Edward's Videogame Obsession #5: Perfect Dark

Probably at about this point, we thought nothing could match our experience with Ocarina of Time, but along came a little shooter called Perfect Dark. This is one of the earliest games that I remember anticipating before it was actually released. We were looking up previews of it online, and what really blew our minds was the sheer amount of weapons in this game. Goldeneye already had a fair share of guns, from AK-47 variants to the fabled Golden Gun, but its unofficial sequel had something like 50 weapons to choose from. These really did live up to the hype. When I make my top videogame weapons of all time list, let me tell you that a shit-ton will be from this game. The most famous of these are the laptop gun and the Farsight. The laptop gun has probably already been described by Daniel somewhere in this blog, considering this gun really sums up his videogame philosophy for some reason, but basically it's a machine gun (that doubles as a laptop!) that you can set up as an automatic turret wherever you want to blast foes while you go about your daily business. The Farsight is an alien weapon that is the ultimate sniper rifle, since it allows you to see and shoot opponents through walls.

I would say out of all Nintendo 64 games, this was the most played by Daniel and me. We played this one from when we bought it until I got a PS2, which was probalby at least two years. This took Jim's love of bots to its farthest possible extent. The customization in the multiplayer was absolutely amazing. You could play with a wide range of bots, ranked by skill level or by the style of play that they exhibited. You could pick whatever weapons you wanted to use. You could pick the style of play. You could pick from a variety of great, great, great levels, including some Goldeneye sequels. You could even pick the music, which was also great. We had our own customized characters in multiplayer mode. Mine was the tall, golden, blonde Mr. Blonde, outfitted in a trenchcoat and standing at least seven feet tall by my estimates. Who did Daniel play as? I'm not sure. Perhaps he can answer.

Perfect Dark had everything we could ever ask for in multiplayer, and to this day it stands as my favorite multiplayer experience of all time. While shooters since this have perfected the gameplay aspect (especially considering shooters weren't exactly great to play on an N64 controller), no one has ever topped the customization. I will admit, the Halo and Call of Duty series have done a great job with this, but again...the lack of bots can't be stressed enough. TimeSplitters came the closest (again, this was basically an unofficial sequel of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, since it was made by a lot of the same crew), especially after TimeSplitters: Future Perfect started showing the individual scores for each player on a team instead of just grouping the team score.

Like Goldeneye, this game had a fun although ultimately unmemorable story mode. Console games had clearly not learned the lessons of Half-Life yet, but that doesn't mean I don't love the single-player campaign too. One of my ultimate goals is to eventually beat this game, since both Greg and I were stuck on the final boss. It probably wasn't that hard, but it was the fact that you had to go through the entire level each time you died on the boss that led us to give up on it (similar to me and Super Mario 64). I'd also like to beat all of the challenges (another great, great aspect of the game) with Daniel someday.

--Edward