GoldenEye - out now on Switch & Xbox

[Sprite Machine]

On 04/02/2023 at 16:18, Sumire said:

 

Hmm, not had any problem like that. Probably the usual PC related fun with hardware and software conflicts.

Seems fine now since doing a driver update. Also forced vsync on in the control panel.

 

Played through the first 7 levels. It's good fun, and very nearly a finished game. A shame it's just missing a few textures here and there, missing water on the boat level, etc. I can't stop myself from switching back and forth between original and new graphics!

 

I like how you have to go into your gadget inventory to complete objectives, like copying the Goldeneye key and then selecting the key to throw it back on the table. It doesn't tell you how to do it, you have to work it out. That said, this XBLA version has on-screen hint markers for if you miss a key somewhere, pointing you towards where it is (I assume that's not in the original!).

 

Also how you have to manually position the mines to blow up the gas tanks in the second level. They ruined it in the Wii Remake, as you just press a button and the mines automatically appear in a predefined spot. GoldenEye was way ahead of its time.

[Stejay]

2 hours ago, Graham S said:

I didn’t do anything fancy on Xbox, it should just save automatically as you expect, when you finish a level. Must have been a bug for you. Sadly I can’t complete a new level to confirm as I’m stuck on Control but when I fire up the game I can see all my unlocked stuff. You can’t save mid-level but Quick Resume works fine. 

 

I'll check again, but if still the same I'll delete and reinstall it.

[Sprite Machine]

Oh man, 'Statue' is a spectacularly shit level! Confusing layout, murky visuals, repetitive structures and infinitely-spawning enemies.

 

I can see they've tried to fix it in the XBLA version, but somehow have made it worse. Everything's super dark. And the shotgun muzzle textures are permanently turned on, which looks very odd.

 

Yeah, this was not in a finished state. I might stick with original graphics.

[Nick R]

Digital Foundry's video on the game's different versions. Nice attention to detail in that intro!

 

 

 

[Skull Commander]

16 hours ago, Sprite Machine said:

Oh man, 'Statue' is a spectacularly shit level! Confusing layout, murky visuals, repetitive structures and infinitely-spawning enemies.

 

I can see they've tried to fix it in the XBLA version, but somehow have made it worse. Everything's super dark. And the shotgun muzzle textures are permanently turned on, which looks very odd.

 

Yeah, this was not in a finished state. I might stick with original graphics.

Having just endured this one again yesterday I would agree. I forgot how much a detested that level back in the day. 

[Popo]

Once you know the layout of Statue Park, and where the flight recorder might be, it's a piece of cake level though.

[K]

I was dreading Statue and Jungle, but found them surprisingly easy and fairly enjoyable. Statue looks chaotic, but the layout is pretty easy to follow and it channels you towards the next bit with relative ease. It looks hideous and is well below the standards of the best levels, but was ultimately not all that bad.

 

Streets has been the only real stinker so far - the tank itself is irritating to control, and the cannon is weirdly finicky in terms of aiming. Tank bits like this should be cathartic fun, like the corresponding scene in the film or the tank sequence in Halo. In this, it's a massive pain in the bum to even hit enemies.

[DarhkFox]

Gave this a go last night on the switch. Playing on Secret Agent difficulty, this the first time I have properly played the game (i did a few missions on the easy mod years ago).

 

Took 3 and a half hours to beat 4 levels. Just very glitchy using an N64 pad, things happening that shouldn't etc. I really am not sure if i want to continue, but i will try joycon controls after i have set them up.

[K]

That DF video is interesting, but I'm slightly wary about non-programmer John Linneman giving developers his ideas as to how to fix or improve the ports. His solution seems to be to just copy what a different emulator does to a game's visuals, and while I'm sure Linneman knows a lot more about video game graphics programming than your average internet game man, there is an element of "If I were developing this game, I would simply implement a robust method of downsampling the game's visuals" with a slight undercurrent of "lazy devs". That's probably a bit unfair, but it would be interesting to hear a professional's take on his suggestion.

[RFT]

I think there's also the issue of the fact that we know that the project has been massively constrained in what they've been allowed to do with it. With (it seems) Nintendo insisting on an emulated approach instead of a remaster (especially when we know the code existed), and that in no way could the MS version have features the Switch doesn't.

 

Anyway, I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm playing through on 00 agent and just completed Train after a lot of attempts. This is further than I manged to get on 00 back in the 90s.

