the iconic locations from the film, plus a few places Bond may not have originally been to, it was certainly the most successful movie license since Aladdin for Mega Drive or Super Star Wars on the Super NES. Like I said, there's a reason why your first gun has a silencer on it. Rather than simply turning off your brain and mowing down hordes of enemies, you have to stand back and place your shots. The more shots it takes you to take down a guard, the greater the risk you'll be exposed, and the guards will turn off their brains and fire. Even when you're down, they'll keep shooting you until you fly apart like a crash dummy.
The first N64 game (if not the first videogame in general) to have a destructible environment, objective items are quite sadistically kept in areas where a lot of bullets are going to fly, and if they take too many hits, it's Mission Failed and you've got to start over from scratch. Fortunately, the maps aren't very long, and the game keeps a battery record of your mission history so you won't lose your progress. In order to keep player interest in the rather short campaign mode, around about 2 dozen cheat options can be unlocked by completing maps on certain difficulty levels at certain time thresholds. The first one, DK Mode, has become one of the most infamous and imitated cheats in the history of gaming. Unlike Doom or Turok, GoldenEye 007 has no secret areas, only easily-missable corridors and dark corners where boxes of ordnance or armour vests can be found. Rather than giving a percentage of how much of the map you explored, you are graded instead on your marksmanship: how many shots fired relative to how many shots hit, and where they hit. Fortunately, you won't sacrifice your "score", shooting objective items such as door locks. Of course, you won't receive anything extra for having a perfect shooting score, it's just something to compare with your friends.
10/10, would recommend. Despite its age and blocky graphics, relative to the latest generation of Grand Theft Auto or whatever, it still manages to hold its own, even with younger gamers. Obviously, old people like me wax nostalgic about GoldenEye, but if this game does nothing else, it proves that high-quality gameplay, set design, and music will stand the test of time and continue to appeal to people long after the piles of imitators, churned out for a swift quid, have been forgotten.
