YMMV / GoldenEye (1997)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Boris setting off the security in Bunker I: accidental or intentional?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: There's a real-world basis for making the Klobb hilariously weak compared to the other guns - it's chambered in .32 ACP, a rather piddling bullet packing a little over 200 joules of muzzle energy on standard loads. For context, the ubqituous 9x19mm has over 500 joules in its own standard loads.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Natalya will accidentally shoot you if you get in her line of fire during the Jungle stage. On the other hand, you can trick Mooks into shooting each other as well.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Pretty much every boss in the game:
  • For Xenia, stand to the side of the bridge and just fire away as Xenia approaches, since her AI treats bridge rails as solid walls. Or place your remote mines on the bridge and blow her up before she even crosses.
  • For Trevelyan's 1st phase, he only takes damage when he is not running, so 1 explosion or a weapon as strong as the golden gun (or Gold PP7) can kill him once in this phase. Mooks can be goaded into throwing a grenade towards his position by accident, possibly killing Alec. If you somehow get lucky to collect a grenade, don't shoot him yet nor get too close, but throw it at him at the right spot to kill him.
  • Like Xenia, Jaws has the same AI as Xenia because it treats gaps like walls. Drag him into the circle stairs and he won't shoot you if you and him are not aligned with the straight stairs.
  • Baron Samedi. Sure, you have to "kill" him 3 times. Once you get the Golden Gun, Samedi still dies in 1 shot per each phase.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Cradle". Fitting for the conclusion of the game's storyline, the song is tense and awesome the whole way through.
  • Here is a playlist of what the songs originally sounded like before they were resampled to fit the hardware limitations of the N64, and they're even more awesome. Sadly, not every piece is included, but now you can hear Grant Kirkhope's music as it was originally written. The music can also be found at Kirkhope's website.
  • Even the elevator music in "Control" and "Caverns" is incredibly catchy and well-composed.
• Cheese Strategy: Xenia's AI treats the waist-high bridge in the Jungle level as full cover, making her fully able to be shot at as she runs across. This or using the Remote Mines completely take the sting out of what is otherwise a challenging boss battle.
• Common Knowledge: That GoldenEye was the first "good" console FPS. While it might've been the game that finally put console FPSs on the map, there were several highly regarded console FPSs (such as Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Alien Trilogy and Powerslave) released before it.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The ceiling mounted sentry guns, which are exceedingly difficult to hit and have high rates of fire.
  • Triggering an alarm will often summon a never-ending number of sunglasses-wearing Elite Mooks.
  • In multiplayer, heaven help you if you are playing with Proximity Mines and your opponent has memorized the respawn points.
• Designated Hero: Rare seem to have liked Boris enough to make killing him during "Control" a mission failure condition (barring certain devious trickery), with Natalya refusing to reprogram the satellite if Bond kills him (even though Boris pulled out a gun first). This despite that Natalya's first reaction to meeting him at this point in the movie was trying to kill him, due to his complicity in the Severnaya attack, the death of her friends, and the fact that she was repeatedly nearly killed and possibly almost raped as a result of Boris' dickish associates. Um, zany! It probably helps that with all the other changes already made in this version, he really does seem to be more harmless than he already was.
• Difficulty Spike: Bunker 2 marks the point where the challenge starts to ramp up for each difficulty: stronger enemies begin showing up more frequently and in greater numbers and you first meet up with Natalya.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Dr. Doak, being a character original to the game, has gotten a lot of love from the game's fandom. Though he has an equally-large hatedom as well, due to the RNG involved in his placement in the Facility mission which is one of the most frustrating 00 Agent speedruns in the game, just see below.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Oddjob in multiplayer. Because of the combination of the game's controls and his short stature, every other characters' free-aimed shots sail above his head, forcing other players to stop and manually aim down to actually hit him. Because of this, most groups to simply ban him from use. If you play a one-on-one match between Oddjob and Jaws (the tallest character in the game) with slappers only, it's already over. In fact, he's officially considered cheating by the developers themselves.
