Gearbox developed the PC version of 007 Nightfire in 2002. While it shared the same plot as Eurocom’s much more ambitious console game, it was a fundamentally different title, being based on the by then dated GoldSrc engine from the original Half-Life, which Gearbox was intimately familiar with. It looked worse than the console version too and lacked some of its features, like driving segments.

Reviews were indeed poor, but with the passage of time, it has become quite interesting as a retro experience, thanks to the unique feel of the 007 setting combined with GoldSrc flair.

The best version of Goldeneye is actually the unreleased Xbox 360 remaster, which leaked a few years ago, emulated using Xenia or running on native hardware. It’s basically the same as the Perfect Dark Remaster: Gently updated visuals (with the customary toggle for original graphics), modern twin-stick controls and 1080p/60 on Xbox 360, which means it has really low hardware requirements in an emulator. Unlike the Perfect Dark remaster, it runs flawlessly (from what I can tell) in said emulator.

The original version of this game feels very dated, but it’s remarkable how well it holds up with just these relatively minor improvements.

In case you’re wondering why it was never officially released: The licensing situation was a mess. Rare developed it, Nintendo published it, but the IP belonged to the Broccoli family (before Amazon gobbled it up). Rare was bought by Microsoft, but they kept working with Nintendo for years afterwards. They managed to come to an agreement with Perfect Dark (and most other Rare titles), but with the James Bond license, it was never figured out, in part, because it was licensed to other game publishers - namely EA and then Activision - over the years. There must have been some progress in the negotiations, because why else would you develop a remaster to near 100% completion, but then it had to be shelved. It was only recently that a port of the original N64 game, not the remaster, was released for current and last-gen Xbox and Switch, with online multiplayer.

There’s one other interpretation of this game: Eurocom developed a rather excellent remake for the Wii (Goldeneye 007), which is one of the best shooters for the platform (my second favorite after Red Steel 2 and just ahead of Dead Space Extraction). It’s more linear and imitates contemporary Call of Duty’s gameplay, scripting and pace to a T (unsurprising, given that it was under Activision), but I still enjoyed it a lot as a supplement to the original, not a replacement.

The stealth gameplay in particular is excellent and the way it uses the WiiMote for gadgets is extremely clever - but you could also use normal twin-stick controls. Daniel Craig works surprisingly well in this role and setting. It was later remastered for Xbox 360 and PS3 with shinier visuals (Goldeneye 007 Reloaded). Reviews on those platforms were a bit worse (low to mid 70s instead of low to mid 80s), likely because it faced far more significant competition in the genre. Still decent though - and on PS3, you can even play it with Sony’s copy of the Wii remote. While I have emulated the Wii original (way back when, when Wii emulation was nowhere near as good as it is now), I haven’t tried it with the Xbox 360 and PS3 port, which I’ve only played on original hardware. It’s obviously not just prettier on these more powerful systems, but also runs at a more stable - if not perfect - frame rate.

You can talk to me directly instead of behind my back, you know?

I’m not ignoring the international division of labor. Every country is part of it and every country has been part of it in the past, including Socialist ones.

I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.

socialists are even worse than capitalist

Their historic record is considerably worse. I don’t even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn’t hurt).

This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.

extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy

I didn’t say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can’t find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.

Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.

current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save “their economic system” as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?

No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there’s a counter movement back towards local IT.

All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it’s AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn’t talk back, doesn’t form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It’s not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.

I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I’d elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn’t cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution, am I right?

How does a defensive alliance restrict economic systems?

Given your username and where it’s registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It’s one of the reasons why the system failed: Since everyone at every level was doing it, the already hopelessly out of their depth central planners had no reliable data to work with.

This doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course. I’m only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.

Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to take part in the “next big thing” in order to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.

Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I’m noticing some patterns here.