So a few weeks ago I played through GoldenEye on the N64 and finished the entire thing on 00 Agent difficulty, something I’d only ever done once before (about a year ago). A lot of the levels are perfectly doable, but man, those last few are crazy. The Aztec on 00? Holy crap! It can take several tries just to make it out of the first room alive, let alone surviving the rest of it. The enemies are so insanely fast and have such good aim, you have to be really careful to stay on top of it and not make any mistakes, otherwise you’re a goner…
Now I’m playing through Perfect Dark, on Perfect Agent difficulty; and as hard as GoldenEye is, this makes it look like a walk in the park. Most of the tricks that could be used in GE to avoid taking damage from enemies no longer work, enemy gunfire depletes your health much more rapidly, and the whole thing seems to have been designed to appeal to people with a masochistic need for punishment in their games. Last year I did manage to get through all the regular levels (though not the bonus levels), but many of them required multiple attempts before I could pull it off. I’m pretty sure I must have tried and failed to beat the Skedar Attack Ship at least 35 times before finally managing to scrape through with almost no health left. It is brutally unforgiving, and if you make more than one mistake in the beginning, you pretty much have no chance of completing it. I want to see if I can beat them all again, but I’m not entirely convinced I’ll be able to manage it this time!
GoldenEye and Perfect Dark are one of the main reasons why I eschew N64 emulation in favor of using the real system (and was willing to spend $400 on the Framemeister to get acceptable picture quality from it). There are far too many graphics glitches and emulation inaccuracies when trying to run these on the computer, to the point that it often hardly even feels like playing the same game. Using a non-N64 controller for games designed with a six-button layout in mind is also really irritating, and trying to dial in the joystick sensitivity to allow the weapon aiming to work the way it’s supposed to is an exercise in frustration. Much better to just use the original version, which ‘just works’, and skip all that other garbage.