I am 36 and I was NOT prepared for the feels in this video. Holy shit. I actually played Goldeneye for the first time last year, on the original N64. It is a frustrating game a lot of the time, but it was also still pretty fun.
Solo, Frigate, Bunker 2 and Train are my favorite missions on single player mode. I feel completely spoiled having used a dual analog controller for so many years, that revisiting Goldeneye and Perfect Dark with the original N64 controller felt…WEIRD. Especially with any sniping efforts. The infinite enemies that respawn when you start shooting like Rambo in Bunker 2 really forces you to sneak around with those throwing knives as much as possible. Great game, even if it feels so…90s. But then again, I love the early FPS games more than modern titles, so 🤷♂️ There’s something so satisfying about games from the early era that didn’t hold our attention for hours like they try to do now. If an NES game kicked your arse, you didn’t care, but turned it off and went to play outside with your friends. It doesn’t feel like kids have that same mentality these days. Being a kid in the 80s and early 90s was the best. Great chat 👍😎
Yeah, the levels that funnel you down corridors were really good. I found I slipped fairly easily back into using the controller after a few levels. Not while I was attempting Archives obviously, but later. Games were harder back then for the same reason they have side quests now. It's all about padding the length. The limited technology for retro games meant you couldn't do these big story things or cutscenes or even put in a load of levels so the way they made games last was by making them harder. It's just what it was. You played the same big over and over until you got it, and then you died on a later section and had to do it all over again. I don't think the kids are all that different really. It's just what we had.
It's easy to underplay, misrepresent, and outright forget about the factors involved with recreating the gaming experience properly- the original console, controller, and order of releases. You would have gone in to Perfect Dark after mastering Goldeneye and acquiring proficiency with using the stock Fisher Price plastic trident controller. I'm glad you get to experience it so close to the original stock in order way. Doom on the N64 is my favorite port. It's also a work of art.
@@KyIeMcCIeIIan I'll do Perfect Dark at some point. Game's amazing for the time and the hardware. To me it's like the final word on everything you can do on an N64 and squeezed into a cartridge.
@@TheRetroSofa "Squeezed into a cartridge", huh? They don't have a lot of room on them, that's for sure. They said "We don't need no stinking memory, lets make our best seller only 16MB!!!" Then they released Animal Crossing and laughed in Nintendo. 16MB on a fucking disc. What a flex. One of their biggest. I wonder what Sony thought.
I think the nostalgia is what keeps me coming back to GoldenEye. I'm really happy it was ported to the Nintendo Switch. I re-mapped my pro controller for this game, but I also have the N64 controller for the Switch and love using it.
It's great to have it finally back on modern systems even if there's nothing quite like the feel of the original hardware when it comes to GoldenEye. I find aiming with anything other than the N64's weird analogue stick feels weird to me. I think if the N64 had had a modern controller the game would have controlled quite differently.
This is probably the first Goldeneye video I've seen other than my own that properly acknowledges the game's control options, which I very much appreciate. Though I would argue all day (and have!) on the merits of Goldeneye's game design and why I think even what seem to be its flaws produce a worthwhile, quality experience; I was pleasantly surprised with the conclusion for the most part. There's nothing wrong with saying a game that is good is good, and Goldeneye is a good game. And I mention this as someone who still plays it on a regular basis. I have a lot more thoughts on this game but all I'm gonna say for now is that watching that footage of Dam at the end made me wanna play some Goldeneye.
I'll have to check yours out at some point. Yeah this game gets too little respect for its control options from people who presumably didn't change them. The twin-stick controls with two controllers were really innovative and cool. Whenever I get to editing a video, I always think of something I should have either pointed out or put more emphasis on and in this one it's what's in the description: All of this is about a game aging from 10/10 to 8/10. It's still great and always was, but also there's a reason it's not bringing in new fans and demand for that type of gameplay. Thanks for the comment. I left Dam until the end for exactly that reason. 😉
That dual tv setup with cardboard covering the other persons screen on each tv, sounds amazing. Too bad i have no one who still wants to play this game in this day and age, so can't really try this myself. This game is still fresh in my mind up to today. Some of us 40 year olds still know whats up!
It changed the game up completely. I don't know how the Xbox version does its online multiplayer but that could be an answer. But yeah, either way this is one of those games that sticks with you.
I have a friend who held the controller in a 4th way. He held the analogue middle stick with his right hand, and had his left hand hit the regular buttons from above, at a sort of weird almost up-side-down angle. Never seen or heard that anyone else but him held it in this way.
I always viewed the infinitely spawning enemies as Punishment for not being a good James Bond. It's a rewarding Bond like experience IF you get good. It's a punishing Serious Sam like experience if you run in Guns Blazing.
Yes, in some levels. However, the worst levels for infinite enemies don't give you a choice in the matter. Off the top of my head, Surface 2, Depot, and Statue have them from the start. Other levels, such as Control and Bunker 1, start spawning enemies when you complete certain objectives. Better hope you left that objective until last or the others are going to be a real pain to complete!
I had tons of fun playing Goldeneye multiplayer with friends in the 90s and early 00s. I agree, it wasn't *that* amazing overall, but it was still very well-made for the time. The N64 also had (let's face it), a lot of cost-cutting hardware compromises. Which meant that the frame rates could very often dip below 15-20 FPS in certain games, and the textures were often very compressed. It's one of the main reasons the PS1 has aged so well, even with it's wobbly graphics and warped textures. It had a huge library of great games, CD audio, and most of the games managed at least 30 FPS, sometimes 60 FPS. I love the N64 for what it was at the time. I was already a huge fan of the SGI supercomputers at the time, so owning an N64 was a bit like owning a small chunk of that heritage. The N64 had comparable graphics to a PC with essentially a "cut-down Voodoo 1", for around 250 quid. The N64 was just the first console that let many of us experience out-of-the-box multiplayer games for the first time. (Even Mario Party was fun, as long as it didn't go on for more than about an hour. lol) Most of what we do as retro collectors is trying to rekindle those great memories from our youth. Even though I barely play games any more, I still tinker with the hardware and modding, and FPGA versions of those old machines. btw, I was one of the strange people who never had much trouble using the N64 controller. Unless you had very large hands, it was fine. lol
We were a lot more forgiving of framerate dips in the 90's than we are today. The N64 was slow and developers pushed it hard. The RAM was also anaemic hence the texture quality. But it was good at pushing polygons and the filtering and lack of warping were very impressive for the time (for the price). I was also fine with the controller, though I recognise compared to controllers today it's not quite so good. It was the early days of 3D and as SNES games have aged better than N64 games I reckon it's the same for the controllers. My wife and I have played every Mario Party game and could probably do a video about that at some point. I still need to find Mario Party 2 and 3 though and 3 is not cheap.
