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I wanna stare fear in the face
I wanna take it all the way

The one where you play the baddie.

GoldenEye: Rogue Agent is a video game published by Electronic Arts, developed by EA Los Angeles, and released in 2004. EA had the James Bond license at the time, and based on their previous efforts, they decided to use the name of GoldenEye for their next game. They wound up creating an In Name Only game that takes place in a non canonical world.

You play as a freelance agent who was fired from MI6 for your ruthless and evil methods of getting the job done. You are soon recruited by Auric Goldfinger who is tangled in a turf war with Dr. Julius No, who happened to have shot one of your eyes out during a mission a few years previously. It is replaced with an electronic eye made out of gold, which is capable of projecting force fields and magnetic fields to protect yourself while continuing your mercenary work.

Preceded by Everything or Nothing and followed by From Russia with Love.


GoldenEye: Rogue Agent contains examples of the following tropes:

  • All Just a Dream: Variation - the first level (Fort Knox) is actually a simulation. Given the game's premise, this could easily qualify as a Murder Simulator.
  • All There in the Manual: Only one manual, surprisingly. The Xbox manual contains more backstory on your character, and even tells you his last name (Hunter). There was an urban legend that some versions of the manual called him "Jonathan Hunter," but this isn't true.
  • Anti-Armor: The Tesla EM pistol does average damage (about the same as the Jackal .357 pistol), but can take down the Polarity Shields used by Elites in just a couple of shots.
  • Arbitrary Gun Power: Generally averted; the relative power of the various non-sci-fi weapons is generally true to life. The P90 does the least damage (plausible if loaded with civilian-grade rounds), the 9mm pistol does almost as low damage, the .357 Desert Eagle does slightly more damage, the assault rifle does more damage than any pistol (killing lightly-armored Mooks with a single shot and medium-armor Mooks with 3 shots), and the sniper rifle does the most damage for a ballistic weapon.
  • Bathhouse Blitz: One part of the level "Hong Kong" has the player character inadvertently enter a bathhouse run by the Hong Kong Triad. They must then shoot their way through in order to escape. The Bathhouse also appears as an arena in multiplayer mode.
  • Battle Butler: Oddjob.
  • Big Dam Plot: Dr. No has a base at Hoover Dam, from which he stages an assault on Goldfinger's Las Vegas casino, the Midas.
  • Bloodless Carnage: When shot, enemies give off blue hit sparks (presumably representing bullets striking armor) instead of blood.
  • The Cameo: Ernst Stavro Blofeld himself makes an appearance in the ending.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The dividing line between MI6 and SPECTRE: Bond can more-or-less count on M, Q, and his other allies to remain "on his side," but Goldfinger, Scaramanga, Dr. No, and Goldeneye are all pretty much at each other's throats in a complex power-play.
  • Combat Pragmatist: The game is built upon underhanded combat, from the weapons (rail-gun; explosive goo-gun; etc.), scoring (the "kill" score is far more in-depth than on a traditional Bond game), and gadgetry ("zap" the other guy's weapon before you kill him). Of course, you can get a taste of your own medicine on later levels...
  • Cutscene Boss:
    • Oddjob; In the opening level, the bomb explodes just before you're given a chance to fight him, and when he attacks you several levels later, Goldeneye deals with him purely in a cutscene.
    • Defeating Goldfinger is presented as a major objective; the confrontation plays out entirely in a cutscene. (Then again, he doesn't know that you've just hijacked the OMEN...)
  • Darker and Edgier: The title, box art, and fact that you play as the bad guy say enough already. Bonus points for the game literally killing off Bond early on.
  • Deflector Shield: One of the GoldenEye's powers.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: Dr. No is killed towards the end of the game, Goldfinger betrays GoldenEye immediately afterwards, making him the final antagonist.
  • Disintegrator Ray: The OMEN. Weaponized as the OMEN XR.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Dr. No's insignia is reminiscent of the "biohazard" pictogram.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him:
    • James Bond is crushed by a falling helicopter during the first level. Subverted as it's just a virtual reality simulation.
    • Oddjob falls off the Hoover Dam whilst trying to kill you.
  • Dual Wielding: You can wield almost any two weapons at the same time, with the exception of two-handed weapons such as assault rifles or rocket launchers. Dual-wielding is a core element of gameplay, and if you're not dual-wielding your off-hand will wield grenades instead.
  • Electronic Eyes: GoldenEye has an electronic eye that gives him special abilities.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • Elite enemies are as tough or slightly tougher than even the heavy troops, are equipped with Polarity Shields that roughly double their durability and also make them immune to your EM Vision and Throw abilities, and often carry heavier loadouts such as the minigun. They each have a unique name which is displayed on your HUD.
    • To a lesser extent, there are the heavy troops; they wear black-and-red Doom Troops armor (in contrast to the ballistic vests and grey fatigues worn by the medium troops), have more health than the medium troops (requiring about 11-12 Spec 9 pistol shots to kill instead of 7), and can carry heavier loadouts such as miniguns or dual submachine guns.
