GoldenEye 007’s Nintendo Switch controls are kind of a mess


Screenshots you can hear.

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After 25 long years, players can finally enjoy official ports of GoldenEye 007 on platforms newer than the Nintendo 64. Those playing the game on Nintendo Switch, however, face a set of awkward, non-customizable control schemes that suffer greatly in the transition from the N64’s “batarang” to the Switch’s Joy-Cons.

Just like Rare intended

Anyone who’s played a console first-person shooter in recent decades expects a basic control paradigm that works across the genre: the left analog stick is used for lateral motion (forward, back, or side to side), while the right stick is used to turn and look around. Decades of muscle memory have trained console shooter players to expect this basic split, and anything else just feels instantly “off” after all this time.

What many GoldenEye fans have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) is that the N64 original was one of the first titles to use that kind of left thumb/right thumb control dichotomy. GoldenEye‘s built-in “1.2 Solitaire” control scheme mapped lateral movement to the oft-neglected N64 D-pad (positioned under the left thumb), while turning and looking around was controlled by the system’s single analog stick (positioned, in this case, under the right thumb).

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