Perfect Dark

The Short


Pros
- Looks pretty dang good on the N64, even old and blocky
- Reasonably solid controls
- Guns are great, especially the FarSight (see through walls!)
- Decent length single player
- Four player co-op has a hearty amount of fun options

Cons
- Requires the expansion pack to not suck
- Controls, while exceptional at the time, haven't aged particularly well
- Time has not been kind to this game in general

Guns: CONFIRMED

[Note: This is a review of the N64 version of Perfect Dark, not the Xbox 360 rerelease)

The Long

Perfect Dark is a game a lot of people really liked. Essentially a spiritual successor to Goldeneye 64 in many ways, it ditched the modern day aesthetic (but kept the "secret agent" bit) and threw itself into the cyberpunky future, with corporations (always a problem in the future, if video games and movies are to be believed) messing stuff up, the president looking uncannily like Obama, and...aliens? Yeah, the story kind of gets...zany, but as a whole Perfect Dark was a revelation of sorts, and certainly helped push the N64 at least a little away from its "kiddie" image. 

It's just unfortunate that the game hasn't particularly aged well since it's N64 glory days. But we'll get to that.

Perfect Dark follows the adventures of Joanna Dark, a secret agent...sort of, in a world where aliens are battling and the president is in trouble. Honestly, I don't remember much about the story except I didn't get most of it, and it was basically just an excuse to keep shooting dudes. 

Despite the blocky polygons, Perfect Dark had a lot of style

The game offered a lot of improvements over its predecessor, Goldeneye 64. It added reload sequences for each weapon, a lot more multiplayer modes and maps, the controls felt tightened, you could beat up enemies and take their guns, the ability to shoot guns out of their hands, and greatly improved AI (though it still looks pretty stupid compared to some modern games). It was a fast game (though not even comparable to the PC FPS games at the time like Quake) and supported the four-player split-screen mayhem we'd come to expect from Goldeneye. And while you might consider it the same game with a new coat of paint (which it...kind of is, to be completely honest), the improvements make it better in nearly every way. 

I'm not saying Perfect Dark was the revolution Goldeneye 64 was (when essentially we figured out we COULD pull off FPS games on a controller), but it certainly feels like a more refined and expanded game.

Seriously, it looked pretty good (though this screenshot is emulator cleaned-up)

Now I'm not one to rain on the party of those who love the game. I have a full boxed copy and everything, so you know I have fond memories. But after loading it up a ton of years later, this game just...I'm not feeling it. I'm sorry guys, I really am. I can appreciate the art style and everything it did for the genre, but it just doesn't play that great anymore (this includes the Xbox 360 version, which I tried out after to see if the duel-sticks work better. They do a little, but not a lot).

Here's the thing about Perfect Dark: It was a stepping-stone game. Goldeneye 64 was a revelation, no doubt, which made lots of its shortcomings forgivable. Perfect Dark was a step in the right direction in many, many ways, while still maintaining the solide framework of Goldeneye. It's just that lots of FPS games have come out on consoles since Perfect Dark, and a lot of them are just better games, especially with the advent of duel analog sticks. 

I'm not saying this game isn't fun anymore, because it is if you can find three other fans and go blasting away. I'm just saying that, when compared to modern FPS games, it's clunky as hell and isn't appealing. I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to go through that single player again, even though I know I really liked it back in the day. The genre has evolved since then, and taken lots of things and made them loads better (you can thank Halo for a lot of that, though that's a review for a different time).

I still love you, Perfect Dark, but you got old and kind of ugly. 

If you don't believe me, go grab the demo on XBLA and tell me it has aged well. Seriously, do it. If you play it and are totally contented, then by all means buy it or rev up your N64 and go back into it. For me, while I'll still enjoy playing it with friends from time to time, and I'll still remember it fondly, I'm going to keep it like that: remembering it fondly, instead of playing it a lot and getting frustrated.

Still, if you collect retro games your collection has a pretty large hole without this title, and seeing that you can nab it for pretty cheap (~$5 if you are savvy) you might as well go get it. Just keep in mind you'll need that N64 expansion pack if you are going to actually, you know, play it.

Nintendo: Making you buy more crap for your systems since...well, the NES, actually

As it stands, age hasn't been kind to Ms. Joanna Dark, but I think that's ok. If you have nostalgia for it, you'll be willing to (mostly) forgive. If you don't, though, you might want to pass it up. It isn't a bad game by any means (in fact it's a pretty damned good one), but it is certainly a product of an era that has passed us by.

If I were to give it a (modern) star rating, it would be three out of five. This would also apply to the XBLA version, though I didn't go into specifics, since the score deductions weren't based on graphics at all (which is essentially what the XBLA version changed).