"Gave me an existential crisis. Subscribed." Love it. 😃 Thanks so much for the comment and subscribing and I hope it's the first existential crisis of many.
I kind of stumbled across your video, I found it very interesting 😁 the review of 007 and takes on nostalgia and then somewhat a reflection on life in general kind of a cool way to put together a video. My birthday is next month myself....a person does a lot of reflection....Great video. Subscribed!
What a beautiful video, more than I expected out of a Goldeneye retrospective. Really good content for having so few subscribers, wish I could play some split screen Perfect Dark with ya.
Thank you! When I started writing this video it was about Perfect Dark and GoldenEye but I realised I had more than enough to say about GoldenEye. I hope to get to Perfect Dark at some point though.
I agree SO MUCH on the infinitely respawning enemies being an annoying part of the game, or at least the fact that they always know your location. It would make sense to spawn more in and have them patrol for you, sure, but it really does just seem like a lot of artificially added difficulty for players who don't yet know how to speed run through the missions.
Yeah that's it. The game didn't really have logic for enemies to look for you as far as I remember, they either had set patrol paths or they knew where you were. That would have been hard to implement but definitely would have been an improvement.
I tried replaying this game and had an absolutely dreadful time if I'm honest. The contrast between that experience and how much I loved the game as a child could not have been more gigantic.
Right!? I still had some fun with it when I was recording some of the footage here but nothing like the complete adoration I felt for it when it came out.
I don't think to this day I've ever completed Goldeneye in single player, and perhaps I should make time to sit down and do so, but like so many people I have solid memories of pizza parties as a young adult crowding around a copy to play four player multiplayer. Fun times. Rare were one of the great British games developers who made the jump from micro to console, and James Bond was the right I.P. at the right time in the hands of the right people. I feel like Sony may have edged Nintendo out on that generation of the 'console war', but like you I was always a Nintendo loyalist, I stayed true and bought a new Nintendo console whenever they came out, and while I might have felt I missed out at the time on some great games, most of my PlayStation owning friends would cite Goldeneye as a game they regretted Sony didn't have. Ah, the grass is always greener on the other side, as they say. 😉
You're not going to... revisit GoldenEye? *thunder* It is actually a fun game tbf. I dunk on it a bit in this video but "aged badly" means it's gone from a 10/10 to an 8/10 or something. You still have to play it understanding the context of when it game out though. I was a big fan of Rare back in the day, being a regular on fan forums and the like. I didn't get fully into their collect-a-thon platformers but this, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing, and Conker's Bad Fur Day were some of my favourite games. Jetpac was cool, too. 🙂
Good work Mr Sofa. You've earned yourself a subscriber. Time to check out your other videos now. I've only seen this and your video about playing the first Zelda game in 2024
This video totally made my day and I never even played Goldeneye and have no nostalgia for it. Actually I don't even like shooters much. Except for Tur... sorry Doom. I played a lot of Doom. You're both funny and thoughtful, the polar opposite of everything I thought that youtubers could be.
Thanks but I feel like I should defend RUclipsrs a little bit! I'm curious though, what piqued your interest in this video if you never played Goldeneye?
@@TheRetroSofa Two reasons I guess. Firstly, and probably the main one is that I'm watching all of your videos. I like cats quite a bit, you understand. Secondly, whilst I have zero nostalgia for Goldeneye I did have some multiplayer sessions on the wii version some years ago and a good time was had by all, so I'm a little familiar with it ...probably more the concept of it and its reputation as this great gaming behemoth that I missed out on, so I was curious as to why you felt it didn't hold up as well.
@@BurstError547 Cool! Thanks for answering and for checking out my videos, much appreciated. I'll pass on your feedback to Beedle and Minerva as well. 🐱
I wasn't disappointed, I had quite a lot of enjoyment out of this game. I got to relive some of it with the xbox 360 version. I have it on my switch and that is a huge let down as I tried it on my nephews xbox and the control style was great. Something the switch didn't for some reason have. The game had a lot of challenge and replay value and I loved the single player a lot. I follow a lot of speed running for this game and it still brings me a lot of entertainment and joy. I used to try and master the times and beat the ones I would see get posted in magazines. I managed to do so out of pure enjoyment of the game. A lot of people have memories of the multiplayer. I enjoyed both, but I was never a huge fan of multiplayer, it was just the fun you could have with family and friends. I would consider myself pretty good at goldeneye when I was a teenager and had lots of time to play it. I was young and naive and assumed most people were just as good at the game, my step dad was. We both beat our saved games on the console and unlocked all the levels and cheats. Same with my other friend that played the game a lot. Then I discovered a lot of other people on the internet couldn't either beat the game or unlock all of the cheats. I loved the challenge and replay value, it felt rewarding, like you had something to strive to. Then you get new cheats, new levels to unlock and play. While I rarely launch the golden eye xbox 360 that much and I rarely use the n64 joysticks I bought for switch to make the game playable. I still like to go in from time to time. I know the game is different for everyone. This still was just a game I had taken the time to master. While I would never get into speed running it again and I never was a real speed runner, I just tried to lower my personal best times and sadly I no longer have that catridge. It had been stolen from me and that was horrible. Still, I don't think the game is that bad. I would have to disagree with some of your viewpoints. The enemies spawning made the game feel more alive. I remember seeing the interview on how it worked from a technical perspective and it seemed kind of neat game AI. I know it wasn't very intelligent AI, but once an alarm is pulled, enemies should be alerted and looking for this threat to eliminate. I know in a game sense, that can go very wrong, if say you only had a limited set of enemies and the entire level comes looking for you. In this sense, it's just soldiers flooding in from elsewhere in the facilities is what it felt like to me. It added challenge. I don't know if it would have been complained about if the AI had been, well the alarms off, everyone is back to normal and ignoring that there was a threat and you are free to sneak around. I just feel the levels would have felt empty, boring and less challenging if they didn't have infinite spawning the way they did. If I remember correctly, it was implemented with enemies being a certain distance away and them being on alert, it spawned them in to come towards the player. If say you get out of those areas, like the spawn of archives, then you can get free of those enemies. I can see you are a bit out of practice. I had learned to do a lot of strafing and dodging attacks to get out of harms way in that game if I wanted to do the 00 agent difficulties with some success. While it was easy to work around some of the limitations of the AI by being good at moving, I just didn't see that here and couldn't help but feel it's not practice that is the issue, this was just players who didn't beat this game fully. I can't imagine beating the game without learning to use some cover and movement to avoid damage. I think the main strategy to escaping the starting area of the archives is to kill quickly and rush out, or be endlessly spawned onto.
