When Activision announced that they'd be remaking GoldenEye 007 for the Wii, I was completely certain that it was going to be bad. The elements of shit were all there: Quantum of Solace, Activision's other Bond game, was a barely-playable mess; I still hadn't forgiven the remake's developer, Eurocom, for taking Dead Space and turning it into the Wii's one hundredth rail shooter (give or take); and Activision's CEO, Bobby Kottick, is a money-grubbing bastard. Everything was pointing toward GoldenEye being another shitty cash grab.
I didn't even really like GoldenEye for the N64 (I was more of a Turok man), so I couldn't even be excited for nostalgia's sake.GoldenEye has great controls, including the option to play with a Classic or GameCube controller, a strong singleplayer campaign, true local multiplayer (none of that “girlfriend mode” bullshit from the Call of Duty games on Wii) and a fun online mode that takes several pages from the (proper) Call of Duty series.
Even though all console shooters today owe their existence to the original GoldenEye, this Wii-make (hurr hurr!) will never rival the recent Call of Duty games on PC and Xbox 360. Even though there are a lot of people playing GoldenEye online right now, the Wii simply isn't the best system for the genre. First-person shooters have the largest market appeal for two reasons: they're full of mindless action and they typically push the graphics technology of the times forward. Focusing on the latter point, you can use the phrase “graphics whores” all you want, but there's a reason why James Cameron's Avatar broke all kinds of box office records and Disney's animated films are considered some of the most cherished of all time (hint: it's not because of their original stories). People just like things that look good.
Wii games can look good but never realistic. Realism in games is relative to whatever the best looking game currently is. While Half-Life may have looked great at first, nobody is going to argue that it still has the most realistic graphics ever or that we never had to move on from the Quake 2 engine.
So GoldenEye will never be able to compete with the new Medal of Honor or Black Ops because the mass market cares too much about what GoldenEye lacks. But for those who can still appreciate a black and white film or a game only for its gameplay, GoldenEye is outstanding and a game that should come to define, in part, the Wii experience, just as the original helped define the N64.
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