    • In the final level there are the Goldfinger troops armed with Omen XR rifles. While they're the exact same as the regular troops in that level, who are equivalent to medium enemies, the Omen rifles they carry are a One-Hit Kill against you even at full health and armor. Their projectiles are relatively slow, but they can spam them much more quickly than you can.
  • Emergency Weapon: The default Spec 9 "peashooter," a weak pistol with below-average fire rate whose primary draw is infinite ammo. Strangely, it appears to be a full-size combat handgun, in contrast to 007's compact Walther PPK, yet performs noticeably worse.
  • EMP: One of the Goldeneye's functions allows players to hack into electronic equipment and render their foes' guns inoperable.
  • Enemy Chatter: The Mooks' in-game communication is a little more advanced than in previous games. For example, the guards will sometimes figure out that you're in the adjacent room and relay this to their allies.
  • Enemy Civil War: The plot of the game is two different members of SPECTRE going to war with each other.
  • Evil Counterpart: Goldfinger is this to M (sort of), and Scaramanga is this to Q.
  • Evil Versus Evil: It's Dr. No vs. Goldfinger.
  • Eye Scream: "It could easily have been more than your eye..."
  • Foreshadowing: "Excellent work, Goldeneye. Now the rest of my plan may fall into place."
  • First-Name Basis: Number One refers to Scaramanga, Goldfinger, and Dr. No as Francisco, Auric, and Julius.
  • Fun with Acronyms: The Organic Mass-Energy Neutralizer, or the OMEN for short.
  • Gatling Good: The Predator MG, a two-handed, portable anti-aircraft weapon.
  • The Goomba: The light-armored enemies (all Goldfinger troops until the final level, the sleeveless, helmetless Dr. No troops, and most Triad gangsters) generally only carry a single pistol or submachine gun, and die in just 3 Spec 9 pistol shots or 1 assault rifle shot.
  • In Name Only: It's unrelated to the N64 game... and borderline with James Bond (007 only appears in the first mission!)
  • King Mook: After you shoot down her VTOL (which has about 50% more durability than a regular one), Xenia comes out to fight you on foot and is essentially an Elite with higher shields and health. Her shield is about twice as strong as an Elite's and her health is likewise about 2-3 times that of an Elite. However, her offense is below average as she only dual-wields a pistol and venom pistol, compared to the P90 and grenade launcher she had in the original Goldeneye game.
  • Limited Loadout: You can only carry whatever you can hold in your two hands, which means 2 guns dual-wielded or a single two-handed weapon. You also can't carry much ammo either; just 2-3 mags per weapon. The game heavily encourages you to swap out weapons frequently.
  • Logo Joke: With the Bond gunbarrel—the white dot opens up to reveal Dr. No, symbolically shooting GoldenEye's eye out.
  • Magnetism Manipulation: The GoldenEye is a cybernetic eyeball with a host of magnetic superpowers, such as an EMF-based deflector shield and a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner.
  • Mighty Glacier: The Predator MG and the Harpoon RL. They both slow down your movement and the Predator takes a second to start shooting after you pull the trigger, but man do they clear house fast.
  • Mirror Character: The only difference between Bond and GoldenEye is whose side they're fighting on. They're both "blunt instruments" (to quote Ian Fleming himself) in the service of their masters.
  • Moe Greene Special: Dr. No shoots the player character's eye out at the start of the game.
  • N.G.O. Superpower: SPECTRE qualifies, as does its underwater base, the "Octopus".
  • My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Enemy Elites can recharge their Polarity Shields much faster than you can, and enemy Omen troopers can fire and reload their Omen rifles much faster than you can.
  • Mythology Gag: Xenia wears the same see-through mesh crop-top and black leather pants she did in Goldeneye 64.
  • No Honor Among Thieves: Dr. No and Goldfinger want to take over SPECTRE, while Blofeld secretly arranges for them to try so he can have them eliminated. Goldfinger also betrays Goldeneye the moment he outlives his usefulness. This also extends to gameplay; enemy mooks will occasionally grab one of their comrades and use him as a Bulletproof Human Shield, and your Goldfinger allies give you absolutely no benefit of the doubt when it comes to friendly fire; hit one with a single bullet and the entire squad will turn on you, often prioritizing killing you over killing the enemy Dr. No troops they were in a shootout with just moments ago.
  • No Name Given: As the Thunderball rights imbroglio hadn't been solved, SPECTRE appears (the octopus logo is even in the cover) but remains anonymous. Likewise, "Number One" is, for all intents and purposes, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
  • Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: SPECT — sorry, "Our Organization" has seemingly unlimited funds from various companies and things. There's even "The Octopus", an underwater lair that's also a sovereign state unto itself. However, it's implied that the money is finite: the player character is given an "unlimited line of credit" to infiltrate an evil weapon/gadget fair, but if he goes on a spending spree, Goldfinger will call and yell "STOP SPENDING MY MONEY!"
  • One-Hit Kill:
