Before you read the meat of a review, it’s customary to glance through informational bullets up top to find out things like who developed and published the game, what genre it is, if it has multiplayer, and so on. Reading through these classic reviews brought up several bullets that you wouldn’t necessarily see anymore. 

Number of Levels

Many outlets included the amount of single-player levels right up top as some sort of gauge of how much game there is. The issue is, several wrote down a tally of 18 levels not realizing that there are actually 20 when you play through at higher difficulty and unlock two bonus stages. Nintendo Power gets props for listing all 20, but it’s possible they had more access to the game as an official Nintendo publication. And since they had the resources to throw 10 people at it it stands to reason that some would clear out the higher difficulties.

Medium

Gaming Age listed the format a given game was released on in case you weren’t aware that all N64 games came on cartridges and PlayStation games were on disc.

Size

Several outlets listed the number of megabits on GoldenEye’s cartridge. At first this seemed charming and quaint, but throughout N64’s lifespan the size of carts started smaller and grew with later releases. Launch title Super Mario 64 had 64 megabits in 1996, while GoldenEye bumped it up to 96 a year later. The 1998 port of Resident Evil 2 in 1998 set the final ceiling of 512 megabits. Translated to a format we’re more familiar with today, GoldenEye fit onto a cart that was only 12 megaBYTES!

Save Slots

I guess if you have a bunch of gamers in the same house sharing an N64 it doesn’t hurt to know how many different save slots are available in a game. GoldenEye’s four saves should have been plenty for the average household. Thanks, Nintendo Power.

Previous Coverage

Since you can’t put hotlinks in a print magazine, EGM lists the issue the games were last referenced in case you want to dig through your collection and read more about it. Did people actually go back to old content after reading a definitive evaluation of a game’s quality? Tough to say for sure, but it seems doubtful.

Price

Some outlets listed the price of the game up top, which in hindsight makes sense since they weren’t locked in at a standard price and you couldn’t bring up a retailer on your smartphone in 1997. GamePro lists GoldenEye at $69.95, which comes in at an eye-watering $129 in 2022 money at the time of this writing.