Your enjoyment of Goldeneye is going to depend heavily on how much leeway you can give it for being an early console FPS. PC FPS games were more established by this point thanks to Doom and Wolfenstein laying the groundwork, with mouse and keyboard controls making these games a breeze to play. Serious reconsideration had to be given to the mechanical feel of first person shooters when 3D gaming hit the mainstream, and nowhere were the growing pains more pronounced than on console. It doesn't help when the controller you have to work with looks like it was made in a clown factory, too.

And yet, Goldeneye still plays perfectly fine today... if you're willing to accept it for what it is. Yes, the addition of a right stick helps tremendously as evidenced by the leaked Project Bean, and those emulating the original have the option of a mouse and keyboard hack. It goes a long way to make Goldeneye more enjoyable, but also highlights the fact that the game was balanced around having a single analog stick. In some ways it trivializes the game, and in others it makes it far less agonizing (especially in the later levels or 00Agent mode.)

On its default difficulty, Goldeneye is a briskly paced shooter where you're more or less jogging to the end of each level. Higher difficulties add additional mission objectives, some of which are downright obtuse. Losing a life means starting the entire level over, and when you're dealing with aggressive enemies that deal a lot of damage on top of mission objectives that can easily be botched, you end up with a hell of a challenge. But I like it. When you start to figure out the rhythm of levels on 00 it just feels good. Dying is almost always a learning experience, and it's very rewarding when you start to develop a route you have confidence in.

On the more technical side of things, Goldeneye suffers from a lot of the same issues other N64 games do: the framerate is generally pretty terrible, everything looks muddy, the draw distance is abysmal, and the lighting is overly dark. It's sometimes hard to tell what the hell is even going on, and this can result in some cheap deaths. I don't want to be "that guy" that preaches the superiority of CRTs for retro gaming as there are some solid upscaling options on the market, but playing Goldeneye on modern displays is a bad time. My Retrotink did little to alleviate how crushed the blacks were, making levels like the statue graveyard almost impossible to play without heavily boosting the display's brightness. Alternatively, you can try Project Bean, and honestly that might be the best way to go if you want to enjoy Goldeneye today.

I have a lot of fondness for this game, but there's also a lot you need to look past, and if you want to play it today you're going to have to jump over a few hurdles. Or just emulate it.

Fired this up again to scratch an itch. Was expecting it to have aged badly, but provided you can deal with micromanagement and time units it's still best in class.

As far as I'm aware, they really don't make them like this any more. Modern XCOM set the bar for a sort of streamlined complexity, and I don't think JA2 would go down well now, but for me there's something really satisfying about its attention to detail that nothing else can quite match.

This run, one of my mercs threw a strop because she didn't want to work with another guy who was a goofy slob, so I had to fire him to keep her on. I know it's more common these days, but it still seems incredible to me that they squeezed in voice lines for every merc's opinion of every other merc in the game, of which there's like 30-odd? It just adds to the feeling of it being a live, whole, perfectly formed little world.

Update: managed to get the 1.13 mod working on Mac and it's a whole new world of complexity, gonna take me forever to play and I'm okay with that.