night of the goldeneye

[danny_galaga]

as some of you may remember, i belatedly joined the console crowd last year with the purchase of an N64. hey, only ten years behind the times ;-)

well, last night i took it over to a friends with a few cartridges to try out on his new 40" tv. normally we play mame. but last night we played star wars racer, super smash bros, wave racer, mortal kombat, diddy kong racing but most of all we played goldeneye.

what a blast! we were just about falling over laughing. had heaps of fun exploring the different options. adam didnt like golden gun much, seeing as how i found it first (",). we didnt try everything. ive heard the proximity mines are a laugh. we most enjoyed using hand grenades in the facility, since there was an almost equal chance of blowing yourself up. adam played golden eye back in the day, but hadnt seen it for nearly ten years. i have had practice in single player, but had never played multiplayer. still, to start with, he was handing my arse on a plate! then i sureptitiously selected places i had seen recently in single player (bunker, facility) and started to even things up since a glance at his screen told me exaclty how to get to him. sadly by the time i hit my stride, he was getting quite blotto. so by the end the roles were reversed and i was caning him.

we called it quits around 6:30am...

super smash bros was great too, im not great with fighter type games so adam tended to have the upper hand but still a lot of fun.

i will be taking the N64 over to his more often i think (",)

[fjl]

Perfect Dark, a somewhat sequel to Goldeneye is just as fun actually more so than Goldeneye. It has way more options plus you can add bots and do missions with multiplayer. MarioKart 64 is also a blast.

[shmokes]

Ah memories . . .

[hypernova]

Prox mines are possibly the most fun you'll have on that game.  Plus you can do a little made up game.  Have one player lace a level with 10 prox mines or so while the other is out of the room.  Then have the person come back, and take out all ten without getting blown up by one.  It always sucks if someone's laced every spawn point (funnier if that someone was you,) and you're the first to die, because then you're caught in a bad situation...

Golden gun sucks, though we ALWAYS played the equivalent, which was OHK mode.  COUGAR MAGNUM FIGHT!

Grenade launchers are almost as awesome as prox mines.  But there are glitches where the grenades won't bounce off the walls correctly, or just detonate upon impact with the wall.  They're supposed to detonate upon contact with ground.  It's relatively rare, but it can screw you up.  These weapons become too powerful once you memorize spawning positions and their exact order.

Capture the flag is a riot if you've got 4 people.  When you've got the flag, you can't defend yourself, which adds to the insanity.  Facility with the doors.  You hide behind the slow doors, and play mind games with other people who are trying to open it up, and you immediately press it back closed.  Good times, there.  Be careful though, the flag counts as an extension of your body, and can be thus shot.

I prefer PD for its one player version.  But its multiplayer is also amazing.  Plus you can coop the missions...and even have one player as a bad guy in the missions!

[Tahnok]

Remote mines are one of my favorite explosives in that game. It can get quite intense if you're playing with people who know the maps. Then, the A + B detonate trick makes it pretty much impossible to tell when someone is getting ready to detonate the mine above your head.

[shardian]

Perfect dark - dual wield and remote activated laptop gun. nuff said.

[Malacus]

Goldeneye on a projector was the only way we played, VERY good times...

The opening music in Goldeneye is great... 

there was a rumor (which has basically been denied by everyone) along with some photos of an Xbox Live Arcade release of the game, I didnt look at the pics, but i just realized they could have been re-textures of the N64 rom playing on a PC...

-Mal

[ChadTower]

The N64 basically mastered the 4 player party games.  So much fun.  Still a very viable platform for quality gaming, too.  Ours still gets at least as much play as anything we own more modern.  It may still get more play than the Wii and the GameCube combined.

[massive88]

Goldeneye on a projector was the only way we played, VERY good times...

The opening music in Goldeneye is great... 

there was a rumor (which has basically been denied by everyone) along with some photos of an Xbox Live Arcade release of the game, I didnt look at the pics, but i just realized they could have been re-textures of the N64 rom playing on a PC...

-Mal

It was being developed, but latest reports is that it is canned.

http://kotaku.com/344084/xbla-goldeneye-was-real-nearly-done-now-dead

[fjl]

Goldeneye on a projector was the only way we played, VERY good times...

The opening music in Goldeneye is great... 

there was a rumor (which has basically been denied by everyone) along with some photos of an Xbox Live Arcade release of the game, I didnt look at the pics, but i just realized they could have been re-textures of the N64 rom playing on a PC...

