17th April 2023, 12:40 PM
Duh duh duh duuuuh nenene- or whatever. Sadly there's not an easy way to post musical notation in text.
Goldeneye is a game adaptation of more legendary status than the movie it's based on. It was one of the first truly successful FPS games on consoles, helped really motivate controller sales thanks to the N64's adoption of four ports as standard, and really showed what the N64 could do that the Playstation struggled with.
But, above any of those things, it created a shooter subgenre. Many imitated, but only Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 2 (both games made by the same team) managed to capture the design well. This was a game that combined fun gunplay and stealth mechanics, wide explorable level design, and multiple unique level objectives as well as a variety of means to accomplish many of those objectives. While some games had much more developed RPG design (such as System Shock), none combined those mechanics with solid arcadey shooter design almost as well put together as Quake.
However, we should start graphically. Goldeneye wasn't even the best looking shooter of it's day. Quake came out the year before and Quake II was a few months away. (Likewise, Half-Life and Unreal would come out the next year, redefining what could be done graphically in shooters once again.) Compared to those games, Goldeneye was an undetailed blurry mess with tiny levels. Indeed, it hasn't aged well either. Pretty much any game designed to look "photorealistic" hasn't aged well compared to things meant to take on an unrealistic art style. But, what it lacked in graphical fidelity it made up for with it's amazing motion captured animations. While Quake's animations lacked even basic interpolation and were clearly done "by hand" in a way that resembled claymation, Goldeneye was setting a modern standard. But, the hardware could hardly keep up. Maybe the game could have been better optimized. Certainly the explosions could have. Those bring even the 360 version to a crawl. In any event, they did do ONE thing to make the game playable even at it's abysmal frame rate. They specifically coded the game to pick which frames to "skip" so that it preferentially used "important" frames. That is, changes of direction, your actions, enemy's actions. Whenever something was changing from before, that frame got rendered and frames "around" those key changes got skipped. This technique made sure that even though the game was running pretty badly, even by the standards of games like F-Zero, it still had a very "playable" feel to it.
Then there's the enemy design. Enemies react to your presence in interesting ways, can surrender if you sneak up behind, get startled, run for help or to set alarms, duck behind boxes, and react in unique ways when you shoot them. They even set a modern standard with the first body-dependent shot recognition system. Well, one of the first. It seems the original "beta" releases of Team Fortress 1 managed to JUST beat Goldeneye by a few months, but it certainly was the one most players found out about it from, including Romero himself, the Doomsman of Id. Yes, you can thank Goldeneye for the "headshot", and for a very funny way of negating them. If you hit someone in their precious hat, the hat comes off and they remain unharmed, if confused. Frankly, the list of things Goldeneye innovated from that to giving enemies "pathing personalities" and so many other things wrapped in a game that was actually fun to shoot in is staggering in retrospect. For someone who didn't truly "get" games like Doom and Quake until years later, THIS was my entry point into truly falling in love with these games in the way they were meant to be played (without cheating), as well as my entry point into this very forum. Now, the enemies have all kinds of fun behavior you can exploit. Many of them take time to really line up their shot, and this can be exploited to rush in up close, duck, and just karate chop their knees into crushed bone jelly. The most dangerous attack animation an enemy can take is the "marching slowly forward while holding down the trigger" one. If they do that, hide. You're not going to get away with only a little damage. Also, enemies have a lot of trouble seeing past anything even remotely an obstacle to their movement. You can use this to line up free headshots across railings or large gaps, or to lure enemies around long paths while you just fire away.
