The much heralded return of GoldenEye 007 was meant to be the second coming of one of gaming’s golden children. After years of rumours, reports and licensing hell, the game has been brought to Xbox consoles and Nintendo Switch. It gives us a chance to savour a true N64 classic on modern consoles, but the cold reality is that things could have been so, so much better.
Having GoldenEye back and readily playable is, quite simply, fantastic, and it’s truly nostalgic to be able to revisit a game that defined the pre-Halo console first person shooter. The opening level, The Dam, is iconic in and of itself, but there’s just so many moments and touches sprinkled through this game from a time where you could only really discover them for yourself, from playground chatter, or the earliest forms of the internet.
The thing is that it’s this and nothing more. On Nintendo Switch, Nintendo has applied their N64 emulator to the game, albeit with a new tweak that allows for the game to run in 16:9, while for the Xbox version, Microsoft turned to Code Mystics, who employed the exact same N64 emulator that was used for the Rare Replay collection.
There’s curious strengths and weaknesses to both versions. The Xbox version can run at up to 4K and Code Mystics have created a great new default control layout that makes it feel almost like a post-2001 twin-stick FPS, but then it’s limited to 30fps, only has local multiplayer, and cheat codes don’t work. On the other hand, Nintendo’s emulation has a strangely backwards control scheme that’s not been adapted from N64 controller to Joy-Con, but then you can play online thanks to Nintendo Switch Online‘s multiplayer game tunnelling tech.
GoldenEye 007 on Xbox.
There’s also plenty of visual quirks from the emulation. On Xbox, playing at higher resolution has numerous slight graphical glitches, the seams of polygons visible as you move, backgrounds overlaying on foregrounds, and more. Code Mystics asserts that this is authentic to the original game on N64, just that they’re far more visible when emulated at higher resolution.
Now, we don’t want to discredit Code Mystics’ work – they were given a specific job by Microsoft and worked to spec – but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing when we’ve seen what could have been. A big part of the recent push to get GoldenEye 007 re-released was because of the 2021 leak of a GoldenEye HD remaster dating back to the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade.
That remaster never officially saw the light of day, getting bogged down in the split licenses needed between Rare, Nintendo, MGM, and Activision for a while – in the end Rare’s second N64 FPS was remastered and released on Xbox Live Arcade instead. Yet that remaster still existed and eventually leaked online.
Far more than wrapping up the N64 ROM in an emulation layer, it was a full port of the original game to Xbox 360, with Rare then taking the opportunity to create new textures and character models to enhance the visuals – and with the ability to instantly switch between new and old graphics. Oh, and it had online multiplayer.
It’s that which makes GoldenEye 007’s release so disappointing, because even if some licensing issues were cleared up, a pettiness remained, likely with Nintendo and Xbox agreeing that neither version could meaningfully outshine the other. That also meant Nintendo Switch Online and Xbox Game Pass, instead of listing it for sale independently. The only way to “own” this game is to buy Rare Replay digitally, because for some strange reason, it’s not been added to the disc version of this game collection.
And so, while it’s nice to have GoldenEye 007 back and with a legal way to play it on modern consoles, the best way to play? Well, that will see people continuing to live in the legal grey areas of emulation and abandonware.
