Megalextoria

Absolutely classic N64 exclusive. Goldeneye was a very influential first person shooter and one of the more mature games on the N64. I still play this game today and love it to bits.

The single player missions are action packed and really cool, feeling like you actually are James Bond. Three difficulty levels are present in the single player. The soundtrack is really epic and done very well with a industrial and techno feel. Stealth and all out shooting are both tactics in the missions. Basically the missions are fun and have a breadth of weapons available.

As for the offline multiplayer – it is historic. The split screen shooting is one of the first proper iterations and works tremendously. There are a few modes, stages and tons of characters available such as the infamous ‘Jaws’. The golden gun is one hit kill and adds the need of technique and tactics to win a multiplayer game. Multiplayer never gets really boring and it is known for people to have hour long sessions of it amongst friends. Multiplayer is action packed and feels very intense. The only real downfall for this is that the random respawning it can be very unfair at times.

In conclusion, to me Goldeneye is a fantastic original shooting game as of its fun and cool single player which is presented well and also more for its addictive and epic multiplayer which is stuff of legends still today.

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Goldeneye was released by Rare for the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and it is one of the must have games for that system. First person shooters were not the most common type of games on the N64 but Goldeneye, exclusive to that system, did just about everything right.

Prior to Goldeneye, first person shooters were primarily a PC phenomenon. That isn’t to say there weren’t FPS games on consoles but they were not really up to the standards of their PC brethren. Goldeneye changed all of that. It was one of the first modern shooters on a console, adding more realism that the simplistic movements offered by games like Doom. It was also one of the first FPS type games to add stealth elements which are common today.

In Goldeneye, you take the role of 007 himself in a series of missions that don’t all primarily involve killing. A large variety of weapons can be found and used and even a few of the gadgets you will find familiar from the Bond films.

Goldeneye offers an excellent multiplayer mode. Up to four players can play on a split screen in four different modes. Normal is a basic death match mode that can be played individually or as teams. In the You Only Have Twice mode, you are eliminated after two deaths. The Living Daylights is a flag tag type game where the person to keep the flag the longest wins. In the License to Kill mode, players die from a single shot. Finally, in The Man With The Golden Gun mode, a golden gun is placed somewhere on the map and the player that retrieves it can kill with only one shot.

Copies of Nintendo 64 are not cheap but carts can be found on eBay for $25-$30. Unfortunately, because of rights issues, the original game has never been officially re-released. Though not a Bond related game, Perfect Dark was a successor in the sense that it used an upgraded version of the same engine and features many of the same gameplay elements. A number of sequels were ultimately released on a number of systems but none ever quite lived of to the standards of the original. Expectations were not high for Goldeneye when it was being developed but it surprised everyone with its quality and became the third best selling game for the Nintendo 64.

Some of the original members of the Goldeneye team eventually left Rare and formed Free Radical Design. This group developed the TimeSplitters series of games which are among my personal favorite first person shooters.