-Mal

It was being developed, but latest reports is that it is canned.

http://kotaku.com/344084/xbla-goldeneye-was-real-nearly-done-now-dead

Online Multiplayer would have been awesome but in a way, I laugh that it was cancelled since the Goldeneye game was synonymous with the N64 and it would have been blasphamy to play an official re-release of this game on a non Nintendo console plus I don't even own an X-Box. I always hated the fact that Rare was bought off by Microsoft. Its too bad, online multiplayer for Goldeneye is officially dead. Oh wait, I can still play it online with Project64K so screw X-box. 

[danny_galaga]

Golden-Eye was an awesome game, man.  They kinda blew their wad on the first level, though.  So much stuff to do and half of it was chopped out!

What always hurt multiplayer for me was that you couldn't fall off of ledges or stairwells.  So if someone was gunning you down, there was no sense in trying to fall down to a lower level.  All you could do was turn around and hope to hurt them some before you were killed.  The lack of jump wasn't that big a deal but the invisible handrails will really bug you when you go back and play it.

dunno if any of you guys read 'retro gamer' magazine. they did a good 'making of' of goldeneye. did you know that when the team conceived the multiplayer setup (behind the bosses back- 'how can it be fun if you can see what the other guys are doing?') they actually had four 'bonds'. you could play as dalton, brosnan, connery or moore. then one day eon entertainment said 'this is a goldeneye tie-in. no other bonds please'. so the development team had a giant 'first to 100' deathmatch playing the different bonds the day they had to can the other bonds. moore won by one kill!

oh, and all the 'minion' bad guys feature the team members faces. dr doak is david doak, the team leader. the stamper brothers, who owned Rare, declined to be in it.

also, when they were developing it, there was no N64. so they had to emulate the machine as best they could from specs provided by nintendo on a Silicon Graphics machine. not familiar with industrial stuff but apparently they cost in the 6 figure range- thats a pricey N64! when the N64 finally came out they found it was about 75% of what they had been promised. not a disaster, but they had to cut back on some things like textures. also, you wouldnt notice until its pointed out, a lot of it is in black and white!

i have perfect dark too, but i really need to explore goldeneye more. the only game of any description ive ever clocked or finished was super mario land on game boy! im up to the 13th scene in golden eye. only up to the 6th in 00 agent mode. earned my first cheat the other week (ever, in anything!) with the unlocking of DK mode (",)

[Kajoq]

Those old bond Models are still in the game, and there was a way to unlock them to make them usable.  I forget exactly what you had to do, but I remember doing it

[shardian]

Those old bond Models are still in the game, and there was a way to unlock them to make them usable.  I forget exactly what you had to do, but I remember doing it

I never had this game, but a buddy back in the day did, and he had all 4 bonds.

[billpa]

Great great game. So great that I almost failed out of college. Well, maybe an overstatement but I remember playing every night for hours upon hours.

Only thing I didnt like was the armor in the multiplayer, or perhaps no option to disable it as I recall. Too many people stayed close enough to pick it up if they had to.

The best part was memorizing the boards. Everyone knew where eachother were. So battles ended up being very heated. I was never a big fan of the bigger explosive weapons except for remote mines. Those were fun to chuck and detonate in mid air.

I think my favorite weapon was double DD destroyers. You could have some great fun fights with them. Oh, and single Magnums. The time between shots forced you to be accurate.

Perfect Dark was fun as well but different....like GoldenEye on roids. The single player sucked IMHO. The multiplayer was great, but only because of the addition of bots and some interesting weapons like the laptop gun and some others I cannot think of right now.

The N64, for me, was the pinnacle of my console playing. They had a lot of great titles. Super Smash Bros. was my absolute fav. I tried playing the new one of the Wii and I didn't care for it although some of the boards are very cool.

Well, I reminisced enough. Thanks for the trip down memory lane lol

[ChadTower]

Many thousands of N64 joysticks were killed by Goldeneye.  May they rest in powder.

[KenToad]

Perfect Dark was an amazing game, but not as great as Goldeneye, IMO.  Granted, both of them are a couple of the handful of games that I have made any effort to try and beat.  I did manage to unlock most of the cheats and the extra levels in Goldeneye.

That said, my favorite thing to do now in Goldeneye is the speed run in the Facility.  I've gotten so close to that two minute mark .... and nothing makes you feel more like Bond than just popping a few key guys while racing past the great majority of the guarded areas to complete your objective and get out.  The only problem with the scenario was that you had to meet the guy with the key in the final corridor or it was impossible to do it in the necessary time.

As for Perfect Dark, the gameplay suffered a bit and several of the levels just didn't captivate and make you want to try again and again the way that Goldeneye did ... especially the final couple of levels, which had a lot of really cheap scenarios. 