  • The RCP-90 with its huge damage, ludicrous rate of fire, absurd 80 bullets per reload, and its ability to pierce through 3 enemies in 1 shot.
  • The Moonraker Laser with its Infinite Ammo, while doing nearly the same very high damage as the magnum, and pierce through 2 enemies.
  • The Golden PP7, which is fairly easy to unlock (beat Cradle on Agent in about two minutes) and has the same One-Hit Kill properties as the Golden Gun while still being semi-auto. Unfortunately, this is only available through the cheat menu and you cannot score a legitimate victory while progressing.
  • Proximity Mines. Due to the lack of detection on mines themselves and how small they are, it is very easy to hide the mines carefully. You can hide the mines in the mine boxes in case players decide to try getting them, only to see an explosion.
  • Remote Mines. There is a glitch where you can remotely denotate them by pressing A and B at the same time without going to the detonation weapon option, thus saving you significant time to not waste on weapon switching. This is very effective in multiplayer where you can throw a mine; even if you miss the target, you can quick-detonate to do significant damage as long as the enemy is close to the explosion.
• Genre Turning Point:
  • For First Person Shooters on consoles, demonstrating how well an FPS can play on a console, as well as allowing four players to duke it out on one screen without requiring a separate monitor and machine for each player.
  • For the FPS genre as a whole, along with Duke Nukem 3D as a demonstration of how an FPS could have a game world with a realistic environment and objectives instead of simple maze-like and abstract levels where the only thing you had to do was reach the goal. It demonstrated the immersive potential of first-person games that would ultimately result in the Immersive Sim genre.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • With the All Guns cheat on, if you switched your weapons back and forth in a certain way, you could dual wield two different guns, which could have hilarious results such as using a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher, or a laser gun plus the watch laser to make Bond look like he has three arms!
  • A+B to instantly detonate remote mines. No watch required. Basically turns them into smart grenades.
  • There's also the cartridge tilt glitch. See Memetic Mutation.
  • The Slow Animation and Turbo Mode cheats, when activated, render the final cutscene of Cradle hilarious, because the speed change applies only to the characters, not to other objects; thus, with the former turned on, the helicopter will leave without Bond^note You can see the helicopter is animated normally because it shakes a little bit before departing, which in normal speed happens when Bond grabs onto its skid, and with the latter on, Bond will simply fly himself out of the cradle at high speed!
• High-Tier Scrappy: Oddjob in multiplayer, due to his short height forcing other players to aim down to hit him. Even Karl Hilton and Mark Edmonds, ex-Rare members who were involved with the GoldenEye development team, admitted that picking Oddjob was technically cheating.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The game was originally presented as an on-rails shooter in the style of Sega's Virtua Cop. Three years later, Sega would make Confidential Mission, which is basically James Bond or Mission: Impossible meets Virtua Cop.
  • In the game, an image of a man doing John Cleese's silly walk from Monty Python's Flying Circus can be seen on one of the computer monitors. Cleese would play "R", Q's assistant and eventual successor in The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Upon the announcement of the game's rerelease on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, many took issue with the fact that both new versions of the game appeared to be the original game running under Emulation. A large contributor to this was the fact that Rare had previously developed a much more substantial remake of the game, which had to be shelved due to rights issues, but had leaked onto the Internet about a year prior to the rereleases' announcement. In addition to this, the Switch version retains the original's control scheme, seen by some people as dated, while the Xbox version lacks an online multiplayer mode. This made the actual rerelease feel disappointing compared to What Could Have Been.
• Just Here for Godzilla: More specifically, Just Here For Multiplayer. Many players just went for the multiplayer, never reaching into single player. That said, single player mode can be hella fun and challenging.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Jaws in multiplayer. His unusually large frame makes him an easier target.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Tilting the cartridge results in characters on the screen spinning around in circles. Vertically. In other words, everything on the screen that isn't level geometry becomes pinwheels. A user on Nico Nico Douga took wind of it and played the Kohmi Hirose song "promise" under it, and the Geddan ("get down") meme was born.
