HF Retro Game of the Year - 1997 - GoldenEye 007 Wins!

[Shareefruck]

The second Castlevania on the NES (Simon's quest) was very similar in style to Metroid and they were released within a year of each other and included very similar style in play, which is what I do believe coined the term (basically side-scrollers with large maps that you had to explore and progress by obtaining new items/powers). I do agree that Metroid is the bigger emphasis in the genre as it held true to that gamestyle for the most part, but they at least had equal stakes early on.

I'd hesitate to even call either of those two games Metroidvanias, though. I mean, let's face it, when people use that term, they're talking about it being done to the extent of Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night (which borrowed that from Super Metroid).

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

I need to play Earthbound, that'll be the next game I get to on my backlog. It looks pretty quirky and refreshing, and Shareefruck's avatar is intriguing in a perplexing way.


Should we consider changing the option to change your vote for games after seeing the results? I've noticed that people will vote for their legitimate favourite game (Star Fox), and then change their vote based on the votes of other games. So at the end of the day, they're not really voting for their favourite games but rather trying to get the runner up to win or prevent a game they don't like from winning. It kind of skews the results.

 

[KeithIsActuallyBad]

I need to play Earthbound, that'll be the next game I get to on my backlog. It looks pretty quirky and refreshing, and Shareefruck's avatar is intriguing in a perplexing way.


Should we consider changing the option to change your vote for games after seeing the results? I've noticed that people will vote for their legitimate favourite game (Star Fox), and then change their vote based on the votes of other games. So at the end of the day, they're not really voting for their favourite games but rather trying to get the runner up to win or prevent a game they don't like from winning. It kind of skews the results.

Funny enough that's at the very end of the game, for reasons I will not spoil.

Just don't go in expecting anything mind-blowing gameplay wise. It has a few quirks that separate it from the RPGs of that day but otherwise it's pretty standard Dragon Quest fare.

 

[SniperHF]

So at the end of the day, they're not really voting for their favourite games but rather trying to get the runner up to win or prevent a game they don't like from winning. It kind of skews the results.

I don't think it's happening all that much. But even then I don't mind because in the event of a runoff those people would be voting for something else anyway.
Plus I think all the FF boosterism/shaming going on the last 2-3 pages is about the same thing
It didn't go from 20 points behind to neck in neck out of nothing, it was mostly new voters though. On Saturday I counted 68 votes and now we're at 85 (which is about the number we usually end at)

At the current margin we won't have a runoff though.

 

[Osprey]

Intestate 76 should have been on voting list, if I remember correctly it lost "action game of the year" award to Quake 2.

Quake II has a whopping 0 votes so far, so I'm not sure that being the runner-up to it is a strong argument for its inclusion in the poll ... but it makes me smile inside to see someone bring it up. I often wonder if I'm the only one who remembers Interstate 76. It was so awesome, but has been so forgotten. I could see a remake or spiritual sequel being very popular today, especially if someone were to set it in an open world on a map the size of a small state, throw in RPG components and go for the Grand Theft Auto crowd.

 

[Osprey]

Wow FF just got a bunch of votes, we have quite the 3 way race!

The Japanese hackers are meddling in our elections.

and without the success of Goldeneye, you dont have the FPS revolution. No Halo, COD, Battlefield, etc.

Call of Duty and Battlefield were both originally PC games. Goldeneye had nothing to do with them. Goldeneye may've launched a FPS revolution on consoles, but it was just latching onto the FPS revolution that had been ongoing for 5 years already on the PC.

 

[SniperHF]

Call of Duty and Battlefield were both originally PC games. Goldeneye had nothing to do with them. Goldeneye may've launched a FPS revolution on consoles, but it was just latching onto the FPS revolution that had been ongoing for 5 years already on the PC.

The question GoldenEye answered was mostly "can we do this". Shooters were always going to be popular if they found a way to consoles successfully.

