Headscratchers / GoldenEye (1997)

• How were you meant to figure out the golden gun room puzzle? I never figured it out without blatantly cheating with internet maps, but I assume there was a legitimate method.
  • No, there were no in-game hints aside that the bullets would start flying if you stepped on the wrong tile. You either had to figure out the path on your own, learn it from someone who had done it, or buy a magazine with the correct path.
  • It's the kind of erstwhile Guide Dang It! which makes you really happy for emulators with their save states.
  • During this time, players were forced to either go to the store and look at the magazines such as Nintendo Power or buy them because they had the map figured out.
  • I guess my real question then is, unless you just knew the circumstances of the room, how were you even supposed to know without cheating that there even is a path to the room and not assume after three tries that you're just not meant to go in there and comb through the rest of the level?
  • If you go check out old school forums such as GameFAQs (and probably Reddit too), you pick up the vibe that games of this era were a lot less handholding than those of future console generations, and some had puzzles which were arcane and purely trial and error should you not have access to useful resources. Hell, one guy claimed he only lucked out in finding a solution in that a map of the route was saved on his high school computer's shared drive. Magazines were plentiful in most countries, and while not as commonplace as today, the internet was still reasonably accessible even in 1997. Some televised gaming shows would also probably cover it, and there were Nintendo hotlines which would have done their best to help (admittedly, verbally describing the route over the phone must have been a steep task). If you had zero access to any of these resources, it's not such a big deal; either you write the level off as unwinnable (again not really a problem, it's the final mission of the game as clearly indicated by the mission select grid, a bonus mission at that, and while it does unlock one of the best cheats (All Guns) again, you wouldn't really miss that if you didn't know any better, right?) or you do comb the whole level and come to realise that the Golden Gun can only be located behind the trap, at which point you force yourself to puzzle it out, perhaps with the aid of a friend who sketches out the safe route while you trial and error it. Finally, you mention "without cheating" (meaning without looking up the route) but, for such an non-intuitive puzzle which is designed as it is as a very lethal Death Trap, it's not really such a bad thing if the player levels the playing field with the game's own cheats to more easily puzzle out the route, right? They can then memorise the route and do it with cheats turned off. Invincibility would mean they can harmlessly tank the drone gun fire and leave the room to reset them (and the puzzle), whereas with Invisibility it may be possible to avoid the trap triggers (albeit it may not, and it also may not be possible to trigger the Golden Gun unlock, one would have to test this).
  • Bad design is bad design, and Egyptian is a perfect example. Everything the troper above me said only proves that point — if the level does not give you the required information to complete it properly, it's poorly designed. We need to remember to take off the Rose Tinted Glasses every once in a while.
  • I wasn't defending the quality of the design so much, as pointing out that there are various options when Guide Dang It! rears its head (even though they mostly all fall exactly within the category of said trope), as an answer to the question as posed. What's more, I'd add in response to the second question (basically a rephrased version of the first) that the room appears to be quite evocative of similar traps in other media (James Bond films themselves, Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, (of which the first two games were contemporaneous with Goldeneye 007)). Usually such rooms are depicted as either instant death traps which are Unwinnable by Design or else rooms with only a specific route or method to avoid the trap. So, the fact that a player can enter it and does not die immediately indicates that it is not in the former category. The fact that the guns are only exposed from their concealing shells once the player steps onto a triggering panel (and the floor panels are very clearly marked across the ground) further suggests that it is of the latter category, and that indeed there is a strategy to either puzzle out by brute force or through external ("cheating") help. And that would be true regardless of whether the player is deeply versed in video game design tropes and those relating to booby traps, or the technological era they're playing it in and the associated ease of finding the solution by external means.