I take your point about the infinite enemies. I'm not wholly against them, I just think that there should be a limit and they shouldn't immediately know where you are and head straight for you. I think if the alarm was pulled an enemies were looking for the threat it would be better. Instead, they always know where the threat is. It severely limits your options. You can't hide, for example. You just have to fight constantly while you finish your objectives and try to get to the end. I am out of practice, for sure, but the more I played it for this video the more I found myself getting back into it and having a great time. It's still an amazing game and it has also aged badly. It can be both. You were clearly a big fan of it back when it released as I was, and you have kept playing it since. For most people, they played it in the 90's then stopped and went back to it decades later and then the game is disappointing not because it's bad, but because it can't live up to their memory of it.
Hey Bill! Today I found your channel and I'm loving it. You're a great storyteller and that hooked me up immediately. I found you by the SNES DooM video as Ialso started a youtube channel because of that game (not the SNES port). Youre wife's advice for new youtube channels in the NES coop games videomade a lot of sense to me. Must be complicated to live in Germany and justo know little german. Don't feel old. I'm 42 and I feel I'm in my best time. As you said in this video, our memories are just edited bits of moments and feelings about things but that's were the ability to tell stories come useful. Never noticed that golden eye could be played with two joysticks 😮 Loved your videos, loved your cat. Keep going!
You're kind, thanks! I often worry that I'm telling rambling stories that don't go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I'm picking up the language. Immersion is the trick. I think we learn a language when we need to learn a language. And technology helps a lot, of course. I'll pass on the love to Minerva. 🙂
This was a great video about a great game that I recently replayed for nostalgic purposes (on the Xbox) and it was indeed a great trip down memory lane! Happy Birthday and have a new subscriber :) Also I see The World is Not Enough and Donkey Kong Country 3 in the back there!Hopefully they too will be in videos one day.
Kind of you to say, thank you! I have a sneaking feeling DKC3 is underrated because of when it released (after Mario 64) so people don't have the nostalgic connection to it they have with DKC2. I'm currently playing through it so I'll see where that theory goes and whether I have anything to say about it.
No dual analogue sticks and no dual shoulder buttons kills that controllers FPS capabilities. I think the OG PS1 controller was better for FPS control than the N64 controller even with its analogue stick advantage because you simply can't multitask your right hand fast enough to compete.
To each their own. I'd take a single analogue stick for aiming over dual shoulder buttons any day. Original Doom is fine but 360 degree aiming with digital buttons is just the worst.
@@TheRetroSofa When you get the hang of it, it's not so bad. Lots of hand-eye co-ordination. Aim assist always on, of course. No point in not having it; even the analogue won't point exactly where you want it to.
There's a name for that nagging feeling you've been having throughout the video where you wonder if GoldenEye 64 truly held up on its own or if it was just the fantasy of playing as the legend James Bond in a _properly_ done game for the first time combined with nostalgia goggles blinding you and if there was indeed a way to prove that it wasn't just either of those: *Perfect Dark.*
I had a friend at school who was into the wrestling games. If I remember rightly they were mainly played holding the left and right sides of the controller but with the stick functionality you said.
5:45 This level would go much better for you if you would use stealth at the start! Kill the first 2 bad guys with your "slapper" karate chop. Also, be sure you set the controls to 1.2. That way you use the stick ONLY for aiming, and the C-buttons or D-pad only for moving, controls more like a modern shooter.
Hey, I stumbled upon your Zelda video and now I'm progressivly watching your other stuff (and subsctibed, of course!). These are really good videos and I liked your speach about nostalgia, philosophy (childhood, the human confition, etc....^^) Keep on the good work and thank you for making these videos! BTW: I always loved Fischstäbchen, when I was a child^^
A great game is a great game, even if years pass. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Missile Command, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Contra, Doom. 7:04 Oh come on, you are totally hamming that up, with a big side of CHEESE! 17:14 You're wrong! I started writing my comment before the video even started! So there, sir! Have at you! 18:09 Some of tha tis down to how much noise you make. Silenced weapons minimize respawns. Not going full auto reduces the noise. It's not a perfect system, but when I see someone with a screen full of guards and they're just hip firing into them I know they're not picking up what the game is setting down. That's okay, it's an emergent system that is not overtly explained to the player. In the bunker missions you can shoot guards through the glass panels to avoid alerting enemies, for example. Using Karate chop, throwing knives, or any of the silenced weapons is also preferable. Also peaking corners and taking headshots at patrol guards instead of firing automatically is also preferred. 22:00 Yeah, that I don't agree with. Doom 64 is a much more playable game these days, with its fully customizable controls, fluid gameplay, beautiful 2D artwork and colored lighting, and a fantastic ambience. 25:45 Yes, perception is subjective, but truth is objective. The truth is that Goldeneye was revolutionary for its time and set trends that influenced many FPS games on consoles that came after it. The question "Does it have split screen multiplayer?" Is a direct result of Goldeneye making that basically a bar that games had to get over. It is by no means a perfect game, and has been bypassed in a lot of ways... But it is still a classic of its time, and it is still fun. My biggest gripe with the use of the word nostalgia is it implies that anyone who likes old things only remembers them through the lens of their childhood... Ignoring that many of us actually still own these things and play them annually. 27:35 You uh... You wanna talk about it? Y- How do they say it, uh... You wanna grabba pint oh sumfink? 28:10 Ah... Man. You know it's funny you say that, because I think for Gen X and Millennials... We do look back a lot. Look at our media. It's all nostalgia. All remakes, reboots, sequels, repeats... That's for us. Gen X and Millennials. A lot of us just can't let go of it. Which we should stop and look at that the other way. We did have it good. We had it great. We should make it even better for the next group. What a beautiful curse to be able to lament having such an amazing and care free child hood. 32:46 Cheers, and happy birthday, man.