Call of Duty was a success on PC but it didn't become the monster it ended up as there, it took the console multiplayer world to do that. So I think you can draw a line from GoldenEye to Call of Duty in that way. There were 11 years between GoldenEye and BFBC though, let alone the main series.
I don't think GoldenEye is the game of the year, but I'd vote for it over the other 2 top vote getters pretty easily. 50 Sheas made the best case it has.

GoldenEye might be overrated, but it's also unfairly come down on most of the time. I played Wolf3d, Duke 3d, Doom 1 & 2, Hexen. Those early shooters had their control oriented growing pains as well but don't get any flak at all. As someone who played those and who is probably one of the bigger FPS snobs around here, it didn't even really enter my mind that GoldenEye's shooting sucked at the time. I just played the hell of it. GoldenEye was an action game with solid level design, extremely enjoyable multiplayer modes and split screen, gadget/weapon usage, and it let you experience the movie in a way that's probably still under recognized.

If you grab a controller and play GoldenEye it doesn't even really feel like a PC shooter from that time, I don't think it was supposed to. Turok as an example does try to and fails miserably at it.
Duke Nukem 64 handled it a lot better being mostly a port.

 

[Osprey]

Call of Duty was a success on PC but it didn't become the monster it ended up as there, it took the console multiplayer world to do that. So I think you can draw a line from GoldenEye to Call of Duty in that way. There were 11 years between GoldenEye and BFBC though, let alone the main series.

Yeah, you can draw a line between Goldeneye and the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises as they are today, but I was responding to the notion that there'd be "no" CoD and "no" Battlefield without it. He may not have meant it literally like that, but it seemed like something needed to be said in case he did or someone else were to take it that way.

 

[Blitzkrug]

Final Fantasy VII is by far the most overrated game to come out in the last 25 years. And that says something when games like Ocarina of Time exist.

 

[syz]

Goldeneye may've launched a FPS revolution on consoles

It didn't even do that. 3 years later Halo was still being developed as a PC game until Microsoft bought Bungie.

And even then, it's like... who cares? They took a thing that was already established elsewhere and cut a bunch of corners off until it finally worked on a controller. Any subsequent growth of the genre on consoles has more to do with money than with the games.

 

[BigBadBruins7708]

Yeah, you can draw a line between Goldeneye and the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises as they are today, but I was responding to the notion that there'd be "no" CoD and "no" Battlefield without it. He may not have meant it literally like that, but it seemed like something needed to be said in case he did or someone else were to take it that way.

there would be no COD or Battlefield as in they wouldn't be the monsters they are.

Sniper said it better, but without Goldeneye, those never come to console and dont grow to nearly the heights that they did.

for console FPS, they are all essentially the children to Goldeneye and Halo.

Goldeneye proved that it was possible. It also showed that you can utilize gadgets and accessories.

Halo perfected the concept. It took the idea and gave it the modern controls that are now the standard.

side note: Goldeneye gets way too much unfair hate. There is a lot of hindsighting done with it in the sense of people like to compare it to modern shooters to tear it down. Ignoring the restrictions of the tech available at the time. They had to have the simplified, and sometimes clunky shooting controls because of only having the single joystick. Graphics were sacrificed to allow for more features, things to do and places to go.

It also was responsible for making a lot of kids into Bond fans. Among my generation (33 yr old) it made the Goldeneye movie crazy popular.

 

[The Macho King]

there would be no COD or Battlefield as in they wouldn't be the monsters they are.

Sniper said it better, but without Goldeneye, those never come to console and dont grow to nearly the heights that they did.

for console FPS, they are all essentially the children to Goldeneye and Halo.

Goldeneye proved that it was possible. It also showed that you can utilize gadgets and accessories.