Map design is what sets this subgenre apart however in ways that are almost never imitated. Doom and Quake set a standard for levels that encourage a lot of free exploration and some puzzle solving. Half-Life, later on, redefined the shooter as a largely cinematic endeavor. That is, Half-Life popularized shooters as a means of telling stories full of cut scenes and voice acting that very rarely encouraged much exploration and felt more "on rails". While Half-Life is good in it's own right and deserved the praise it got, the industry as a whole was itself guided "on rails" into making Half-Life again and again from that point forward, and only thanks to the more modern Doom games have we seen any hope of breaking out of that rut. But, Goldeneye stands apart. Predating Half-Life, this game skews towards encouraging exploration. It didn't start out that way. Goldeneye was originally envisioned as something more like Virtua Cop, a TRULY on-rails shooter involving a lot of ducking behind crates and firing at enemies in a more automated fashion. In fact, a few levels still have vestiges of that older design, namely the train. Elements like the body zone based damage and detailed animations are hangovers from that which made it into the final version. One thing that stayed throughout the design was a developer insistence that every map "feel like" a real location. Doom and Quake unapologetically don't care how "realistic" their locations feel. They are very much built to be video game levels first and foremost. Goldeneye instead first designed a location that was layed out semi-realistically, THEN went back and added in obstacles, enemies, NPCs and objectives to flesh it out into a fully realized map. This turned out to be the right move for a game designed around playing as a spy instead of a one-man army. Now you're watching patrol paths in some sections to sneak by, or in others finding the best way to take out enemies without worrying about taking too much damage, or avoid damaging mission-critical components. It's to this game's credit they still kept it's "level based" design. Failing a mission by accidentally destroying or killing something important isn't so devastating when you've only lost a few minutes.
Mission difficulty is also interesting. Higher difficulty adds additional mission objectives that make certain rather "empty" feeling levels now brim with greater purpose. The added challenge of far more accurate enemies and less ammo/armor combine with these to make it really worthwhile to play through the game at least three times. Consider it "training", and fun as the game is it really is worthwhile to see a lot of these levels multiple times. There's also very fun rewards. There's two bonus levels, and the first is simply the most challenging in the game. Aztec is absolutely punishing. The second is more of a walk in the park, a "victory lap" you can take. While the puzzle of how to actually unlock the golden gun is just trial and error (sadly there is no way to find out without just experimenting over and over again, or looking up the solution online), once you have it down, it's easy to remember for life. One thing this game does better than Perfect dark is these bonus levels. There's only two, but each gets a dedicated level, enemies, and even guns.
About that variation. Objectives are directly tied, mostly, to specific item statuses. That means that while the game is designed for you to accomplish the objectives a certain way, so long as you manage to get the object in it's desired state, that's all the objective tracker actually cares about. You can thus create unique solutions to problems. So, in the Facility for example, the level is designed for you to hit certain buttons on consoles to open doors ahead, but you can instead skip some of those buttons altogether by alerting guards to your presence with gunfire and making them open the door for you giving you an alternate path in. About the most egregious exception I can think of is a case where a remote mine "modified" into a timed mine (why not just use a timed mine?) is the only method you can use to destroy a certain helicopter. Had they allowed it to be destroyed via other tools, it would have opened up that level a bit more, since grenades can also be found in that level. It's also possible in a few levels to "sneak" through without ever alerting guards to your presence and thus avoiding an endless swarm of them spawning into the level. In fact, level "interaction" in this game is a step above what typical shooters had. Duke Nuke Them 3D started the trend towards greater interactivity, and this game ran with that and expanded it thanks to unique "spy gadgets" that enabled new means of interacting with things.
Combining the free exploration, the feeling that each area of the level has a purpose, the high degree of interactivity with objects throughout, and impressive (for the time) AI that included passive behaviors as well as how they handled player actions, and you get the complete package that truly created a sense of sneaking through, gunning down opposition, and accomplishing espionage tasks in a way no game really had before. Again, System Shock and games like it must take credit for innovating a lot of the 3D interaction and RPG elements beyond just shooting, but those games didn't have solid shooting mechanics and a good physics system combined with that. Other games that did have solid physical mechanics like Metal Gear Solid and Thief wouldn't come out for another year with their take on sneaking missions. (Metal Gear 1 and 2 do deserve some credit as well, but they predated the 3D revolution.)
