GoldenEye 007 and Your Wrong-Console Friend

We all had a friend who had the wrong console.

Everything they did was different. Their house smelled different. Not bad, just different to yours. They had dinner at a weird time, they didn't watch the same TV channels as you did, and they were always trying to sell you on the wrestling federation that you didn't follow. They listened to Blur; you preferred Oasis. They had the wrong console, and they swore by it.

Lovely people, but they had the wrong flavour Ribena.

My wrong-console friend had an N64 and that was my lone exposure to GoldenEye 007. An extremely limited sampling of an era-defining multiplayer experience, played once or twice during sleep-overs. An experience that I've heard my peers praise to high heavens since and one that, if I'm honest, didn't make much of an impression on my teenage self. I liked what I liked, and what I liked was Sega and Sony. Nintendo just wasn't for me, nor most of my immediate group of friends for that matter.

As I write this, it dawns on me that, as a Saturn owner, my mates probably considered me their wrong-console friend. I will need some time to fully contemplate this.

In the years since, GoldenEye has been held up as a classic of the genre. One of, if not the, first great console FPS multiplayer games, and a first-ballot entry into the local-multiplayer Hall of Fame. And I only played it for a couple of hours, tops. Shame on me.

Key members of Rare's GoldenEye team would go on to form Free Radical and develop one of my all-time favourite FPS series, TimeSpliiters. And those TS games of course owe a great deal to GoldenEye, especially in their multiplayer brilliance. 

There are plenty of seminal games that I have missed over the years. Link to the Past, Mario Galaxy; all the Dragon Quests, Half-Life, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Super Metroid - there are many gaps in my gaming resume. But all things considered, GoldenEye 007 is perhaps the most glaring omission, given my age at the time and preference for action games.

Fortunately, this week a GoldenEye remaster was released on Xbox and Switch. There are some confusing differences between the two versions, with each being a remaster in a slightly different sense. The Xbox version is a straight-forward upgrade, with more modern control schemes and better visuals, while the Switch is more faithful to the original but does offer online multiplayer, which Xbox does not. Anyway, it's on Game Pass and that's where I played it, Day One.

I find I have a lot of time for non-current gen gaming these days. Not just retro gaming, but games from the previous two generations, which may or may not yet qualify as retro. There was a time, not that long ago, when I was so absorbed in current-gen gaming that I simply didn't have the time or interest to revisit past generations. Changing tastes, less fear of missing out, better options for back compatibility (on Xbox, anyway) and a very slight cooling on modern gaming have caused that to change, and now I spend far more time with older titles than I once did. Few things excite me more than seeing Xbox 360 games appearing in MS Store sales; my Saturn, Mega Sg and Dreamcast have all been getting regular use, and I even re-connected my PS3 to the big TV late last year and had a blast with it. 

So yeah, I pounced on the opportunity to play GoldenEye 007. Not quite for the first time, but as good as. I grabbed it on Game Pass and went through the first two stages.

It's alright, I guess.