"Goldeneye was good only if you didn't have PC" Justify:

Yeah, and you definitely have the cooler headed opinion. I just get frustrated when people talk about these opinions as though they are fact. If someone says they didn't like Halo, then fine. I get it. But when people say Halo didn't do anything unique or that it was a bad game, I get irritated. Some stuff is just empirical, and Goldeneye and Halo empirically did new things for the genre.

But when you look at what you could do with Quake and QE, GoldenEye was a toy. That doesn't necessarily mean that one was more "fun" than the other but it really was true that Quake was superior than GoldenEye in form and function.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of that before; are you sure you're not just upset that a member of the crew said it? I played Unreal Tournament with many others, and we all really enjoyed Goldeneye. I think the real way to say it is Goldeneye was only good if you played it back then. You know, like pretty much any form of entertainment.

So this person whom you'd listen to would have to be the Video Game King without claiming to be the King? How would that work? How would you verify that this person is the King? That aside, I do very much like your use of ad hominem. Almost makes one forget anything else in this discussion.

For a console FPS back in those days Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were pretty good, but they were totally eclipsed by what was being done on the PC side of things. Same with Halo.

For a console game Goldeneye and what followed it were pretty revolutionary, but it isn't something that wasn't already being done on a PC years before with games like Doom and Duke 3D.

A console FPS and a PC FPS (at that time) were two completely different animals. It's hard to compare them directly besides maybe the graphics/technical stuff because virtually everything about them was different.

Well thank you for learning me about Disruptor, which I now must play, and which appears to feature some incredible 90s FMV. Has GB ever played this game on a stream? Because they really should:

Comparing Doom and Duke to Goldeneye is baffling to me. Goldeneye is leaps and bounds more advanced than either of those games. If for no other reason than the 3d engine. And don't even get me started on the rumble pak...

My first shooter was Goldeneye, and I enjoyed it a good bit. Then Half-Life came out, that's when FPS's really got good!

So I was not a PC Gamer and even now I sit here at an iMac, so yeah Goldeneye was great, I can't sit here and tell you that the game controls perfectly but damn if thats not a fun game. I mean I have zero connection to the James Bond brand and I still played that game a whole bunch.

Didn't have a PC when Golden Eye came out. Didn't care either. Because I had Golden Eye on the 64. Game was kick-ass. Playing with my friends, IN MY LIVING ROOM, was (and still is) more fun then getting on Skype and going "Hi guys, good to "see" you. Want to play some dota? Snarf snarf"

i would agree with the perfect dark being superior to goldeneye argument except for it running somewhat like ass in comparison (especially with coop or multiple bots). also the stupid slap vision blur effect carrying over after you died. <_<. ALSO not being able to shoot the ammo boxes/guns/armor around to create your own ammo caches. but it was still great even if i didn't have the same crew to play it with when it was released that i had with goldeneye.

goldeney, though. man, it will always be one of my vey favorite games. the legs on it were just incredible; i was playing it with about the same fervor a year or so after i started. we did so many things to pretty much break the game with gameshark. opening up the extra levels for multi and doing some weird predator/human versus scenarios will always be some of my fondest gamin memories. yeah i wasn't muh of a pc person around then, but i'd still echo others' statements here that there was a helluva lot of original concepts that the game brought to the table. didn't the concept of headshots first appear there?

anyway pc is well and good for the speed/fluidity reasons mentioned, and i do loves me some Duke, but goldeneye was just something else. <3 that game 4ever.

edit: now this makes me want to go and buy PD on xbox live

I can say something to this fact better than most. My first gaming platform was the PC. My mom had paid over $1000 for our first real PC and even got someone to come over to show us how to use it properly. (I was already a heavy PC user in school so the tutorial was mainly for my mom and sister). The first thing I did was play games on the thing. One of the first games I played was Wolfenstein 3D. Liked it quite a bit. The next was one of the Doom games and finally I played Duke 3D. I loved Duke 3D but I hated using the mouse and keyboard for it. It was always so uncomfortable to use. I played a host of other games for PC including some mech game that I can't remember. Goldeneye was a revelation for me. Here was a shooter I can play sitting on my bed and/or chair and also play with my friends. Same with Perfect Dark and same with Time Splitters 2.

@pillclinton said:

Well thank you for learning me about Disruptor, which I now must play, and which appears to feature some incredible 90s FMV. Has GB ever played this game on a stream? Because they really should:

Disruptor was excellent.

Basically when everyone else was struggling to get Doom ported to the console in a way that didn't feel like something less than the PC version, Insomniac made an FPS from the ground up for consoles that took what Doom did well and added in all the stuff the PSX was good at that the PC wasn't. It was basically Doom era gameplay at it's best before the leap to the next level of Quake-era stuff.

And yeah, between this and Warhawk make me miss FMV really, really badly.

@ripelivejam: No. Headshots started with counterstrike.

It's also where the meme started, although maybe that's obvious haha ("Boom! Headshot.")

Weeeell my first online FPS was Quake. Enjoyed the hell out of it. Coping with 200+ ping was always fun.

