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The plot becomes a lot more convoluted from this point on. Fun fact: he was modeled after notorious Nintendo fanboy Robin Williams on the Nintendo 64 version of the game. After dealing with those problems on the ground level, you would then go to the mansion’s basement in order to rescue your boss, Daniel Carrington, this game’s equivalent to 007’s M. Taking care of objectives, such as killing the snipers on the rooftops, or getting rid of the DataDyne hackers, is a lot less linear than any other Perfect Dark level.
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After either rescuing a negotiator by sniping down a couple of soldiers or taking care of them with your bare fists, depending on the difficulty, you basically had an open level at your disposal. Without a doubt, one of the best-designed levels in FPS history. The fourth level, Carrington Villa, is the game’s highlight. You also had to protect and escort an NPC throughout the entire level, which was a lot less annoying than having to deal with Natalya back in GoldenEye.
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This was the first mission that taught you how to deal with the game’s impressive lighting effects, as you had to use night vision goggles in order to see what was in front of you. Carroll, who was actually a sentient flying laptop, while the third mission was set in the same environment as the first one, with you being forced to go to the top floor of the DataDyne building during a security blackout. The second mission would make you explore a hidden underground lab in order to rescue Dr. It was the perfect introductory level, a safe place that allowed you to freely explore its corridors, but not complicated enough that would make you get lost.
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A huge commercial skyscraper in which you were free to explore its top four floors, as well as the ground level, was full of easy objectives to complete, soldiers to get rid of, and one annoying Cassandra De Vries to punch in order to acquire a key card. The first mission, DataDyne Central: Defection, was much more detailed and layered than any other mission featured in GoldenEye.
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That was just a small sample of what Rare had in stock. That iconic intro cinematic featuring the Nintendo 64 logo slowly turning into the game’s logo, accompanied by a then-revolutionary surround sound effect, was the single most impressive thing you could find on Nintendo’s console back in the day. Perfect Dark was one of those games that wanted to impress you even before it started. An introductory level as iconic as World 1-1 or Green Hill Zone, in my humble opinion. This retrospective contains spoilers for this twenty year-old game. Let’s take a closer look at this masterpiece, but for the purposes of gathering screenshots in an easier manner, I’ll be using footage from the 2010 remaster released for the Xbox 360.
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A game that pushed the N64’s hardware to such ludicrous levels that it forced people to own the RAM expansion pak in order to run properly. It was a game that pushed boundaries in terms of graphics, lighting effects, gameplay, and most impressively, the amount of content included in a mere 32MB of data. It was, for a brief period of time, the single most technically advanced game ever released. It’s hard to even figure out where to start when talking about a game as important as Perfect Dark. That game was Perfect Dark, a game that, despite far from flawless, quickly became my favorite game of all time, which is now twenty years old. It was a sequel to the juggernaut hit GoldenEye, but instead of being another James Bond game, it was a brand new IP set in a cyberpunk depiction of the then-distant year of 2023, starring a female spy named after a French war hero, Joanna Dark. It was my seventh birthday and one of the gifts I gotten from my parents was this brand new Nintendo 64 game that had just been released. I still remember as if it were yesterday.
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