Halo perfected the concept. It took the idea and gave it the modern controls that are now the standard.

side note: Goldeneye gets way too much unfair hate. There is a lot of hindsighting done with it in the sense of people like to compare it to modern shooters to tear it down. Ignoring the restrictions of the tech available at the time. They had to have the simplified, and sometimes clunky shooting controls because of only having the single joystick. Graphics were sacrificed to allow for more features, things to do and places to go.

It also was responsible for making a lot of kids into Bond fans. Among my generation (33 yr old) it made the Goldeneye movie crazy popular.

I do think this is overstating it a bit. There were decent shooters on consoles already. Sega Saturn had this one called Painkiller that was really good, had solid shooting mechanics, and good mobility/platforming. There was a Doom port that wasn't the worst thing in existence.

I don't think Goldeneye had that huge of an effect. The market for FPS games was huge on PC - there was always going to be attempts by developers to bring them over to consoles. One poster said it earlier, and I think it holds - what made FPS games blow up on consoles wasn't Goldeneye - it was dual analog.

Edit: Should also point out that in addition to dual analog - online multiplayer. Quake, Tribes, and Counter-Strike are bigger impacts on the FPS genre in that regard. I'd put Halo as more important than Goldeneye for console gaming for that reason. FPS thrives in multiplayer, and local multiplayer just doesn't have the legs to "revolutionize" anything.

 

[member 157595]

Look at that list of titles, and that's not even including some other greats. 1997 was absurd.

By a slim margin, I will pick Symphony of the Night. I consider it to be one of the two best 2D platformers in the history of the video game industry, along with Super Metroid.

 

[member 157595]

The second Castlevania on the NES (Simon's quest) was very similar in style to Metroid and they were released within a year of each other and included very similar style in play, which is what I do believe coined the term (basically side-scrollers with large maps that you had to explore and progress by obtaining new items/powers). I do agree that Metroid is the bigger emphasis in the genre as it held true to that gamestyle for the most part, but they at least had equal stakes early on.

That game was so, so terribly flawed (I'm not implying you think otherwise, just speaking rhetorically). I like that style of game but Simon's Quest was just a sea of bad decisions. Thank god they got their heads out of their asses with the 3rd game on the NES, which is one of the best Castlevanias ever despite the stiff controls. The NA version is extremely hard though.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

Anyone who sees my avatar should know which way I voted in this poll... I literally have it tattooed on my body. lol

 

[Rodgerwilco]

Look at that list of titles, and that's not even including some other greats. 1997 was absurd.

By a slim margin, I will pick Symphony of the Night. I consider it to be one of the two best 2D platformers in the history of the video game industry, along with Super Metroid.

1997 was such an insanely golden year for video games. I agree about SotN. Incredibly good game, I actually just re-played through it on my original disk from 1997 a couple months ago.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

With the possible exception of Half-Life (also overlooked I see), FF7 is probably the most important and influential game of the 90's. These results are strange.

Goldeneye, a shooter with abysmal controls and no draw distance which takes any precision or skill out of the game?

MK64, still years away from the fine tuning required to make the Mario Kart franchise actually fun?

FF7 was a pioneer in FMV and CGI. It had an insane $40 million marketing budget and the commercials made it seem like an action movie. It tricked people like me into trying it and falling in love with this new form of intelligent gamplay, cinematic storytelling and Japanese eccentricities. 21 years later and I still vastly prefer Japanese made games over Western ones, it all started with FF7. I know that's not an uncommon story either.

Squaresoft leaving Nintendo and developing Final Fantasy for the Playstation was the biggest coup in that generation of console wars. It kicked off a golden age of RPG's on the Playstation and established Sony as the home for interesting Japanese developers, a distinction they still hold 20 years later. FF7 has the most famous plot twist in gaming history. The game is so iconic that the remake announcement is still the biggest moment in E3 history.

If you're having a sleepover at 10 years old, yeah I guess Goldeneye is better. But FF7 was the game of the year and arguably the game of the 90's.

