youTwo beloved games from the past have been relaunched in the past week: 2008’s nauseating sci-fi horror Dead Space has been resurrected with modern technology, and 1997’s innovative first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 (pictured above) has arrived on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, looking somewhat less fresh.
Dead Space (pictured below) wasn’t my thing: I’m too sensitive for horror (sometimes I cry at commercials). But GoldenEye 007 brings back a lot of fond memories for me, as it does for anyone who played during the Nintendo 64 era. Try to find a millennial who doesn’t have fond memories of meeting up at that friend’s house after school. for split-screen fights to the death, or a member of Gen Xer who almost missed a college essay deadline because of it.
My first thought, whenever a game like this comes around again, is always: what if it’s terrible now? Having reviewed it, GoldenEye might be one of those games where you just had to play it when it first came out. Loading it up on Xbox now, you can’t help but be hyper-aware of the blocky and claustrophobic nature of its environments, the odd movement, the almost eerily basic character models.
All these shortcomings were characteristic of the technical ingenuity of the time, which allowed the game to run smoothly on a console with 4 MB of memory. Now though, while still iconic, it looks dated. This is the case with so many iconic games from the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, and it’s why re-releases can be such a risky business. Stripped of their context, these games arrive in a future where their astonishing technical innovations are commonplace and 100 percent improved.
When it first released, the very idea of a first-person shooter on a console was laughable; How would you control it, without a keyboard and mouse? Before GoldenEye, if you wanted to blow up your friends at a social occasion, you had to have a LAN setup with multiple PCs and tangles of cables (or just play Bomberman). It was Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 (below) that really set the standard for console shooters, leading them to become a dominant genre to this day, but GoldenEye was an important step on that path. How can you explain that to someone who arrives cold in 2023? There is no way to communicate what this game meant.
Art derives its meaning not only from its form, but also from its context. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a fascinating painting, even more so when understood as the beginning of Expressionism, whose influence stretches back into the next century. My feeling about early video games, and keep in mind that we’re still only 50 years into this medium, is that their context tends to be more important than their form. You have to understand where they come from and be prepared to put up with their limitations. A painting is easier to appreciate in itself than an old game with primitive graphics and annoying controls.
And if you have the eye of a historian, or that of a coder, in a way it is more It’s interesting to see what game designers, artists and musicians of the past did with so little at their disposal than to see what sumptuous worlds today’s hundreds of computers with enormous computing power create. That Rare managed to create, in GoldenEye, a first-person shooter that worked absolutely on the Nintendo 64, not to mention one that was actually enjoyed, is incredible. Much of early game development consisted of amazingly talented people performing miracles with the tools they had, creating things that simply couldn’t exist, until they did.
I often think about how twentysomethings Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell managed to create the world of The Hobbit in basic text and graphics, one that even mimicked the passage of time, on a ZX Spectrum in 1982. As Megler has said, “I think solving a problem within strict constraints, which is the space we found ourselves in, sparks a very different kind of creativity. That in itself can be very powerful.”
It’s a weird retro game that’s just as fun to play 20+ years ago as it was when it came out. The 1990s were also a particularly tough time: game designers and artists had perfected 2D game design by the middle of the decade, but the early years of low-polygon 3D were tough as everyone caught on. how to control a character in three dimensions. Even the classics from that era, GoldenEye among them, look and feel pretty clunky now. But we can still appreciate them, through the right lens.
what to play
I spent one night this week with hifi fever, the action-rhythm game from the creators of The Evil Within, Tango Gameworks, had a surprise launch last week, and I was ecstatic. Imagine the offspring of Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, Space Channel 5 and Devil May Cry. You play an annoying rock star wannabe turned robot-smashing vigilante with a mechanical arm, on a mission to take down all the flamboyant executives of a sinister mega-corporation. As in the recent spate of heavy metal first-person shooters (Metal: Hellsinger, BPM: Bullets Per Minute), attacking and moving to the beat deals extra damage and makes everything flow beautifully, and everyone beats to the beat. helping you sink into the zone. The relentlessly upbeat rock soundtrack and absurdly stylish live comic art style put me in a happy place nostalgic for 2000s Japanese games.
Available in: Xbox and PC, through Game Pass
Approximate playing time: 10-12 hours
what to read
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I’m not the only one who’s been enjoying the delights of Apple Arcade recently: Guardian gaming columnist Dominik Diamond has become the kind of casual smartphone gamer he might have mocked in his youth.
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So many emotions ran through me when I read that Phoebe Waller-Bridge might be writing a Tomb Raider TV series. This is perfect: the classiest writer on TV writes the classiest character in games. Could he really understand Croft and give us the version of the character that the legions of female Tomb Raider fans have always wanted but never had? A girl can have hope. (Check out this issue of Pushing Buttons where I write more about Lara Croft.)
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I can finally talk about the third episode of The Last of Us: an hour and fifteen minute love story about a minor character from the game, Bill. It’s a beautiful portrait of the journey of long-term relationships, a movingly ordinary story set against the extraordinary backdrop of the end of the world. This episode sold me on this series and potentially the whole concept of TV game adaptations. It has been renewed for a second season now; The Last of Us Part II is significantly more difficult stuff, and I’ll be interested to see how it handles.
what to click
GoldenEye 007: the beloved classic that transformed video games
Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?
Season Review: Atmospheric Road Trip Game With A Mixed Message
Jockey Pocket Card: Keep Going! review: prepare for wackiness
block of questions
Today’s very accurate question comes from a regular reader. Ian: There seems to be a growing number of remastered versions of existing games, such as Final Fantasy VIII. However I invest more in the original pixel figurines, perhaps because I have to use my imagination, than in the “photorealistic” remastered characters. And you?
Isn’t it amazing how a bunch of black and white squares representing Charizard mean more to me than the beautiful fully animated 3D creatures in the current Pokémon games? I think there is definitely something to be said for your imagination to fill in the gaps. Depends on the game, for me, but I’m generally on the side of restoration rather than remake – take the original art style, clean it up a bit maybe, even redo it, but don’t stray too far from the source material. . Sometimes trying to modernize the visuals of a previous game can mess it up, as Silent Hill players found out when they played the game. HD Collectiononly to discover that the new developers had gotten rid of the oppressive fog characteristic of the city, for much of the original designer. consternation. On the other hand: the extraordinary renovation of Bluepoint of shadow of the colossus it made everything look and feel like a new game without losing any of the mystery of the original, and now I prefer the newer one. As in any case of restoration, it is a delicate art.