 

Once it's done I might go back to the Perfect Dark remaster and try and clear that on Perfect Agent. There is definitely something in the gunplay of these two that's never really been captured since - the closeness, the speed, the thump of the guns.

[Popo]

5 minutes ago, RFT said:

There is definitely something in the gunplay of these two that's never really been captured since

Quoted for truth. Goldeneye/Perfect Dark Rare were right up there with Bungie for gunfeel. 

[Ketchup]

Just did control and seriously that was tough...on Agent. I've breezed through every other level on Agent and a few on Secret and 00 but this one i died many times, Natalia died many times when one random enemy would just unload a whole clip into her in an instant. Guards constantly respawn and i don't know how i'll ever do it on secret or 00. On the N64 i managed to do it on 00 so here's hoping its as difficult as agent with just more stuff to do cos otherwise it's a huge difficulty spike that i don't remember it being before.

[Sprite Machine]

Hmm, 'Archives' is not a fun level for somebody with a poor sense of direction (ie. me). It seems to break every rule of level design simultaneously.

 

Conversely, 'Train' is very straightforward!  

[Chopsocky]

Man, Xenia on S/X.

 

I don't think I will even bother downloading this release even though they kindly added it to Rare Replay. The 90% finished remake was so much better. I wonder if system link will work for multiplayer at some point.

[Colonel Panic]

21 hours ago, K said:

but I'm slightly wary about non-programmer John Linneman giving developers his ideas as to how to fix or improve the ports.

Sums up my issue with the entire existence of DF.

 

 

[Art Vandelay]

Control is a massive pain in the arse at the point you have to fend everyone off from shooting Natalya whilst she taps away, but then I remembered if you hang about on the mezzanine and don't detonate the mines until she's done then the glass stays intact and the guards all sort of funnel up the stairwell and you can slaughter them at your leisure. It's still a tricky one as sometimes some klutz will start chucking grenades about and it's bedlam then, but that does sort of help. 

[Fry Crayola]

Basic downsampling is very easy to implement, though. You render internally at a higher resolution, then render the result at a shrunken 240p. The graphics hardware does the job of interpolating pixels for you. Given both Switch and Xbox versions of the game are rendering at higher than the N64's 240p output, there's no technical barrier to doing this. Linneman's status as a non-developer doesn't make him wrong in this instance.

 

The rest of the video, though, that's just DF being DF. A lot of extremely minor niggles that, while it'd be nice if they weren't there, haven't marred my enjoyment in the slightest.

[K]

I guess my issue is with the way it's presented. If it's technically easy to implement and potentially beneficial, then the developers must have considered it at some point. If I were a developer, I'd get very annoyed with non-professionals making obvious suggestions. I think if he'd positioned it more as 'here's a cool technique that I like the look of, and might have addressed some of these issues" rather than as a fix, then it might have sat better.

[NoVisAnima]

28 minutes ago, K said:

I guess my issue is with the way it's presented. If it's technically easy to implement and potentially beneficial, then the developers must have considered it at some point. If I were a developer, I'd get very annoyed with non-professionals making obvious suggestions. I think if he'd positioned it more as 'here's a cool technique that I like the look of, and might have addressed some of these issues" rather than as a fix, then it might have sat better.

The down sampling thing he's suggesting is about rendering at a high resolution and then down sampling back to the original resolution which would maintain the original image of the game. This is about keeping the game looking as it used to and in his demonstration made it look to my eyes like ass. More faithful to the original but he doesn't see any issue with raising the framerate, managing that was a feature of the game... 

[Fry Crayola]

49 minutes ago, K said:

If I were a developer, I'd get very annoyed with non-professionals making obvious suggestions.

 

Yeah, absolutely. I think Linneman comes from a better place than most, in that at least he's not asking for multiplayer to be implemented in two days, or that a game should just have the ability to save anywhere, or that a gun should also be a sword and a key and put on the blockchain so that it could be also used in Destiny.

 

But it probably does rankle a few feathers. Indeed, I wonder how devs feel about Digital Foundry in general given the premise of the entire channel feels like nitpicking. When compared to something like Game Maker's Toolkit, which always appears to focus on something positive about some game or other, it seems very negative. 

[Graham S]

He does seem quite knowledgeable a lot of the time. I know he can't spend his day programming video games as he has a lot of frames to count and foliage to look at, but quite often when a game comes out he'll spot some obscure rendering bug, tells the devs about it, and they often put out a patch. I know DF-type discourse has had both good and bad effects, but the guy himself doesn't strike me as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. I think there's a place for that sort of analysis.