    • The Mag-Rail and OMEN-XR are these for most human-based enemies (excluding boss-type enemies and vehicles), though the OMEN-XR is more prominent. They are carried by both random mooks and "named" mooks in the final level. Your GoldenEye "shield" power can protect you from one shot of it, however, the same goes for the aforementioned "elite forces" as they too come equipped with a similar shield as well, and once said shield is down, well... it disintegrates you into a blue cloud of particles once it hits, regardless of difficulty.
    • Your "Throw" ability also kills the affected enemy instantly, at the high cost of 3/4ths of your energy bar. It doesn't work on "Elites" unless their shield is down, however.
    • Punching an enemy while your Polarity Shield is active is likewise a one-hit kill, as the physical contact discharges the shield into them. It also only costs about 1/3rd of your energy to do so.
  • Poison Is Evil: The venom guns cause instant but brief (about 3 seconds) paralysis. Per the manual, they're used primarily in assassinations and abductions, and they're a little more sadistic than James Bond's usual dart guns, which render his opponents unconscious or asleep for a while.
  • Proscenium Reveal: The first mission looks like a grittier retread of the climax of Goldfinger, where Bond dies ten seconds after landing and Goldfinger's nuke successfully detonates. Afterwards it's revealed to be a training simulation; the player character is fired from MI6 for supposedly being responsible for Bond's death and also for letting the bomb go off because he spent too long killing mooks instead of hauling ass to disarm the bomb.
  • Punny Name: The Eye Powers' names.
  • Puzzle Boss: When you finally confront Dr. No, he shoots at you from a reactor platform protected by an impenetrable energy shield. You need to use your hack ability to overload the 5 consoles on his platform, at which point the reactor will overload and electrify his platform. At this point he's dead as soon as you take out his Polarity Shield (which is about as tough as Xenia's).
  • Regenerating Health: Rogue Agent uses the traditional Armor/Health system from Goldeneye, but is the first Bond game to have health regenerate to full if you don't take damage for several seconds. The regeneration rate is noticeably slower than more modern games, though.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The opening cutscenes establish that GoldenEye lost his "real" eye in a skirmish with Dr. No a few years previously.
  • Rogue Agent: The game involves, as you'd expect, an MI6 agent going rogue after being discharged due to "needless brutality" and being recruited into SPECTRE by Goldfinger himself.
  • Role Called: In this case, GoldenEye is the nickname given to our main character, referencing his Red Right Hand.
  • Sequel Hook: GoldenEye defeats both Dr. No and Goldfinger and rides off with Pussy Galore into the sunset. Cue Scaramanga and Blofeld deciding to keep an eye on them...
  • Shout-Out:
    • The most easily-found pistol is called the "Jackal."
    • The game's logo is a more stylized version of SPECTRE's octopus insignia from You Only Live Twice.
    • Charmingly, the Hong Kong level prominently features a Carver Media Group Network sign on top of a building. It becomes an improvised bridge later in the level.
  • Sociopathic Soldier: Where 007 is detached and clinical, his erstwhile colleague is sadistic and vicious—exactly the qualities MI-6 does not want. He was probably a menace even before the good doctor captured him, and this is what got him into trouble in the first place.
  • Villain Protagonist: The whole point of the game is to play an evil version of James Bond.
  • We Can Rebuild Him: Or at least the eye you lost during the second mission.
  • Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: The Octopus level has GoldenEye running around a black market showroom of high-tech and extremely expensive goodies for villains to buy and use against the people of the free world, including things like nuclear submarines. As an agent of Goldfinger, GoldenEye has access to a virtually unlimited line of credit and can use it to buy several of these wicked toys, though Goldfinger will eventually call up and complain that he's going to go broke if the spending spree continues.
  • Wolfpack Boss: Since Goldfinger is killed in a pre-rendered cutscene, the game's "Final Boss" fight are 4 Elites (2 of whom are armed with Omen rifles) backed up by about a dozen regular Mooks.
  • X-Ray Vision: The M.R.I. vision allows you to see enemies through walls (very effective when combined with the Mag-Rail which shoots through walls), but has a limited range of a few dozen feet.
  • You Have Failed Me: What happens after your first mission: you get kicked out of MI6 for reckless behavior and for disobeying direct orders.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Goldfinger pulls this on Goldeneye as he disables Dr. No's defense satellite, overloads Dr. No's nuclear reactor, which then kills Goldfinger's rival via painful electrocution. Shortly afterwards Goldfinger reveals that what Goldeneye really disabled earlier wasn't Dr. No's defense satellite but instead Dr. No's island defense grid, tells Goldeneye that "there are no chairs at the table for those who might challenge me", prevents Galore from extracting him and all but expects Goldeneye to die when the nuclear reactor he overloaded earlier finally goes critical and explodes in a typical nuclear fashion. Goldeneye manages to fly himself out using Dr. No's large Osprey-like attack aircraft just as the island's nuclear reactor detonates behind him.

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