Anyway, we always played the "Matrix" version of Perfect Dark, which is that you and a friend take the Neo/Trinity models and face off against the best bots in the "Agent" skin in the multiplayer level that looks like the Foyer from the first Matrix movie.  Then you turn on that proximity slo-mo or whatever that's called, so that it slows down whenever you get close to an enemy. 

That was a hoot, get your dual machine pistols and fall in slow motion while blazing down the bad guys.

Thanks for the memories, Danny.   

[shardian]

I never had this game, but a buddy back in the day did, and he had all 4 bonds.

No, he didn't.  They're still in the ROM but you have to hack it to make them playable.

I must be having false memory then. I only played a handful of times, and wasn't all that interested as I was the only guy who hadn't memorized the maps.

[Matthew Fisher]

I never had this game, but a buddy back in the day did, and he had all 4 bonds.

No, he didn't.  They're still in the ROM but you have to hack it to make them playable.

I must be having false memory then. I only played a handful of times, and wasn't all that interested as I was the only guy who hadn't memorized the maps.

Poor George Lazenby.  Everyone always forgets him.  In my humble opinion, though, only Connery was better.

[fjl]

I thought Goldeneye was more fun but not superior. Perfect Dark was definitely superior than Goldeneye but not as fun when it came to the single player. Part of the reason I came to realize that Goldeneye was so much fun was due to its realism. I'm not talking about awesome graphics or realistic animations. It was because the guns where loosely based on real guns and everyone you shoot was a person. Other first person shooters(FPS) and this even extended into the PC platform, it involved blasting, at times non human enemies. And for me that downsized the fun of the game. Turok was the first FPS game i played and while I thought it was awesome and couldn't be beat, my thinking changed once I got into Goldeneye. It made me depreciate what I thought of the Turok game. Shoot dinosaurs? Not as fun as shooting at what looked like a real person that shot back at you.

So while Perfect Dark was superior, my favorite memories and levels where the missions that involved human enemies. Once it changed to alien enemies, the game no longer seemed as fun as it first was. Multiplayer was still a blast though.

As for the other Bonds coming out on the game, from what I recall they where NOT accessible. The only thing accessible through the N64 was using the Game Genie or whatever that device was called that let you hack the game, and it ONLY allowed you to view the pictures of the other bonds in the game. But you couldn't use the models.

[ChadTower]

Perfect Dark had more system resources available to it - it required the Expansion Pak.  It should have been better.

[fjl]

Better how? That Expansion pack only added 4Mb of extra memory. There wasn't much that could be done with it except slightly better textures and a few more polygons onscreen. 4MB wasn't enought to make the game come out much different than Goldeneye.

[ChadTower]

...which roughly doubled the amount of RAM available.   That is a substantial jump.

[shardian]

Better how? That Expansion pack only added 4Mb of extra memory. There wasn't much that could be done with it except slightly better textures and a few more polygons onscreen. 4MB wasn't enought to make the game come out much different than Goldeneye.

The expansion pack may have only added4 MB, but that was a hell of alot for the N64. The expansion pack increased the viewable polygons on screen. The biggie was that multiplayer action was severely handicapped without the expansion pack.

[fjl]

RAM is RAM. It only adds... RAM.

For better processing you'll need to change the rest of the hardware. Memory mostly allows running a few extra processes and not even necessarily better or faster.

[shardian]

RAM is RAM. It only adds... RAM.

For better processing you'll need to change the rest of the hardware. Memory mostly allows running a few extra processes and not even necessarily better or faster.

I think you are stuck in the current "my computer has 4 gigs of ram" thought process. Back in the late 90's, a moderate jump in RAM worked wonders for overall system speed.

[ChadTower]

shardian is right, when you have a severe bottleneck like the 4MiB of RAM the N64 had, expanding that does wonders.  That was when CPU was cheaper than RAM and storage was even more expensive.

[danny_galaga]

shardian is right, when you have a severe bottleneck like the 4MiB of RAM the N64 had, expanding that does wonders.  That was when CPU was cheaper than RAM and storage was even more expensive.

and coincidentally, now you can buy the n64 console for less than the ram pack 

[fjl]

shardian is right, when you have a severe bottleneck like the 4MiB of RAM the N64 had, expanding that does wonders.  That was when CPU was cheaper than RAM and storage was even more expensive.

So then what's the reason for Perfect Dark still "not being better" even after they made it require the Expansion Pack? And what did game did make good use of the Expansion pack? Far as I remember, no games where really any better.

