Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark | |
---|---|
Platforms | Xbox Live Arcade, N64 |
Genre | Hard to go back FPS |
Score | 5 |
Buy from Amazon |
Sometimes, nostalgia has the habit of biting back. Hard. Ten years ago,
Perfect Dark was released on the Nintendo 64,
and along with The Legend of
Zelda: Majora's Mask, capped off a great system by pushing it way
past its limits. I gobbled this game up when it was released by
throwing parties in my parent's basement and putting off getting my
driver's license for another month. GoldenEye 007 was a great first-person
shooter, but we were ready for some Perfect Dark.
Ten years
later, and Perfect
Dark is ported to Xbox Live Arcade. I was a bit worried: how would a
pre-Halo first-person shooter play against its modern day brethren? In
my opinion, while GoldenEye was the console shooter breakout hit, Halo
had set the standard for how they should actually play. Its control
scheme is still used to this day, and imagining myself strafing with the
C-buttons gives me the shivers.
For only $10 though, it was a
hard bargain to pass up. Here was a game that I coughed up $59.99 + tax
before I even had a job, I could easily hand over 800 Microsoft
Points for a trip down memory lane. My friend Jim also bought the game,
and we decided to take the journey together, playing through the single
player campaign via online co-op (imagine doing that ten years ago on
the Nintendo 64!). While we had both played the original, I was the
more die-hard fan and had pored countless hours into my multiplayer
character. We started up, with him playing as the lovely Joanna and me
as the blonde no-named sister.
What I hated: Let's start
at a little different spot than usual, because unfortunately, this is
what really stands out from my experience.
First of all, Perfect
Dark was not made for the dual joystick setup. Back in the day on the
Nintendo 64, the controls for first-person shooters were typically set
up a bit different. The left thumbstick moved you forward and back and
rotated you around; the C-buttons let you strafe and look up and down.
This setup breaks up the one stick for moving one stick for looking
scheme that we're so accustomed to today (post-Halo). But with the
C-buttons being only buttons and not a thumbstick, the original setup
was probably ideal for the N64 controller, and the games were designed
to feature less vertical aiming and a liberal dose of auto-aim to
accommodate.
So now 4J Studios was tasked with translating the
older control scheme to the what gamers know and want. So the
thumbsticks do what you would expect, but Perfect Dark was simply not
made for this type of control. Aiming is now incredibly easy, and if
your reticle drifts anywhere near a bad guy you'll pump them full of
bullets as fast as you can hold down the R trigger. And since most bad
guys are hanging out on ground level and right in front of your face
because of the corridor style levels, you can run and gun without any
kind of fear at all. It's kind of pathetic how fast everything dies,
even on the tougher difficulty levels.
Basically I'm complaining
that the original game's difficulty was artificially inflated by the
ancient control scheme, which is very unfortunate. However, further
steps could have been taken to at least make the controls palpable.
Sure, you move around as you would expect, but shooting leaves a lot to
be desired. The right stick allows you to aim, but holding down the
L-trigger allows you to look down the scope or take manual aim. You can
pop in and out of cover with the left stick while holding down the
L-trigger, and move the reticle around in limited motion. This is
completely pointless though as the aiming controls are really finicky.
There's lots of unnecessary give and it feels really floaty.
Speaking
of floaty, I'm sure this has always been this way, but running around
in the game felt... off. I can't really place it, but things feel so
much natural in today's first-person shooters.
My other major
complaint is the level design. The stages are objective based, which is
cool and all, but there is zero direction on what to do or where to
go. The game seems to think you're sneaking around most of the time, so
being seen by a guard has them galloping towards the nearest alarm
system, and sometimes missions will just end for no apparent reason.
One really weird mission had you in running around in some alleys and at
one point you had to avoid being seen by some bots while stealing a
taxi or something. Jim and I had to replay this mission about five times
because none of the objectives made any sense in the context of the
level.
