Despite the many drawbacks, there is something great about Goldeneye finally arriving on modern systems, and I think it is worth mentioning.

Preservation in the game industry stinks. It's awful. It's worse than film and music. And Goldeneye is just one of many classics that has languished in limbo for over 20 years. The reality is 90% of people who like games won't touch emulators, and if a game isn't on an official storefront they won't revisit it. So, Nintendo and Microsoft sitting down and getting this done, no matter how compromised, is commendable.

But now that I've said that; boy is it compromised!!!!

The modern control layout on Xbox is awesome, and for a few levels it will feel like a truly reinvigorated experience. But quickly, that novelty wears off and the ugly edges become hard to ignore. Rendering the game at 4K, but using the same ugly textures and absolutely god awful text is a crime. Not remastering the all-time great soundtrack is a WAR crime.

The lack of online multiplayer, presumably tied up in some sort of negotiations, is what really kneecaps it, although the spectre of the cancelled 360 remake also looms large.

Many of the improvements made in that version would have been appreciated here, like halos around mission critical items which, today just like on the N64, can easily be missed as they fly off enemies into the grey texture blob that makes up the level.

In a roundabout way, this release is a wonderful preservation of the original because it's a warts and all presentation. The awkward objectives, no checkpoints, no VO, and local only multiplayer means that people are at least getting an accurate recreation of 1996.

I never hated Goldeneye or anything, but the original N64 version ran like a Power Point and controlled like a pre-Halo FPS on a controller I’d charitably describe as “ambitious”.

Well, I have now beaten the Xbox Series X version of Goldeneye on 00 Agent difficulty… although I have yet to play the two unlockable Roger Moore era missions. I hear Aztec’s a doozy.

But yeah, I think it’s a good game.

Even without modernized controls and a steady framerate, Goldeneye has gotta be one of the all-time greatest movie games. It’s faithful to the film and franchise, doing its best to represent the James Bond experience through varied gameplay: There are run-and-gun corridors, long range sniper shootouts, extremely challenging stealth missions, and even a couple of opportunities to drive a tank (you stick out the top like in the film).

My favorite mission was easily Frigate, which reminded me of Modern Warfare (in a good way) and my least favorite was probably Streets. I didn’t say the tank was fun to drive.

A minor complaint is that the game isn’t amazing at explaining objectives, so it required substantial trial-and-error on 00 Agent. I’d rather have it under-explain than baby me, though. Also, I didn’t realize Goldeneye was a spaghetti western, because I must have shot the hat off every soldier in the USSR.

Goldeneye actually slaps. I still think the gulf between it and The World is Not Enough isn’t quite as wide as people think, but almost nothing is as seductive as nostalgia. I doubt that game will get the same modernized treatment.

Also I don’t really care about the multiplayer, sorry, I have no friends ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

I assumed I would just play up through Facility as I have done countless times, but then I ended up running through Goldeneye again. And it turns out, when unshackled from archaic controls, it’s pretty dang fun! Poking around finding all the little things you need to do in a level is rewarding but mercifully brief. And there is something really charming seeing how, with such restrained resources, Rare set a delightful Bond atmosphere.

Sure, it gets up to its retro game BS by the end with some pretty frustrating encounters, but again, the levels are short and eventually you find ways to break those moments.

Goldeneye is, however, impossible for me to score at this point. The guns, maps, music, UI, everything really is dripping with nostalgia for me. What I will say is that if you have played Goldeneye before, this port may not give it a fresh cost of paint, but it does give the opportunity to play it as you remember it and not as it was with better controls, resolution, and performance. And even if you are new to it, I think there is something kind of special to experience here.

Edit: Also, I never realized that the cheats came from speed-running levels and that has really hooked me as an endgame. It turns how I played the levels on their head and nudges you towards how to break the game. It’s a super cool, whole new way to play that is rewarded with neat cheats.

For a game that was rushed to ship in 1997, it is pretty remarkable what Goldeneye managed to achieve.

GoldenEye 007 is a game that piqued my interest for a pretty long time for a handful of reasons. I've heard this game constantly being referred to as one of the greatest FPS games of all time as well as one of the greatest games ever made. Because of this, its influence on the FPS genre & video games as a whole, and me being the Rare fanboy I am, I decided to finally give GoldenEye 007 a try. When I finally did, I ended up being rather disappointed by it all in the end.