I have as many fond memories playing 4-player Goldeneye as Quake on PC and Unreal Tournament on PC. And later I was obsessed with Counter-Strike. So, yes, they are just pulling that stuff outta their ass.

@cornbredx: iirc goodeneye came before counterstrike...

Yeah, wasn't counterstrike a half life mod?

Goldeneye was well before that.

@ripelivejam: it did.

relevance is importance the game places on specific areas being hit. I didnt play golden eye a lot, but I dont remember head shots being much different. I could be wrong, again, I didn't play it a lot. =)

Any time the staff makes a comment like that, I just shrug it off. While they are knowledgeable about a lot of things, they also allow their ignorance on certain topics to show

I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that GoldenEye was the best FPS of its era, but it was certainly a groundbreaking title when it came to the genre on consoles. The fact that the game's quality has been far surpassed by modern advancements at this point doesn't diminish the impact that GoldenEye had.

@jazgalaxy: Maybe Doom and Duke was a bad comparison, but Quake and Quake 2 are a better example.

Half-Life is too, but that came out a little less than a year after GoldenEye.

I remember thinking Goldeneye looked and played like shit back then and at that time I was playing mostly on console (PSX though mostly). The reason I believed it looked and played bad though isn't really the games fault. The N64 controls were so horrendous that it made you fight the controls to get it to do what you want in every game. Compound that with the fact that I think I was playing it while daisy chaining a couple of console through coaxial because that's all my TV had. I remember it being a muddled mess of pixels where I could barely make anything out. I remember even getting dizzy at one point because of it.

Never really got to enjoy the game, but I know what it and halo did for gaming. So I do get why people would defend it against PC games. Though I'd still tend to agree with Brad and friends about it's quality since even at the time it was out I still hated it.

Right.

The only thing I'm arguing is that GoldenEye was a good game that stood next to the best FPS games you could buy at the time without qualification. It's not "nostalgia" that makes it good. It's not "not having a PC" that makes it good. It's just a very well designed and fully featured game.

Is it the best? that's up for individuals to decide. But it certainly wasn't inferior.

Grouping GoldenEye and PD with Halo is not something I'd agree with. If you were playing Half-Life or whatever when Perfect Dark came out, yeah, console shooters are going to seem clunky and primitive.

Halo almost singlehandedly justified shooters on consoles and showed that they could be done well. There were a couple decent console shooters prior, but none that put it all together like Halo did.

I'm as big a fan of Halo 1 as there can be. I bought the game, and the xbox on day 1 back before anyone knew what either was, and played through the campaign about two dozen times because people kept coming by my dorm room and going "Hey, let me see that xbox thing people say you have..."

That being said, I completely disagree with you. Halo was the total package, sure, but it iterated on things GoldenEye was doing before and even lacked some things that Perfect Dark had, namely Bots. Halo is obviously the superior game, as it came out years after both 007 and PD, but both those games still held their own against what the PC was offering.

Goldeneye was interesting in its own way, and I never played Perfect Dark, but yeah, fuck Halo. Their solution to the vastly inferior controls was to make the game slow enough so that it didn't really matter. Not a formula for fun, IMO.

I don't understand these Goldeneye,Quake, Doom comparisons. Where in the world did Quake have a good campaign? Goldeneye innovated on 2 fronts, while at the end of the day (before Half-Life) PC FPS just had good multiplayer play.

I don't understand how people seem to ignore that Goldeneye was half a stealth game as well as FPS and had a campaign that nothing before it had close to having.I played both games back in the day, and I think its silly to think a game that was just shooting other dudes and solving some small puzzles was so much better than a game that was far, far deeper.

I second that statement.

@fattony12000 said:

They had to have based her appearance on Jennifer Garner, right? This was back when Alias was all the rage, wasn't it?

Well I didn't have a pc and I fucking loved it, so confirmed?

@extomar said:

I maintain that Goldeneye controlled just fine if you used the "Turok-style" control preset (move with the C buttons, aim with the analog stick). Not everyone liked that setup, but I greatly preferred it over the standard controls.

I could just be crazy, though.

Yeah I'll be honest that stuff still gets on my nerves sometimes when they start the "FF7 sucks" or "Star Wars sucks" or "if you like this you're a bad person" but I'd rather they be upfront with their opinions then try to make everybody happy. They've been doing this long enough they probably deserve that leeway.

That said, if Jeff dumps on Star Wars one more time I am gonna burn their office to the ground. YOU'RE ON NOTICE JEFF.

I had a PC thought Goldeneye was great but Halo is hot garbage. Do I win? And Doom is still fantastic to play.

Goldeneye was awesome. But it also controlled like complete ass. I prefered the PC shooters back then, and I still do, but I don't really think that makes Goldeneye less of a game. It was fantastic for its limits and fantastic for a bunch of other reasons. I just dont feel any incentive to play it when I could be playing Quake instead.

Goldeneye was good to play with people who had a 64 but my go to back then was Starsiege Tribes and Half-Life running on a P3 450 + Voodoo3.

I think Halo: Combat Evolved was the first FPS on consoles that I thought was amazing.