But that's not all this game had to offer. Speedrunner bait was programmed into this game. Rare may not have even realized the full extent of what they'd done, but this game passes into legend as one of the oldest of the really popular old guard of speedrunning classics. That short list includes Super Mario Bros, Super Metroid, Doom, Quake, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and the one that eclipsed them all in popularity, Super Mario 64. Goldeneye may not be THE most popular speedrunning game of all time, but it's still on the list and for good reason. They programmed in a lot of cheats behind accomplishing certain goals, ranging from beating a level on a certain difficulty for the first time to beating a level within a certain amount of time. The latter is what really took the challenge up for those that had beaten the game on 00 Agent and wanted more. Every level has one difficult that has a time challenge. These range from easy to "Caverns and Facility". Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the quickest path and discovering what counts as accomplishing an objective (like, rescuing Natalia on one of the many... MANY times you need to rescue her only involves letting her see you through a door and then she just runs from the guards meant to... guard her). What isn't so fun is finding out just how many aspects require random luck, like where certain NPCs spawn, or where in a guarding path an enemy is when the level opens up. All in all though, some require such perfect execution. Caverns in particular gave me such trouble because that level is difficult to even survive in in the first place, and now you have to do it within a certain amount of time. QUICKLY taking out guards that are right next to sensitive exploding tanks that themselves are next to a mission critical radio you need to use is... frustrating. Still, the elation of finally achieving these goals is wonderful. The diagonal run is key to this, as well as using a far superior control scheme. 1.2 is similar to Turok's control scheme, and turned out to be the ideal way to control a shooter on the N64. It was more or less this style that got adopted in two stick control schemes later on and that's what we have to this day. With all this in mind, and with a LOT of room for improvement thanks to all those unique quirks and the flexibility the game's engine allows in resolving objectives, it was no wonder the challenge switched to beating other's times online, and the rest is history. Oh yes, and one additional detail regarding it. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are two games that rely on the in-game timer and not an external timer to determine records. While an outside game timer would allow finer determination on times, the in-game one "accounts" for oddities in Bond's movement speed that an outside timer does not, allowing for times that better reflect player skill and not random luck.
Multiplayer is another story. Someone went and snuck that mode in working on it on their off-time as a side project and it almost didn't make it into the game. For something of such a sketchy quickly hashed out nature to turn out to be the part that defined it's play for so many people is nothing short of a gaming miracle. Numerous modes of play were introduced, but the basic deathmatch proved to be the most popular, followed by flag tag. Multiple preset loadouts were done, you hold whatever you find until you die, then scramble around hiding from all those who outgun you until you manage to get it all together again. What really impressed where the number of well thought out stages that really emphasized the stealthier side of Bond's shooty play, and those wonderful proximity mines! Even with everyone able to see the screen, you can take advantage of moments of high action elsewhere to covertly plant a bomb right under where an ammo crate or armor spawns, or next to a door, or most evilly a player spawn point. It may not really hold up today in this regard, as multiplayer shooter map design has really become a well developed science at this point, but it was amazing for it's time.
Sound deserves a mention. From the sound of each gun, to enemy banter, to even Bond's footsteps on different surfaces the sound design really is top notch. Music is absolutely amazing and stands up to even Doom and Quake's legendary scores. The Jungle deserves a mention here, as it mostly lacks a soundtrack altogether in favor of ambiance. This is apparently a glitch as there is a song specifically for it, but it goes unused. I think it's for the better. The ambient sounds of the jungle really make it stand out.
All in all, this game deserves it's reputation, but I think it deserves more. So very many articles that bring it up these days only vaguely allude to it being "important for console games" as a sort of backhanded compliment, without realizing that Goldeneye wasn't just "good for a console game", it was truly innovative in ways that survive to this day, and in other ways that very few games ever imitated. Even The World is Not Enough for N64 didn't capture that level design nearly so well.
I'd review the 360 enhanced port of Goldeneye, but that was never officially released. Instead, we have an emulated ROM. So, the only thing I can say about it is it allows fully customized duel stick controls based on the 1.2 control scheme, inverted, and even allows mapping movement to the wonderful XBox One d-pad. Do this to get full speed strafe-running back. It runs at a smooth 30 FPS, at higher resolution, but no improved draw distances and the textures all look "wrong". It's also got achievements for doing all the stuff you'd normally do to 100% the game. The only thing of note is this time through, it's the version I played. All in all, if you want to play the game emulated, there are better options. One of them is the 1964 emulator with a special profile mapping mouse and keyboard support into the game. If you're going to play emulated, that's the best way to do it.