  • "No Oddjob!" ^Explanation Oddjob's short height made him one of the hardest targets to hit in Deathmatch, and thus one of the most popular choices; players would frequently call "No Oddjob!" at the character selection screen to ensure that their opponents couldn't use him. Choosing Oddjob anyway was one of the classic dirty tricks of gaming.
  • James Bond's mouth ^ExplanationThe game's boxart has a front view of James Bond holding a pistol. However, if you look at where Bond's gun-holding hand and fingers are relative to his head, his headshot on the boxart can be humorously misinterpreted as having a really long mouth.
  • Ryan Lockwood's grandiose reaction in his famous, world-record tying (and since broken) Streets Agent 1:12 speedrun has become a major meme in the community.
    "I am a fucking legend!"
• Mis-blamed: The Klobb is lauded in popular culture as the one Russian gun that everyone likes to make fun of from this game. But what's conveniently ignored most of the time is the fact that the Klobb is actually the Skorpion VZ/61◊ which is a gun from Czechoslovakia. Even though both states belonged to the Communist Bloc, Russia (which was part of the Soviet Union during Czechoslovakia's lifetime) never used it. It's also not nearly as ineffectual in real life as the game makes it seem.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound on the results screen informing you of the "NEW CHEAT AVAILABLE"!
  • The sound of a bullet shattering the glass lens at the front of a CCTV camera, destroying it.
  • The stock "tennis player" grunts, yelps and groans that run in a loop whenever enemies are struck.
• Never Live It Down: Natalya's reputation that stems from this game as a woman with a death wish who gets captured a lot is a far cry from the film, where she is much more of an Action Survivor and frequently ranks among the franchise's best Bond Girls. Unfortunately, the game's depiction of her is certainly more memorable in gaming circles.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: For years, GoldenEye was considered the best licensed game ever, and even without considering the license, one of the most influential FPS games of all time. It helps that, rather than being rushed to coincide with the release of the movie (a fate that would, ironically, spell the end of Bond licensed games fifteen years later), the game went through a lengthy development process, releasing almost a full two years after the movie.
• Once Original, Now Common: In 1997, this game was nothing less than legendary, and helped to kick the term "Doom clone" out of the gamer's lexicon. However, since the release of spiritual successors such as Perfect Dark and Timesplitters, GoldenEye's foundation has been vastly improved over the years, rather by its innovative mechanics at the time, or its objective-based mission structure. The framerate can seriously chug at times, and that the game's default (1.1) control scheme would be considered baffling in today's day and age, especially in regards to how Bond cannot move and aim at the same time due to the N64's controller design. Even with as legendary as the game's multiplayer is, it's rather barebones and doesn't lend itself to competitive gameplay all that much due to the game's heavy amount of Auto Aim (given that it was a literal last minute addition). A contemporary player may be left scratching their head as to what made the game such a popular sleep-over party game in the late '90s.
• Periphery Demographic: One of the devs admitted that the multiplayer was an afterthought. You wouldn't know from its massive popularity as a multiplayer shooter.
• The Scrappy: Natalya, who is basically useless outside of getting caught. A sharp contrast to her portrayal in the film where she is often ranked as one of the best Bond girls. She can however be useful during the Jungle stage helping you take out several Janus troops (provided you're not in her line of fire).
• Scrappy Weapon: The Klobb. It says something when, in Goldeneye: Source, it is a starting weapon in all sets it is in and lowers the Mercy Invincibility timeout (making rapid fire more useful), and people will still charge each other with melee weapons before even considering to use it. It has poor accuracy, a small mag, and the lowest damage per shot of any weapon in the game. On the highest damage settings, outside of Licensed To Kill mode, the Klobb is the only weapon that will not kill you in one shot.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • It's pretty apparent that the menu theme is a mashup of Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir" with the Bond theme.
  • The Musical Nods to the Goldfinger/Licence to Kill themes in "Frigate" and the Live and Let Die theme in "Archives" appears to take this route, not-quite having the same chord progression as the tracks they're referencing likely for copyright reasons.
