My Top 100: #22 – GoldenEye 007

 

GameTrailers staff would be pissed if they saw this list!  GoldenEye 007 on a countdown, and it’s not number one???  BLASPHEMY!!!

All kidding aside, there’s a reason this game is number one on three different GT countdown videos.  It is indeed the best movie-based game I’ve ever played, the first multiplayer game I ever truly enjoyed, and it is definitely one of the best first person shooters of all time.  A few great ones have come along and re-invented the genre since its release in 1997, but GoldenEye has aged quite nicely.  You can still pick it up and play today, and have just as much fun as you did when it first came out!

Before GoldenEye, FPS games were all more-or-less simple Doom-clones.  That makes sense, since pretty much every franchise was trying to get in on it, and those games just seemed to be the way of the future.  Star Wars, Duke Nukem, and even id Software themselves were milking the first person genre for all it was worth.  Even Chex Cereal also had a DOS-based FPS, included in specially-marked boxes of the product.

So, technically, nobody was…  milking it…  more than they were.

Hah.

Anyhow, the sense of immersion we got when playing GoldenEye was unlike anything we had experienced up until that point.  If you had seen the movie, you could often identify some of those sets in the game.  They had evidently taken a lot of time in getting the level layouts just right, and it really helped get you into playing the character.

The shooting mechanic was also completely different than anything I had ever seen.  Whether you shot a guard in the head, in the torso, in the leg, or in the arm, you actually felt like you were connecting with the hits.  You weren’t just facing an enemy sprite that had four or five frames of movement, aiming in their general direction and pulling the trigger, hoping your shots were actually having an effect…  no, no.  Bullets were now a tangible thing; making holes in the wall when you missed, leaving blood-stained clothing wherever you connected, while crates and barrels would warp slightly with every bullet.

While a lot of the things in GoldenEye were “in-your-face awesome”, it was the subtle things that truly made it great.

ALSO, YOU CAN GET TO THAT ISLAND IN THE DISTANCE IN THE DAM LEVEL!!!!

Well, you have to use major game-altering cheats, and there’s nothing to really look at once you get to it…  but that didn’t stop us from trying to get there.

 

 

Another thing that rocked about GoldenEye was the Cheat Mode.  Completing levels in a certain amount of time would grant various gameplay modifiers, the majority of which would give you weapons for levels that normally didn’t carry them, or help the player make it through a level in some other fashion.  Things like DK Mode and Paintball Mode were thrown in for the fun of it, and were always worth a laugh or two.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t use a cheat to get a cheat.  That was fair, but I didn’t find myself that great at playing the game.  Getting the Infinite Ammo (Control Room on Secret Agent in 10:00) and Invisibility cheats (Archives on 00 Agent in 1:20) were difficult to get, but I had lucked out and managed to get them without too much pain and personal torment.

The one I really wanted to unlock, just so that I could explore each level without too much trouble, was the Invincibility cheat.  For that, I’d have to beat the Facility level on 00 Agent difficulty in under two minutes and five seconds…  that was insane!  Not only would I have to run around like a mad man, but I had to depend on that damn Dr. Doak to be in the right spot when I went to find him.  Of course, he never was, and whenever I happened to get that far into the level only to fail due to a technicality, I’d turn the console off in frustration.

One day, my mom went to her friend’s place.  She had a computer that was hooked up to the Internet, so naturally, I wanted to tag along.  I still had that old computer at home, and I didn’t think I’d be getting the Internet for myself for quite some time.  I wanted to browse, and see what was going on in the world.

Among the things I did a Yahoo search for was “how to get the invincibility cheat in GoldenEye“.  There were a few results with some pretty good tips, but one of the pages actually had a video showing you how to do it!  That was unheard of!  A video from the Internet?  That’s just wild…

I clicked on it, and hoped there wouldn’t be a phone call to disrupt the half-hour of downloading time.

Finally, it opened, and though the screen was only about two inches wide and blurry as hell, I was fascinated.  The guy who recorded himself playing was flying through hallways, ignoring the gunfire, and talking to Dr. Doak and Alec so quickly that I could barely register what was going on!  I mean, I had an idea of what I had to do, now, but pulling it off would be another thing altogether.

And just how did he make this video?  With his VCR?  The simple idea of a video on the Internet melted my brain, just a little bit.

Now that I had an idea of how to get that holy grail of GoldenEye cheats, I wanted to see what other websites had videos.  I went to NASCAR.com next, and found a treasure trove of racing clips there.

I really wanted to get hooked up to this Internet thing…  imagine a website dedicated to all kinds of video game and racing clips.  That’d be cool, huh??  It’s a nice thought, but it’ll never happen