GoldenEye N64

I didn’t get a Nintendo 64 until it had been out for a few years, you could say I was late to the ‘Mario party’ you could, but you wouldn’t… I was a child from a working class family and a console was a Christmas present if you’d been really good, or there was overtime on at your parents’ place of work!
I managed to get my hands on a second hand one a few years post release with some birthday money.
I was bang in to wrestling until I was about 15 so the reasoning of my purchase was for the great grappling based wrestling games the console had; WCW vs NWO: Revenge, WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy!
I lived many a spandex clad fantasy on those games, I’m not ashamed to admit.
As the console was second hand, it came with 2 games already; the classic Mario 64 and of course, 007: GoldenEye.
I was never a huge Bond fan, the films just didn’t grab me. I enjoyed them sure, but I wasn’t going to own them or marathon them anytime soon, then or now. It wasn’t until Daniel Craig donned the swarve moniker that I had any interest.
But GoldenEye was and is such a good game that it could have been about any generic agent and still would have been arguably the best game on Nintendo’s titular console.
I was late to the party, but I made up for it for spending many an evening hopping about as ‘Jaws’ throwing knives at friends.
The campaign was great, the controls revolutionary and my first time with a shooter personally, but the real fun, the bit everyone remembers better than it was and I’m not talking about Pierce Brosnan’s cuboid face but the multiplayer of course. Split screen, no online, actually in the same room with other human beings, balls out (not literally) fun!
Not perfect of course, the fun was what you made it, like deciding on certain weapons only before that was even a thing, ‘karate chops only’ being my personal favourite. I will always remember this game as better than it was. Xbox head Phil Spencer said when questioned about why we’ve never seen an updated version, or a remake or even a shoddy port; “GoldenEye has always been a rights issue, not a ‘getting code to run’ issue.” and I’m kinda glad it never did, sure there’s the fan made GoldenEye: Source on PC but you’ll never beat that 4 friends in a room on one console with a tiny TV laughing, shouting and falling out, and no, you can’t use 'Oddjob’, you know he has a tiny hitbox you animal!