The actual level design also shows off the young age of
console shooters when Perfect Dark was released. They're very spread
out, with unmarked door after unmarked door to keep you busy. There are
lots of small little red buttons to push and long corridors that lead
to dead-ends causing you to backtrack until you activate the right
computer. The submarine level had us running for twenty minutes because we
had no idea what to do next even after we had killed every bad guy and
pressed every button. Kind of sad turning to GameFAQs for a shooter.
Can't
forget to mention the floating box level either, where you had to push a
crate into multiple elevators, around bendy catwalks, and in front of
pits where it could fall back down all the while it was bouncing
around like it was in a pinball machine. I wanted to throw my
controller down in disgust this part pissed me off so much. And then
all you do is shoot at the crate in front of a cracked wall to create a
Zelda-style hole. Couldn't we have just shot at the wall or tossed a
grenade? Ugh.
What I loved: Well, there's still a bit to
love with Rare's original shooter, Perfect Dark is a pretty deep game,
especially considering it first came out in 2000. The game features 17
levels, and they're all pretty much unique and different. While I
mentioned the level design leaves a lot to be desired ten years later,
at the time the levels were huge and awesome. The villa stage has you
exploring a huge estate and shooting out its multiple floors and
basement levels, and then a few minutes later you're running around a
submarine, or Air Force 1. The science fiction premise let the writers
and designers really go crazy. You never see this kind of variety any
more.
There are also a ton of weapons, more than 30 in all, with
secondary fire on all of them. Everyone remembers the laptop gun and
the Farsight, but there were some cool alien weapons I completely forgot
about. After playing through the co-op campaign, I had used all but
two weapons!
Each level is also book-ended with hilariously bad
cutscenes. While the direction of the scenes is decent enough, the
accompanying voice acting is just... bad. All the actors sound so bland
and inflectionless, this is laughable though because it's great to see
how far the industry has come while not immediately affecting my
gameplay experience.
I was a bit torn about the graphics at
first, but I think I really like the upgrade. The Perfect Dark XBLA
port is kind of like playing an older computer game on a brand new
computer with really high resolution textures. The levels look awesome,
if a little blocky, but the character models are just so-so, and the
animations are pathetically bad. Most of the time, however, you're just
interacting with the environments, and so playing this game in
officially supported high definition looks great! The overall graphical
experience is kind of a mixed bag, but like I said, the work into the
textures alone makes up for most of the 10 years of aging.
Scores
Gameplay:
4
Badly translated controls marred my experience with the Perfect
Dark port. I really wanted this to play like my recent experiences with
Halo: Reach or Modern Warfare, but it simply didn't. I
know it was never meant to play like that as it's from a time before the
modern console shooter, but I can wish.
Fun Factor: 5
Perfect
Dark features a ton of gaming modes that will satisfy any number of
available friends, but that doesn't mean you should play it. During the
co-op campaign with my N64-era veteran friend, most of our voice
chatting was about where the next button was and whether we had already
explored this unmarked corridor yet.
Graphics and Sound: 8
The
graphical upgrade is the best part about this port, and the bad
framerate-riddled original can finally be played and enjoyed in the
manner it was meant to be. The music is excellent and the voice acting
is awful, a balance that was not unexpected.
Story: 5
I
seem to remember this being an entertaining romp with aliens and evil
corporations, but it just turned out to be a bit of a mess with anything
important always happening during a cutscene. Even Trevelyan's double
cross in Goldeneye 007 happened outside of a cutscene. The story does
bring you to a heckuva lot of different locations though, which means a
ton of variation in environments. We can at least be thankful for that.
Overall:
5
I loved the original, but something happened over ten years that
almost made me regret ever purchasing the Xbox Live Arcade port. My
advice: unless this will be your first first-person shooter ever, which
is highly unlikely, skip Perfect Dark. If you played it originally on
the Nintendo 64 I would warn you even more against purchasing this.
Nostalgia is a bitch.