[danny_galaga]

well, according to the instructions (yes, i have them) you can only play a limited number of two player games in perfect dark without the expansion pack. with it, you get all the goodies...

and from wikipedia:

"Donkey Kong 64 is a 3D platformer video game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64. It was published by Nintendo and first released on November 22, 1999. The game requires the use of the Expansion Pak in order to function, and was the first Nintendo 64 game to do so. The initial release of Donkey Kong 64 included the Expansion Pak with the game for free."

so, not so much thats its better with it, just that it wont work without it!

[ChadTower]

I'm not going to argue "why Perfect Dark isn't better" - that is subjective.  What isn't subjective is the texturing, the amount of objects being handled at any given time, and the AI.  All of those are stronger in Perfect Dark than in Goldeneye and are a direct result of increased resources.

Other good examples of games that are better because of the Expansion Pak are Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64.

[shardian]

I believe Rouge Squadron benefitted hugely with the pack too. Without it, your field of vision was very limited, and there was always fog around you. With the expansion pack, the fog was removed because the system could handle generating more stuff.

[Cakemeister]

Majora's Mask and Banjo-Tooie used the expansion pack. It made bigger levels possible.

[Tahnok]

[...]
Only thing I didnt like was the armor in the multiplayer, or perhaps no option to disable it as I recall. Too many people stayed close enough to pick it up if they had to.
[...]

I'm surprised experienced players even bother with health. We always turn on the license to kill scenario (1 hit kill). It causes some intense standoffs (and cuts down on the "run and gun" aspect a lot).

[hypernova]

[...]
Only thing I didnt like was the armor in the multiplayer, or perhaps no option to disable it as I recall. Too many people stayed close enough to pick it up if they had to.
[...]

I'm surprised experienced players even bother with health. We always turn on the license to kill scenario (1 hit kill). It causes some intense standoffs (and cuts down on the "run and gun" aspect a lot).

We did the same, as I mentioned earlier.  Except for CTF and team modes, where we turned the health all the way down, and armor had little effect.

[ROMbler]

A lot of great memories with Goldeneye.  Was my fav N64 game. 

[fjl]

Me too. Even after I passed it, I still played it over and over. Then trying to pass all the levels under a certain time to obtain the cheats. I unlocked all of them even that really hard one of the facility. I forget what cheat you unlock though. The trick to that one was to have the scientist that gives you the key card to come out in the room where one of the objectives is to be done. There was this one solitary room that he would sometimes appear in. If he didn't appear in that room, there's no way you could ever finish it under the required time. I played it forever until I finally unlocked it. Great times!

[Jdurg]

God Goldeneye was fun.  This may sound like sacrilige, but I had NEVER seen any Bond Movies until I got to college.  Then I played Goldeneye and my roommate and the time forced me to watch all of the Bond movies at that point in time.  (Up through Tomorrow Never Dies which had recently come out).  I was hooked instantly.  We would play non-stop and we all eventually got so good at the game that nobody would play us anymore.  I actually had to start losing games on purpose just so people would continue to play.

The four of us remembered the locations of all the spawn points, the order, the location of the good weapons, etc.  We always played LTK as the one shot kill really made for some fun moments.  Like when you'd launch a grenade at just the right angle to bank it around a few walls and just barely nick someone.  It was great when they weren't expecting it, then suddenly their screen turns red.   

Better yet was playing with proxy mines and lacing up the spawn points.  It was great unless someone nailed you first before you could get someone else.  If that happens, welcome negative point score!

Even better was playing with just throwing knives or slappers.  That made for some fun nights.  God I loved that game! 


(We also played with a "No Odd-Job" rule since his height gave him an unfair advantage).

[danny_galaga]

one more rave about this game. i think the soundtrack and incidental music dont get enough credit for this game. it utterly gels with the game and adds to the feel of being part of the bond experience. and in fact you can check out some remixes here:

http://www.ocremix.org/game/goldeneye-007-n64/

big ups to Grame Norgate (Sound Effects) Robin Beanland (Elevator Music) and Grant Kirkhope (Music Composer)

(",)
   
   

[KenToad]

one more rave about this game. i think the soundtrack and incidental music dont get enough credit for this game. it utterly gels with the game and adds to the feel of being part of the bond experience. and in fact you can check out some remixes here:

http://www.ocremix.org/game/goldeneye-007-n64/

big ups to Grame Norgate (Sound Effects) Robin Beanland (Elevator Music) and Grant Kirkhope (Music Composer)

(",)
   
   

Seconded ... the music was a big reason why I repeatedly played the game in the first place.  I still love the music in the Silo and a few other boards.