Look, I get that there is a generation in anglo territories where the N64 sold ok that discovered multiplayer games with this thing, but it’s a slideshow with barely functional single stick controls. Quakeworld was a thing over here.
Oh, I don’t question the fun with friends. I had fun with friends with plenty of crappy old games.
I’m saying the pretense that it was one of the best games ever made and a seminal FPS and that it holds up and it was a great thing one would want to replay any of the times it’s been re-released makes zero sense, decoupled from the memories.
I agree that GoldenEye wasn’t a great game (even for the time) but are you really going to compare it to the online PC gaming scene in 1996?? Did quakeworld even have couch co op support? If it did, I sure hope someone had the adapter so you could play it a TV instead of your tiny crt monitors. If it didn’t, this comparison holds even less weight
And what’s with the “anglo regions” stuff? Was there a store in your area selling PCs for the equivalent of 200USD or something?
OK, so this one is really interesting and I think people maybe don’t realize how that brief moment in time played out in some places.
So the Internet wasn’t as widely available everywhere worldwide. It was expensive over here, and you paid by the minute. You could feel money bleeding out of your pocket if you were using it to play games, and horror stories of people who forgot to log off and got hit by huge phone bills were all over the news.
So while arcades were dying, LAN cafés exploded. All the way from Quake 1 to early CounterStrike days people would pay some cash to rent a semi-competent PC in a big room of LAN-connected computers and play each other in multiplayer games. Or, you know, if you needed to send an email or you didn´t have a computer at home and needed to write something. But mostly games. It was not that much more expensive than using the Internet at home and the experience was so much better.
I played some Doom and Command & Conquer with a couple of specific weirdo friends who had a modem, but LAN cafés were certainly the main venue for that kind of thing. There were like half a dozen in my town, and they each had communities focused on specific games. There was the Quake 3 place, which then got taken over by CS, to my disappointment. There was the weird tiny place where people did Baldur’s Gate MP runs, a place that insisted on focusing on Unreal. There was a cheap one in a basement that never got over Quake 1 and people were doing railgun only 24/7. One place had people pay in advance to leave their Ultima Online characters mining while they went to class. It was groddy and magical and it’ll never come back.
And I remember in the Quake 3 place they had the PC port of Turok up and running and I kept wondering who would want to play that instead, and especially who would want to play it on a console with a single stick. And then moving on with my day. I think that’s a big part of why GoldenEye and the N64 didn’t quite work as well in this market.
I’m partially with you on this. I was so confused by people being in love with Goldeneye as I had been playing FPS games multiplayer for many years at that point, Quakeword and its many mods were light years better. That being said, it was highly novel for console-only gamers and the game itself was fun enough once you got over the horrid controller.
Yeah, and I think that’s nuanced that slowly got eroded. Even at the time I remember the consensus about GoldenEye being “it’s a good FPS… for a console”. I’m not sure I would rather play it over Alien Trilogy or whatever the competition was in 1996, but that was the argument.
But then the “for a console in 1997” part started getting dropped off after console FPSs stopped being this weird, mismatched exceptional thing and became mainstream and now people don’t remember that playing a FPS with a controller was a thing nobody did because it sucked. The N64 took a first stab at making that semi-functional that wouldn’t really come together until Halo CE.
See, that’s the thing, I’m not even being unfair to console FPSs. I’ll play on a controller. Catch me on a good day I’ll say it’s more fair, since your accuracy isn’t dependent on how much you splurged on crazy carbon fiber, 5 gram mice with infinite dpi.
But GoldenEye on a single stick at 15fps still sucked.
Takes deep breath
GoldenEye is bad and has always been bad.
Ducks for cover
Look, I get that there is a generation in anglo territories where the N64 sold ok that discovered multiplayer games with this thing, but it’s a slideshow with barely functional single stick controls. Quakeworld was a thing over here.
Hey, no fair. You know how hard it is for us to aim down.
<Waits patiently for emergence from ducking>
<Delivers audible Oddjob slap 👋>
Amazing how the nostalgia goggles can make us think we were having fun with friends or something?
Oh, I don’t question the fun with friends. I had fun with friends with plenty of crappy old games.
I’m saying the pretense that it was one of the best games ever made and a seminal FPS and that it holds up and it was a great thing one would want to replay any of the times it’s been re-released makes zero sense, decoupled from the memories.
If that’s what you had then it was really fun.
I will agree that it is complete dogshit now though.
I agree that GoldenEye wasn’t a great game (even for the time) but are you really going to compare it to the online PC gaming scene in 1996?? Did quakeworld even have couch co op support? If it did, I sure hope someone had the adapter so you could play it a TV instead of your tiny crt monitors. If it didn’t, this comparison holds even less weight
And what’s with the “anglo regions” stuff? Was there a store in your area selling PCs for the equivalent of 200USD or something?
OK, so this one is really interesting and I think people maybe don’t realize how that brief moment in time played out in some places.
So the Internet wasn’t as widely available everywhere worldwide. It was expensive over here, and you paid by the minute. You could feel money bleeding out of your pocket if you were using it to play games, and horror stories of people who forgot to log off and got hit by huge phone bills were all over the news.
So while arcades were dying, LAN cafés exploded. All the way from Quake 1 to early CounterStrike days people would pay some cash to rent a semi-competent PC in a big room of LAN-connected computers and play each other in multiplayer games. Or, you know, if you needed to send an email or you didn´t have a computer at home and needed to write something. But mostly games. It was not that much more expensive than using the Internet at home and the experience was so much better.
I played some Doom and Command & Conquer with a couple of specific weirdo friends who had a modem, but LAN cafés were certainly the main venue for that kind of thing. There were like half a dozen in my town, and they each had communities focused on specific games. There was the Quake 3 place, which then got taken over by CS, to my disappointment. There was the weird tiny place where people did Baldur’s Gate MP runs, a place that insisted on focusing on Unreal. There was a cheap one in a basement that never got over Quake 1 and people were doing railgun only 24/7. One place had people pay in advance to leave their Ultima Online characters mining while they went to class. It was groddy and magical and it’ll never come back.
And I remember in the Quake 3 place they had the PC port of Turok up and running and I kept wondering who would want to play that instead, and especially who would want to play it on a console with a single stick. And then moving on with my day. I think that’s a big part of why GoldenEye and the N64 didn’t quite work as well in this market.
I’m partially with you on this. I was so confused by people being in love with Goldeneye as I had been playing FPS games multiplayer for many years at that point, Quakeword and its many mods were light years better. That being said, it was highly novel for console-only gamers and the game itself was fun enough once you got over the horrid controller.
Yeah, and I think that’s nuanced that slowly got eroded. Even at the time I remember the consensus about GoldenEye being “it’s a good FPS… for a console”. I’m not sure I would rather play it over Alien Trilogy or whatever the competition was in 1996, but that was the argument.
But then the “for a console in 1997” part started getting dropped off after console FPSs stopped being this weird, mismatched exceptional thing and became mainstream and now people don’t remember that playing a FPS with a controller was a thing nobody did because it sucked. The N64 took a first stab at making that semi-functional that wouldn’t really come together until Halo CE.
Why past tense? It still sucks.
See, that’s the thing, I’m not even being unfair to console FPSs. I’ll play on a controller. Catch me on a good day I’ll say it’s more fair, since your accuracy isn’t dependent on how much you splurged on crazy carbon fiber, 5 gram mice with infinite dpi.
But GoldenEye on a single stick at 15fps still sucked.
I firmly believe that it doesn’t actually matter that much outside of the .1% actual pro’s. But yeah, you have a point.
Throws proximity mine in general direction.
Also, SNES > N64.