Perfect Dark

I am a member of a very exclusive club. I bought a Nintendo 64 and didn’t buy Goldeneye. I did play it, but I could just never really get into it. Fast forward a couple of years and a ’spiritual successor’ or sorts came out in the form of Perfect Dark. I didn’t buy it either until it had been out for some time and I could get it for about $18. By that time I was pretty bored, there was nothing on the horizon that I wanted to get, and my friends all told me how great of a game it was.

Perfect Dark stars super-stealthy secret agent Joanna Dark that you have to guide on a series of missions, each more improbable than the last. The game takes place in the future, and quickly evolves from a standard ‘raid some building/complex, kill all the baddies, and rescue [object]‘ to quite the sci-fi story. I won’t give it away, but ‘Elvis’ does make an appearance.

The game is, at its heart, a shooting game with objectives. You run around shooting things, collecting things, avoiding being shot, and and making your way to the point that triggers the next story sequence. One thing I was particularly impressed by was the sheer level of voiceover work in this game. Every cutscene is voiced, well, the ones I managed to see, at any rate. Just about the time I decided to temporarily shelve the game. I fully intended to go back to it some day, but it’s looking less likely as time goes on, unfortunately.

It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but I couldn’t get into it. It might have been the brutal level of difficulty (not likely, I’ve finished other Rare titles before and since), or it might have been due to the bizarre storyline (again, probably not, I’ve played through weirder games before), but, really, I have to attribute it to not being able to muddle through the control scheme. The Nintendo 64 controller just was not the most ideal for playing this type of game.

One Response to “Perfect Dark”

  1. [...] It’s true, I’m one of the few folks that bought a Nintendo 64 and didn’t buy Goldeneye. The game that I heard time and again was the greatest game on the console. The game that I still hear about today when fans talk about what game they’d most like to see on the Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade. Of course, neither of those things is likely to happen, and that suits me fine. [...]

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