I know with the KF7 you can aim and fire individual bullets and that counts as silenced, which is useful in the bunker levels. Archives though I always had trouble going quiet. Even if I'd slapped the guards and gone out the room, I wouldn't have been able to keep up the slapping for long. My tactic for that level was always to go loud and rely on the exploding boxes which, as you see, works perfectly fine on the PC but I was out of practice aiming with the N64 controller. Doom 64 is on my list. I've got it and played it on N64 and PC but yet to finish it. Great game. Agree, GoldenEye was revolutionary and that was a big part of its appeal. But via hype. This is what I meant with the "we were told GoldenEye was great" bit. Because it was revolutionary the magazines hyped it and called it the best FPS ever and that's what we got. As is my recollection, anyway. The multiplayer was great, the game as a whole was great, but if you weren't part of that hype back in the day I can understand someone playing it today and going "sorry what is this is this good?". I don't think there are many people picking up GoldenEye for the first time today because they want to play it, rather than to understand the history of it. Agree on your point about nostalgia. It sells so our politicians and sales people rely on it too much than is good leaving little room for new art steeped in the experience of the older stuff without being straight-up nostalgia. It's an interesting topic with a lot of different paths we could walk down, for sure. Thanks. 😃
youre supposed to be stealthy on Archives. literally if you just play the level with your slapper its super easy. when you shoot it spawns infinite enemies...
I did reply to this, not sure why it didn't show up. Anyway I agree with you but running over to your interrogators and slapping them doesn't feel very "Bond", you know? That's just the way I liked to play it back in the day.
I personally disagree with most of the things you say in terms of the game being dated. Quite the opposite. I just can't get into the singleplayer in modern shooters specifically because I feel like I'm going down a corridor rather than exploring a real location. Even when modern games have optional locations, it feels like an optional location rather than just a place that would be there in the real world. And the AI in Goldeneye is BETTER than what you see in many modern shooters. They can navigate the whole levels, throw grenades and take actions to evade getting shot, which is more than what you can say about the enemies in let's say Call of Duty or Fallout. What they could've done better is to, like in modern games, have some sort of visual means of showing players what they need to interact with and where they should go using some sort of designated color.
Absolutely fine to disagree and, as I said, I wouldn't talk at such length about my history with a game if I didn't love it. I like realistic locations but I also want to be rewarded for exploring, you know? If not with a collectable then maybe like an interesting story element or interactive object or something. GoldenEye ends up feeling a bit empty if you go off the beaten path. Enemy AI is good, but what it's missing (and what'd make the infinite spawning enemies better) is search AI. It can do three things: Follow a path, combat, and go directly to the player. That's it. It's good at those things, as you say, but that's it. Even if they could remember where they last saw/heard you and just go straight there that'd be something but once they're aware of you, they can scan your brain directly. I still prefer it to Call of Duty though. 😉
@@TheRetroSofa I agree that a lot of things could be better. But I wouldn't say that something's dated if it's actually more advanced than what's in the biggest AAA games on the market 25 years on.
When I was a teenager, I wanted the first PC I built to be pretty inexpensive. Pentium 133, 1GB hard drive, 32MB RAM. Something like that. Except on the way out of the computer fair where I bought all the parts, I saw Quake II running on a Voodoo Banshee and I had to have it. So I ended up with a fairly budget PC with a beefy graphics card and when Half Life came out the following year, I had to make a choice. I only had enough hard drive space for Windows 98 and either Half Life or Microsoft Office. My grades might have suffered for a bit but I never regretted it. 😃
@@TheRetroSofa ha ha ha ! The age difference - my first pc i cant even remember the specs! All i remember was sharing it with my Dad playing C&Q Generals!
I put them either side of a playthrough of the Dam level from GoldenEye 007. That's called a segue. 🙂 It's all about nostalgia. Politicians (and it's not just Trump but that's the example I used) exploit it because of how much it matters to us and it matters to us because of the people we remember.
31:42 i just followed you, but dude please don't talk crap about Trump.. He's awesome, and yes he is trying to make America great, by protecting our borders, and bringing manufacturing back.. it's not exploiting people when he was already President for 4 years and he literally did a d@mn good job at making our country great
...and today, at 40 years old, I just found out the you can dual control Goldeneye????? just wow....
People dunk on the controls but dual analogue was right there!
I am 36 and I was NOT prepared for the feels in this video. Holy shit.
I actually played Goldeneye for the first time last year, on the original N64. It is a frustrating game a lot of the time, but it was also still pretty fun.
Yeah the scripts go where they go and nostalgia can, and should, be an emotional experience. Goldeneye more than most for me. It's a great game.
Solo, Frigate, Bunker 2 and Train are my favorite missions on single player mode. I feel completely spoiled having used a dual analog controller for so many years, that revisiting Goldeneye and Perfect Dark with the original N64 controller felt…WEIRD. Especially with any sniping efforts. The infinite enemies that respawn when you start shooting like Rambo in Bunker 2 really forces you to sneak around with those throwing knives as much as possible. Great game, even if it feels so…90s. But then again, I love the early FPS games more than modern titles, so 🤷♂️ There’s something so satisfying about games from the early era that didn’t hold our attention for hours like they try to do now. If an NES game kicked your arse, you didn’t care, but turned it off and went to play outside with your friends. It doesn’t feel like kids have that same mentality these days. Being a kid in the 80s and early 90s was the best. Great chat 👍😎
Perfect Dark was a masterpiece in its day.
Yeah, the levels that funnel you down corridors were really good. I found I slipped fairly easily back into using the controller after a few levels. Not while I was attempting Archives obviously, but later.
Games were harder back then for the same reason they have side quests now. It's all about padding the length. The limited technology for retro games meant you couldn't do these big story things or cutscenes or even put in a load of levels so the way they made games last was by making them harder. It's just what it was. You played the same big over and over until you got it, and then you died on a later section and had to do it all over again. I don't think the kids are all that different really. It's just what we had.
