Love this game so much. Jean-Luc Goddard said something like "All you need to make a good movie is a girl and a gun." and this is sort of like that but it's a video game. Basically just takes everything that Goldeneye did and does it way better, and also is just like one of those games that has so many features attached to it, way way beyond the scope of what the N64 is seemingly capable of doing that it's just astounding. Just cast your headspace back to the early 2000s and yeah, it's great. For some reason this entire game is like 32MB in size, which is totally miniscule by today's standards. Donkey Kong 64 had that false advertising of like "It's so big, we added an expansion pack to fit it all in." but literally that's actually this game, and I guess people complain about the framerate on the N64 version a lot, but it's something where literally the only complaint is like "It's just so massive that it can just barely run on its own console." Even then I kind of did just get used to the lag after a while. Game as a whole is like, quite short, but it's one of those things where it's also like expanded so much with just how difficult it is and how you have to fine tune everything with your approach (especially the Perfect Agent difficulty) so yeah. It's punishing, but my frustration at this game was definitely matched by the satisfaction I felt finally completing levels after the umpteenth attempt or so.

The scope of this game is just astounding. I think like there's a lot of FPS game elements that are taken for granted, but there's just something so viscerally satisfying about the gunplay and the objectives in this, and I just love the atmosphere where you can be like in an office block in a towering skyline at one moment, a sunny villa the next, then an alien spacecraft etc. but the level design is so very distinctive, and it all seemingly does work together. Little fixtures like the lighting effects and the texture work, and the voice acting and just how cinematic the rest of the game is when you aren't shooting dudes just works so well. Game loves just delving into conspiratorial stuff about secret agencies and aliens, government corruption and what not. Joanna Dark just murders hundreds of guys throughout this entire game but, like The Matrix, it's okay that she does it, because it's really, really cool and badass.

Also didn't remember this game being genuinely as funny as it was. I mean I guess the plot's a bit preposterous, so you have wisecracking alien sidekicks, flamboyant A.I. simulations of someone's personality, some guy who threatens people and makes declarations in a Kermit the Frog voice. Kind of gives the game some character honestly. Oh, and Grant Kirkhope's soundtrack. Probably is one of the best game soundtracks out there, especially Chicago: Stealth which is like the epitome of moody tech-noir.

(also uh, i may or may not have projected trans feelings onto this game. actually that is super, super obvious in retrospect, lol.)