Perfect Dark also had difficulty that scales in more than just enemy strength and intelligence - the harder the difficulty, the more you actually have to accomplish in any given mission.īasically, any future Perfect Dark should be a spy game, not just a shooter. As a descendant of GoldenEye, it benefits from open-ended level and objective design that in the present day is only really represented in IO Interactive's Hitman titles. Xbox has shooters - but the original Perfect Dark is more than that. I covered this in our list of top games Xbox should bring back on the Xbox Series X, but Perfect Dark is a perfect chance for Xbox Game Studios to recreate a prestige property - and it has the pieces in place to define itself as a very different property to what Microsoft already has available. So let's reflect and say this: it's time to bring Perfect Dark back. Twenty years is a long time, and a great time for reflection. That game captures some of the magic of the original, especially in its DarkOps multiplayer, but in many other ways it fumbles, in part presumably because the shadow of Halo loomed large over the sequel, diluting elements that made its predecessor great.Īnyway, Happy Twentieth Birthday to Perfect Dark, a charming shooter that proved just how well it'd aged with a snappy, high frame rate Xbox Live Arcade port. Five years later we'd see her again with little of this charm, however - as an impetuous teenager in Perfect Dark Zero. ![]() Protagonist Jo Dark, inspired at least in part by La Femme Nikita, The X-Files' Scully and even Joan of Arc (Joanna Dark, get it?) is no mere Lara Croft clone - she was envisioned as something more, as professional and impressive as Bond. It's mad, brilliant, and completely different to Bond. But then it gets progressively campier - a visit to Area 51 to rescue an alien called Elvis, saving the President aboard Air Force One, underwater bases, and ultimately a trip to an alien world to save the day. ![]() This is the bit of Perfect Dark people remember, and that's fine. That element of the game is a triumph, too - a story that is tonally a dystopic, Blade Runner-like science fiction thriller laced with spy story tropes - but only for a while, before it takes a turn into campy alien intrigue.Īt first it's corporate espionage, sneaking into rival corporate offices to steal back technology. Gone are the admittedly thrilling rearrangements of the familiar Bond theme, replaced instead by a score thick with atmosphere and indicative of the game's tone. It isn't all just an incremental sequel to the 007 adventure, however. Yes, that game is attached to a classic film outing for a character that is an international icon - but as a video game, Perfect Dark is better by pretty much every metric, packed with features and depth. Let's be clear: Perfect Dark is better than GoldenEye. The story is delivered not just via pre-mission briefing notes and subtitles, but through full voice acting.Īll of this adds up. Levels are larger and more dynamic with lighting effects that at the time boggled the mind. Small details in GoldenEye like enemy reactions to being shot in specific places are now writ large. In many ways it is GoldenEye turned up to eleven detail is now dense enough that the RAM-boosting N64 Expansion Pak accessory was required to even start the campaign missions. ![]() When a rights bidding war emerged for the ability to make a Tomorrow Never Dies game, the decision was cemented, and Perfect Dark was born.ĭespite the property switch, Perfect Dark is very much a sequel to GoldenEye. After the huge success of GoldenEye 007, developer Rare knew it wanted to make a sequel to top its system-defining movie tie-in but also was unsure if it wanted to work within the confines of James Bond again. ![]() On this day twenty years ago, one of the most beloved games of all time got a sequel that wasn't technically a sequel at all.
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