It's easy to underplay, misrepresent, and outright forget about the factors involved with recreating the gaming experience properly- the original console, controller, and order of releases. You would have gone in to Perfect Dark after mastering Goldeneye and acquiring proficiency with using the stock Fisher Price plastic trident controller. I'm glad you get to experience it so close to the original stock in order way. Doom on the N64 is my favorite port. It's also a work of art.
@@KyIeMcCIeIIan I'll do Perfect Dark at some point. Game's amazing for the time and the hardware. To me it's like the final word on everything you can do on an N64 and squeezed into a cartridge.
@@TheRetroSofa "Squeezed into a cartridge", huh? They don't have a lot of room on them, that's for sure. They said "We don't need no stinking memory, lets make our best seller only 16MB!!!" Then they released Animal Crossing and laughed in Nintendo. 16MB on a fucking disc. What a flex. One of their biggest. I wonder what Sony thought.
I think the nostalgia is what keeps me coming back to GoldenEye. I'm really happy it was ported to the Nintendo Switch. I re-mapped my pro controller for this game, but I also have the N64 controller for the Switch and love using it.
It's great to have it finally back on modern systems even if there's nothing quite like the feel of the original hardware when it comes to GoldenEye. I find aiming with anything other than the N64's weird analogue stick feels weird to me. I think if the N64 had had a modern controller the game would have controlled quite differently.
This is probably the first Goldeneye video I've seen other than my own that properly acknowledges the game's control options, which I very much appreciate.
Though I would argue all day (and have!) on the merits of Goldeneye's game design and why I think even what seem to be its flaws produce a worthwhile, quality experience; I was pleasantly surprised with the conclusion for the most part. There's nothing wrong with saying a game that is good is good, and Goldeneye is a good game. And I mention this as someone who still plays it on a regular basis.
I have a lot more thoughts on this game but all I'm gonna say for now is that watching that footage of Dam at the end made me wanna play some Goldeneye.
I'll have to check yours out at some point. Yeah this game gets too little respect for its control options from people who presumably didn't change them. The twin-stick controls with two controllers were really innovative and cool.
Whenever I get to editing a video, I always think of something I should have either pointed out or put more emphasis on and in this one it's what's in the description: All of this is about a game aging from 10/10 to 8/10. It's still great and always was, but also there's a reason it's not bringing in new fans and demand for that type of gameplay.
Thanks for the comment. I left Dam until the end for exactly that reason. 😉
That dual tv setup with cardboard covering the other persons screen on each tv, sounds amazing. Too bad i have no one who still wants to play this game in this day and age, so can't really try this myself. This game is still fresh in my mind up to today. Some of us 40 year olds still know whats up!
It changed the game up completely. I don't know how the Xbox version does its online multiplayer but that could be an answer. But yeah, either way this is one of those games that sticks with you.
Dude I love your perspective; people always forget what eyes they're looking through
Thansk! And yeah, it do be like that.
I have a friend who held the controller in a 4th way. He held the analogue middle stick with his right hand, and had his left hand hit the regular buttons from above, at a sort of weird almost up-side-down angle. Never seen or heard that anyone else but him held it in this way.
Outstanding. I would describe this method as "technically legal".
I always viewed the infinitely spawning enemies as Punishment for not being a good James Bond. It's a rewarding Bond like experience IF you get good. It's a punishing Serious Sam like experience if you run in Guns Blazing.
Yes, in some levels. However, the worst levels for infinite enemies don't give you a choice in the matter. Off the top of my head, Surface 2, Depot, and Statue have them from the start. Other levels, such as Control and Bunker 1, start spawning enemies when you complete certain objectives. Better hope you left that objective until last or the others are going to be a real pain to complete!
Very nostalgic. We’d spend hours playing goldeneye!
Thanks! Yep, good times. Maybe we'll break it out again for a quick game sometime.
I had tons of fun playing Goldeneye multiplayer with friends in the 90s and early 00s.
I agree, it wasn't *that* amazing overall, but it was still very well-made for the time.
The N64 also had (let's face it), a lot of cost-cutting hardware compromises.
Which meant that the frame rates could very often dip below 15-20 FPS in certain games, and the textures were often very compressed.
It's one of the main reasons the PS1 has aged so well, even with it's wobbly graphics and warped textures.
It had a huge library of great games, CD audio, and most of the games managed at least 30 FPS, sometimes 60 FPS.
I love the N64 for what it was at the time.
I was already a huge fan of the SGI supercomputers at the time, so owning an N64 was a bit like owning a small chunk of that heritage.
The N64 had comparable graphics to a PC with essentially a "cut-down Voodoo 1", for around 250 quid.
The N64 was just the first console that let many of us experience out-of-the-box multiplayer games for the first time.
(Even Mario Party was fun, as long as it didn't go on for more than about an hour. lol)
Most of what we do as retro collectors is trying to rekindle those great memories from our youth.
Even though I barely play games any more, I still tinker with the hardware and modding, and FPGA versions of those old machines.
btw, I was one of the strange people who never had much trouble using the N64 controller.
Unless you had very large hands, it was fine. lol
We were a lot more forgiving of framerate dips in the 90's than we are today. The N64 was slow and developers pushed it hard. The RAM was also anaemic hence the texture quality. But it was good at pushing polygons and the filtering and lack of warping were very impressive for the time (for the price).
I was also fine with the controller, though I recognise compared to controllers today it's not quite so good. It was the early days of 3D and as SNES games have aged better than N64 games I reckon it's the same for the controllers.
My wife and I have played every Mario Party game and could probably do a video about that at some point. I still need to find Mario Party 2 and 3 though and 3 is not cheap.
Jesus man that last little bit about marching backwards gave me an existential crisis. Subscribed.
"Gave me an existential crisis. Subscribed." Love it. 😃
Thanks so much for the comment and subscribing and I hope it's the first existential crisis of many.
I kind of stumbled across your video, I found it very interesting 😁 the review of 007 and takes on nostalgia and then somewhat a reflection on life in general kind of a cool way to put together a video. My birthday is next month myself....a person does a lot of reflection....Great video. Subscribed!
Thanks and best wishes for next month.
