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No GoldenEye For Xbox Live
Joystiq reports that, as revealed on a recent VGM podcast, GoldenEye is not likely coming to Xbox Live anytime soon. From the article: "I would say is that as far as I know we don't have plans to bring those types of games on Xbox Live Arcade ... Some of the games that were ... on the N64, those games were pretty large and are still gonna be pretty hard to distribute digitally depending on the title."
I guess it's fair. After all, Golden Eye won't be coming to the Revolution either.
Bundle goldeneye with a disk of other classics and sell it. Goldeneye would overtake halo for users, imo.
EA owns the current Goldeneye/Bond license, not Microsoft or Rare. So, to publish Goldeneye on Xbox Live, Microsoft would have to deal with EA which they clearly do not want to do. It's too bad; I'm sure Goldeneye on Xbox live would be a monster seller. I don't think space limitations are the issue, the biggest N64 games were 65 megabytes.
The 360 hard drive is only 20 gigs, with only a 13 gig user partition (the other partition is swap space, cache, console settings, etc.).
13 gigs is not big enough to keep a bunch of games stored. Space Invaders, Gauntlet, yes... Full on first person shooters, no!
I think even if you look at what Nintendo's planning on doing in this space ... it's 8- and 16-bit games, it's not 32- and 64-bit games.
Actually, Nintendo has already stated that N64 games will be part of this, so bzzt - wrong answer.
And anyway, the ROMs themselves aren't that big. 16 MB tops if I remember correctly. I'm sure Nintendo could set this up in such a way that, assuming the entire game image isn't downloaded before execution, the critical components are downloaded first and then the remainder streamed as the user plays the game. Of course, Nintendo does pride itself on presentation quality, so my best guess is that they'd force a complete download before execution, so that a network service interruption doesn't cause the game to crash or pause because the download stalled.
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Wasn't Nintendo planning on having all of its older titles availible on the revolution? If so, Goldeneye could be a major hit for the system. If they have some way to play it online against other opponenets, that would be even better.
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I find it pretty funny that Microsoft is balking at the size of a a 32 MB download where Nintendo is jumping at the chance to do the exact same thing-- considering that the XBox 360 has gigabytes and gigabytes of hard drive space, and the Nintendo Revolution will have 500 MB.
It almost makes one wonder if the real problem isn't N64 cart size, the problem is that they can't get the licensing but don't want to say so out loud.
How big are XBox Live games normally, like Geometry Wars 2 and such?
So does this dismiss the rumor that dreamcast games will be ported over to xbox live?
Yah, the HD is only 13 gigs, but some of the demos on arcade are over 1 gig, and you can redownload anything you purchase. So putting about 5 dreamcast games on the harddrive is entirly reasonable.
I have about 4 game demos (each nearly 1 gig), 6 games from xbox live, and 8 gigs free. I'm definately not hurting for space.
Sprite based games are one thing, but how impressed will everybody be when they see blurry N64-era textures blown up into high-def? I'd think a game like Goldeneye would have to be significantly reworked to make it presentable in high resolution, IP rights issues aside.
The size issue is pretty lame. When you have a service like Live delivering HD trailers at hundreds of MB in size, I would think a rom cartridge from the N64 would be a piece of cake. Case in point is Goldeneye. 96Mbits. That's only 12MB of disk space. If you make multiple copies of that on the 13GB partition, you would have over 1000 copies. To be fair, though, games like Smash TV are about 6Mbit in size so it would be larger than that.
Any game that was developed by Rare + Published by Nintendo will almost certainly not be available in ANY back catalog at all. This includes Goldeneye, Killer Instinct, Blast Corps... perhaps Banjo(?) as well.
And anyone who mentions "Starfox" or "Donkry Kong" being a Rare property deserves a cockpunch.
Sounds like an excuse. Distribution shouldn't be a problem. I got Half-Life 2 and Day of Defeat over Steam. Those seemed pretty large.
Now on the other hand, if he had mention problems with storing the games...
Nintendo doesn't have much access to Goldeneye anymore; the Rare bits are in Microsoft's hands and the EA licencing is... well, EA.
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
EA has the Bond license.
EA is the publisher for Free Radical, which employs most of the original Goldeneye team and produces games with a greatly enhanced version of the Goldeneye engine (or at least a Goldeneye playalike).
Call me crazy, but:
Bond license + next-gen engine = killer, multiplatform, online Goldeneye remake
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I guess by thoise statements that he made he doesnt know about Nintendos plans. Wich Nintendo will be distributing n64 games for the revolution. I would laugh so hard if the list of games for the virtual console comes out and goldeneye is on it . Looks likeEverybody is counting nintendo out again prematurly just like people did with the ds.
Of course you know what this means.. did anyone think of this just now?
Even for a big game, on a modest cable modem connection, it'll be downloaded
in 10 seconds flat.
Isn't that service!?
Just download the bloody ROM for an N64 emulator, or buy the real thing - you can pick up an N64 and Goldeneye for price of 1 or 2 month's broadband rental, or you could get one of the mods for unreal and halflife, or you can realise how over-rated it really was to begin with.. :P I loved Goldeneye when it came out, but back then you only had a handful of console FPS games and most of them were Doom...
It won't happen for these reasons:
1. The James Bond license, in a complete switch from the usual state of things, actually makes the game much cooler.
2. Emulating an N64 is still not trivial, would rely on using information that would have to be gained in a clean-room reverse engineering, and even then may be subject to a lawsuit from Nintendo. Of course they could always look at public emulators, but I'm unsure that wouldn't carry its own liability.
3. The ROM has Nintendo's logo all over it, all that would have to be scrubbed. Further, I'm reasonably sure Nintendo actually owns the copyright on the game. They were the original publisher in any case.
However, the game's size is likely NOT a determining factor. The Wikipedia page for Goldeneye 007 states that the game's ROM is 16 megabytes. The size limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is 50 megabytes. Even counting in twice the game's ROM size to hold an emulator, it would still probably fit.
However, consider this: Rare still probably has the source code and art assets for the game. They could probably recompile the game to make use of the X-Box 360's hyperflash sparklemagic technical pixie thingies. In fact, they would have to do this, otherwise people would laugh at how the 360 now has a FIRST-GEN N64 GAME WITHOUT ANY GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT, gasp! So that means, at the very least, better textures.
The N64 game's ROM was only that small because it used heavy texture compression and because people weren't accustomed to 360-level texture sharpness. Look at it now: the game is still cool, but it's blurry as hell. Unfortunatly, to improve the textures would probably greatly increase the game's size, and that 50 megabyte Live Arcade limit looks like a hard (if arbitrary) one.
That's speculation of course, but it sounds about right to me. Anyone care to subject it to the iron knifeblade of reason?