Staying Onatopp of things

The slow agonising death of the Amiga meant PC gaming was all she wrote for Your Correspondent during uni - interfloor college Worms and Rally Challenge tournaments to the fore - but the advent of the consoles meant it wouldn't be limited to that. At The Hovel in the late 90s we took a long time to pick a side, finally joining the Nintendo 64 side of the argument rather than the Playstation posse. Playstations were cheaper, had more games and generally seemed a lot less Michael Mouse, Sony's developers not being psychopathically obsessed with subbing the fat Italian plumber into every fucking platform they bashed out. However, N64 had one advantage the PS1 (as it later became known) lacked. Genuine multiplayer ability. And soon thereafter, the best multiplayer game ever developed: N64 Goldeneye 007.

It's easy to forget with the modern solidity of the Bond franchise that Goldeneye (the fillum) turned up at a time when the 007 story looked like petering out to a fairly pathetic conclusion. The two Timmy Dalton Bond flicks at the end of the '80s had been a'ight, but nothing much worth writing home to Moneypenny over, and they'd followed on from some very fucking dire mid-80s efforts with a fat, aging Roger Moore poncing his way through the dreary likes of A View To A Kill. By the time Goldeneye came out it'd been six years since the last installment - and for certified Bond-heads like Your Correspondent, who spent much of calendar year 1995 reading every 007 book Ian Fleming wrote (instead of focusing on arguably more pressing issues such as studying for the HSC), it was just as well that the new installment was significantly fucking stellar. It had a proper, hard-edged Bond, an interesting, believable villain (basically Bond's evil twin), a swathe of hotties (in particular the carnivorously seductive Xenia Onatopp), explodey goodness by the metric shitload, and Robbie Coltrane as a fat Russian mafia don. What's not to like?

Goldeneye the game came several years after the movie, by which stage you'd be forgiven for thinking the steam would have gone out of the merch deal long ago and the whole souffle would have been distinctly deflated. Yeah but no but. It was absolutely stellar. Gameplay, graphics and gunwork was all top notch, and best of all it was even better as a multiplayer enterprise than as a single person undertaking. Much like sex, just with more oddly-shaped coloured plastic (unless you're doing it very differently to the rest of us.) I said in the Amiga gaming post (to which this is basically Part Two) that it was probably the best game EVAAAAAARRRRR and if I was about to change my position on it I'd hardly have gone on so fucking long about it already wouldn't I.

The weapons, an obvious and absolute requirement for a decent FPSer, were oresome. Armalite rifles and grenade launchers and frickin' lasers and all kinds of good lovin'. The best weapon, though, was the simplest. In a couple of single-player levels, most memorably the one based around busting out of the Russkie military barracks unarmed and single handed, you got the DD43 Dostovei pistol in your hot little hand as soon as you dropped the first official-looking dude in the interrogation room. No great shakes that, not on its lonesome anyhoo. But paired with another, identical Dossie in your other hand... can I get a WOOOOOOO!!!! As in the finest work of one Johnny WOOOOOOO!!!! back in the day in Hong Kong action flicks, which usually involved Chow Yun Fat busting up baddies and bits of scenery with a nine mill in each chubby paw, accompanied by stratospheric levels of win. Opening and concluding the case for the Crown, 1992's Hard Boiled. See it or die tryin'.

Sadly the Johnny WOOOOOOO!!!! option wasn't available on multiplayer mode, which was where the various N64s seconded to the various sharehouses in which I lived throughout the late Nineties and early Noughties usually found themselves parked upon. However, next best thing was opting for one-shot one-kill mode ('Licence to Kill') and weapon-opting for Pistols - the Dossie, Bond's trusty PP7 and Dirty Harry's .44 Cougar Magnum, aka the Hand Cannon, whose awesome hit-power advantage over the others was of no use whatsover. Given the thing reloaded with the alacrity of a council worker on smoko it was almost spectacularly useless - you could loose the entire magazine of the others in the time it took to persuade two or three rounds out of the Magnum. However, claiming a face-to-face kill with the Magnum gave you bragging rights that lasted long beyond the end of the game in question.