Proper deep. Great video. Channel and content 👍
Thanks. 🙂
Love your take on this and nostalgia as a whole, man. Gratitude is super important. Great vid
Thanks! Yeah, it is. I'm glad you got what I was saying there because I did get a bit excited. 🙂
What a beautiful video, more than I expected out of a Goldeneye retrospective. Really good content for having so few subscribers, wish I could play some split screen Perfect Dark with ya.
Thank you! When I started writing this video it was about Perfect Dark and GoldenEye but I realised I had more than enough to say about GoldenEye. I hope to get to Perfect Dark at some point though.
Don't worry man, I'm old too. 39 this year.. time fly's...
Sure does. Clearly we're having too much fun.
I agree SO MUCH on the infinitely respawning enemies being an annoying part of the game, or at least the fact that they always know your location. It would make sense to spawn more in and have them patrol for you, sure, but it really does just seem like a lot of artificially added difficulty for players who don't yet know how to speed run through the missions.
Yeah that's it. The game didn't really have logic for enemies to look for you as far as I remember, they either had set patrol paths or they knew where you were. That would have been hard to implement but definitely would have been an improvement.
Happy birthday, Bill! Nice vid. Enjoying the channel.
Thanks, Chris! Hope you and yours are doing well.
Very happy memmories of this game! So much fun in multiplayer just the best party game.
I tried replaying this game and had an absolutely dreadful time if I'm honest.
The contrast between that experience and how much I loved the game as a child could not have been more gigantic.
Right!? I still had some fun with it when I was recording some of the footage here but nothing like the complete adoration I felt for it when it came out.
I don't think to this day I've ever completed Goldeneye in single player, and perhaps I should make time to sit down and do so, but like so many people I have solid memories of pizza parties as a young adult crowding around a copy to play four player multiplayer. Fun times.
Rare were one of the great British games developers who made the jump from micro to console, and James Bond was the right I.P. at the right time in the hands of the right people.
I feel like Sony may have edged Nintendo out on that generation of the 'console war', but like you I was always a Nintendo loyalist, I stayed true and bought a new Nintendo console whenever they came out, and while I might have felt I missed out at the time on some great games, most of my PlayStation owning friends would cite Goldeneye as a game they regretted Sony didn't have. Ah, the grass is always greener on the other side, as they say. 😉
You're not going to... revisit GoldenEye? *thunder*
It is actually a fun game tbf. I dunk on it a bit in this video but "aged badly" means it's gone from a 10/10 to an 8/10 or something. You still have to play it understanding the context of when it game out though. I was a big fan of Rare back in the day, being a regular on fan forums and the like. I didn't get fully into their collect-a-thon platformers but this, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing, and Conker's Bad Fur Day were some of my favourite games. Jetpac was cool, too. 🙂
Good work Mr Sofa. You've earned yourself a subscriber. Time to check out your other videos now. I've only seen this and your video about playing the first Zelda game in 2024
Call me Bill. Bill Sofa. And thanks! 😃
This video totally made my day and I never even played Goldeneye and have no nostalgia for it. Actually I don't even like shooters much. Except for Tur... sorry Doom. I played a lot of Doom. You're both funny and thoughtful, the polar opposite of everything I thought that youtubers could be.
Thanks but I feel like I should defend RUclipsrs a little bit! I'm curious though, what piqued your interest in this video if you never played Goldeneye?
@@TheRetroSofa Two reasons I guess. Firstly, and probably the main one is that I'm watching all of your videos. I like cats quite a bit, you understand. Secondly, whilst I have zero nostalgia for Goldeneye I did have some multiplayer sessions on the wii version some years ago and a good time was had by all, so I'm a little familiar with it ...probably more the concept of it and its reputation as this great gaming behemoth that I missed out on, so I was curious as to why you felt it didn't hold up as well.
@@BurstError547 Cool! Thanks for answering and for checking out my videos, much appreciated. I'll pass on your feedback to Beedle and Minerva as well. 🐱
I wasn't disappointed, I had quite a lot of enjoyment out of this game. I got to relive some of it with the xbox 360 version. I have it on my switch and that is a huge let down as I tried it on my nephews xbox and the control style was great. Something the switch didn't for some reason have. The game had a lot of challenge and replay value and I loved the single player a lot. I follow a lot of speed running for this game and it still brings me a lot of entertainment and joy. I used to try and master the times and beat the ones I would see get posted in magazines. I managed to do so out of pure enjoyment of the game. A lot of people have memories of the multiplayer. I enjoyed both, but I was never a huge fan of multiplayer, it was just the fun you could have with family and friends. I would consider myself pretty good at goldeneye when I was a teenager and had lots of time to play it. I was young and naive and assumed most people were just as good at the game, my step dad was. We both beat our saved games on the console and unlocked all the levels and cheats. Same with my other friend that played the game a lot. Then I discovered a lot of other people on the internet couldn't either beat the game or unlock all of the cheats. I loved the challenge and replay value, it felt rewarding, like you had something to strive to. Then you get new cheats, new levels to unlock and play. While I rarely launch the golden eye xbox 360 that much and I rarely use the n64 joysticks I bought for switch to make the game playable. I still like to go in from time to time. I know the game is different for everyone. This still was just a game I had taken the time to master. While I would never get into speed running it again and I never was a real speed runner, I just tried to lower my personal best times and sadly I no longer have that catridge. It had been stolen from me and that was horrible.
Still, I don't think the game is that bad. I would have to disagree with some of your viewpoints. The enemies spawning made the game feel more alive. I remember seeing the interview on how it worked from a technical perspective and it seemed kind of neat game AI. I know it wasn't very intelligent AI, but once an alarm is pulled, enemies should be alerted and looking for this threat to eliminate. I know in a game sense, that can go very wrong, if say you only had a limited set of enemies and the entire level comes looking for you. In this sense, it's just soldiers flooding in from elsewhere in the facilities is what it felt like to me. It added challenge. I don't know if it would have been complained about if the AI had been, well the alarms off, everyone is back to normal and ignoring that there was a threat and you are free to sneak around. I just feel the levels would have felt empty, boring and less challenging if they didn't have infinite spawning the way they did. If I remember correctly, it was implemented with enemies being a certain distance away and them being on alert, it spawned them in to come towards the player. If say you get out of those areas, like the spawn of archives, then you can get free of those enemies. I can see you are a bit out of practice. I had learned to do a lot of strafing and dodging attacks to get out of harms way in that game if I wanted to do the 00 agent difficulties with some success. While it was easy to work around some of the limitations of the AI by being good at moving, I just didn't see that here and couldn't help but feel it's not practice that is the issue, this was just players who didn't beat this game fully. I can't imagine beating the game without learning to use some cover and movement to avoid damage. I think the main strategy to escaping the starting area of the archives is to kill quickly and rush out, or be endlessly spawned onto.