There's a difference between "being upfront with their opinions" and "expressing opinions that are actually educated." Southern Baptist televangelists are incredibly opinionated and will let everyone know what they think, but that doesn't make their opinions worth listening.

Goldeneye had headshots, local multiplayer and something approaching a decent control scheme for gamepad. Everything else was better on PC, and a gamepad control scheme wasnt required.

PC had online multiplayer, mouse and kb configs, better engines, and mod support. It's pretty fair to say that Goldeneye was much less impressive if you had already seen this stuff.

Back in the day I had the distinct impression that the game was much more impressive to non gamers. It seemed to pull in a lot of people who liked the movie then got them into FPS.

@hailinel: There is a strange undercurrent to the topic along with some responses and comments that PC gamers had an unfounded belief that Quake was superior to other games like GoldenEye where I am only pointing out there was in fact a lot of reason for that. Quake was historically important because it was the first engine that seamlessly unified modeling, sfx (graphics and audio), physics, and (most importantly) rules in an open ended framework where developers and modders where free to completely build a game with it. Before Quake, devs could make games to do stuff like replace sounds or sprites or add custom built levels or weapons or whatever but that would essentially just be a reskin of the same old game. With Quake and Quake Engine you could completely build a new game. As far as history has shown GoldenEye was a footnote while Quake was historic.

...which isn't to say that GoldenEye wasn't as fun as Quake. The big drawback to Quake was that it took a lot of maintenance play games (the main reason why PC games got a reputation for being complex and clumsy and error prone unless tweaked was perpetuated by Quake) while GoldenEye was about as "plug and play" as you could get.

You see, heres the deal. The game ran at maybe 20fps if you were lucky. Super mario 64 ran at a pretty high framerate, and is super response. Ocarina of Time, ran closer to 25-30fps. Very playable. But thats why the ds version felt so much better. That was the problem with goldeneye, it just felt sluggish. Now going back and playing on an emulator at 60fps, its much more playable. Though the sound is torched that way. But we are discussing how it plays on the 64 right now.

Perfect dark did control alittle better. But even it wasn't perfect. Going and playing the XBLA version of it, the level design isn't great. You see, Jedi Knight 2 was very very playable. Still is today. Is not exactly easy, but if you take away dated graphics. Its a fun run in the past.

I say Goldeneye was probably the best looking shooter when it was released. But it most certainly wasn't the best thought out, or best playing shooter. Its a good 8.0 64 game for its time. I felt people went weirdly overboard crazy when that game came out. One year later, Half Life. Which had been in development for longer time, it did do some things different.

i dont wanna argue i just wanna enjoy things

@fattony12000 said:

@pillclinton said:

@fattony12000 said:

They had to have based her appearance on Jennifer Garner, right? This was back when Alias was all the rage, wasn't it?

Yeah, Joanna Dark, I get that. I mean the Garner-ishness of her PDZ incarnation. She didn't look so Garner-ish until PDZ is what I'm saying.

Sounds like someone never played Timesplitters...

As much as I loved Goldeneye as a kid, I have to agree. There were much better shooters on the PC because developers didn't know how to do shooting properly for consoles back in the day.

goldeneye was great, deal with it naysayers. i'm sure there were plenty of shooters that looked, performed, and controlled better- but couch deathmatches have gone the way of the dodo, and we've lost something because of that. i had many a silly night with some bros staying up way too late doing license to kill on the facility. good times.

@fattony12000 said:

Man, I still remember the internet rage that blew up when that design of Joanna was first shown off.

GoldenEye/Quake is just such an odd comparison in a lot of ways. Even putting aside the platform differences aside, they both catered to different gameplay types. Unless I'm just horribly misremembering the game, Quake was just run, gun, grab the key card, run some more, gun a lot more, and find the exit. GoldenEye had a slower pace to it with a greater variety of objectives (and also a lot of shooting dudes).

Goldeneye was the first experience I had of a local multiplayer shooter, so it doesn't matter if on a technical standpoint it wasn't Quake, the game offered something Quake did not.

The idea that Goldeneye was just the poor man's FPS of it's day is bullshit. I count Goldeneye as an important (and enjoyable) game because of it's numerous, revolutionary mechanics.

Hang on a second, while I figure out how to do bullet points.

• There we go. Apparently you just click on the bullet point icon.
• Stealth - remember when stealth was a great, crazy new thing and then it got tedious because every game felt the need to have a stealth section but then it got good again when stealth became an option? Goldeneye gave you the option to play it stealthy before that was even a thing.
• Headshots. Region-specific damage, if you like, but FUCKIN' HEADSHOTS.
• Sniper Rifles. Lucasart's Outlaws predates Goldeneye by about 6 months but nobody ever talks about that game (see levels set on a train).
• Pierce Brosnan
• Fucking listen to this.

Back in the day, I had a PC, an internet connection and I loved Quake, but the dim view that a certain "professional videogamesman" has of Goldeneye riles me a bit.

He didn't get it.

That's okay. It's a broad church.

Also, Grant Kirkhope Vs. Trent Reznor.

No contest.