But Perfect Dark did, no, it surpassed and that's what I'll review next time.
Goldeneye is a game adaptation of more legendary status than the movie it's based on. It was one of the first truly successful FPS games on consoles, helped really motivate controller sales thanks to the N64's adoption of four ports as standard, and really showed what the N64 could do that the Playstation struggled with.
But, above any of those things, it created a shooter subgenre. Many imitated, but only Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 2 (both games made by the same team) managed to capture the design well. This was a game that combined fun gunplay and stealth mechanics, wide explorable level design, and multiple unique level objectives as well as a variety of means to accomplish many of those objectives. While some games had much more developed RPG design (such as System Shock), none combined those mechanics with solid arcadey shooter design almost as well put together as Quake.
However, we should start graphically. Goldeneye wasn't even the best looking shooter of it's day. Quake came out the year before and Quake II was a few months away. (Likewise, Half-Life and Unreal would come out the next year, redefining what could be done graphically in shooters once again.) Compared to those games, Goldeneye was an undetailed blurry mess with tiny levels. Indeed, it hasn't aged well either. Pretty much any game designed to look "photorealistic" hasn't aged well compared to things meant to take on an unrealistic art style. But, what it lacked in graphical fidelity it made up for with it's amazing motion captured animations. While Quake's animations lacked even basic interpolation and were clearly done "by hand" in a way that resembled claymation, Goldeneye was setting a modern standard. But, the hardware could hardly keep up. Maybe the game could have been better optimized. Certainly the explosions could have. Those bring even the 360 version to a crawl. In any event, they did do ONE thing to make the game playable even at it's abysmal frame rate. They specifically coded the game to pick which frames to "skip" so that it preferentially used "important" frames. That is, changes of direction, your actions, enemy's actions. Whenever something was changing from before, that frame got rendered and frames "around" those key changes got skipped. This technique made sure that even though the game was running pretty badly, even by the standards of games like F-Zero, it still had a very "playable" feel to it.
Then there's the enemy design. Enemies react to your presence in interesting ways, can surrender if you sneak up behind, get startled, run for help or to set alarms, duck behind boxes, and react in unique ways when you shoot them. They even set a modern standard with the first body-dependent shot recognition system. Well, one of the first. It seems the original "beta" releases of Team Fortress 1 managed to JUST beat Goldeneye by a few months, but it certainly was the one most players found out about it from, including Romero himself, the Doomsman of Id. Yes, you can thank Goldeneye for the "headshot", and for a very funny way of negating them. If you hit someone in their precious hat, the hat comes off and they remain unharmed, if confused. Frankly, the list of things Goldeneye innovated from that to giving enemies "pathing personalities" and so many other things wrapped in a game that was actually fun to shoot in is staggering in retrospect. For someone who didn't truly "get" games like Doom and Quake until years later, THIS was my entry point into truly falling in love with these games in the way they were meant to be played (without cheating), as well as my entry point into this very forum. Now, the enemies have all kinds of fun behavior you can exploit. Many of them take time to really line up their shot, and this can be exploited to rush in up close, duck, and just karate chop their knees into crushed bone jelly. The most dangerous attack animation an enemy can take is the "marching slowly forward while holding down the trigger" one. If they do that, hide. You're not going to get away with only a little damage. Also, enemies have a lot of trouble seeing past anything even remotely an obstacle to their movement. You can use this to line up free headshots across railings or large gaps, or to lure enemies around long paths while you just fire away.