[Kevvy Metal]

If you think that's bad, you should see Alex Battaglia explaining to all those developers out there how they should do their PC ports 😂

 

 

[Graham S]

And with this game in particular I'm interested in expert opinion about the end result. A lot of the more mainstream videos were just whining that we didn't get the 360 remaster or something with similar goals, and how it's not 60fps, whereas I'm more interested in the quality of the emulation and what technical experts or GoldenEye specialists reckon is the best option easily available to me.

[Lyrical Donut]

33 minutes ago, Kevvy Metal said:

If you think that's bad, you should see Alex Battaglia explaining to all those developers out there how they should do their PC ports 😂

 

 

'kin ell. Work harder, you plebs!

[Kevvy Metal]

My prior job was working at a studio under contract from Xbox Games Studios, on remaster work. 

 

It's likely the developers had very little time to finish the project, maybe a month or even weeks and had a few requisites.

It'll like be 4K/60 fps, and parity as close as possible to the near-simultaneous Switch release, so one didn't have a unique selling point over the other. 

Looks like they were limited to the emulator used for the N64 stuff on Rare Replay. The down-sampling thing is probably not even supported by the emulator so even if they wanted to, it would be more time and likely not what XGS would of requested. 

 

So it'll be - get it running on the emulator, ROM hack out any inappropriate things -as mentioned in the DF video- modernise the controls and bug fix (which would of lead to the easy fix of 30 fps, as waived by XGS) and that'll be it. It's all time and money.   

 

Also, on the note of the other video and why the lousy PC ports? (whisper it, it's because they don't make any money due to piracy much money)

[Fry Crayola]

I'm gonna start up a Grammatical Foundry just to pick apart erroneous use of "would of".

[Kevvy Metal]

9 minutes ago, Fry Crayola said:

I'm gonna start up a Grammitical Foundry just to pick apart erroneous use of "would of".

 

Would have. 

I'm dyslexic and have to re-read over everthing I write multiple times to ensure it's correct, which it usually isn't. 

Next time I'll make some mistakes with there/their/they're or fewer/less to make everyone even more irrate. 

[Nick R]

On 06/02/2023 at 12:38, K said:

That DF video is interesting, but I'm slightly wary about non-programmer John Linneman giving developers his ideas as to how to fix or improve the ports. His solution seems to be to just copy what a different emulator does to a game's visuals, and while I'm sure Linneman knows a lot more about video game graphics programming than your average internet game man, there is an element of "If I were developing this game, I would simply implement a robust method of downsampling the game's visuals" with a slight undercurrent of "lazy devs". That's probably a bit unfair, but it would be interesting to hear a professional's take on his suggestion.

 

3 hours ago, Colonel Panic said:

Sums up my issue with the entire existence of DF.

 

I rarely get that undercurrent from Linneman's videos. Even if he doesn't explicitly acknowledge restrictions that developers may have been under, I usually interpret his comments on things like the downsampling example here to mean "In an ideal world, this is how I wish it could have been done," rather than as an entitled "The fact that they didn't do it this way shows that they're LAZY and DON'T CARE."

 

(Unfortunately this doesn't prevent other people online from using DF's videos as ammos for the latter complaint.)

[Benny]

2 hours ago, Fry Crayola said:

Game Maker's Toolkit, which always appears to focus on something positive about some game or other

 

Apart from Elden Ring, in which they seemed to partly misunderstand or just disagree with the implementation of some design decisions that are quite fundamental to the game's directorial intent. The idiosyncratic nature of some aspects were treated as failures in some respects that had to be "smoothed" out, which is so antithetical to how those games are made.

[Kevvy Metal]

28 minutes ago, Benny said:

 

Apart from Elden Ring, in which they seemed to partly misunderstand or just disagree with the implementation of some design decisions that are quite fundamental to the game's directorial intent. The idiosyncratic nature of some aspects were treated as failures in some respects that had to be "smoothed" out, which is so antithetical to how those games are made.

 

Yes, there's absolutely loads and loads of examples of this in GMTK, where the creator's intend just flies over his head, or he entrenches his opinion that it's done wrong. Probably due to his roots as a game's critic. They love to be both wrong and let people know about it. 

 

I had to stop watching it as I was finding it absolutely infuriating, which is a shame as so much of it's great and well researched.