Goldeneye Newsflash: Old Game is Old

Goldeneye is still the incredible game we always knew it was. That confirmation, as if confirmation was needed, came with its re-release on Xbox and Switch this week.

But with every re-release, there comes the shocked voices of those who miss the obvious. Old games are old.

There aren’t quality of life features. The controls are a little more complicated than they need to be. The textures look like someone threw up in gravel and smeared them on the walls.

THAT’S WHY WE LIKED THEM, SNOWFLAKE.

I’m kidding. Old games aren’t for everybody and that’s okay. In our constantly busy world, what precious gaming hours we have shouldn’t be spent doing what we don’t enjoy.

But it does lead to a problem. This is something I noticed around the time Sonic Adventure game out on the PS3/Xbox 360, and it’s something that I’m sure is going to be true with every remaster to this day.

The negativity leads to a kind of changing of opinion that doesn’t always bounce back. Sonic Adventure (or any Sega re-release) is actually a great example. Those remasters came out to a massive amount of criticism. Some of that was deserved. They’d used the Gamecube version as a base, and that had introduced a bunch of issues over the Dreamcast version.

But some of it was just cruel. It was the “this isn’t what I remember”. And when is anything?

Goldeneye – Going Home Again

Goldeneye proves itself as a great game, especially with the modern controls of the Xbox release. It feels and, more importantly, looks fantastic. We’ll say it’s stylised, but fantastic.

Reaction seems to have been positive, but there’s still a little bit of doubt in the discussion. Was it always like this? Did we really play it like that? Did we really say graphics were never going to improve?

And while there isn’t much risk of Goldeneye getting a remake or remaster after this point, it would be a shame if the memory of it was tarnished for some. Especially if its sin was simply that it is so old now.

It’s amazing the blanks that can be filled into our memories. I was playing Spider-Man on PS2 the other day – the first game based on Sam Raimi’s films. And the controls are impossible. The bosses are ridiculous. And yet I had no recollection of that at all.

Retro games are fantastic. And we’re lucky, as a community, that so many fans are keen to preserve their old games. We’ve written before about the amount of content in other industries that just doesn’t exist anymore because nobody bothered to keep a copy aside.

And the further out we get from these games, the harder they are to come back to. I don’t know that my son’s generation will ever really care about Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft or even Sonic the Hedgehog the way I did.

But that’s not a bad thing. They’ll have their own mascots. They’ll be happy in the knowledge that old games are old…

…And that they’re just not up for the Goldeneye challenge.