There were a set of shooters that I’m calling the Goldeneye shooters. I don’t really remember if anyone has ever gone over this era, they just lump them in with 5th and 6th gen console games.

If you were gaming at the time you should remember this.. Goldeneye shooters we’re a short lived set of FPS’s from 1997 to around 2003 ish. Usually they were groundbreaking FPSs made popular by Rare and then Free Radical.

These games had several characteristics. They gave you a set of objectives to complete levels. When the difficulty went up, you got more objectives. Most had an auto-centering aiming system. You had a set of gadgets you used to complete objectives. The start menus were even similar, you swiped over to see info on your weapons or gadgets, and could read long objective descriptions. Most of them had big multiplayer scenes too.

Games I define as GoldenEye shooters would include GoldenEye, The World Is Not Enough, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters and No One Lives Forever. All these games were cool but I had issues with them. It’s not that they haven’t aged well, even back then I would’ve had issues with them.

The biggest gripe I had was the auto-centering system when aiming. You’re trying to get headshots, but it’s difficult because your reticle keeps moving back to their body if you let go of the stick. In TimeSplitters 2 it’s a chore to shoot out a camera. I get there was time when you had a single joystick, but even then it felt clunky to me. After everyone went to two analog sticks, this should’ve never had been a thing. The other thing were the objectives, early games were trials of frustration. You saw what your objective was but it wouldn’t tell you where something was or you could do this in a room. So you found yourself at the end of levels unable to finish and walking back through them pressing the A button on every door, pairing or clock to find secret rooms and documents. The Perfect Dark level where you have to fight the invisible aliens while blowing up the pilar’s comes to mind. If you put explosive on the wrong part of the pilar, you instantly failed.

The GoldenEye shooter were brought to an end by another game, Halo. Halo’s popularity led to it standardizing controls for console FPSs and changed the industry. Though some people felt Halo ruined FPSs because everyone tried copying it.