Map design is what sets this subgenre apart however in ways that are almost never imitated. Doom and Quake set a standard for levels that encourage a lot of free exploration and some puzzle solving. Half-Life, later on, redefined the shooter as a largely cinematic endeavor. That is, Half-Life popularized shooters as a means of telling stories full of cut scenes and voice acting that very rarely encouraged much exploration and felt more "on rails". While Half-Life is good in it's own right and deserved the praise it got, the industry as a whole was itself guided "on rails" into making Half-Life again and again from that point forward, and only thanks to the more modern Doom games have we seen any hope of breaking out of that rut. But, Goldeneye stands apart. Predating Half-Life, this game skews towards encouraging exploration. It didn't start out that way. Goldeneye was originally envisioned as something more like Virtua Cop, a TRULY on-rails shooter involving a lot of ducking behind crates and firing at enemies in a more automated fashion. In fact, a few levels still have vestiges of that older design, namely the train. Elements like the body zone based damage and detailed animations are hangovers from that which made it into the final version. One thing that stayed throughout the design was a developer insistence that every map "feel like" a real location. Doom and Quake unapologetically don't care how "realistic" their locations feel. They are very much built to be video game levels first and foremost. Goldeneye instead first designed a location that was layed out semi-realistically, THEN went back and added in obstacles, enemies, NPCs and objectives to flesh it out into a fully realized map. This turned out to be the right move for a game designed around playing as a spy instead of a one-man army. Now you're watching patrol paths in some sections to sneak by, or in others finding the best way to take out enemies without worrying about taking too much damage, or avoid damaging mission-critical components. It's to this game's credit they still kept it's "level based" design. Failing a mission by accidentally destroying or killing something important isn't so devastating when you've only lost a few minutes.
Mission difficulty is also interesting. Higher difficulty adds additional mission objectives that make certain rather "empty" feeling levels now brim with greater purpose. The added challenge of far more accurate enemies and less ammo/armor combine with these to make it really worthwhile to play through the game at least three times. Consider it "training", and fun as the game is it really is worthwhile to see a lot of these levels multiple times. There's also very fun rewards. There's two bonus levels, and the first is simply the most challenging in the game. Aztec is absolutely punishing. The second is more of a walk in the park, a "victory lap" you can take. While the puzzle of how to actually unlock the golden gun is just trial and error (sadly there is no way to find out without just experimenting over and over again, or looking up the solution online), once you have it down, it's easy to remember for life. One thing this game does better than Perfect dark is these bonus levels. There's only two, but each gets a dedicated level, enemies, and even guns.
About that variation. Objectives are directly tied, mostly, to specific item statuses. That means that while the game is designed for you to accomplish the objectives a certain way, so long as you manage to get the object in it's desired state, that's all the objective tracker actually cares about. You can thus create unique solutions to problems. So, in the Facility for example, the level is designed for you to hit certain buttons on consoles to open doors ahead, but you can instead skip some of those buttons altogether by alerting guards to your presence with gunfire and making them open the door for you giving you an alternate path in. About the most egregious exception I can think of is a case where a remote mine "modified" into a timed mine (why not just use a timed mine?) is the only method you can use to destroy a certain helicopter. Had they allowed it to be destroyed via other tools, it would have opened up that level a bit more, since grenades can also be found in that level. It's also possible in a few levels to "sneak" through without ever alerting guards to your presence and thus avoiding an endless swarm of them spawning into the level. In fact, level "interaction" in this game is a step above what typical shooters had. Duke Nuke Them 3D started the trend towards greater interactivity, and this game ran with that and expanded it thanks to unique "spy gadgets" that enabled new means of interacting with things.
Combining the free exploration, the feeling that each area of the level has a purpose, the high degree of interactivity with objects throughout, and impressive (for the time) AI that included passive behaviors as well as how they handled player actions, and you get the complete package that truly created a sense of sneaking through, gunning down opposition, and accomplishing espionage tasks in a way no game really had before. Again, System Shock and games like it must take credit for innovating a lot of the 3D interaction and RPG elements beyond just shooting, but those games didn't have solid shooting mechanics and a good physics system combined with that. Other games that did have solid physical mechanics like Metal Gear Solid and Thief wouldn't come out for another year with their take on sneaking missions. (Metal Gear 1 and 2 do deserve some credit as well, but they predated the 3D revolution.)
