Perfect Dark Review

Joanna Dark enters a next-gen combat simulator.

If you’re under 20 years of age, you probably don’t share the fondness some slightly older gamers have for Perfect Dark (unless you were born with an N64 controller in your hands). Those older, most-beloved games from yester-year are always fondly remembered. The thing is, those memories are usually under a heavy dose of nostalgia-laced brownies. You know the ones. Game Revolution may have reviewed Perfect Dark way back when it originally came out, but Rare’s port of the game for Xbox Live Arcade deserves its own shot.

[image1]Perfect Dark still centers around the super spy Leeloo Dallas Joanna Dark, codenamed Perfect Dark for her exceptional test scores. But It’s time to put the scantrons and standardized tests away. Joanna’s employer, the Carrington Institute, is waging a secret war with dataDyne, another megacorporation leveraging its army of inept guards for nefarious deeds in 2023. Joanna’s campaign against dataDyne takes her through the looking glass, as no one is as they seem and organizations are always playing off each other. Whether you’re gunning down dataDyne, FBI, NSA, or even enemies that are out of this world, your mission is to uncover and protect Carrington Institute’s assets.

Rare has upgraded Perfect Dark‘s graphics to match the HD generation. If you’ve ever tried playing a Nintendo 64 game on a modern TV you know what it’s like to play a game with beer goggles on. Buzzed Mario Karting is still drunk Mario Karting, everyone.

Aside from the textural enhancements, Perfect Dark on Xbox Live Arcade also takes advantage of Xbox Live. Eight-player human matches are possible, whereas the Nintendo 64 was limited to its four controller ports. If you wanted to have eight-player matches in the good old days, you had to use the simulants (bots) that come highly customizable in multiplayer games. (Of course, my friends and I put two TVs side by side and yelled at each other like we were playing in the same match.)

[image2]Aside from graphics and Xbox Live, the port remains the same game it was except for the addition of a more hardcore awards system. You could think of these as in-game achievements for completing missions or objectives in extreme conditions.

The controls are new too; you no longer need three hands like you did with the Nintendo 64 controller. Modern controllers now have the benefit of duo analog sticks. In this version of Perfect Dark, the reticle is a little floaty, but everything is balanced to both modernize the gameplay and keep a lot of the feel that makes Perfect Dark an old-school experience. That’s the highest praise I can lavish on this game.

I loved Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64. It turned the volume to 11 from Goldeneye 007‘s 10 (maybe 9). All of the weapons, maps, options, simulants, character skins, missions, and cheats have made the transition, and it’s all so faithful to the original! Remember the Laptop Gun? Remember the Farsight? It’s all here. Nothing was lost in the transition, including the fun quotient in the multiplayer. Booting that up reminds me why all-nighters were so easy back then.

[image3]While I’d love to review the game through my own nostalgia goggles, that’s not what I’m getting paid for (hey, I’m not getting paid at all!). There are some frustrations: Mission objectives can be unclear as is the direction you should be taking through the level. Of course, the fidelity is not going to be on par with any modern game, and Rare could have done more to expand the online options.

I love the fact that you can play split-screen over the Xbox Live, but the game still suffers graphically during this mode. Given how long split-screen has been around, why is this still an issue? It also begs the question as to why Rare doesn’t make hardcore games anymore?

Perfect Dark for Xbox Live Arcade has done exactly what it should do as a port, especially with its mere $10 price point. It retains so much of what made the game fun and entertaining way back when, while still modernizing the controls and multiplayer fare to stand up to modern audiences. New players will find a lot to enjoy and the people who completed speed runs blindfolded will find new layers to enjoy.