Goldeneye 007

by Gregory Moffett

A sad truth about growing older is that Christmas gradually loses a lot of the magic that surrounds the festive holiday. It can almost seem like just another day off from work, albeit an expensive one!

When I think back to my most cherished memories from childhood, Christmas ’98 tends to rank amongst my favourite ever moments in time.

A year after receiving the N64, along with the huge disappointment that was FIFA 64, the console had already started to prove its worth with the outstanding Mario Kart 64, a game my brother and I had saved up to buy a few months into the year.

Christmas would bring with it a combination of V-Rally 99 Edition and Goldeneye 007, games we had both been looking forward to from genres that we had little to no experience of.

V-Rally was certainly great fun and difficult to master but it complimented the shooting action of Goldeneye perfectly that winter. The handling may have been extremely sensitive, with crashes proving to be catastrophic to your chances of winning, but I had such a good time mastering the game and still get it out from time to time to bathe in the warm glow of nostalgia.

My dad had been reading a review of it in a games magazine a couple of weeks before Christmas and had mentioned to us that trees and houses pop up in front of you. I thought that sounded completely ridiculous and couldn’t understand why something like that would happen in something that was supposed to be relatively realistic. As it turns out, the ‘pop-up’ was just in reference to the race tracks loading in front of you, a little into the distance, something many games of that era were guilty of, not that it could really be helped!

Goldeneye, however, was a completely different animal. Admittedly, a friend from school had rented it a few weeks previously and brought it up to my house to play for a couple of hours. It was my first real experience of properly playing and controlling something in a 3D space with the camera turning according to my inputs. I was absolutely lost playing in multiplayer and actually found it a little overwhelming, confused with all the various button inputs, looking up and down as well as side-stepping, turning and aiming. In all honesty, the brief time I had with it had given me second thoughts about getting the game from Santa.

Those doubts vanished as soon as the game was unwrapped from under the Christmas tree that year as I navigated my way through the menu to the single player campaign in order to tackle the Dam level for the first time.

The shooting felt highly satisfying, especially given the atmosphere Goldeneye provided through its graphics, sound and overall vibe. Everything was superb!

I never saw the film until a few years later so didn’t know what to expect but the variety of locations and objectives meant there was plenty to explore and enjoy, whatever the difficulty. Seeing James Bond wrapped up in a furry coat while taking down enemies with the Klobb on the Surface felt really special at that time of year (as did sliding a Ford Escort round the stages of Sweden in V-Rally 99)

Multiplayer sessions with my brother and friends added even more fun to the whole package and it was literally a blast playing with the custom rules of proximity mines ONLY, where we didn’t allow each other to use guns at all. Littering each location with mines and watching everyone fall into the traps was hilarious.

To this day, Goldeneye 007 is still my favourite ever FPS, a feeling reinforced by playing through the single player again on ‘agent’ difficult recently. An absolute classic!