Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Masterpiece"

Goldeneye. Just saying the name brings back so many great memories. This was the game you would spend countless hours playing over and over. When you spent the night at a friend's house, this is what you played. This is why some of us refuse to play COD: Black Ops; because they just don't make 'em like they used to.

Let's start with the negatives. Yes, the graphics are dated. There is a lot of classic N64 "fog" in Goldeneye. It's an older N64 game, and for that, it looks just fine. There is no voice acting in the game, which is a little disappointing when playing this game today. Instead we get text to read, but thankfully the game doesn't throw too much at us. Besides, if you've already seen the movie, then you will know what's going on anyway. I feel like I'm committing blasphemy for speaking poorly about this game, but for those being my only complaints, it definitely does not affect my love and praise for this classic, and it shouldn't affect yours either. The one issue that does hurt this game and needs to be addressed is the frame rate. In single player, this has never been an issue. Where this comes up is in 4-player death matches. As with all my game reviews, they are only done straight from the original game cartridge or disc, no emulators, so I don't know if this is noticed there or not. When playing 4-player and someone is firing a machine gun, the game does lag. It's not horrible or jumpy, but it's definitely noticeable. For whatever reason, I do not recall noticing this back as a kid, but I sure notice it now, and it's the one real blemish on this game that actually hurts the gameplay. I wanted so badly to give this game a perfect 10, but I can't for that reason and that reason only. In fact, I'd probably lower my rating to more like an 8.5 if the gameplay weren't so fantastic.

Now for the positives, and there are a lot of positives. As I was saying, the gameplay is just phenomenal. Playing as James Bond, whether he's Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery or whoever, is just plain cool. The music? Other then the Halo series' music, it's the best there is for a FPS. The names of the weapons are just ingenious. Instead of going the route of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, where the names of the guns are all real, this game uses fake names for awesome, but also realistic weaponry. We have the PP7 (pistol), the Golden Gun (one shot kills), and the Klobb (machine gun) just to name a few. How about the cheat codes? Unlocking all 5 trillion multiplayer characters (which spans the entire 007 movie series up to Goldeneye) and paintball mode were simply mandatory for me. The single-player campaign is great fun, but it's the multiplayer that makes this game stand out so much. The amount of work they put into the multiplayer is just amazing. So many great levels, and it seemed like everyone had a different favorite. From Stack (my personal fav) to the Archives to the Temple, classic levels with great design that are just perfect for blasting your friends away again and again. So many different options and rules for the game, including License to kill (one shot kills, great fun with machine guns), health handicaps, You Only Live Twice and many more. The controls and gameplay are so easy to learn, but so difficult to master. It's the perfect pick-up-and-play game for newcomers. I could go on, but frankly, you and I both know I'm not telling you anything new.

This was the game that made me a proud N64 owner. This was the game that etched in my loyalty to Nintendo. This is the First Person Shooter. This is Goldeneye, and Rareware's greatest gift to mankind.