I couldn't agree more with the bolded parts. Goldeneye was a fun game to play with your friends at a sleepover, but it was a dated game the day it came out and doesn't stand the test of time whatsoever. Final Fantasy 7 is the game you get lost in and feel an intimate connection with.

 

[Big McLargehuge]

It didn't even do that. 3 years later Halo was still being developed as a PC game until Microsoft bought Bungie.

And even then, it's like... who cares? They took a thing that was already established elsewhere and cut a bunch of corners off until it finally worked on a controller. Any subsequent growth of the genre on consoles has more to do with money than with the games.

*dumps books of every PC master race nerd on the planet*

 

[Pilky01]

1. Goldeneye 007
2. Final Fantasy 7
3. Mario Kart 64

If the poll closes right now then it finishes with my top 3 in the exact order I put em.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

Funny enough that's at the very end of the game, for reasons I will not spoil.

Just don't go in expecting anything mind-blowing gameplay wise. It has a few quirks that separate it from the RPGs of that day but otherwise it's pretty standard Dragon Quest fare.

The only thing I know about it is there is a big allegory for abortion? I've just read that on gaming websites, not sure if it was intentional by Nintendo or not.

 

[Osprey]

there would be no COD or Battlefield as in they wouldn't be the monsters they are.

Sniper said it better, but without Goldeneye, those never come to console and dont grow to nearly the heights that they did.

While you can draw a line between GoldenEye and the massive popularity of CoD and Battlefield today, you can't necessarily take the inverse and say that, without GoldenEye, there wouldn't be the massive popularity of CoD and Battlefield. That is most likely false because, if GoldenEye hadn't been the catalyst for console FPS popularity, something else wouldn't been, such as Halo. FPSes had been huge on PC since 1993, so it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make them work on consoles, especially with the rapidly improving hardware of the late 90s. When they inevitably did, the next step would've been to bring existing, successful PC series like CoD and Battlefield to consoles, so we'd likely still be where we are today.

 

[Blitzkrug]

The only thing I know about it is there is a big allegory for abortion? I've just read that on gaming websites, not sure if it was intentional by Nintendo or not.

It wasn't even remotely intentional. It's just a fan theory that happens to look a little bit convincing since a) the area where the final battle takes place has an entrance that happens to resemble a woman's birth canal and b) for some reason, as the battle goes on the final boss takes on this shape, which is suspiciously shaped like an unborn fetus: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/7/7a/Giygas.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20170202011119

The creator of the game has said multiple times that the final battle is actually based on an experience he had as a child when he accidentally walked into the wrong movie theater which was showing "The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty" where he apparently witnessed a rape scene. (which isn't much better than it being based on abortion, but still) The boss he created is a manifestation of his feelings/stuff as he watched that.

Fans have since gone back, tracked down that very movie and have confirmed there was no rape scene at all, so in all likelihood the dude just has a really vivid imagination and produced that final fight.

The Scene that Inspired Giygas

Hopefully this isn't too off topic for the mods since this is a GOTY thread, but i do recommend playing Earthbound at least once. My all time favorite JRPG,

 

[KeithIsActuallyBad]

The only thing I know about it is there is a big allegory for abortion? I've just read that on gaming websites, not sure if it was intentional by Nintendo or not.

It's already been pointed out but yeah it's a big coincidence. Giygas represents other things and if there's any allegories in the story, it belongs to someone else whose name I won't mention.

 

[member 157595]

I couldn't agree more with the bolded parts. Goldeneye was a fun game to play with your friends at a sleepover, but it was a dated game the day it came out and doesn't stand the test of time whatsoever. Final Fantasy 7 is the game you get lost in and feel an intimate connection with.

I've grown to like FF7 even more than I did when it was new.

I finally realized that it's probably because I f***ing hate FF8 so damn much.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

I've grown to like FF7 even more than I did when it was new.

I finally realized that it's probably because I ****ing hate FF8 so damn much.

I can honestly draw a parallel between growing up and my level of maturity by how I viewed the events of FF7.