Game Info

Developer/Publisher Rare/Nintendo Genre 3D Action Players 1-4 Supports Rumble Pak Else Player's Choice (£30) Save on cart (4 slots)

Top indoor stuff, really. I can remember Bond descending these stairs in the GoldenEye movie.

Over a year has passed since then and I finally bought N64 and, of course, Goldeneye. It's time to review it and see how Bond still manages with year 1999s best shooters. Turok 2 tried and, from what I've heard, it didn't quite make the mark. Of course it seems that they are quite different from each other, Turok with open wide outside-places, and Goldeneye with tighter, smaller indoor levels. It can't beat Half-Life, but it's the best for Nintendo 64, and the best 1st person shooter on console.

Graphically it still is quite top-notch on N64, and doesn't have to be shamed in front of some of the 3D-accelerated PC games either, but great graphs come with a price, as always. The framerate dives deep at times, and the beautiful explosions just make it worse. For two reasons you should never fire on an enemy while there are smoke in front of you: with KF7 , (most likely AK-47) the sound goes "bang... bang... bang" cause the framerate's going through a dramatic slowdown making it hard to hit, and enemy shoots just as sharp even when there's inpenetratable smokewall between him and you. I heard that in Perfect Dark, Rare is using Expansion Pak for sharper textures and to make the framerate smoother. That's a mere rumour, but I like to believe that. You get over the sometimes bad framerate, and the explosions really look like the real thing, except they last little bit too long, they're not napalm you know. But that's just a petty detail, which can be overlooked.

Make sure they don't get close enough for you to see their faces.

In Goldeneye the foes exceptionally don't look identical, cause they have a random face. That prevents a funny feeling when about five men are in a row and everyone looking the same. Couple of them look really nasty with a huge scar and evil grimace. On the other hand, there are some which look like a tunafish with those round eyes. But one flaw comes to mind right when I see some animation, the enemies look like 80-year old man picking up a newspaper, when they kneel down to aim and shoot you. They are just too slow to be even lousy guards. You can take 'em down with ease while they're in the middle of an animation and unable to shoot you. I would have preferred less enemies, and instead of their mass, they could be faster in their moves, more agile, more deadly, and more life-like manneristic, maybe in Perfect Dark then. Nevertheless they do make a better opponent than in most of other shooters.

	Next page
Juho Mankila - Janne Mankila - Jani Tuominen