A couple of weeks ago,Goldeneye 007wasre-released on Nintendo Switch and Xbox Game Pass. And perhaps we should’ve expected this given the many years of hoo-hah around the game’s licensing and who actually owns the rights to the game, but the experience isn’t quite the same on Switch and Xbox (and PC, if you can handle playing via cloud gaming), with the latter getting the short end of the stick.
First up, it massively sucks for self-explanatory reasons that the Xbox version doesn’t get online multiplayer, which through the popularity of Game Pass could’ve given the game a real run at a revival, with a proper online scene and everything (or at least confirm that indeed there is no market for the N64 classic other than nostalgia).
But what really miffed me off was the inexplicable omission of cheats from the Xbox version of the 25-year-old game. Yep, while Switch players can just whack in the codes to play on any level they want, at any difficulties they want, with all characters unlocked and of course DK Mode to give everything giant bobbing heads, people on Xbox need to stoically play through the whole damn game for hours and hours to unlock the full experience they so fondly remember.
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Now, back in 1998, many of us were perfectly happy to master this game, which at the time was one of the most spectacular damn first-person shooters ever made. It was a challenge, sure, but it was also a joy to work through this marvel of FPS design (and let’s not forget that if you couldn’t be assed, then you could just bash in the cheat codes). But 25 years on, does anyone really have the time or desire to spend however-many (12, 15, 20?) hours playing through an inevitably outdated game just so they can unlock all the things that make it the complete experience?
At this point, Goldeneye is basically a historical artifact, best appreciated with complete freedom to revisit whichever levels, cheats, and multiplayer maps you want rather than interacting with it as you would’ve 25 years ago. I want to jump in, piss around a bit, set up some multiplayer matches with all the usual suspects of characters and a few friends friends (screw it,Oddjob’s allowed!); I’m not here to slog sequentially through a game that–beloved though it may be–is as good as ancient now.
Also, if there was such a thing as a golden era of cheat codes, it must’ve been the PS1/N64 era, right? We weredrowningin cheats back then, taking cuttings from video game magazines to try out all the weird random things the developers threw in there just for the fun of it. I’d go so far as to say that cheats were part of the identity of games like Goldeneye, and without them, it’s just not the same game, and may feel too inaccessible for curious younger gamers to fully embrace it.
And to those saying that cheats somehow taint the ‘authentic’ experience? The cheats were right there in the original game–theyarethe authentic experience–and I’ll be damned if I’m going to play 15 hours of Goldeneye just so I can play it for three hours on my terms.
