Perfect Dark is Rare’s first-person shooter from 2000, and it is the game that took what the studio had learned making a Bond game and built something bigger. It follows Joanna Dark, an agent of the Carrington Institute, a research organization in a sleek near-future world dominated by corporations, as she works to stop a conspiracy by the rival corporation dataDyne. It is the finest shooter on the Nintendo 64 and a serious candidate for the best game on the console.
Joanna
Joanna Dark is a talented young operative with the codename Perfect Dark, and she is the rare video game protagonist of her era who is a character rather than a camera. The story is corporate espionage that turns into something stranger, and it is told with a confidence the genre did not have on consoles in 2000.
The Missions
The single-player campaign is built on objectives, and the objectives change with the difficulty. On the easiest setting a mission is a run to the exit. On the hardest it is a list of tasks, each one demanding a different route and a different approach. That design gives the game a depth that a shooter of its length should not have, and it rewards a player who replays a level as much as one who finishes it.
The Gadgets and Guns
The weapons are the most inventive of their generation. Nearly every gun has a secondary function, some of them absurd and all of them useful, and the gadgets turn stealth into an option rather than a punishment. Rare’s toy-box instinct is everywhere, and it never gets in the way of the shooting.
Multiplayer
The split-screen multiplayer is the reason the game lived in dorm rooms for years. Bots with adjustable personalities, a huge list of modes and options, and cooperative and counter-operative play, where one player takes the campaign and the other plays the enemies, made it the most complete multiplayer package on any console at the time.
The Remaster
A decade after the original, 4J Studios and Rare rebuilt the game for Xbox 360, released in March 2010 through Xbox Live Arcade, with higher-resolution textures and models, a higher frame rate and online multiplayer over Xbox Live. The engine was rewritten from scratch to support the new hardware, but the game plays exactly the same. Some critics called it outdated. Most agreed it was a solid revival, and the remaster is the way to play now.
Where It Falls Short
On the Nintendo 64 the frame rate was the price of the ambition, and the game chugged badly whenever the screen filled. The story’s later turn into science fiction lost some players who had signed up for spycraft. And the controls, brilliant for their time, are of their time.
The Verdict
Perfect Dark is a masterpiece of console design, a game that gave its players more ways to play than anything before it and most things since. The frame rate is forgiven. Everything else is admired.
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