As someone who considers GoldenEye to be one of my top fifty favorite movies and GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64 to be one of my top ten favorite video games, I've watched or played through the same story dozens of times; hell, I even read John Gardner's novelization back in elementary school, although I remember finding it pretty insipid. I daresay I'm as close to an expert on GoldenEye's plot as probably just about anyone alive this side of Bruce Feirstein.
So I found it an interesting experience to play through the new remake of GoldenEye 007 on Wii. It seemed like a lot of whiners on internet message boards thought it was a travesty for them to swap in Daniel Craig and shift the story a bit (a lot of whiners who saw the movie once or maybe twice in the mid-to-late 90s, I imagine), but while it certainly doesn't replace the original I enjoyed experiencing a favorite story in a new light, just as I'm sure huge Shakespeare buffs enjoy the freshness of seeing Hamlet and Richard III with new actors and reinterpreted aesthetics every few years. Not that I'm comparing Bond to Shakespeare... Bond is clearly better.
Furthermore, this game actually adds back in a whole bunch of memorable movie scenes absent from the original game. Of course for every one of these there's also something they kept from the N64 version that wasn't in the film or something they changed or added that wasn't in either. It's an eclectic mix of story elements, as you'd probably expect from a narrative that's adapted from a game that is adapted from a movie while being updated from 1995 to 2010. So let's just break into down into bullet points, go through, and document everything I can think of.
We'll be doing this in five categories: first, film scenes absent from the N64 game that have been added back into this one. Second, changes the N64 game made that the Wii one kept (note that this is only analyzing story differences, not gameplay). Thirdly, film changes the N64 game made that the Wii version ditched. Fourthly, stuff the Wii game did that flies against both film and N64. And lastly, just for fun, stuff from the film neither game included. I'll leave out stuff present in all three because the broad framework of the story is consistent across all mediums and I don't wanna synopsize the whole damn plot. Obviously, full spoilers for every version of the story ahead.
Beyond the jump: get shaken, not stirred.
