A sentiment I touched upon recently, and one that relates to an age old wisdom, is that the journey is always more interesting than the destination.


The gooners know…good lord, do they know

Finally out of the deep, dark depths of the Caverns that our winding narrative took us through, GoldenEye 64 reaches its apex level, as 006 and 007 finally throw hands at one another, on what feels like the top of the world, as they duke it out once and for on the Cradle, the control platform for the titular doomsday device, and the grand finale for our blood soaked tale of revenge…

After the train incident, the film takes a more or less serious turn, as Bond and Natalya end up diving headfirst into what feels like a totally unearned romantic entanglement, part of which was involved with my mention of how both the movie and game derail, in more ways than one, and any subversion one was waiting for to flip the script on its head never came. Afterwards, they go to save the day, in what is a delightfully well paced final act, and has some greatly ridiculous action sequences, one of which was a hard as fuck fight between 006 & 007; sadly forgotten about in my own day, but tremendously appreciated upon rewatch.

The Cradle, which acts as the final set piece, and the installation with the power to activate another GoldenEye satellite, (in the film) has Boris attempting to regain control of said super weapon by fixing whatever foul technomancy Natalya conjured upon the command codes…of which he is unsuccessful. In the game, 006 rushes towards the final terminal on top of the Cradle to accomplish a similar goal, which is easily enough dispatched with a few bullets. I think to myself a lot of ways that this seems like quite the anti-climactic silliness involved in deactivating a doomsday weapon, but reason has nothing to do with this moment in time, so we get our head back in the game, and chase Trevelyan around the Cradle, as he continues to allude capture or being dragged into a straight up confrontation.

Eventually, he relents, as you do enough damage to him with random pepper sprays of bullets here and there amidst the sprints. He retreats to the bottom of the structure, where him and Bond duke it out, much like the film, seeing 007 victorious; cue credits. I’d say on most difficulties, this is a surprisingly relaxed final level/boss overall, but now that I think back to a lot of (developer) Rare titles, and in spite of their sadomasochistic streaks that infect a lot of their minigames and random novelty segments within their video games, they have never been known to make the ending portions of their games overly torturous, so I guess the Cradle tracks in the overall annals of Rare’s pedigree.

Unlike the other levels in GoldenEye, where there are new mission objectives based on difficulty level, or some level of exploration that varies among the litany of areas, the Cradle truly is just a small arena designed with the idea of chasing after and gunning down 006. There is not much else to do here, so no last minute easter eggs or cool secrets to speak of. If you knock 006 off the platform at the end, it will show a special cinematic, with him falling to his death, much like in the movie, which is a nice touch.

There is only like three weapons on this level, too, one of which you may not even pick up, if no one uses a grenade and is dispatched mid-throw to obtain it, though it’s of little use, as 006 moves way too fast for it to be of any real help whatsoever. On higher difficulties, even the ZMG (9mm) is quite useless, as it rips through clips like a heated knife through butter, and you quickly have no ammo after very little time, which ends up with one realizing they kind of wanted (you) the player to just finish the job with the PP7 special issue from the jump.

Though the Cradle is a rather straight forward level, and doesn’t represent some kind of epic gauntlet ala a Warthog run at the end of a Halo, nor an over the top ballistics ballad like at the end of a Doom, overall, it feels appropriate, even with its small stature, and you feel well accomplished by games end. If you beat it on 00 Agent, you do unlock access to the two secret levels, Aztec and Egypt, which is a nice little bonus, and of course, if you only beat it on Agent, you have other difficulties to look forward to, and if you did beat it on 00 Agent, there is a good chance you have lots of cheats to still unlock, which is a trial onto itself.

Since I plan on doing a couple of encores to round out this series, not leaving the secret levels out of this, I don’t feel the need to do an official wrap up punctuating this particular article, as firstly; this isn’t over, but secondly, cause I feel as if I still need more time to consider final wrap up thoughts on the whole thing full stop. It does seem quite queer I can imagine, to think that someone who has been pondering about a game for almost 30 years needs another few days to finalize thoughts, but we live in quite a queer reality. So it goes.

I’ve said before, even in regards to shooters, though the sentiment applies to any game, appreciate what the game is, instead of judging what it isn’t. I believe the first time I expressed this sentiment, it was in fact in reference to shooters, with the idea that- “If you expect Call of Duty of Halo, you’re doing them both an injustice”, as they are not attempting to accomplish the same thing, even existing within the same genre. So, when I look at GoldenEye 64, I technically could take it to one more level of absurdity, and judge the GoldenEye game we got, vs the one we didn’t, in me asserting trivialities such as “the last level should have been longer”, or “they don’t let you play around with more weapons on a regular basis” etc, kind of glossing over what ended up being not just a great game, but one that set a precedent, that to this day, is celebrated…that, and it’s going to be fairly difficult to judge the GoldenEye game we didn’t get for…uh…obvious reasons.…and the game we got was a celebrated watershed moment, so if you walk away unimpressed after all is said and one, you leave me with one last burning question…

...what are your fucking standards, my dude?

~Pashford