But that's not all this game had to offer. Speedrunner bait was programmed into this game. Rare may not have even realized the full extent of what they'd done, but this game passes into legend as one of the oldest of the really popular old guard of speedrunning classics. That short list includes Super Mario Bros, Super Metroid, Doom, Quake, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and the one that eclipsed them all in popularity, Super Mario 64. Goldeneye may not be THE most popular speedrunning game of all time, but it's still on the list and for good reason. They programmed in a lot of cheats behind accomplishing certain goals, ranging from beating a level on a certain difficulty for the first time to beating a level within a certain amount of time. The latter is what really took the challenge up for those that had beaten the game on 00 Agent and wanted more. Every level has one difficult that has a time challenge. These range from easy to "Caverns and Facility". Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the quickest path and discovering what counts as accomplishing an objective (like, rescuing Natalia on one of the many... MANY times you need to rescue her only involves letting her see you through a door and then she just runs from the guards meant to... guard her). What isn't so fun is finding out just how many aspects require random luck, like where certain NPCs spawn, or where in a guarding path an enemy is when the level opens up. All in all though, some require such perfect execution. Caverns in particular gave me such trouble because that level is difficult to even survive in in the first place, and now you have to do it within a certain amount of time. QUICKLY taking out guards that are right next to sensitive exploding tanks that themselves are next to a mission critical radio you need to use is... frustrating. Still, the elation of finally achieving these goals is wonderful. The diagonal run is key to this, as well as using a far superior control scheme. 1.2 is similar to Turok's control scheme, and turned out to be the ideal way to control a shooter on the N64. It was more or less this style that got adopted in two stick control schemes later on and that's what we have to this day. With all this in mind, and with a LOT of room for improvement thanks to all those unique quirks and the flexibility the game's engine allows in resolving objectives, it was no wonder the challenge switched to beating other's times online, and the rest is history. Oh yes, and one additional detail regarding it. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are two games that rely on the in-game timer and not an external timer to determine records. While an outside game timer would allow finer determination on times, the in-game one "accounts" for oddities in Bond's movement speed that an outside timer does not, allowing for times that better reflect player skill and not random luck.
Multiplayer is another story. Someone went and snuck that mode in working on it on their off-time as a side project and it almost didn't make it into the game. For something of such a sketchy quickly hashed out nature to turn out to be the part that defined it's play for so many people is nothing short of a gaming miracle. Numerous modes of play were introduced, but the basic deathmatch proved to be the most popular, followed by flag tag. Multiple preset loadouts were done, you hold whatever you find until you die, then scramble around hiding from all those who outgun you until you manage to get it all together again. What really impressed where the number of well thought out stages that really emphasized the stealthier side of Bond's shooty play, and those wonderful proximity mines! Even with everyone able to see the screen, you can take advantage of moments of high action elsewhere to covertly plant a bomb right under where an ammo crate or armor spawns, or next to a door, or most evilly a player spawn point. It may not really hold up today in this regard, as multiplayer shooter map design has really become a well developed science at this point, but it was amazing for it's time.
Sound deserves a mention. From the sound of each gun, to enemy banter, to even Bond's footsteps on different surfaces the sound design really is top notch. Music is absolutely amazing and stands up to even Doom and Quake's legendary scores. The Jungle deserves a mention here, as it mostly lacks a soundtrack altogether in favor of ambiance. This is apparently a glitch as there is a song specifically for it, but it goes unused. I think it's for the better. The ambient sounds of the jungle really make it stand out.
All in all, this game deserves it's reputation, but I think it deserves more. So very many articles that bring it up these days only vaguely allude to it being "important for console games" as a sort of backhanded compliment, without realizing that Goldeneye wasn't just "good for a console game", it was truly innovative in ways that survive to this day, and in other ways that very few games ever imitated. Even The World is Not Enough for N64 didn't capture that level design nearly so well.
I'd review the 360 enhanced port of Goldeneye, but that was never officially released. Instead, we have an emulated ROM. So, the only thing I can say about it is it allows fully customized duel stick controls based on the 1.2 control scheme, inverted, and even allows mapping movement to the wonderful XBox One d-pad. Do this to get full speed strafe-running back. It runs at a smooth 30 FPS, at higher resolution, but no improved draw distances and the textures all look "wrong". It's also got achievements for doing all the stuff you'd normally do to 100% the game. The only thing of note is this time through, it's the version I played. All in all, if you want to play the game emulated, there are better options. One of them is the 1964 emulator with a special profile mapping mouse and keyboard support into the game. If you're going to play emulated, that's the best way to do it.
But Perfect Dark did, no, it surpassed and that's what I'll review next time.