• That One Achievement: Both the Facility cheat and the Archives cheat are agreed upon to be the master cheats in the game.
  • For the "Facility" cheat (invincibility) the stage has to be cleared in 2:05 or lower (on 00 Agent, no less). It takes a healthy amount of planning and strategy and the hope that Dr. Doak will appear in the right place at the right time.
  • Statue on Secret Agent in less than 3:15 (fast animation) is one that seldom gets mentioned, but can be just as tight and unforgiving as Facility and Archives. You have to navigate the confusing and disorienting level pretty much perfectly, waste time with Valentin, make sure the meeting with Janus doesn't get overridden by regular guards by looping around the back of the Lenin statue, race back to Natalya and the helicopter, pray for good Black Box spawn RNG, and finally sprint back to the gates of the statue park. If everything goes perfectly, you'll have maybe 10 seconds of leeway tops.
  • For the Archives cheat (invisibility) clever planning of your way through the door maze is essential, and the confrontation with Mishkin at the safe is where most player lose the necessary time. Another factor is figuring out which direction each door opens towards and moving yourself accordingly.
  • Train on 00 Agent in 5:25 or less (Silver PP7) can be quite difficult, as you have to quickly clear out each densely packed train car, many also filled with explosive crates and furniture. The later cars also feature the black outfit elite Janus troops, and there's nary a body armor in the level. And because it's 00 difficulty, you're required to shoot Xenia as well when saving Natalya.
• That One Boss:
  • Xenia is quite difficult to defeat as she deals a lot of damage and can take a lot of hits. A common trick used to beat her is to exploit a weakness in her AI that forces her to run across the nearby bridge if the player stands slightly diagonally to it as she will not recognize that the railings can be shot through.
  • Trevelyan in the cradle. He literally runs away from you and you can only damage him when he is not running. Once he takes 1 hit from his shooting spots, he becomes invincible, meaning that you have to make each shot count in higher difficulties or be lucky enough to throw a well-timed grenade if you are lucky to get one from the enemies. Speaking of grenades, the never ending guards will continuously be peppering you with both grenades and ZMG fire.
  • Jaws, the Damage-Sponge Boss of the already difficult Moonraker-themed Aztec Complex mission. If you took the lower path, this boss is much harder due to not being able to exploit the A.I. on the stairway. It doesn't help that if you defeat the boss, enemies start generating nonstop.
  • Baron Samedi is reasonably easy with the Golden Gun –- but he's a boss that has to be fought three times in an already unforgiving level.
• That One Level: Mainly in 00 Agent.
  • The Surface II is a difficult level to complete, mainly because you are forced to carefully stealth-play that level. If at any time the camera catches you and triggers the alarm, you automatically get Respawning Enemies, making this very difficult to accomplish.
  • Bunker II can seem near impossible with its infinitely spawning guards that show up if you make too much noise.....unless you know exactly how the level mechanics work and how to deal with them. Turns out the game considers "making too much noise" to be firing a loud gun too much. It couldn't care less if you aggro every guard in sight by merely entering their field of view. This allows you to abuse the set of hidden Throwing Knives in the cell block to silently kill all the guards by luring them around corners and then knifing them, up to the room which spawns the infinite guards (the big one with the wooden crates and side niches). When you get to this room, you can switch to a gun because once the room is clear, the infinite guards won't spawn from it anymore.
  • Statue is an interesting example in that it's hated not for being hard but for being slow, boring, and breaking the pacing. The poor lighting and maze like navigation only make it worse. If you are trying to complete this mission for the first time, the objectives could make you fail the mission quickly. This is the only missions to have all 5 objectives in a level even in Agent mode.
  • Train is extremely frustrating because it involves fighting your way through several cramped cars full of mooks while surrounded by exploding crates. Once you rescue Natalya, you've got to wait for her to work on the computer while a timer counts down to an explosion. You always have about four seconds to escape from the car before it explodes and get Natalya out, too, while yet more mooks are waiting for you. It's just too easy for things to go wrong and make the entire level a waste. (Well, unless you shoot Xenia along with Ourumov — this gains more than enough time for her to crack the password and cautiously exit through the hole to take out the last guards.)