The main advantage of one-shot-kills was it meant relative newcomers to the game - sharehouse guests over for beers, pizza and random violence - didn't get fucked over by not having committed all the levels and the placements of armour and 'power weapons' (the really heavy duty shit - the Magnum on Pistols, the D5K Deutsche on Automatics, grenade/rocket launchers, frickin' lasers etc.) Of course when the visitors left or crashed the local pros came out to play - Craigos, Yuri and I knew the stages, knew where to camp and what to farm, and generally what was the best method of completely fucking each other off to the point of chucking toys and going for a sulk, or at least downstairs to the Brewroom (aka the garage, where we had a couple of dodgy old couches set up) for a beer. We tended to keep our sense of humour about picking levels though. Like selecting Rocket Launchers for playing the Archives, which were basically a series of very narrow straight corridors and possibly the dumbest place ever to consider firing a rocket-propelled explosive device. Tossing Proximity Mines around like confetti - particularly with the aim of blowing up someone on the toilet in the Facility stage - was another example of Chateau Dodgy Best Practice.

While there were some seriously awesome weaps - haven't even got to the ZMG machine pistol which like the D5K Douche was louder than God taking a dump or the KF-7 Kalashnikov ripoff or the AR-33 Armalite or the oresomely oresome oresomness of the sniper rifle - just as sure as Jack Newton swims in circles, there were some dud weapons too. The Hand Cannon on one-shot-kills, obviously. And the gold standard in crap weapons, the crappest weapon in the long and storied history of first person shooters - a Russian-issue automatic called the Klobb. It sounded like a staple gun. In fact it pretty much WAS a fucking staple gun, just without the capacity for injuring people. It had a pitiful twenty-round mag (half that of the directly-competing Douche), the entire contents of which would often be insufficient to relieve an opponent of their body armour let alone their health points, particularly if they were waving a Dossie or a Douche in opposition to your world view. It was laughably poor. Based on the Czech Skorpion machine pistol, a besmirchment over which the Czechs should sue, the Klobb was named after Ken Lobb, one of the game's designers, who everyone must have secretly hated and/or thought was fucking shit at his job.

Everyone had their favourite characters. The version we had at Chateau Dodgy in St Lucia (as distinct from the original at the Hovel in Randwick) was ex-Theft Converters and most of the weapons, cheats and additional characters had been unlocked, with the result that noone was so predictable or gauche as to pick Bond himself. Craigos went for the maniacally grinning Siberian guard; Yuri chose the primary Bond Shag, Natalya, figuring we'd shoot him less due to chivalry (wrong) and/or being marginally shorter would provide a competitive advantage (also wrong, now that our standard crosshair aiming height was now a headshot rather than a chest shot.) Me? I went for this guy - the Seedy Scientist. I mean, who the fuck else would you pick? Sure the labcoat was a bit dogs-balls-on-a-goldfish at middle distances but hey, when you're rolling with mad FPS skillz like mine you gots to bring yourself back to the pack somehow.

That's bollocks, of course. I'm 'King Arse at FPS games, probably because Goldeneye's the only one I've ever really been engaged by - possibly because of the Bond link, probably because of the oresomeness of the game itself. Finishing Goldeneye in single-player mode was up there with finishing Lemmings in terms of personal achievement, and probably didn't take a lot fewer years to do. Now, of course, the gaming world has long since moved on from the N64 - Nintendo having released another couple of failed consoles in the interim until striking gold again with the Wii - and from N64 Goldeneye, although a core community of fanboys seem to have kept the dream alive with sites like GoldeneyeForever.com (from where most of the above images were, um, borrowed.)

In conclusion: N64 Goldeneye was, to quote Spiderbait, fucken awesome.

Now go and rent Hard Boiled. Seriously.

The Doctor is OUT.