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'GoldenEye: Source' Updated: A Classic, Free Multiplayer Game (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Verge:
GoldenEye: Source received its first update in more than three years this week. It's free to download and it features 25 recreated maps, 10 different multiplayer modes, and redesigned versions of the original game's 28 weapons. It was created using Valve's Source engine, the same set of tools used to create Counter Strike and Half-Life games. So it's a massive step up in both visuals and performance for one of the more drastically dated gaming masterpieces of the last 20 years...
GoldenEye 007, the beloved N64 first-person shooter, has been recreated in high-definition glory by a team of dedicated fans over the course of 10 years...the attention to detail and the amount of effort that went into GoldenEye: Source make it one of the most polished HD remakes of a N64 classic.
With 8 million copies sold, Wikipedia calls it the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all-time (although this version doesn't recreate its single-player campaigns). Anyone have fond memories of playing Goldeneye 007?
GoldenEye 007, the beloved N64 first-person shooter, has been recreated in high-definition glory by a team of dedicated fans over the course of 10 years...the attention to detail and the amount of effort that went into GoldenEye: Source make it one of the most polished HD remakes of a N64 classic.
With 8 million copies sold, Wikipedia calls it the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all-time (although this version doesn't recreate its single-player campaigns). Anyone have fond memories of playing Goldeneye 007?
Viceroy: Is it... legal?
Sith Lord: I will make it legal.
Not all shooters, even on the PC, are zippy Quake clones, nor need they be. A lower movement speed ads tactical dimensions of its own. Sure, it may not be to your liking, but maybe you don't like turn-based strategy either. That doesn't mean it's bad.
Having played dozens of shooters from the era, only two of which on the N64 (GoldenEye and Perfect Dark) I can try to explain why I liked them. The lower pace made the games less reflex-based, you had to play more strategically to win. The level design was better than any other game from the period, both as ‘levels’ and as ‘believable places’. Artistically, considering the hardware it ran on, the games looked much better than other games from the period. (In comparison Quake II looked very ugly; it seemed tasteless and somehow the textures, models and levels didn't tie together, didn't resonate.) It was easy to play GoldenEye in a party setting, handing over controllers as you died, and the gameplay worked in that environment. And it was fun to play two-player on the couch. Most games had netplay at the time, but nothing quite beats playing together with your buddies in the same room like that. And I really liked the single-player campaigns, especially Perfect Dark's.
I'm saying this as mostly a PC gamer. I think the PC is inherently a better platform, for all kinds of reasons. But I can recognise a good console title when I see it and I'm not afraid to give it the praise it deserves.
Huh?
Some companies (like RARE) actually spent time rewriting the microcode for the RCP to squeeze a little bit more power out of the console. I know this because I was one of the folks who worked on such a project (though not for RARE). The firmware Nintendo originally shipped was horribly optimized and didn't perform that well. The source code they gave us was almost completely undocumented, and we had to buy a specialized SGI system just to rebuild it (an Onyx if I recall correctly, as opposed to the usual Indy SDK kits). Even then, there were zero tools to actually debug the damned thing, so most of that work had to be done completely blind (Nintendo did have a customized engineering test rig with a ton of breakout points for hardware analyzers and stuff, but we could never get our hands on one).
99.95% of the companies out there simply didn't have the time or resources to pull something off like this, since it was a huge undertaking (in addition to actually building your game). If you couldn't write your own RSP microcode, you were stuck with the default implementations (the SGI one, which was slow and clunky, or the Nintendo one, which was fast but insanely unstable), and neither worked particularly well. That wasn't the developers fault though. The blame should be placed on Nintendo and SGI for screwing that one up.