The super duper retro gaming review thread

You're being really thorough with reviewing every version of the game. Have you thought about writing them up for HG101? I'm sure they'd love a submission like that and they usually require you to be thorough with the playing and reviewing all the ports which you seem to have been.

My thoughts on my recent play through of goldeneye. I've tried to be objective but don't expect a glowing review:

http://lifein16bit.blogspot.com/2011/08/goldeneye-n64.html

Just go for it, couldn't be easier to set one up and I'm sure people here such as myself will follow it. I've gotten hits from famicomblog which is weird. Mostly it's people leeching my thief and actraiser screenshots on google though

EnterNow wrote: »

Fyp

You forgot the important one, shitty gameplay for goldeneye.

Go play it then and tell me in all honesty it hasn't aged badly and that it's not as good as you remembered. All that matters is that when I played it recently it wasn't much fun. However if I go back and play something like Doom 2 it'll be far more enjoyable.

Well that's more the games legacy and I did go into that and can't deny what it did and it's innovations for FPS games and console FPS games. Still I think it's worthwhile commenting on how the games hold up, it shows how far gaming has come. I think it's better to comment on this rather than to be like those people that still believe Goldeneye holds up as one of the best FPS games ever. As much as I give out about Halo I can still go back to that game and play it and have loads of fun. Well until the Library level at least :P I can't really say that about goldeneye.

Also about graphics aging, if there's one thing I hate it's a crap art style. If you have a crap art style once the technology moves on your game is going to look like ass. If you've good art that works around the limitations of the hardware then the game should look great forever. Goldeneye really has terrible art (as do most games that go for a realistic setting). If a game's got **** art then I'm not going to let it get away with it. Even though Goldeneye is impressive technologically for an N64 game (I did give it credit here) it's a terrible looking game in the art department.

Well if there's a better term than aging then I'll use it. Dated maybe?

As for legend of dragoon it really is timeless. It's just as **** as it's ever been.

That Xybots review has me interested in a lynx now. Looks like a great game. Never seen the original in motion, it looks amazing for its time. I wonder if the programmers could have gotten the scrolling smoother by using a raytraced engine like wolfenstein. The lynx was capable of it since it could scale and rotate images with little performance penalty and the alien vs. predator beta that is floating around shows that it was possible to do an FPS in the vein of wolfenstein 3D.

Glad you thought it was balanced, it's what I was aiming for and cut out my usual hyperbole

I suppose it's not fair to compare a stylised game with one that isn't. I still don't think the art design is all that good though. One part I just thought about where I don't give the game credit is the incidental details in each room, stuff like the science equipment in the labs etc., that gave them a lived in feel. This is something you would see in build engine games like Duke 3D but for a full 3D engine game Goldeneye was the first to do it and it wasn't until a year later with Half-Life that you saw these kinds of believable environments.

As for comparing Goldeneye to PC games it wasn't deliberate it's just that there's not much to compare it to on console before Goldeneye was released. I mentioned some of the features it introduced to the FPS genre that were taken from RPG and simulation genres, genres that were at the time were almost solely confined to the PC. This isn't a slight against the game as in PC got there first, it'smore to show what Goldeneye did to spice up the FPS genre by introducing all these new elements. The mission structure was present in a few obsucre FPS games like Dark Forces and the severely underappreciated Outlaws but I found Goldeneye was a lot less linear in how you achieve these objectives and also it did this in a full 3D environment as opposed to the pseudo 3D games before it based on raycasting 2D engines.

I don't compare goldeneye to earlier FPS games because I believe at the time that Goldeneye was the most advance FPS out there in terms of the ideas it introduced to the genre. In the same year the most advanced PC FPS was Quake 2, a game that really hadn't evolved much from Quake 1. In hindsight it was more technologically advanced as well but a much uglier game thanks to some poor art and overuse of coloured lighting. The levels were not believable in the way that Goldeneye made them. I guess I didn't give goldeneye enough credit in this regard.

As for comparing it to later FPS games I was really trying to find out why the game is no longer playable. A few PC games tried to mimmick the goldeneye experience, most notably Sin which was decent but a week later the big game changer came along, Half-Life which really overnight changed the way FPS games were made and set the quality bar so much higher that it was another year before games were even coming close to the quality of that game. It really just left goldeneye and ever other 3D engine based FPS behind and made us demand far more from FPS games. I feel the 2D engine games have aged more gracefully due to being unique experiences from 3D engine games.

I feel also the frame rate is a big factor. It was forgiveable when Goldeneye was released because you were getting the best FPS experience around at the time. However as it was surpassed by better games which also had smoother feeling controls due to stable 30+ frames per second it becomes less forgiveable in goldeneye.

Anyway that was practically another blog post!

As for the blog header, doing something like that would be beyond my capabilities so I'll just list them here:

Top row from the right: Virtual boy, Actraiser 2, Earthbound, Persona 4, Super Metroid
Bottom row from the right: Shin Megami Tensei, Donkey Kong, Catherine, Dragon Quest 8, lastly my old videogame set up