Tag: N64

GoldenEye 007 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 39)

“GoldenEye 007” might be the biggest conundrum (or at least the toughest call for inclusion) on this entire countdown of what I consider to be the most essential retro video games a person can play.

On the one hand, you have a game that is by many metrics among the most important games in the entire history of gaming. GoldenEye personified a platform – the Nintendo 64 – in a way few other games have ever come close to doing. It provided a template for first-person shooting on home consoles for essentially the next decade (and to some degree, it mapped out what developers are still doing today). And it was immensely popular, providing joy (and misery) to countless millions of people.

However, on the other hand, you also have a game that is virtually unplayable for many younger gamers, who upon playing it will almost inevitably declare it overrated and terrible and miss the whole dang point of why it mattered in the first place.

The reasons for this are easy to identify. 

Firstly, it’s the general look of the game, which featured early-polygons that are fuzzy, colorless, and ugly and offer comically unrefined edges, creating the “blocky” effect that so many games of that era had. 

“Oh hey, that guy looks like an extra from Dire Strait’s ‘Money for Nothing’ video!”

“Wow, that lady’s chest looks like Madonna’s famous cone bra for some reason.”*

* That these jokes are themselves somewhat dated does not escape me. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We all get old. I linked to the source material for the younger pups out there. Also, here’s a more modern version for you: These people look like less colorful Minecraft characters.

So yes, the graphics were super ugly. But that would be easy to forgive with good controls and … WELP. 

Yeah, here you’ve got to contend with that wonky N64 controller,* early first-person “tank” controls that everyone has by now (justifiably) declared to be entirely inefficient at accomplishing things (you can’t aim or move quickly), and perhaps worst of all, critical stuff mapped to those silly yellow arrow buttons on the N64 which are annoyingly small and difficult to find in real time … which is unfortunately what we’re dealing with here – real-time battles wherein baddies are trying to shoot you in the face.

* The N64 controller is famously wonky. It features three prongs giving it the appearance of a tripod, those stupid tiny yellow buttons your fingers can’t locate without you glancing down at the controller (getting you killed in the process), and a cute little joystick for analogue control which is positioned squarely in the middle of the controller for some reason and baffles newcomers endlessly. The idea behind the whole thing is that you use the middle prong when you’re using the joystick and the left prong when using the standard d-pad, but that’s not intuitive, people constantly get it wrong, and the whole dang thing is super weird regardless.

In summation, the controls and visuals of GoldenEye 007 can best be described as “dated” and at worst be labeled as something akin to getting a splinter stuck under your fingernail. 

You don’t want that there. It hurts. As a piece of a greater whole, it served a purpose. But now it sucks and you want it to go away. 

These controls and graphics suck, and you want them to go away.

Thusly, encouraging people to play this is to invite scorn and misunderstanding.

And yet…

People LOVE this game. 

I LOVE this game. 

GoldenEye is an all-timer, and it represents a simpler time for so many of us, full of gaming, friends, laughs, continual virtual murder, and general hilarity. The flaws, such as they are, weren’t really flaws at the time, because nothing better existed to compare them to. It was just an awesome game.

So, the case for GoldenEye essentially comes down to this: Either we encourage people to play it knowing they simply won’t have the same experience people did in the late 90s, OR we let it be forgotten completely as us older people die off.

Morbid, I know, but that’s kinda the point here. What games shouldn’t pass away from our society’s consciousness. Which ones need to be celebrated and remembered?

GoldenEye, for better AND worse, needs to be celebrated and remembered.

So, prepare to have a nice, long splinter shoved up under your fingernail, because we’re doing this thing.

GoldenEye 007 at a glance:

Genre: First-person shooter
Released: 1997
Platform: Nintendo 64
No. 29 on IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time
Continue reading GoldenEye 007 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 39)

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 34)

As a grotesque, anthropomorphized moon threatens to collide with your world and bring about total annihilation, you, as the gamer, wrestle with the very real notion that you don’t know how to stop this, and moreover, that you’re not going to have the time to do anything about it anyway, even if you could figure out what that was supposed to be.

In short, you’re doomed. 

And you know it.

Bummer.

Quite obviously, it is not a stretch to say that “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” is one of Nintendo’s darker creations, nor is it unfair to say that the game isn’t shy about throwing the player into the deep end quickly. The primary objective of the game, that of preventing this global apocalypse, is shoved in your face right away. 

And it is added upon with still more to burden yourself with, as though preventing widespread death and devastation is … somehow not enough.

Whereas its immediate predecessor (and certified gem) “Ocarina of Time” started you out in the comfy confines of your personal home and community, introducing you gradually to external threats (with mostly obvious methods  – and fairly introduced abilities – to overcome them), Majora’s Mask at the outset puts you in a vulnerable position alone on the road, makes you an immediate victim of a robbery and a curse(!), then leaves you with this hellish scenario of the moon colliding with your immediate location raining certain destruction … with just three days to try to stop it from happening.

Feelings of dread and doom overwhelm, to the extent few games have emulated before or since. We’re 45 minutes into this game, and we cannot in our wildest imaginations begin to understand how we’re going to get our heroic alter-ego, Link, through this one.

“Well, it’s been a good run buddy, but I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this one alive.”

“Me neither. See you on the other side, champ.”

Compare this to previous Zelda games. An enemy, even a grossly overpowered one like Ganon, is still just one entity. The challenge is easier to wrap your arms around.

  1. Take down this bad guy. 
  2. Save the princess. 
  3. Win the day!

The threat in Majora’s Mask is more elusive, ultimately, and more conceptually difficult to process. Its scope is immense, akin to asking a person to solve a problem like world hunger or devise a method for ridding the world of cockroaches.

“Where do I even begin?”

Where indeed. The trick, which is revealed in those early moments (but only after a sort of dread-panic has taken firm hold), is that time travel once again comes into play, as it did in the previous game. 

Here, it’s implemented differently, as a kind of looping dynamic. You can go back to the beginning of this hellish scenario as many times as you like, as it turns out, as a way of “buying” yourself more time.

But this is a true deal with the devil, Faustian in its intent. 

Yes, you get a chance to restart. But it’s a return to the same initial feelings of despair that so overwhelmed you to begin with. It’s the same place, with the same people, with the same scenario. Played out, over and over again. And as if that doesn’t sound problematic enough – retraumatizing yourself over and over again – certain things you’ve done to rectify the problems in the world around you … well those reset as well. Progress is lost. You must begin all over again. And perhaps worst of all, once you reach a certain point in the time loop, you reach yet another level of horrifying understanding, and it’s that your first impression was actually correct: 

The breadth of the task in front of you is simply impossible. 

You cannot do it. There’s just no way to save everyone and fix everything. Some wrongs will not be corrected, and there’s nothing you can do about that. 

In a sense, you truly ARE doomed.

THIS is the essence of Majora’s Mask. And it’s effing brilliant.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask at a glance:

Genre: Adventure
Released: 2000
Platform: Nintendo 64
Runner-up for GameSpot’s “Best Nintendo 64 Game”
Continue reading The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 34)