Good news, retro game fans! The N64 smash hit, Goldeneye 007, is now available to play on modern consoles. Finally, you can shoot your way through the single best video game ever adapted from a movie. After 26 years trapped in licensing limbo, the Rare classic is free! We can again blast and slap and blow up our friends in multiplayer deathmatch, just like old times.

What a relief to finally be able to purchase an upgraded version of Goldeneye, one which utilizes modern controls and adds other accessibility options and quality of life improvements. …I’m sorry, what?…Oh, that’s not what this is…? What do you mean I can’t even buy it?

Today’s rerelease of Goldeneye 007 is really pretty interesting. Not good necessarily, but definitely interesting. There are two different avenues one can take to play this game: Xbox Game Pass or Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. The former is often called the “best deal in gaming”, while the latter is universality accepted as the worst. But you’ll notice something similar about these options, they’re both subscription services.

And that’s the part of this rerelease that stings, the subscriptions. If you want to play the “new” version of this 26-year-old game, you can’t just purchase it outright. You need to remain subscribed to a plan and pay some amount of money in perpetuity. Sure, if you were already gonna shell out for the subscription anyway, then great—it’s a nice bonus. But if you just want to play this one game with modern conveniences, then getting roped into a subscription is probably just too big of a hassle to even consider.

Technically, there is one non-subscription way to play Goldeneye. If you’ve purchased the digital version of Rare Replay—the retro game compilation on Xbox—then Goldeneye will become available for no additional charge. Please note, however, that this only works with the digital version; if you bought a physical disk copy of Rare Replay, you don’t get Goldeneye. Also, Rare Replay is only available on Xbox consoles and not for PC. Man, they really don’t want you to buy this game….

Even for those who have the requisite subscriptions to play it, this new Goldeneye poses some annoying tradeoffs.

For example, the Xbox Game Pass version will have no online multiplayer. That’s right! The platform that made online play mainstream and rocketed console first-person shooters into dominance will not have any online modes. The regular splitscreen multiplayer is there, but you can’t play any deathmatches with your brother in another state. Why? Well, it’s almost certainly because Nintendo wanted to keep that particular feature exclusive to the Switch. (They are only kind of playing nice here.)

Despite having online multiplayer, the Switch’s Goldeneye is almost certainly the inferior version. The Xbox game features support for dual analog stick controls, but the Switch does not. NSO doesn’t even allow you remap buttons for specific games, so you’ll probably have to do some serious tweaking to get to a control setup that’s even barely serviceable. Even if you have a hard-to-find (and overpriced) official N64 controller for your Switch, you’ll still need to get reacquainted with the woefully outdated controls before trying to convince yourself this was all worth it. C’mon Nintendo, you at least have to make this thing playable with a standard Switch controller, right? Right?

One thing I can’t get over though, Rare has already done a much better job with Perfect Dark. The spiritual successor to Goldeneye back in the N64 era, Perfect Dark wasn’t shackled by the same trademark/copyright issues which Bond encountered. Microsoft released a Perfect Dark remake for the Xbox 360 in 2010, and it even including online muliplayer. Then Rare was able to include that game in its Rare Replay from the collection’s beginning. That’s how you do it!

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this whole mess though, is that there was also an Xbox 360 remake for Goldeneye nearly completed in 2008. However, due to the usual Bond licensing trouble, the remake was never released. Of course, we know all about this game because the rom leaked in 2021 and it’s playable on PC using an emulator.

The XBLA version of Goldeneye featured updated dual analog controls, HD visuals, and—get this—the option to switch between the updated graphics and the original N64 visuals at the touch of button. It looked like truly a stellar remake, and—as far as I can tell—is still the best way to play this game today. It’s just a shame that the officially released version(s) of Goldeneye 007 can’t measure up to that.