GoldenEye 007 for the now largely forgotten Nintendo 64, was a massive hit in the mid-to-late 1990’s. The console eventually faded away and was replaced with the new generation. However, the game itself has not been forgotten and has received a new lease of life in this retroactive remake styled into the form of a hand-held Game Boy cartridge.

James Bond, super secret agent extraordinaire is atop a dam controlled by… baddies. In order to thwart this evil, he uses his skills of… running, jumping and shooting. The game, needless to say, is a lot not like the original. For the reduction, the graphics, game play and story have all been scaled down with it, leaving James with the essentials of any side-scrolling platform inhabiting spy.

While the controls seem awkward at times and the enemies a bit difficult to notice before they’re pouncing on you, at only one level long the difficulty of the game has been chosen well. In order to drag out the length of an otherwise one-trick-pony, the amount of restarting you have to do is up there. As with the original game, you do have to start the level over again if you die, but that’s all part of the charm.

Unique in its approach – taking a modern game and un-dating it to a by-gone era – GoldenEye 2D manages to be entirely retro, hip, modern and quite possibly the start of a whole new genre.