The new GoldenEye 007

[Midnight Crossroads]

/ranton

Activision, I am disappointed.

Let me tell you a story, when I was young, my first game on the N64 was, like many other children, none other than GoldenEye. It was awesome. I can not tell you how giddy I was from the second I zoomed into James Bond's head to jumping onto a waiting helicopter's landing skids as an explosion went off behind me. My excitement was only magnified by going back again to unlock cheats, and then there was multiplayer. My friends spent hours playing that game. I lost a controller because the spring of the joystick wore out.

Then Perfect Dark game out and things just got better. Then all was silent.

Then the new GoldenEye 007 was released.

What happened? Seriously, Rare made one of the finest examples of the FPS genre to date with Perfect Dark. You had it handed to you on a silver platter, and you turned into a Call of Duty clone.

Now, I love Call of Duty. Its my go-to game when I'm bored. UO is wicked fun. But Activision, if I wanted to play Call of Duty, I'ld play it. When I play GoldenEye I want a game that doesn't care about realism or grittiness.

I want to carry every weapon in the game on my back. I want to throw remote mines on my friends and send them running into a group of enemies to blow them all up. Perks and classes? Seriously guys? And what about the weapons? You take a gun that blows up when you throw it on the ground after someone picks it up, and replace it with a laundry list of boring SMGs with nothing different about them with generic red dot sights. It's awesome what you did with Oddjobs hat, but killing men from 20 paces with bladed bowler does not make up for the pile of fail you handed me. Seriously, why didn't you listen more to the guy that suggest "kill people with hat?" And what the fuck happened to the Facility? The maps are just bad, but how could you touch the Facility?

Now, maybe I'm wrong and Rare took the kids with them, but as far as I know, everything was handed to you. Everything. How did you manage to screw it up?

/rantoff

 

[Wolfenbarg]

The original competitors for Goldeneye were the far superior FPS titles on the PC. However, since consoles were reaching a broader market with more limited hardware, the relative competitors on the N64 were... well almost nobody. Combined with the fact that the game didn't suck (I hated it, but that's because I got to play said PC titles), of course it was a hit. Now since then we've had two genre defining FPS titles from Halo and Call of Duty 4, so what did you expect? There was no way they could compete with that. So the only solution was to copy them.

But seriously, let me reiterate that Goldeneye had no real competition. These are completely different eras we're talking about. They used almost the same formula in following James Bond games and they all failed miserably because they had to try to beat Halo.

 

[Midnight Crossroads]

The original competitors for Goldeneye were the far superior FPS titles on the PC. However, since consoles were reaching a broader market with more limited hardware, the relative competitors on the N64 were... well almost nobody. Combined with the fact that the game didn't suck (I hated it, but that's because I got to play said PC titles), of course it was a hit. Now since then we've had two genre defining FPS titles from Halo and Call of Duty 4, so what did you expect? There was no way they could compete with that. So the only solution was to copy them.

But seriously, let me reiterate that Goldeneye had no real competition. These are completely different eras we're talking about. They used almost the same formula in following James Bond games and they all failed miserably because they had to try to beat Halo.

I expected GoldenEye plus all the improvements they made with Perfect Dark, which was a far better game. It was on the box. GoldenEye 007.

Why would the company that releases Call of Duty want a game just like it out there unless they deliberately wanted it to fail? They had to have known the only people who would play it are the people whom already love GoldenEye, faults and all. The people playing Call of Duty would just say, "meh, call of duty knockoff," and go back to Call of Duty.

 

[Wolfenbarg]

For a few reasons:

1) It's cheap. They can use the same engine that they've developed more than one game on to make it.

2) Low risk. Activision quickly learned the value of turning a typically over the top war styled game into a gritty action title. That value was roughly 10 gazillion dollars. Really, it seems like it was a horrible idea for Activision not to seek out a developer and give them free reign on the project. But they probably did because:

3) 007 games sucked after GoldenEye. Check out the titles that came after it. Perfect Dark was good, but it wasn't a 007 game. The ideas are all in place and the heart is there, but the style just didn't work in the transition to the PS2/Xbox generation. Activision would probably be taking more of a risk to try to make it similar to the original game.

 

[SilkySkyKitten]

3) 007 games sucked after GoldenEye. Check out the titles that came after it. Perfect Dark was good, but it wasn't a 007 game. The ideas are all in place and the heart is there, but the style just didn't work in the transition to the PS2/Xbox generation. Activision would probably be taking more of a risk to try to make it similar to the original game.

Uh, what about Everything or Nothing? That game was awesome, and is still the only Bond game I've ever played that truly made you feel like you were taking part in a Bond film, not just a shooter-game with a Bond license (not even Goldeneye could do that).

OT: I must be one of the few here who actually decided to play the new Goldeneye without my nostalgia-tinted glasses and I'm glad I did. Yeah, it borrows quite a bit of it's gameplay elements from Call of Duty and isn't an exact remake of the original. In the end, however, it has one thing that kept it from being another silly cash in: it was fucking fun. Eurocom, while making a game that was quite different from the original, made a game that tapped right into that part of the brain that says "Holy shit, this is fun!" much like Rare did with the original. Plus, the references to the original film (my absolute favorite Bond film) were quite awesome to see, even if they made all the characters look like Barbie dolls.

Perhaps you need to take off your nostalgia-tinted glasses, realize that no: this is not the same Goldeneye you remember (which truly, isn't always a bad thing), watch the original movie to help you appreciate all the little references to said movie, and in the end just try to have fun. That's what I did, and I enjoyed the hell out of the new Goldeneye.

 

[Bloodstain]

Perks and classes? Seriously guys?

What the he-...what did they do to my precious GoldenEye 007?!
...now I'm sad. Very sad.

So many great games getting ruined...the Max Payne Series (I refuse to accept Part 3), GoldenEye...

 

[Geekosaurus]

and you turned into a Call of Duty clone

'What sells well?'
'Call of Duty.'
'Let's copy that.'

I'm afraid that's how it's going to be for a while.

 

[brucelee13245]

The original competitors for Goldeneye were the far superior FPS titles on the PC. However, since consoles were reaching a broader market with more limited hardware, the relative competitors on the N64 were... well almost nobody. Combined with the fact that the game didn't suck (I hated it, but that's because I got to play said PC titles), of course it was a hit. Now since then we've had two genre defining FPS titles from Halo and Call of Duty 4, so what did you expect? There was no way they could compete with that. So the only solution was to copy them.

But seriously, let me reiterate that Goldeneye had no real competition. These are completely different eras we're talking about. They used almost the same formula in following James Bond games and they all failed miserably because they had to try to beat Halo.

Though i partially agree with you, i believe the game would have still sold well, BECAUSE of the n64 version. Im sure anyone that was excited about Goldeneye (2) was a fan of the old one and i bet ya anyone that was disappointed with the game was also a fan of the original. I thin the entire point of the game was to relive that nostalgia that came with the first one. It didn't have to be LIKE halo or call of duty. It WAS Goldeneye and that's what mattered. Though i do agree with your argument from a non nostalgia point of view.