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The canceled Xbox 360 version of Goldeneye 007 has now been laid bare—and this view of virtual Pierce Brosnan bungee-jumping from the first level’s closing section is a good indicator of its scope. Some of the basic geometry is identical, while some major aspects have been touched up, particularly the character models and background geometry.
Graslu00 -
The dam and surrounding mountains have never looked so detailed.
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But other aspects have been left largely untouched, like the menu system.
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Dam, intro sequence. That’s way less grainy and aliased than on N64.
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Camera pans toward James Bond.
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Is that who I think it is?
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Let’s go do some work for England, James.
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This island at the end of Dam is much clearer in the X360 version. You still can’t get there, but it’s a nice touch.
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I have a bad feeling about this dude.
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Explosion sprites have been touched up and no longer bring the game to its rendering knees.
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A different kind of “tank control.”
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Much increased view distances are lovely stuff if you don’t want to pull out your sniper rifle in snowy environs.
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Familiar briefing interface.
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Touched-up pre-mission intros.
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That’s definitely a more refined model, though still obviously not as high-fidelity as you might expect from average Xbox 360 fare.
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Natalya looks much different with her new model.
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Updated screen animations can be found on the game’s computers. Also, notice the fully rendered Russian keyboard.
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Combat time.
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Textures and models have been updated, but the animations remain identical to the 1996 original, so they’re still wacky ’90s robots (which is fine by me).
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One sign this is a legitimate leak: that’s a scanned version of longtime Xbox producer Ken Lobb circa 2014, around the time this remake’s production was nearly complete. (He also helped produce the original N64 version as part of Nintendo of America’s staff in the ’90s.)
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A romp through a dark jungle.
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Xenia didn’t stand a chance.
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New Brosnan-ized character, but the dorky elevator music remains.
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Get out of the way! I’m trying to minimize casualties here!
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The end credits (with a glitch in how they render a surrounding jungle) remain mostly the same, with two touch-ups. First is the addition of Xbox-specific language.
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And second is this obvious plea to Bond’s rights holders.
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If you clicked this far, then here’s a fun Easter egg for you: a teaser of the unreleased game’s Xbox 360 achievements, as provided to Ars by Graslu00.
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The remaining achievements are as follows. 00 Agent: Complete the game on Secret Agent difficulty. (25G) Bullet Proof: Complete a level having collected all the body armour. (5G) Sprinter: Complete the game from start to finish in less than an hour. (30G) Slapper: Complete a level without firing a shot and having killed 5 guards. (10G) Agent: Complete a level on any difficulty. (5G) Bullet Shy: Complete a level without getting hit. (20G) Secret Agent: Complete the game on Agent difficulty. (15G) License To Kill: Complete any level having killed more than 50 guards. (10G) Dual Wield: Dual wield any weapon. (5G) Munitions Expert: Complete a level having hit enemies with more than 300 shots. (15G) 007: Complete the game on 00 Agent difficulty. (40G)
Goldeneye 007‘s official remake project, as co-helmed by Rare, Microsoft, and 4J Studios before being quietly canceled, is one of the gaming industry’s wildest lost projects. We’ve discussed this canceled Xbox 360 game at length over the years, with updates coming mostly in the form of increasingly detailed leaks—and this week’s is easily the biggest yet. The rumored N64 update’s dam, as it were, has burst open, with a legitimate playable copy having leaked.
A longtime Spanish game streamer, who goes by Graslu00, was handed the veritable GoldenEye key in the form of one of the game’s near-complete ROMs, as made by Rare during the 2010s for Xbox 360 consoles and then indefinitely shelved. Graslu00 loaded the ROM in a PC emulator, confirmed it was real, and pre-recorded a full “00 Agent” gameplay session (meaning, the hardest difficulty with the most required objectives) before hosting a chat while showing the footage to viewers on Friday. Which made me wonder: how the heck did he get the ROM?
“I was sent the build anonymously and told to wait” until a certain date to reveal it, Graslu00 tells Ars Technica in an email interview. The files came with a peculiar note: “Never say never, release coming soon, James.”
From the look of Graslu00’s channel, his years of Goldeneye-affiliated streams may have gotten a ROM leaker’s attention, and his latest two-hour video shows a clear N64 Goldeneye expert tackling its every remade level in efficient fashion. Hence, the video counts not only as the first independent footage of this holy grail of lost video games, but also its first-ever speedrun.
Not your dad’s RCP90
If all of this is new to you, rewind to my last piece about the X360 Goldeneye 007 remake, which breaks down its basics. As I’ve previously reported, this is a note-for-note remake of the N64 classic, as opposed to a revision, and it is so allegiant that it includes a “switch graphics” button, similar to some Halo game remakes. You can switch back and forth between the game’s original assets and a completely new coat of paint (and much more realistic-looking actors, including a James Bond that finally looks like Pierce Brosnan) by pressing a single button.
Graslu00 opts not to test that feature in his footage, though in emails to Ars, he confirms the graphic-toggle button works without hitching or pausing the game. (He admits he has noticed a few funky graphic mismatch bugs when switching back and forth but says they’re mild.) For this two-hour video, Graslu00 chose not to show off the toggle because he wanted to maintain “flow” and prove that the canceled project is indeed playable from start to finish… at least, on the Xenia emulator (not to be confused with Goldeneye 007 character Xenia Onnatop). In emails with Ars, he claims the game runs identically on 360 hardware and is “signed as retail,” thus working more easily on emulators (and requiring a patch to work on developer 360 hardware). That means its small number of bugs relating to sound volume imbalances, vanishing-and-reappearing assets, and dummy textures are inherent to the build he was anonymously provided, as opposed to an issue with emulators (though exactly which build this is remains unclear, since the menus don’t include, say, a version number).
In the meantime, the project’s full scope has never been clearer than seen in this two-hour video. Every campaign level is not only beaten but beaten soundly, with occasional pauses to linger over revised skyboxes, textures, props, and remodeled character faces—and the scale of this game’s improvements surpasses that of the Perfect Dark X360 remake, as proven by elements like completely remodeled mountains in Dam, higher-res posters in Archives, and a total overhaul of bonus-level Egyptian. Still, this video counts more as a speedrun than a careful analysis. Graslu00 clearly knows his Goldeneye, thanks to high-speed strafe-running, manual-aim mastery, and the kind of rapid-fire PP7 gunfire that you’d swear was coming from an RCP90.
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