dosboot said: Perfect Dark deserves more recognition than being a 'pretty good' game. It is the crowning achievement of old Rare, the crowning achievement of the Nintendo 64, and, in this voter's book, it's the most enjoyable FPS ever made.
I. OK - WHAT IS IT?
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Rare took their previous secret agent game, Goldeneye, and created an original IP spinoff with the same look and feel. This time, the star agent is Joanna Dark and the game takes place in a near future setting. Imagine flying cars, researchers closing in on developing AI lifeforms, and international corporations with large firearm procurement departments. As these types of games are wont to do, you begin with a mission that unexpectedly unfolds into a far grander adventure. In Perfect Dark's case, that involves a conspiracy against the president, first contact with distinct good guy aliens and bad guy aliens, and fighting for the planet's fate.
Joanna Dark has a very loosely referenced backstory, but apparently she is some kind of prodigy when it comes to her occupation (her profile directly from the game contains lines like "Superb reactions. Proficient with a variety of weapons" and "She scored unprecedented achievements in training leading to the creation of a new class of training grade"). She works for the Carrington Institute, which is this world's benevolent megacorp + counter terrorism agency rolled into one. Joanna is the youngest agent produced by the organization but, surprisingly, she's also the most mature and collected figure within the story. As a FPS game, it is pretty clear how Perfect Dark is derived from Goldeneye, but as a sci-fi story about a lady at the forefront of a para-military organization it's also easy to see comparisons with Ghost in the Shell and other sci-fi media.
II. FPS Design
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If there is one thing I will always go to bat for, it might be the FPS gameplay that emerged and evolved from Goldeneye. And Perfect Dark is the best game in that lineage. Doom and Quake started the FPSes off genre
right by giving the player a strong defensive edge. I don't know where FPS designers wandered off to, but it wasn't learning from the innovations created by GE & PD.
Take a look: Perfect Dark is basically "hitscan" enemies from start to finish. But the defensive edge is still there and perhaps stronger than any FPS. Enemies are programmed to take aim via a wide variety of deliberate animations before firing. This gives clear telegraphs that the player can respond to. Shooting an enemy will interrupt whatever they are doing (and there are tactical decisions behind shooting different body parts). It's a very simple concession, but sometimes game designers could use a 101 refresher that if you don't put good concessions in your game then you are creating situations with forced damage. The second concession to the player (and also rarely copied...) is that enemies don't exhaust every last millisecond of their animations to update their aim. So if the player is moving in the right way at the right relative positions, they can avoid enemy fire and transparently understand why they were unharmed. Why hasn't this been copied in FPSes? Who knows, but we can appreciate that Perfect Dark did. And it is a really hard game too! But it does it while being fair and understandable.
You could take these two concessions and reword them slightly into a schema for how Dark Souls enemies are designed, which is a funny aside but if it convinces someone then all the better.
III. The Game is Stacked High with Good Content
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Maybe 99% of people won't care about these academic considerations, but they will care about where Perfect Dark delivers the most: iterating Goldeneye's gameplay with bigger levels, more enemy types, and more weapons. There's thirty-four weapons in this game! I know I'm not exactly talking to a group of Carl Sagans, so let's try to contextualize that big number by comparing it to similar games. Here's an easy way: does your game assign weapons to hotkeys? Then it probably has fewer guns than Perfect Dark.
Let's also appreciate the equipment in this game. Heck, that the game has an inventory system in the first place makes it feel like you are controlling a character and not just a floating gun. One mission gives you the DrugSpy robot, the next starts you with two combat boosts, and the next gives you night vision goggles. It's a typical example of how the game routinely provides special purpose weapons and items with no fanfare and no nose leading (those 3 mission briefings don't mention the optional items, much less recommend where to use them). You are supposed to literally play around with your weapons and items until you find the best strategies.
The game is also a completionist's playground that Sakurai would approve of: there's the 17 main missions (with 3 difficulties a piece to clear, all of which add new objectives) and then 4 more bonus missions. Every mission also has a built in speedrun challenge for you to return to and unlock cheats. Back at HQ, you can knock out a slew of challenges in the firing range - 3 challenges per weapon! There's also 30 combat simulator challenges (against bots of ever increasing difficulty) based on the multiplayer component of the game.
Then there's endless amount of custom challenges you can make for yourself using either the simulator or the regular game. Like Goldeneye, mastering the game gives you the option to adjust enemy health, accuracy and damage. You can also craft unusual 'modded' scenarios on top of this using cheats: give every enemy a shield or a rocket launcher, and then give the player some kind of handicap to balance it out. For example, start yourself with a cloaking device and your pick of one overpowered weapon (from the 'All Weapons' cheat).
After you've exhausted all that,
boot up the credits one last time and let it reach those memorable final words... Perfect Dark is Forever.
I was starting to sweat.
