Perfect Dark Retrospective (Paul)

Paul – June 8th, 2010

I love Perfect Dark. I always have done ever since it was launched. I can remember the day of release as clear as a bell; getting up at some ungodly hour to drive into town and queuing up outside the shop half hour before it opened to nab my copy and being so excited after all the delays and the hype to actually be getting my hands on it. It’s a day that will long remain etched in my memory. But … time is a cruel and unforgiving mistress and going back to the original N64 version of it now after having spent some considerable time with the new all-singing and all-dancing XBLA version is like going from a sprint to walking through thick mud. You find yourself wondering how you ever put up with those frame rates, which by todays standards would see the game laughed out of town. But I still love it. The game was so ahead of its time it’s frightening, with features that games today are still not implementing, and I don’t care what anyone says about balancing issues; the weapons are great. All of them look super cool and futuristic, with reload animations that can make some of them look damn sexy, especially when you compare the ‘dipping’ reloads in GoldenEye. Just check out the laptop gun or watch how a cyclone devours a whole clip in two seconds! Also, secondary functions back then was such a cool idea and other games were quick to take it on.

Many people will complain about the naff story but I have to admit that I really enjoyed it and got quite invested in it. I’m a bit of a sci-fi geek anyway so a tale of secret meetings with alien races and a plot to dispose of the president grabbed my interest straight away and only made the game that much more enjoyable for me. Sure, I never did buy the fact that the Skedar with all their technological superiority would actually need humanity’s help to retrieve a Cetan ship at the bottom of the ocean but I’ll go with it.

Firing up the game now it’s remarkable to see how fuzzy it all looks (certainly not how I remember it) and the frame rate, particularly when grenades and rockets start flying around, really is bad. The XBLA remake has really spoiled us in this regard. Back in the day I remember looking at everything with a sense of awe and wonder at the neo noir futuristic world Rare had created, but today it does all look pretty tired. However, take that out of the equation and we are left with a game that still stands up extremely well from a gameplay perspective. It’s very refreshing to be put in a scenario where it’s left to you to work things out and to find solutions on your own accord. Hand-holding is very evident in today’s games (look no further than Rare’s own Perfect Dark Zero with its flashing white arrows on the ground to highlight where to go next) and there’s definitely a feeling that there’s a lot that modern developers could learn from PD. Varying objectives depending on the difficulty level is something I miss, rather than just making enemies more resistant to gunfire the higher up the difficulty levels you go, and the mechanic of having a pre-determined amount of health and relying on shields (if you can find them) is something that adds a lot more tension to each level and encourages stealth play. The way to handle health is something that has been a thorn in the side of many a game and the Halos and CODs of this world have plumped for recharging health. I never really liked that as it felt like cheating, although you could argue that picking up health packs is just as bad, but in PD it feels just right. You have health, you get shot and you die. Simple. It’s never unfair and you know that any deaths are due to your poor tactics rather than some cheating AI and I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve played through levels multiple times just to try and shave off a few more seconds from my completion time or to test out new ideas and and attacks to take out the bad guys.

Undoubtedly one of the game’s strongest features is its soundtrack. So many tunes, all fitting their environments and scenarios perfectly and able to create real tension during the more active sections. I think it speaks volumes about the quality of the soundtrack that I have it on my iPod to this day and many a long bus journey has been made vastly more tolerable by Grant Kirkhope’s wondrous tunes.

All this reminising and I can’t help but be reminded of my all-time greatest gaming memories. I was playing on Area 51 infiltration, at the stage where you get into the main compound and go down in the lift to gain access to the Area 51 hangar. I had grabbed me a rocket launcher (memory serves that I was playing with the ‘all weapons’ cheat turned on but I can’t really remember) and as the lift door to the hangar opened I ran inside. Several guards were immediately alerted to my presence and started running around and gunning for me. Two guards were positioned over by the far wall. Looking around I panicked and, what is pure luck rather than skill I assure you, I squeezed the trigger and the rocket was away, whooshing towards the guards. They began to move forward and the rocket sailed inbetween them and smacked into the wall behind them. The explosion sent them flying, arms and legs all over the place, and I laughed. Not a small chortle, but the sort of instinctive snort that you can’t control. Perfect Dark is full of moments like this and each of them sums up just what a great game it really is. Now to you guys reading who experience this kind of thing all the time in modern games you have to understand what a big deal things like this were to me. Back in 2001 this really was next gen gaming. I was born and raised on the Super NES and moving up to the N64 was a true leap with the Rare N64 games representing all that is great and good in gaming. Some would say that this period was a golden age for gaming, and for Rare inparticular. On this evidence, with Perfect Dark sitting at the top of a very impressive list of Triple AAA releases on N64, I’d be hard pressed to disagree.