I take your point about the infinite enemies. I'm not wholly against them, I just think that there should be a limit and they shouldn't immediately know where you are and head straight for you. I think if the alarm was pulled an enemies were looking for the threat it would be better. Instead, they always know where the threat is. It severely limits your options. You can't hide, for example. You just have to fight constantly while you finish your objectives and try to get to the end. I am out of practice, for sure, but the more I played it for this video the more I found myself getting back into it and having a great time. It's still an amazing game and it has also aged badly. It can be both.
You were clearly a big fan of it back when it released as I was, and you have kept playing it since. For most people, they played it in the 90's then stopped and went back to it decades later and then the game is disappointing not because it's bad, but because it can't live up to their memory of it.
Happy birthday Bill! as a present i will be your 170th subscriber!
Thank you!
I was here before you had 100K+ subs. Which you will, because this channel is great. ❤the kitty too!
Thank you so much! I'll pass the love on to Minerva too, just as soon as she stops chewing my Mario figures.
First time here, loving the Video! You got a sub for sure
Thanks! Very kind.
Still have anger when I saw them shoot threw a dead guy just standing there. Hated that
Came for goldeneye, stayed for cat.
This is the way.
Hey Bill! Today I found your channel and I'm loving it. You're a great storyteller and that hooked me up immediately.
I found you by the SNES DooM video as Ialso started a youtube channel because of that game (not the SNES port).
Youre wife's advice for new youtube channels in the NES coop games videomade a lot of sense to me.
Must be complicated to live in Germany and justo know little german.
Don't feel old. I'm 42 and I feel I'm in my best time. As you said in this video, our memories are just edited bits of moments and feelings about things but that's were the ability to tell stories come useful.
Never noticed that golden eye could be played with two joysticks 😮
Loved your videos, loved your cat.
Keep going!
You're kind, thanks! I often worry that I'm telling rambling stories that don't go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville.
I'm picking up the language. Immersion is the trick. I think we learn a language when we need to learn a language. And technology helps a lot, of course. I'll pass on the love to Minerva. 🙂
This was a great video about a great game that I recently replayed for nostalgic purposes (on the Xbox) and it was indeed a great trip down memory lane! Happy Birthday and have a new subscriber :)
Also I see The World is Not Enough and Donkey Kong Country 3 in the back there!Hopefully they too will be in videos one day.
Kind of you to say, thank you! I have a sneaking feeling DKC3 is underrated because of when it released (after Mario 64) so people don't have the nostalgic connection to it they have with DKC2. I'm currently playing through it so I'll see where that theory goes and whether I have anything to say about it.
No dual analogue sticks and no dual shoulder buttons kills that controllers FPS capabilities. I think the OG PS1 controller was better for FPS control than the N64 controller even with its analogue stick advantage because you simply can't multitask your right hand fast enough to compete.
To each their own. I'd take a single analogue stick for aiming over dual shoulder buttons any day. Original Doom is fine but 360 degree aiming with digital buttons is just the worst.
@@TheRetroSofa When you get the hang of it, it's not so bad. Lots of hand-eye co-ordination. Aim assist always on, of course. No point in not having it; even the analogue won't point exactly where you want it to.
I won a NES in a contest, never having heard of one before lol
Playing goldeneye with a mouse and keyboard with mouse aiming on all of the time makes the game absurdly easy you can head shot literally everyone.
It really does. The game was designed for the controller.
There's a name for that nagging feeling you've been having throughout the video where you wonder if GoldenEye 64 truly held up on its own or if it was just the fantasy of playing as the legend James Bond in a _properly_ done game for the first time combined with nostalgia goggles blinding you and if there was indeed a way to prove that it wasn't just either of those:
*Perfect Dark.*
I'd like to get onto that at some point. Perfect Dark is an excellent game. Mind you, I haven't really played it for about two decades...
Great review, great video!! You've gotten a sub and looking forward to more
Thanks so much and welcome!
Art.
Left out the wwf and wcw games where u used the thumbstick for taunt/special
I had a friend at school who was into the wrestling games. If I remember rightly they were mainly played holding the left and right sides of the controller but with the stick functionality you said.
I play it on gameplay now and it plays great, definitely doesn't feel like it aged much with the modern controls you get on the Xbox
5:45 This level would go much better for you if you would use stealth at the start! Kill the first 2 bad guys with your "slapper" karate chop. Also, be sure you set the controls to 1.2. That way you use the stick ONLY for aiming, and the C-buttons or D-pad only for moving, controls more like a modern shooter.
My controls were 1.2 when I turned the console on because this is my save file from back in the day. I'm just bad at video games. 😛
@@TheRetroSofa Sorry friend, I commented before watching the whole video and now I'm seeing you doing the dual controller option LOL
Hey, I stumbled upon your Zelda video and now I'm progressivly watching your other stuff (and subsctibed, of course!). These are really good videos and I liked your speach about nostalgia, philosophy (childhood, the human confition, etc....^^)
Keep on the good work and thank you for making these videos!
BTW: I always loved Fischstäbchen, when I was a child^^
Thanks so much! That's really nice of you. I think I still love most things I loved when I was a child whether it's Nintendo or Fischstäbchen. 😃
A great game is a great game, even if years pass. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Missile Command, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Contra, Doom.
7:04 Oh come on, you are totally hamming that up, with a big side of CHEESE!
17:14 You're wrong! I started writing my comment before the video even started! So there, sir! Have at you!
18:09 Some of tha tis down to how much noise you make. Silenced weapons minimize respawns. Not going full auto reduces the noise. It's not a perfect system, but when I see someone with a screen full of guards and they're just hip firing into them I know they're not picking up what the game is setting down. That's okay, it's an emergent system that is not overtly explained to the player. In the bunker missions you can shoot guards through the glass panels to avoid alerting enemies, for example. Using Karate chop, throwing knives, or any of the silenced weapons is also preferable. Also peaking corners and taking headshots at patrol guards instead of firing automatically is also preferred.
