10 years on, and guess what? The game which inspired Halo, still makes Halo 3 look like a pile of vomit by comparison!
Although I've always preferred Goldeneye, Perfect Dark was like Goldeneye 2. More things to do, more options, and some amazing weapons. It was the FPS that FPS have been trying to copy ever since. The amusing thing is, many STILL havn't managed to beat it! Especially with this re-rendered re-make of this brilliant little gem!
Despite some absolutely terrible voice acting and a campaign storyline which is by no means fantastic, the game's multiplayer is still massively fun to this very day. And I'm not even exaggerating.
I played counter-agent today for about 4 hours straight, and I realized that it's a mode I havn't seen a recent game attempt in any exciting fashion. The aim of counter-agent is to stop a real player (random or one of your friends) from making it through one of the missions usually found in the single player campaign. You do this by jumping from enemy to enemy as you get killed, and as you can imagine, the traps and tricks the counter-agent can pull in this mode make it deliciously fun.
And then of course there is the wealth of single or multi-player challenges, some of which feel nearly impossible. Add to that many of the classic stages and weapons from the original Goldeneye, and a weapon that lets you scan through walls and snipe enemies across the other side of the map, DS9 style. I will be playing this for many many months to come, which makes it the best 800 points I ever spent.
One gripe I have was that they didn't go quite far enough with re-touching some of the character models and textures. It still feels quite wooden, and although it's nice for retro memories, it would have been good to have the option of switching between old and new.