lagued with delays, long awaited and long overdue, Perfect Dark has finally arrived. It's the follow-up to the smash hit Goldeneye 007, which still garners praise as the best first-person sneaky shooter on any console. On a technical level, Perfect Dark surpasses its predecessor with more sophisticated artificial intelligence, superior lighting and sound effects (Dolby Surround, no less) plus "secondary firing" features for about 35 weapons--some conventional and some space-age armaments of heroic disproportion. Plus it remains true to the immersive, story-driven game-play of a first-person James Bond in a Blade Runner world.
Lead heroine Joanna Dark is a stealthy secret agent/tactician with a license to kill, a sanction that she uses extremely liberally--and graphically. This game rates a "mature" warning, although the bloodletting can be toned down to a charmingly colorful "paint ball" festival in lieu of splattered gore.
Interactive characters range from a Sean Connery-esque Chief of the "Carrington Institute" (like the CIA without the A), to generic co-workers, to full-fledged "Simulants"--computer-generated people that train, aid or do multiplayer battle with Ms. Dark. On the nemesis side lurk master evil schemers and their hordes of dime-a-dozen hired thugs whose guns are prone to jamming in the middle of a firefight. Ms. Dark frequently strolls up to such thugs and lets them whine for a while about their misfortunes before plugging them with a bit of lead or plasma or, better still, slapping them silly.
More importantly, enemies get more elaborate as the game progresses. Clearly "borrowing" from the X-Files, Perfect Dark involves an alien invasion conspiracy--complete with a good-guy alien sidekick, a Grey called Elvis. Eventually Ms. Dark encounters freaky-looking space monsters that are as eager to attack her with their vicious claws as they are willing to barrage her from a distance with nasty alien weaponry.
The final encounter with the alien Skedar boss--which actually unlocks a few more special mission levels and options--offers a classic showdown finale on a far-off planet. An epic action adventure in every sense, it's complete with the one-woman war machine motif first made famous by Sigourney Weaver.
High action, low speed
Let's face it: The N64 is a near-dead horse that Nintendo continues to flog as a competitive machine. Games with game-play of this amazing calibre do well to emphasize that game-play is more important than graphics razzle-dazzle. Despite the comparatively paltry number of games available on the N64, titles like this one excel enough to make the whole system worth recommending … reluctantly.
Perfect Dark is not a perfect game. Although it had a prolonged stay under wraps as developers at Rare tweaked it, the game reached a point where ambition exceeded the tools in hand. Even with the Expansion Pak--Nintendo's ram-boosting add-on--the high-intensity action elements cause play to suffer dramatically. Frame rate bogs down to slide-show speed in the heat of battle. "Collision priority" problems often find the player walking on air or hung up on a nonexistent obstacle. Also, there are innumerable inconsistencies in dialogue, plot development and explanation, as if such details remained on the back burners right up until launch.
Had Perfect Dark come out a couple of years ago as was originally intended, such flaws would have been more understandable. But stalling the launch in the hope of wringing superpowers from a fading console simply reaffirmed that Rare is a first-rate game developer while the N64 is a 64-lb. weakling.
Still, for those who already own an N64, the blocky, hazy graphics and frame-rate sluggishness can be forgiven. Perfect Dark immerses players in an intricate series of commando missions of seek-and-discover, sneak-and-destroy and tiptoe through the rampage. Repeat play is offered by increasingly difficult settings, along with added objectives and hidden bonus levels, plus a variety of multiplayer modes: cooperative mini-missions, flat-out death matches or variants. All by itself, Perfect Dark justifies owning an N64, or even buying an N64 at this extremely late date.
