Training/Armory
Overview
Training was a level cut from GoldenEye 007. It's hard to nail down exactly what it was, or even how many levels it would have been, since the idea didn't get anywhere near completion. It seems the concept was to have an MI6 environment where there would have been some combination of tutorials, minigames, and a shooting range. The only part of it that actually got made was the shooting range. The developer who worked on it, Adrian Smith, described it as follows:
"It was modelled as an environment from 'Q' Branch. It would have been great if it was added and incorporated with some mini games."
— Adrian Smith, GoldenEye 007 Developer (Source)
According to project lead Martin Hollis the team did not get around to fully developing the concept for GoldenEye, but did for Perfect Dark. Thus we might surmise Training would have been analogous to Perfect Dark's Carrington Institute.
The menu concept on the right is from the book Nintendo 64 Anthology and lists both Armory and Training as options. As far as we know neither of those menu options were ever programmed in. When developers tested Training they would have loaded straight into the level with a debug boot command.
The book GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr adds more detail:
"The team also had to cut out a firing range that Smith had built as a kind of mini-game, with one range for pistols, another for rifles, and one for the sniper and rocket launcher, with timed accuracy tests and target-shooting games that could unlock new weapons. Smith’s shooting range looked just like the one from Q branch in the movie, Smith told me — he duplicated the hallways and made the floor transparent so it looked like you had a mirror image of the galleries. But this double geometry would have slowed the frame rate down, and the team needed the cartridge space for multiplayer, so it had to wait until an eventual appearance in Perfect Dark (2000)."
(GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr, p. 90)
It sounds like it would have been a really cool looking level, and this adds another confirmation that the idea was carried over to Perfect Dark. But there's also a couple of odd statements here. Mirroring the level's geometry to create a reflection shouldn't have been too much of an issue for the N64. They did it for Egyptian's reflecting pool after all. And if cartridge space was an issue why not remove Citadel to make room for the shooting range?
Assets
It can't be said for certain, but I think this texture was likely meant to be the shooting range target.
We do not have the level's main geometry, but data miners did find an unused collision tile file in the XBLA leak. The file goes by the name "sho", perhaps short for shooting range. It consists of a hexagonal center with three branches. We believe this is likely the collision for the cut level. See below for an interactive view. The three branches match well with Smith's description of the three ranges.