  • Control. It starts with cleaning up the first room to make way for Natalya, and for each soldier in it, there's a sentry gun ready to mince you. You have to be stealthy if you want to make it relatively unscathed. Then there's this room with the sentry guns aimed at the door (as well as the soldiers facing it), so opening it up might not quite be a good idea. And then there's saving Natalya's bacon while she hacks into the computer... particularly annoying are the guys who randomly appear directly to her left and right and immediately start emptying bullets into her, while you'll inevitably be tied up on account of the multiple shooters coming down the various stairs. It's also one of the longest levels, usually taking over 10 minutes to complete.
  • Caverns is much longer. Sure, you begin the level with 3 weapons. However, the Janus guards carry deadlier weapons, such as ZMGs and AR33 Assault Rifles. The game demands that Bond keeps scientist casualties to a minimal, but they often find themselves in the crossfire and explosions. There is a radio Bond will have to activate to contact Jack Wade, but the problem starts with it being guarded, and it gets worse when you realize you've just destroyed the equipment by shooting one of the guard with your AR33 and having that bullet piercing an explosion barrel that he was standing in front of, failing the mission. Another problem in that room is that in harder levels, you have to kill the guards in the radio area quickly or else the enemy guards in that room will throw a misbounced grenade and accidentally destroy everyone in that area, causing you to not only fail one objective for a destroyed machine, but also scientist casualties. As you progress through the level, you get Respawning Enemies, but only this time, the enemies carry even more tougher weapons such as the RCP-90, Automatic Shotgun, and dual ZMGs. This level can demand players to finish the levels quicker than usual, but also treading carefully at the same time.
  • Cradle. Never-ending mooks are the real final boss as you play cat and mouse with Trevelyan. In 00 Agent, you can die before even making it up the first ramp due to enemy's good accuracy on 00 Agent; this is due to the lack of resolution, fog level, and less effective auto-aim in harder difficulties. What makes this worse is that every enemy in this level and randomly throw a grenade, making navigation much harder. because Trevelyan can only be damaged in certain spots, you have to either throw a grenade (if you are lucky to get one) to quickly end the fight or make headshots count every time until you reach the final phase.
  • Aztec. While it is fun to get that unlimited Moonraker Laser and 1 Body Armor (even in 00 Agent), the level's setup is frustrating. To start, enemies delivering 1.5 - 2 bars of health per hit in 00 Agent, you are given little room for error. You begin with only a PP7, but sandwiched with 3 enemy guards; there is a chance that one of the guards will throw a grenade at your starting position, so trying to play hide-and-seek in that small spot can be an instant-kill. There are a lot of sniper-positioned guards that will shoot you with very good accuracy, so trying to go guns blazing or speed through the level is not wise. It also doesn't help that the sentry guns are more well-hidden in this level. If you took the lower path, Jaws is much more difficult to defeat due to not having any gaps where you can shoot him and him not shooting back, let alone a lack of access to that one body armor. Defeating Jaws or doing the open door trick will trigger the Respawning Enemies event. Regardless of what path you take, you will still have to backtrack various areas to complete your objectives while enemy respawns are taking place.
• Tough Act to Follow: For many years, every Bond game released after would inevitably be unfavorably compared to this one, and none of them even remotely reached close to the popularity this one achieved. That said, as the more dated aspects of this game have become more obvious over the years (such as its somewhat low budget production values and its single-analog control scheme), combined with fans who grew up on future installments (Nightfire especially, almost unanimously considered the best of the games past this one) having become more vocal, this has died out a bit with time. Averted entirely with Rare's own Creator-Driven Successor to this game Perfect Dark, which commonly is called an Even Better Sequel (or, at the very least, on par).
• Underused Game Mechanic: The only levels requiring use of an item that can only be equipped by pausing are five of the first seven levels and one of the bonus levels.

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