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Comment by basedgod | Hacker News Reader

stock n64 goldeneye is unplayable garbage

what a waste of time

Of course it doesn't hold up to modern standards 25 years later. But at the time it was released, it was considered outstanding and revolutionary. I mean c'mon, you could shoot guards in the groin and they would slowly fall to the ground clutching their junk in agony.

Indeed a large appeal was the technical marvel of have a 4 person split screen game of such magnitude. Very different from the relative simplicity of Mario kart.

Edit: it also bothers me that despite our progress on all technological fronts we still get halo as the best split screen fps experience.

Edit 2: also still love playing OG 007 with friends who come over because if you didn’t figure out how to prevent screen cheating you never learned how to actually play.

Oh that last point! My friends and I used to just strafe along every single wall and all you could see was the wall texture until it was time to shoot. We knew all the levels so well that just the changes in lighting, or sometimes how quickly a door opened, were enough for us to tell where someone else was (avoid the coloured corridors in Complex).

Screen cheating is a skill, countering it is a skill, and countering THAT is an even bigger skill.

Oh the sounds too. You knew when someone opened a door and there are only so many doors and if they opened two doors in rapid succession.. they were gonzo. The game is really a game of mastering all senses I guess lol.

you could should their hats without damaging the guards! (which was great on facility (aka second mission) -- you could shot the hat out of a guard that was using the bathroom).

The game being hard was part of the appeal. It took skill. Maybe arguably dumb skill on the wrong areas - but skill. I’m not impressed that modernizing and switching the input methods made it “better” because my respect for them as a player will still come from how well they can do hobbled in the same way as myself.

Edit: one such strategy is using odd job, the most derided of strategies because you were basically taking advantage of how difficult it was to use the Z axis. Screen cheating was generally not that big a deal because you could do it just as well as anyone else. It was more so “honor in doing so” that was a problem.

Oddjob was what we made the winner-goes-on play as in my circle of friends because his head is at headshot level. You headshot him by just firing from the hip.

Jaws, on the other hand, was taller than everyone so everyone had to aim up at your head, and you could get headshots on everyone else without moving the reticle.

Offjob's true advantage, at least for us, was that he could hide inside exploded boxes and he could counter Jaws.

I forgot about jaws height! It often depended on who had unlocked what I suppose (different friends at different stages, for proper competition we always had the cart with everything and cheats) But odd job was definitely off limits - I think he was actually slightly under headshot range. But easy enough adjustment I guess.

Forgot about the exploded boxes thing too! I haven’t played much 007 since pandemic. Still got the slime green n64 and such though.

I haven't played in 15 years but I think you're right.

When Oddjob was close, you would have to quicktap C-up instead of C-down to get a headshot on him while you were strafing around. But once he was 10+ meters away, you didn't have to adjust aim at all.

Meanwhile, when Jaws was close, you'd have to even double-tap C-down to aim at his head. And even far away you'd only get body shots without adjusting aim. Which is also the disadvantage that Oddjob has trying to shoot everyone else in the game, thus we never considered him much of an advantage since he will mainly get bodyshots on other players.

Frankly this is good PhD paper territory.

Game also taught my dislike of inverted up/down I remember that being a specific thing and I don’t remember if it was changeable but it’s annoying me now so probably not heh.

Wait you can fire from the hip in goldeneye?

Yes. I’d argue zooming was less likely, the AK47 that looked like a bottle of Chianti and you sprayed everywhere being a good example. It was really hard to try and use the aiming mode but key to levels (I forget exact name) where it’s a maze that people can end up on different stories. The one with all the hidden doors is what I’m referring to.

Perhaps it didn’t look like it was from the hip - but for all intents and purposes it was. Holding down the Z button and aiming with the joystick was “down the sights”. I don’t recall if accuracy differs much in either scenario but the Z button version definitely did differ in accuracy when you were panic-shooting.

I just mean shooting the gun without holding R to make the reticle appear.

IIRC Goldeneye even had horizontal-axis auto-aim which helped.

Yeah, realistic guns and sights were only introduced to FPS several years later. Those were a major draw of Counter Strike.

You'll find the same in Quake, Quake 2, Doom, etc

Even if you were to take that guy's word as gospel, he even says later that the game is good, that the game's controls just aged poorly, thus if you use the mouse+keyboard patch the game is good again.

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