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Perfect Dark
Text Review
Joanna Dark is a cool customer. Her weapons are cool, her hair is cool and, unfortunately for her enemies, even her blood runs cold. A highly trained special operative, Dark is an assassin without peers. She’s so good, in fact, that most people refer to her simply as Perfect Dark.
She shares the tag only with wrestling legend Mr. Perfect. That’s pretty elite company.
Created by the brilliant minds at Rare, she’s the sexy and lethal protagonist of the similarly named Perfect Dark, a first-person shooter released for the Nintendo 64 in 2000. Coming on the heels of Rare’s GoldenEye 007, a game which set a new standard for FPS games on the home console, Perfect Dark released to seemingly insurmountable hype. Fortunately for the millions of people who bought it, Rare’s sophisticated shooter lived up to its expectations.
Perfect Dark tells a story about aliens, intergalactic war and government conspiracies—it sounds like something out of a cheap movie on the SyFy channel, but particularly for its era, Perfect Dark’s story was at least an interesting break from the FPS norm. The real reason to play the game, however, wasn’t the story or even Ms. Dark herself. It was the firepower, and Rare delivered it in spades. Perfect Dark boasts more than 30 weapons and gadgets, from futuristic guns that can scope through walls to a Psychosis Gun that confuses enemies.
The weapons are varied, but more importantly, they’re also thoughtfully balanced. Each of them has a weakness, and when the bullets start flying, it makes the action more intense.
And whether playing alone or with pals, Perfect Dark features precisely that—action. Many FPS classics, GoldenEye 007 included, are remembered mostly for their multiplayer modes, but Perfect Dark features an absorbing and well-designed single-player adventure, too. The game’s more than 17 levels feature four difficulty modes, and depending on which difficulty players choose, the objectives of each mission change. While playing the Perfect Agent difficulty, for example, a mission will entail much more than on the easier Agent mode.
Add her dynamic single-player mode to a combat simulator, training levels, shooting range, statistics tracker and, of course, multiplayer, and it’s easy to see why Joanna is so perfect.
With the exception of perhaps Nintendo, an arguable omission at best, no developer made more classic games for the Nintendo 64 than Rare. From Banjo-Kazooie and Blast Corps to Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Jet Force Gemini, the list goes on and on. Perfect Dark, however, was the culmination of those efforts, a remarkably sleek and stylish shooter with virtually no rival on a home console. Even better than Rare’s groundbreaking GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark outclassed the competition as the best shooter ever released for the Nintendo 64.
And, for that matter, one of the very best games on the platform. Period.
- Derek Buck
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform(s): Nintendo 64, GameBoy Color, Xbox 360
She shares the tag only with wrestling legend Mr. Perfect. That’s pretty elite company.
Created by the brilliant minds at Rare, she’s the sexy and lethal protagonist of the similarly named Perfect Dark, a first-person shooter released for the Nintendo 64 in 2000. Coming on the heels of Rare’s GoldenEye 007, a game which set a new standard for FPS games on the home console, Perfect Dark released to seemingly insurmountable hype. Fortunately for the millions of people who bought it, Rare’s sophisticated shooter lived up to its expectations.
Perfect Dark tells a story about aliens, intergalactic war and government conspiracies—it sounds like something out of a cheap movie on the SyFy channel, but particularly for its era, Perfect Dark’s story was at least an interesting break from the FPS norm. The real reason to play the game, however, wasn’t the story or even Ms. Dark herself. It was the firepower, and Rare delivered it in spades. Perfect Dark boasts more than 30 weapons and gadgets, from futuristic guns that can scope through walls to a Psychosis Gun that confuses enemies.
The weapons are varied, but more importantly, they’re also thoughtfully balanced. Each of them has a weakness, and when the bullets start flying, it makes the action more intense.
And whether playing alone or with pals, Perfect Dark features precisely that—action. Many FPS classics, GoldenEye 007 included, are remembered mostly for their multiplayer modes, but Perfect Dark features an absorbing and well-designed single-player adventure, too. The game’s more than 17 levels feature four difficulty modes, and depending on which difficulty players choose, the objectives of each mission change. While playing the Perfect Agent difficulty, for example, a mission will entail much more than on the easier Agent mode.
Add her dynamic single-player mode to a combat simulator, training levels, shooting range, statistics tracker and, of course, multiplayer, and it’s easy to see why Joanna is so perfect.
With the exception of perhaps Nintendo, an arguable omission at best, no developer made more classic games for the Nintendo 64 than Rare. From Banjo-Kazooie and Blast Corps to Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Jet Force Gemini, the list goes on and on. Perfect Dark, however, was the culmination of those efforts, a remarkably sleek and stylish shooter with virtually no rival on a home console. Even better than Rare’s groundbreaking GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark outclassed the competition as the best shooter ever released for the Nintendo 64.
And, for that matter, one of the very best games on the platform. Period.
- Derek Buck
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform(s): Nintendo 64, GameBoy Color, Xbox 360
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