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Perfect Dark: 20 Years Later - Kotaku

Perfect Dark: 20 Years Later - Kotaku

Perfect Dark: 20 Years Later - Kotaku
May 23, 2020 2 mins, 11 secs

Twenty years on from release I must acknowledge that, for a classic multiplayer game, Perfect Dark now suffers from a fairly major fault.

But what Perfect Dark does have, beyond even GoldenEye and most other FPS-es, is imagination.

If Rare had revolutionized what a console FPS could be, Perfect Dark was its belated manifesto.

Perfect Dark’s grimy hi-tech vision of the future showed the cinematic influence here is Blade Runner, shiny office buildings rising out of dirty streets.

Wandering around its rooms means meeting a succession of extremely camp British types who coo things such as “Welcome to hacker central.” The writing isn’t inspirational, with Joanna Dark not so much a character in search of an author as a cipher in search of a magazine cover.

Perfect Dark is otherwise po-faced, a microcosm of the duality at this game’s heart.

Perfect Dark, as a game, is hilarious.

Any multiplayer game featuring them degenerates into a race to see who can plant most, quickest – though this time around they at least have a threat detector built in to help out.

Some weapons are there just for the hell of it, like the nerve grenade that turns four-player splitscreen into a black-and-blue smeary mess, or the perfect recreations of GoldenEye guns (with names like PP9i and Klo1313).

The Peacesim abhors violence, and runs around the level trying to collect weapons and ammo before players can get to them.

Multiplayer also includes some insanely time-demanding achievements, which for the top (level one) rank require you to, among other things, kill 18,000 (splitscreen) opponents, win 900 accuracy medals (maximum of one per game), travel 9,000 kilometers in-game (that’s around 5,600 miles), and play for a total time of 12 days and 12 hours.

Like so much of Perfect Dark, it’s partly a joke and partly hubris.

Most of the ideas and innovations of Perfect Dark are in multiplayer, but there are also gems in the underrated singleplayer campaign.

There’s a block of cheese in every other level of the game, too, for no particular reason.

The cheats, unlocked with timed level runs, run the usual gamut: a Big Head (DK) mode, Small Jo mode, Heads Only mode, and Marquis of Queensbury rules.

This blacks out the level, but gives you night-vision goggles – perfect for some user-controlled rockets...

As with so many other of Perfect Dark’s big ideas, it falls just short of greatness, but is good enough that your imagination can fill-in the gaps.

There’s real character in Perfect Dark, but it’s nothing to do with its heroine.

But Perfect Dark never needed to worry about the future anyway.

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