As GoldenEye 007 hits Xbox and Switch, please stop dumping on other people's nostalgia
It's OK to not like something, but sometimes you really did have to be there at the time.
I f**king loved GoldenEye. As a proper, card carrying, 'N64 kid', this game was quite possibly the best thing ever to hit a games console. It was 1997, the PlayStation could only really put out first-person shooters that appeared to have been put through a blender, and while the PC was home to some true classics (Blood and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II both hit that same year – Quake and Duke Nukem 3D the year before), for most people the N64 was the best choice when it came to multiplayer-friendly gaming.
GoldenEye 007 from Rare, for people who didn't mess with LANs or whatever the internet was doing back then, was the pinnacle of FPS multiplayer. It supported four-player multiplayer, out the box. It was revolutionary at the time. You can play the game now and think your Twitter-baiting negative thoughts, or suggest you never thought it was good in the first place, but just know that you are wrong. I'm honestly just sad that you never got to play four-player GoldenEye split-screen with some friends, because it absolutely ruled.
Back then, and this is hard to believe, I was a complete dork – which meant I actually did mess around with LANs. I'd even go to my local PC store, hand over £3, and proceed to spend an hour blasting other children to bits in Duke on the 12-PC LAN they had set up out the back. Good times, for sure. I had a PC because, as mentioned, I was a dork. I played those aforementioned shooters. They were great. There's no denying that, but I had more fun with GoldenEye. My memories playing it are more hotly seared onto my brain. GoldenEye was a key part of my childhood.
After school, me, my brother, and some friends would play for hours. Facility was our map of choice, essentially because you could drop out of the vent in the toilet and kill your friend, often shouting some terrible catchphrase from the era. Such fun. It wasn't just about Facility, though; Bunker, Temple, and Egyptian were all brilliant, too. Rounds in GoldenEye were fast and furious, and I'm sure our neighbours could hear the shouts of "stop looking at my screen!" and "s**t, he's got the Golden Gun."
Let's face it, if you play GoldenEye today, it does feel somewhat different to modern first-person shooters. I highly doubt anyone new to the game in 2023 will come away feeling that great about it (although controls have been modernised somewhat on the modern ports), but that doesn't mean this N64 classic isn't deserving of its place in gaming history.
It's fine to look at old games through a modern lens, but just let people have their nostalgic moment, too. Let them remember those months, maybe years, of fun they had slapping the s**t out of each other in a game that ran at an abominable frame rate.
If you have the Switch Online Expansion Pack or Game Pass (or the digital version of Rare Replay), loved GoldenEye back in the day and fancy a throwback to a different part of your life, boot it up. Let's face it, we could all do with being transported to a simpler time now and again.
Or of course, you could play Perfect Dark (on Game Pass), which is an all round better game.