Back in the mists of time there is a FPS game that sprang to life on a console known as the N64...Perfect Dark...
As i was saying Perfect Dark is a first-person shooter (or a FPS if you like) made by Rare for the N64. Back in the day it was seen as the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007 which was also a FPS game made by Rare. Unlike Goldeneye the lead is played by a woman and the setting for Perfect Dark is that of the future. But many of the things that made the past game goldeneye so good stuck around to make Perfect Dark an even better game.
Before i cover the story i will take a dive into the gameplay...Perfect Dark features many elements that are typical of a FPS game. Including a range of weapons to collect, enemies to defeat and distinct environments to explore. Not only that but like the past game that rare made (Goldeneye) the player could use stealth to tackle missions, and objectives would vary with the difficulty setting that the player could pick from. This being a FPS game it is going to have its fair amount of weapons for the player to use...Thes range from handguns, rifles, submachine guns, a shotgun, rocket launchers, combat knives, grenade launchers, various explosives, and several extraterrestrial weapons. One of said extraterrestrial weapons had the cool ability to see and shoot people through walls...A very very fun weapon to use in the multiplayer mode...But i will not be covering that here...
In Perfect Dark the player controls Joanna through a series of levels collected together into missions. In each level, the player must complete certain objectives and then exit the stage. The requirements are varied, with many levels requiring the recovery and use of numerous high-tech gadgets. If you fail an objective or die at anypoint during the mission then you will have to start the level again. The player can set the levels to three distinct difficulty settings these are Agent, Special Agent or Perfect Agent. This will change the game in a way to make it harder for the player to beat the level but as i said before you will have to do extra objectives to move on.
Perfect Dark also has a co-operative mode in which two players, or one player and up to three computer-controlled players, tackle the missions together. If two humans play, the game uses a split screen display, with the option to split horizontally or vertically. Only one human player is required to survive the mission, although all the objectives must still be completed. Not only that but the game also has a Counter Op mode in which one player plays the missions as Joanna while the other takes over the role of an enemy including their weaponry and low health and attempts to stop her. The Counter Op player takes control of another enemy if they are killed. This mode is one of the modes that drew me in as i think it was the first time i had seen a mode like it.
Now with the gameplay out of the way i will take a look at the plot of Perfect Dark. The year is 2023 and there is a war going on between two alien races. The Maians, who resemble the stereotypical grey alien; and the Skedar, reptile-like extraterrestrials who can disguise themselves as Scandinavian humans. Meanwhile on Earth, there is an on-going rivalry between two factions. The Carrington Institute who are working with the Maians and the dataDyne who secretly made a deal with a group of Scandinavians. They agreed to assist them in constructing an AI to crack the codes of a "Cetan" alien ship buried on the ocean floor. In return, the Scandinavians promised to supply them with enough alien technology to become the biggest corporation on Earth.
You are cast in the role of Joanna Dark, an agent of the Carrington Institute, whose impeccable scores in training have earned her the codename "Perfect Dark". On your first mission you are sent to rescue a scientist named Dr. Caroll from the dataDyne skyscraper. It is revealed that Dr. Caroll is in fact the AI created by dataDyne, who felt that dataDyne had betrayed ethical and moral standards....
That is where the story for you the reader ends as you will have to dive in yourself to see how it all works out.
Perfect Dark came out for the Nintendo 64 in north america on May 22, 2000 and in PAL regions on June 30, 2000.
This is one of the games that i would always go back to back in the day and to this day i still play from time to time. Even if gaming has moved on some games are worth playing again and again and Perfect Dark is such a game. If you have a N64 and do not have this game...hunt it down you will not regret it at all.