22:00 Yeah, that I don't agree with. Doom 64 is a much more playable game these days, with its fully customizable controls, fluid gameplay, beautiful 2D artwork and colored lighting, and a fantastic ambience.
25:45 Yes, perception is subjective, but truth is objective. The truth is that Goldeneye was revolutionary for its time and set trends that influenced many FPS games on consoles that came after it. The question "Does it have split screen multiplayer?" Is a direct result of Goldeneye making that basically a bar that games had to get over. It is by no means a perfect game, and has been bypassed in a lot of ways... But it is still a classic of its time, and it is still fun.
My biggest gripe with the use of the word nostalgia is it implies that anyone who likes old things only remembers them through the lens of their childhood... Ignoring that many of us actually still own these things and play them annually.
27:35 You uh... You wanna talk about it? Y- How do they say it, uh... You wanna grabba pint oh sumfink?
28:10 Ah... Man. You know it's funny you say that, because I think for Gen X and Millennials... We do look back a lot. Look at our media. It's all nostalgia. All remakes, reboots, sequels, repeats... That's for us. Gen X and Millennials. A lot of us just can't let go of it. Which we should stop and look at that the other way. We did have it good. We had it great. We should make it even better for the next group.
What a beautiful curse to be able to lament having such an amazing and care free child hood.
32:46 Cheers, and happy birthday, man.
I know with the KF7 you can aim and fire individual bullets and that counts as silenced, which is useful in the bunker levels. Archives though I always had trouble going quiet. Even if I'd slapped the guards and gone out the room, I wouldn't have been able to keep up the slapping for long. My tactic for that level was always to go loud and rely on the exploding boxes which, as you see, works perfectly fine on the PC but I was out of practice aiming with the N64 controller.
Doom 64 is on my list. I've got it and played it on N64 and PC but yet to finish it. Great game.
Agree, GoldenEye was revolutionary and that was a big part of its appeal. But via hype. This is what I meant with the "we were told GoldenEye was great" bit. Because it was revolutionary the magazines hyped it and called it the best FPS ever and that's what we got. As is my recollection, anyway. The multiplayer was great, the game as a whole was great, but if you weren't part of that hype back in the day I can understand someone playing it today and going "sorry what is this is this good?". I don't think there are many people picking up GoldenEye for the first time today because they want to play it, rather than to understand the history of it.
Agree on your point about nostalgia. It sells so our politicians and sales people rely on it too much than is good leaving little room for new art steeped in the experience of the older stuff without being straight-up nostalgia. It's an interesting topic with a lot of different paths we could walk down, for sure.
Thanks. 😃
Maybe it was the multiplayer with friends?
Probably.
youre supposed to be stealthy on Archives. literally if you just play the level with your slapper its super easy. when you shoot it spawns infinite enemies...
I did reply to this, not sure why it didn't show up. Anyway I agree with you but running over to your interrogators and slapping them doesn't feel very "Bond", you know? That's just the way I liked to play it back in the day.
I personally disagree with most of the things you say in terms of the game being dated. Quite the opposite. I just can't get into the singleplayer in modern shooters specifically because I feel like I'm going down a corridor rather than exploring a real location. Even when modern games have optional locations, it feels like an optional location rather than just a place that would be there in the real world. And the AI in Goldeneye is BETTER than what you see in many modern shooters. They can navigate the whole levels, throw grenades and take actions to evade getting shot, which is more than what you can say about the enemies in let's say Call of Duty or Fallout.
What they could've done better is to, like in modern games, have some sort of visual means of showing players what they need to interact with and where they should go using some sort of designated color.
Absolutely fine to disagree and, as I said, I wouldn't talk at such length about my history with a game if I didn't love it. I like realistic locations but I also want to be rewarded for exploring, you know? If not with a collectable then maybe like an interesting story element or interactive object or something. GoldenEye ends up feeling a bit empty if you go off the beaten path. Enemy AI is good, but what it's missing (and what'd make the infinite spawning enemies better) is search AI. It can do three things: Follow a path, combat, and go directly to the player. That's it. It's good at those things, as you say, but that's it. Even if they could remember where they last saw/heard you and just go straight there that'd be something but once they're aware of you, they can scan your brain directly.
I still prefer it to Call of Duty though. 😉
@@TheRetroSofa I agree that a lot of things could be better. But I wouldn't say that something's dated if it's actually more advanced than what's in the biggest AAA games on the market 25 years on.
All well before my time but interesting nontheless! The earliest game i remember playing was half life 1!
When I was a teenager, I wanted the first PC I built to be pretty inexpensive. Pentium 133, 1GB hard drive, 32MB RAM. Something like that. Except on the way out of the computer fair where I bought all the parts, I saw Quake II running on a Voodoo Banshee and I had to have it. So I ended up with a fairly budget PC with a beefy graphics card and when Half Life came out the following year, I had to make a choice. I only had enough hard drive space for Windows 98 and either Half Life or Microsoft Office.
My grades might have suffered for a bit but I never regretted it. 😃
@@TheRetroSofa ha ha ha ! The age difference - my first pc i cant even remember the specs! All i remember was sharing it with my Dad playing C&Q Generals!
Outrageous slandering of archive level design and infinate enemies!
Oh wow.
I'm older than you.
how did you manage to make a "i miss my dead nan" point into a "trump bad" point.
I put them either side of a playthrough of the Dam level from GoldenEye 007. That's called a segue. 🙂
It's all about nostalgia. Politicians (and it's not just Trump but that's the example I used) exploit it because of how much it matters to us and it matters to us because of the people we remember.
“Trump bad” is a point that should be made every second of the day, no matter what the topic of conversation.
@@jamalcorbin5542 weak
31:42 i just followed you, but dude please don't talk crap about Trump.. He's awesome, and yes he is trying to make America great, by protecting our borders, and bringing manufacturing back.. it's not exploiting people when he was already President for 4 years and he literally did a d@mn good job at making our country great
I don't think you would like my Flappy Bird video.
That old saying about people who've been tricked getting mad when people point it out has never rung more true. Jesus.