When GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo Switch was announced back in September, nostalgic gamers across the world rejoiced. Rare‘s iconic first-person shooter made waves when it originally launched in 1997, yet its complicated licensing deal between Nintendo and Rare’s owner Microsoft suggested that it would have a quiet death in the history books, despite rumblings of a remake in 2008 that never made it to release.
Today as the zombified corpse of GoldenEye 007 cavorts away on the Switch, I wonder if that would have been for the best. Though I didn’t play GoldenEye 007 at launch (I was three months old) it was the second game I ever played when I was given a hand-me-down Nintendo 64 of my own five or six years later. For years, GoldenEye 007 was my go-to shooter – whether it was battering my brother as bad boy Alec Trevelyan or wreaking havoc on the streets of St. Petersburg in single-player, it felt unmatched.
There’s no denying that, at launch, GoldenEye 007 was head and shoulders above everything else. But as I played some of the Nintendo Switch version’s online multiplayer with other NME staffers, I started to wonder who this nostalgic necromancy was for. Certainly not me: abysmal controls turned tense shootouts into ridiculously awkward jousting matches, where the tactic of choice became running at each other while firing so that nobody had to try and actually aim. It became worse when we new control schemes in the hopes of finding something more modern, which subjected each of our characters to nightmarish body horror as they writhed in circles while we tried to move them.
