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"Goldeneye 2"

Rare has made many a smash hit before, remember the success they reached with Donkey Kong Country on the SNES and with that incredible beat ‘em up killer instinct on the same platform? The next genre they conquered meanwhile was on the N64, the first person shooter genre, with a game called Goldeneye. Now Goldeneye reached new heights for first person shooters, no one could really put a finger on what was so brilliant, the individual hit areas on baddies or the ability to mess with near enough anything? Whatever it was it is one of very few games that had a life span of 3 years. Now with the Bond license gone and the original team disbanded the chances of a grand return to the glory days of Goldeneye are almost nil, and instead we have three alternative games.

So only a handful of the original Goldeneye team still exist within Rare today, most left and created their own company Free Radical Design, a couple joined Retro Studios and are as of now working on new Nintendo First Person Shooter, Metroid Prime. Others have joined Acclaim and other such companies including Capcom. But despite losing the majority of the Goldeneye team, Rare did still have something that they could use to make a claim as the real sequel to Goldeneye, the Goldeneye engine. The Bond license may have gone from their grasps but nevertheless with the Goldeneye game engine in place, creating a new game that feels and plays very similar to the original Bond outing was highly possible. Enter Perfect Dark, a game that is so popular that a third is already planned for Gamecube, the first N64 game featured many elements from Goldeneye, including the control system, certain multiplayer levels and even Goldeneye guns (or close relations)! But it isn’t just the Bond license that this game is sorely lacking. Robert Booth successfully headed the Perfect Dark project but lacked the skills and unique insight into the Goldeneye project that lead designer of Free Radical Design, David Doak had. It also created some complaints, many moaned that it lacked the experimental fun that made Goldeneye so great. Personally Perfect Dark was great in many parts better than Goldeneye, despite this the elegance and mystery surrounding Goldeneye was not carried forward into Perfect Dark.

People believed Dr. David Doak and his band of men left Rare due to disliking Nintendo, this is in fact untrue it was to do with wanting to come up with their own original ideas rather than being dictated on what to do. But their first game, Timesplitters, was released just for Playstation 2 and that helped fuel the rumour despite the PS2 being the only console available at the time that Free Radical Design could make their idea successfully on. Timesplitters wasn’t like Goldeneye, it didn’t have a good story (in fact it really didn’t have one at all) but the multiplayer was stunning implementing ideas such as Deathmatch editor, which proved to the world that the originality and ingenuity of the Goldeneye team did exist within Free Radical Design. Yet you must consider this has no relevance to Bond in anyway, featuring nothing from Goldeneye and going against the slow paced stealth multiplayer mode used in Goldeneye in favour of a faster more action packed one. So how can this be seen as the true follow up to Goldeneye then? Well it can’t but its sequel that is destined for a Nintendo console (Gamecube) this September can. Featuring a similar control system, a decent enough storyline, the general interface feels like the teams first smash hit FPS and even certain levels are a definite tribute to Goldeneye including a Dam level. Timesplitters 2 looks very promising indeed and does look like a game that borrows heavily from Goldeneye as well as mixing clever new ideas that Free Radical Design are famous for.

But no game engine or no genius design team can replace that brilliant feeling of actually playing as James Bond. Something with EA and their various teams are in charge of, The World Is Not Enough, Agent Under Fire and the upcoming Nightfire are three of the five Bond games from EA and the only three that are actually first person shooters. Eurocom heads two of them (TWINE and Nightfire) and to be quite honest despite not having a world-renowned game engine or critically acclaimed design team these games aren’t too shabby. They all borrow heavily from Goldeneye, trying to get the dynamics similar to the worlds best, they even try to suck you into the world of Bond more than Goldeneye with actual voices and longer cut scenes. But none of EA’s attempts beat Goldeneye be it Single player or Multiplayer (despite maybe the vehicle levels in Agent Under Fire). Also the ability to explore and the beefy feel of the weapons were sadly missing. It successfully put you in Bond’s shoes but they won’t be breaking any records anytime soon and they haven’t created anything as stunning and long lasting as Goldeneye did, it is just a well-rounded effort.

So what do you class as the sequel to Goldeneye, if you wish to re-create the feeling that Goldeneye presented you with what game would you choose? As for me well I don’t know, originality is always what I go for so probably Timesplitters but lucky for me I’m in a position where I can play and enjoy all three. Maybe one day the awesome game engine, the brilliant team and the most sort after First Person Shooter game license will reunite and we can enjoy the true sequel to Goldeneye but lets face it, we may be waiting a very long time.

Here's to the future.

Dringo.

It's tough to have such an impact from a sequel as players are not only expecting more of the same, but also the effect the original had when it was released.

This is hard for game developers, as they are stuck between making a game which is "bigger and better", and carrying out an entirely new approach for the sequel, which will probably leave die hard fans crying.

The snow level (after you crashed the plane) was quite good for stealth and sniping.
You even got the chance to assasinate the fake president.

Nah, they made sure it wasn't as good as it could have been as soon as they set the last few levels on alien grounds.

I much prefer killing humans than aliens and the last level with all the Skedar was a huge disappointment (except for the end boss which was pretty good).

It's like MGS2 in a way, because they ruined that totally as soon as they set it on the oil rig. I mean, how the hell do you stylishly stealth your way past a guy on a 2 feet wide bridge? There is only way and that's hang over the side. It gets a bit tedious after a while. Plus, every goddamm area was the same!! They should have set it in a wide open area where stealth could really be used properly, like in the original.

Perfect Dark was everything it should've been.

