Before you reach for your pitchfork, bear in mind the reason for this is obvious: many of the faces in the Nintendo 64 version were scans of the development team and their friends, and since this Xbox version is handled by a moslty new team (only programmer Mark Edmonds remained from the original group), those new hi-res face scans will have to come from somewhere.
While all these changes are undoubtedly a good thing, there’s another one in there that may have fans screaming for blood. Were Pogs actually rubbish too? (Answer: yes) The remaster allows players to switch between modern and N64 visuals. With a single tap those lovely new HD textures are replaced with the old, murky, blurry ones and you’ll start questioning everything you loved during your childhood. Still, nostalgia is a powerful rewriter of history, so just in case anyone playing this Xbox 360 remaster was in any doubt that there had been improvements made a decade down the line, the developers came up with a masterstroke: the ability to instantly switch to the N64 visuals by simply pressing the RB button. Play it today and you’d be forgiven for thinking that someone had smeared Vaseline down your screen while you weren’t looking. In some of these people’s heads the game looked great, and that’s because it did: in 1997. Of course, nostalgia goggles can sometimes cloud our memories, and there are many players who, like us, played the N64 version of GoldenEye religiously and think back on those days fondly.
“Natalya, Boris and Valentin no longer look like someone punched some peach-coloured Play-Doh into a loaf of bread, they now actually resemble the actors who portrayed them in the film.”
This isn’t just the sort of simple upscaling you may see in some modern HD remasters: almost everything here has been retextured or remodelled to a truly impressive degree. The likes of Natalya, Boris and Valentin no longer look like someone punched some peach-coloured Play-Doh into a loaf of bread, but closely resemble the actors who portrayed them in the film.Īnd that’s just for starters: Initiate the campaign itself and from the second you see that first shot of the Dam stage in Arkangelsk, it’s clear that there have been huge improvements made here. Even two console generations later, the difference is stark. The classic opening animation from the N64 version, which shows all the major characters from the game, now goes one step further by switching between their N64 appearance and their shiny new Xbox 360 look. Boot it up and watch the intro sequence, and you’ll immediately come to a conclusion that will last with you throughout the entirety of your time with this beta: there was clearly still some polish left to be done at this stage, but what’s there is phenomenal.
0 kommentar(er)