The first thing that made me realize right off the bat this may not be what I was expecting was the objective-based missions for each level. Given its a James Bond game its pretty fitting, but going around trying to figure out what to do before the end of each level just bothered me, especially when I would technically beat the level but still have to do it all over again because I missed something. Something I feel I should clarify is I beat it on Secret Agent difficulty. This issue likely wouldn't be as prevalent if I played Agent difficulty, but whenever I play games I always prefer to play on the normal difficulty and I wasn't changing that tradition for this game. The level design is pretty hit or miss. There are some levels that I thought were fine like the first level, the cave, and the final level, but then there were parts where I wanted to permanently delete the game off my Series X and never play it again with levels such as Control, Bunker 2, and Train. Switching through your weapons feels slower than most other games and for the type of game that GoldenEye 007 is, that isn't good. It's pretty slow in the first two DOOM games but it is usually a bit more tolerable in those because generally you are given more space to move and they have more of a focus on moving around to avoid enemies.

The only other positive thing I can really mention besides the amount of influence this game had on the gaming industry is the multiplayer. It's been a pretty long while since I have played it but I played it at a friend's house once and I remember it being pretty decent. Overall, the game as a whole was a mixed bag for me. I tried to enjoy it but at the end of the day, I couldn't help but feel that it didn't live up to the expectations that I built for it. I do plan on playing Perfect Dark sometime in the near future so I hope that one will be a more enjoyable adventure from Rare Ltd.

(Had originally posted this on the regular GoldenEye page, but then the Xbox version got its own entry)

Cleared the whole game on 00 Agent and unlocked all the cheats, something I'd never done before! It was great to finally do this two and a half decades after having played GoldenEye for the first time, and some of these levels really gave me a run for my money!

- Facility on 00 Agent in under 2:05: This is to unlock the Invincible Bond cheat. I barely scraped by after about an hour and a half of trying, only to realize that you can do the move+strafe speed doubling on Xbox if you change your D-pad to "Move + Strafe". WHOOPS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE IT EASIER

- Archives on 00 Agent in under 1:20: This is one where you have to absolutely nail the optimal route. Is this what speedrunning feels like??

- Control on Secret Agent in under 10:00 and again on 00 Agent: This legitimately took me over 3 hours of play time to beat these twice. The speed isn't a concern, if you manage to survive and don't screw around, you'll definitely make it in under 10 minutes. What really surprised me is that the issue wasn't Natalya dying. In fact, she only died once! Blowing up the downstairs mainframes right away will open up holes in the bulletproof glass panes that funnel the enemies to a smaller general area than if they break through themselves. The problem was just staying alive long enough for Natalya do get all the computer work done (accomplished this 80% of the time) and then making it to the elevator without keeling over. The saddest moment of this playthrough was making it to the last section with plenty of health, but accidentally throwing the last remote mine on the ceiling juuuuust far enough away from the mainframe behind the last door, softlocking the level. I killed every guy in the whole place, no one had a grenade or anything I could use! GAH

- Caverns on 00 Agent: I didn't realize how much of an ammo decrease there was on 00 Agent until this playthrough. If an enemy drops 30 rounds on Agent, they'll only drop 10 on 00 Agent. Caverns was the level where I really had to nail headshots and conserve ammo, because I kept running out and then encountering a large group of enemies. Definitely use the timed mines on ammo crates when you see them!!

- Aztec: I had never played the two secret levels before! It was wild going into Aztec and Egyptian, not knowing a thing about what I needed to do. Egyptian ended up being a pushover (if you look up the pattern of tiles to walk on in the Golden Gun room), but Aztec kicked my butt for a couple hours. What was incredibly satisfying was that it wasn't luck-dependent like the waves of enemies in Control, I got legitimately better with each run, ultimately beating the level on 00 Agent with health to spare. Quite possibly my favorite level in the game now!

But OH NO! It turns out the only two achievements I'm missing (complete story on Agent and Secret Agent) require you to not just get a checkmark on those missions, you have to beat each level on each difficulty. That's 3 different playthroughs. Guess I'll be logging this two more times this week! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH GOLDENEYE BABY

EDIT: Instead of a fourth review of GoldenEye, I'm gonna do a P.S. here. It turns out that if you've beaten everything on 00 Agent and gotten all the difficulties checked off, you can complete the Agent and Secret Agent achievements with cheats on! I turned on all weapons for the Agent playthrough, but the most enjoyable experience I had with this rerelease was turning on RC-P90s and Paintball Mode and blasting through the Secret Agent difficulty. What a delightful victory lap!