Problem is, after Goldeneye blew everyone away and redefined the entire genre, fans were expecting the same from Perfect Dark.
I think that Rare did the best that was possible from the N64 and made massive improvements in terms of AI, graphics, animation, gameplay and imagination (ranging from weapons, gadgets to levels) but it would take a lot more to make the same impact that Goldeneye did.

And the game could often suffer from slowdown.

I think that with the Gamecube they have the power to stretch things further and cause a Goldeneye sized fuss all over again.
However, it'll be unfair to expect them to fully realise it.

I'd be reasonably happy with a smoother update of the N64 Perfect Dark with online play, lots of levels (both multiplayer and single player) and NO SLOWDOWN whatsoever.

If there is one game that can get me back into the rhythm of what a Saturday used to be it's Perfect Dark 2. And that is that 3 friends come round in the morning (about 10 or 11) and play begins on Perfect Dark up until about 3. Then we head down the pool room and have around 2 hours of pool or snooker. Then we come home and play more Perfect Dark up until about 10. That was what a Saturday used to be. Now it's just the pool and snooker with no gaming. :-(

See, I wasn't really disappointed with the PD one player... the only way it disappointed me was in terms of difficulty, and that was only because I had pretty much mastered Goldeneye in one player by unlocking all levels and the 007 mode. I'd played Goldeneye so much that I'd become very good at the Rare style of FPS. And for that reason PD didn't take me so long to win in one player. I now have all the cheats for it, all the secret levels and all that jazz. The only things I can't do is those challenges in the combat simulator! I got up to something like number 25, but the last few are damn hard!!!

The multiplay on PD was blummin amazing! Many a night me and a mate have stayed up playing teams, just two of us against overwhelming numbers of Simulants, as we improved slowly cranking up the Sim difficulty... ah, those were the days :D

And the combat boosts for multiplay were ingenious! The one thing I think they should have done was instead of having a couple of Goldeneye levels back, have all of them, but make them only available once you'd unlocked them somehow... that woulda been cool! Imagine that Goldeneye level that had all the square rooms and the ramps that led to little ledges that went around the edge of the rooms... remember it? I think it was called stack or something? But if it was in PD you coulda jumped from all the ledges to pursue someone on the level below... sweet :D

anyway... what I want for PD2... all the PD and Goldeneye multiplay levels recreated as well as plenty of new ones, the return of classic Goldeneye and PD guns as well of plenty of new ones, and more single player levels, because it doesn't really need to be more difficult (although that could help) but it does need to be longer... Oh and some cool unlockable features that aren't things like cheats... maybe unlock some classic PD or Goldeneye levels to play with your new guns and stuff, maybe unlock some cool retro Rare games... or maybe they could have arcade machines in game that you play them on... (like that RC pro-AM arcade machine that was in Jet Force Gemini, but it would be in an actual arcade full of people playing different games... ooh... :D)

Anyway, I, like you, seem to have gone on and on and on...

I consider Perfect Dark to be the true sequel to Goldeneye.

Goldeneye was great in one player yes, but it was obviously best when played with friends. This, in my opinion, was the most importnat thing about the sequel. Perfect Dark didn't have a great one player game but the multiplayer was the best ever!

For me, that was what I wanted. Okay I'd have liked a better one player game but that was never going to last forever. It still had a great one player game going by standards of other FPSs but it's because everyone was expecting so much that it disappointed slightly.

The mulitplayer on the other hand was absolutely brilliantly, amazingly, fantastically, superb. It didn't require as much skill as Goldeneye and because of that, we never played it on License to Kill (like we ALWAYS did with Goldeneye) but it was the wealth of machine guns that made it so enjoyable. Usually in shooting games, there is a "machine gun". In PD there's an Avenger, a Cyclone, an AR53(??), an RCP-120, a Dragon, a Laptop gun, a Callisto, and probably a few others I can't remember. And they were all so different too. The Avenger was definitely my favourite (and it was the most dangerous for both players. It was so powerful that 2 or 3 shots would usually be enough for the kill, but because it ran out of bullets so fast and took what seemed liked an age to reload, it was dangerous to use. But they don't call me Danger Daddy for nothing...

I always do this when talking about Perfect Dark. I just go on and on and on and on....

I haven't actually seen anything about the grappling hook in Prime... not saying it's not there, but I haven't heard about it...

Dringo wrote:
> Sibs wrote:
> I think the wider issue here is just how much change is accpetable
> before a game ceases to become similar enough to the previous title.
>
>>> It is much like Strafex and Metroid. He said Metroid Prime wouldn't
>>> be
>>> a 'proper' Metroid game because you couldn't see Samus most of the
>>> time, and the grappling hook was missing, and the ball rolling was
>>> gimmicky. Obviously Strafex would have liked these features to be
>>> used
>>> as an anchor point, something remaining constant in the series.
>
> Yes well Strafex is wrong :) The grappling hook is in there and the
> bal rolling is a major part of the gameplay.


Not really. I've not seen much of the grappling hook but the ball rolling isn't a seamless move like it used to be. There's now dedicated sections to it.

Besides, my main point is that they've taken all the platforming out of a platformer and that what's the point in having a strong character if you can't see them?

Samus is sort of wasted on an FPS, but considering it IS an FPS, it's possibly the best a Metroid game could be in that genre.

Although an FPS doesn't quite take the franchise to it's full potential, it's as much as we should expect this time...

Solskjær wrote:
> No no no no no..... it can't be for Nightfire...
>
> I remember recently reading about how Bond will be completely
> different in this game - unlike Pierce Brosnan or any other Bond
> they've done before.
>
> And you can't try and tell me that they're NOT gunna use the real him
> in the game based on the 20th Bond film! That's just madness!!

You're wrong. Bond's face in Nightfire IS going to be the face of Pierce Brosnan. Sorry.