When GoldenEye was released in 1997 I had my mom drive me out to Wal-Mart to get it on (or at least near) its release date, and I have absolutely no idea why. At that point I had zero experience with first-person shooters, I wasn't particularly familiar with Rare as a developer (outside of Donkey Kong Country), and I wasn't a particularly big Bond fan (GoldenEye had been the only one I had seen). I don't even remember if I knew that much about it going in, and I definitely don't recall finding the idea of being in a first-person perspective to be something that really blew me away - that is, I never looked at it and really recognized that it was showing things in a perspective that was all that different than what I had seen before - this strikes me as odd when I look back to it.I assume that what compelled me to get it had to have been the glowing reviews in Nintendo Power - it made the top 10 of their top 100 games list a month or two before it even came out - which would imply that even then I'd been conditioned into running out and getting whatever Nintendo's big release was that quarter (it would certainly explain how I wound up with Diddy Kong Racing).
This is all relevant because I am pretty sure that it is because GoldenEye came in so under my radar - as the next big 'I guess I should get it' game - that it managed to create such a deep impression. Had I been introduced to FPS's on the PC via DOOM and Quake, I probably would have been turned off by it, since GoldenEye bears about as much of a resemblance to DOOM gameplay-wise as it does in aesthetics. The emphasis on GoldenEye was never really on shooting - that the auto-aim is so effective is a hint of this - but rather on completing objectives. Now, on the face there may seem to be little difference in going to point A to meet a scientist before exiting the level and going to point A to get a red key before exiting the level, and if that were as far as GoldenEye went with its objectives that would be an excellent point. GoldenEye does go further, though, with sections emphasizing stealth, through the use of Bond's gadgets to achieve these objectives, through the of character interaction.
Most important, I feel, is the style of level design GoldenEye introduced (remember - it beat Half-Life to the punch by a couple months). Rather than the emphasis on mazes seen especially in id's shooters (as well as contemporaries like Turok), GoldenEye leaned towards a more scripted style, funneling the player through the levels in a much more intentionally designed pathway. While I can certainly appreciate on an academic level what id and DOOM did for the industry, I greatly prefer this style of game, and I'd say that judging by the kinds of FPS's we see made today, I'm far from alone on this.
As I noted in my The World is Not Enough review, that title actually does a better job of feeling like a Bond game, but it can't really come close to matching the feel here. That superb feel is what makes the multiplayer one of the best on the system as well, and really was one of the few things that rescued the N64 from becoming a complete disaster. I tend to overlook GoldenEye when I remember the N64 because, for my money, pseudo-sequel Perfect Dark eclipsed it in nearly every respect - the only spot I can cede to GoldenEye is 4-player deathmath, where Perfect Dark's pushing of the N64 hardware finally comes to bite it in the ass. Luckily for GoldenEye, with that many combatants bots aren't necessary, and the use of the bond license adds quite a bit to the affair.
That Perfect Dark improved so dramatically on what GoldenEye started forces me to hold back on being as effusive in my praise as GoldenEye might deserve. It's absolutely spectacular, but only when judged for its time.
9.0/10
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