If you liked Goldeneye and don't have Perfect Dark yet, I oughta hit you. Hard.

But let's begin at the beginning: when Goldeneye came out all them years ago, it was quite the unique creature. It didn't really have a ton of critical praise - not that it was being bashed by the critics, but it just didn't make huge waves. It was "just another good game". And marketing wise, the only real thing the game had for it was the James Bond license and in that case, things were even more dubious considering how licensed games turn out most of the time.

But despite all that, about 99.9% of N64 gamers consider the game to be one of the most seminal titles on the system. And arguably, critics should have thought so too. After all, this was a title that took the more strategic, almost realistic approach to first-person shooters before Half Life came out and kicked the genre's collective ass. Goldeneye went out and said: "Hey, you can do more with the Single Player missions in a FPS than just collecting red and blue keys." But, possibly because it was made on a console instead of a PC, Goldeneye never really got the respect it deserved from anyone other than n64 gamers.

The game also had the BEST deathmatch on a console at the time. Turok who? Quake what? Goldeneye was the best of it's kind for a long time...

And now we have Perfect Dark, the follow up. And how natural that the "sequel" should take the original's mantle?

Not a sequel in the truest sense, due to the disappearance of the Bond license, Perfect Dark follows the adventures of seminal hottie and covert agent extraordinaire Joanna Dark. I could go into an entirely new article about how hot Joanna is (watch the Perfect Dark commercials and try not to drool), and how she is to first-person shooters as Reiko Nagase is to racers, but I'll hold back on that. Joanna works for the Carrington Institute, a private operated and owned joint that does all sorts of corporate espionage and other sorts of uncanny stuff. There's no real sense in getting too deep about the games story, since it's about as important to Perfect Dark as a story is to a John Woo movie, but the cinemas and entire atmosphere of the game really helps pull you in. The game even has a training area taking place within the institute, where you can go through the paces if your Goldeneye tactics are a little rusty.

Perfect Dark isn't really a huge graphical leap from Goldeneye in the strictest sense; it looks better, but not so good that you're going to go "GAH!". There are tons of little things that were done that makes the game shine better though, such as improved lighting (this is actually both a gameplay mechanic and a graphical thing), better textures, better looking explosions. It's like they took Goldeneye, which already had the N64's graphic knob turned up to 10, and put it on 12. My personal favorite, however, is the added animation for the character models. No more stiff as all hades death animations for your enemies--they now die in style. If you shoot someone whos teetering over the railing of a fire escape, they'll fall over the railing and hit the ground. This may not seem like a big deal to anyone who plays a lot of PC first-person shooters, but it really adds an extra bit of personality that Goldeneye was missing.

Speaking of personality, Perfect Dark's sound is full of it. The music, while not phenomenal, has a kick to it that will make you actually leave it on instead of turning it down and playing your own. But Perfect Dark's greatest aural strength is it's sound effects and voice. The guns, explosions, footsteps, and other sound effects all sound great even with the 64's less than amazing sound capabilities. As for the voices... well, the cinemas aren't exactly Metal Gear Solid, but they're nowhere near Resident Evil quality crud. But the best part is the screams of anguish that your enemies give out while you blast them away. I never thought I would hear someone gurgle "bitch" as I blow them away from a Nintendo game. Fantastic.

But not only do they give great death screams, the enemies also shout out orders at each other and taunts at you. This little bit underlies one of the key gameplay improvements made in Perfect Dark; better enemy AI. Enemies will run to get reinforcements, sound alarms, and basically do anything in their power to gun you down. Of special note are the enemies who are equipped with stealth technology: they'll vanish from the screen, then re appear behind you and try and blast you away. So you're only chance is to be facing them when they show up, otherwise you're toast. The only real oddity is that the enemies seem a lot less sensitive to sound in Perfect Dark than they did in Goldeneye. If you fired your PPK into a guard's head without a silencer in Goldeye, and there was someone in the next room over, they'd run in to check and see what happened. But in Perfect Dark, you can take out a guard full John Woo style with both guns blazing, and as long as there's no other guards in the immediate vicinity, there won't be any reprucussions. An odd development, but forgivable in the face of how much the enemies have improved otherwise.

The weapons too, have been upped from Goldeneye. While the majority still fall into the Single Shot/Rapid Fire/Grenade/Rocket system, the addition of the alternate firing modes really really adds extra depth. Your rifle just run out of bullets? Well enter alternate fire mode, and you can use grenades. Not only that, but several of the new weapons kick ass in new, untold ways. For example, two of my personal favorites: The Farsight, and the N-Bomb. The Farsight is an alien laser cannon that lets you scan through walls, and snipe your enemy from a distance. Now this might sound all too powerful, but since this is Rare, there is balance, which comes in the form that it's a hellaciously hard to aim and sometimes it can be hard to find your foe. The N-Bomb is an explosive device that creates something that can be described as a miniature black hole: if you get inside, you take damage. But of more worry than any damage you might take is that, even after the explosion is gone, it effects your vision. Things are insanely blurry and dark, making moving a major task, much less aiming or shooting at anyone. This is an effect that is also employed to make the weaponless combat aspect of Perfect Dark more potent, because in Goldeneye, if you were unarmed you were screwed. In Perfect Dark, however, you could get lucky and manage to stagger your enemy long enough to disarm them with your alternate fire mode for your punches. Weapon design doesn't get much better than this kiddies.

Single player missions are of standard golden quality. While none of them are really that much more outstanding than anything you had to do in Goldeneye, they seem more refined somehow. As always, a wide variety of mission based objectives (rescue, escort, save the hostages, recon, et all) keep the single player from getting stale. Some of the later levels even dip into a bit of Acclaim's territory, with you boarding an alien spaceship and having to take on a race of creatures who can't quite be described as human in any sense. As with Goldeneye, Rare has also been sadistic enough to include an extra set of insanely hard mission goals for those of you who decide to raise the diffuculty level up from regular Agent mode. Expect this game to keep you busy for a while.

But arguably the biggest improvement in Perfect Dark is now the multitude of multiplayer additions. While Goldeneye had a barebones multiplayer that still made it king of the console deathmatch, Perfect Dark has it with all the fixins. You have a ton of new modes to play in, including but not limited to: Capture the Flag (or Briefcase, rather), King of the Kill, Hacker Cenral (a personal favorite in which you have to download a virus into a computer terminal located somewhere on the stage without getting killed), and many others. New multiplayer levels are well put together, some of them surpassing the high standards set in GE. You can also customize your player model (or team, as it would be) which adds a bit of extra flavor.

But probably the biggest addition is that of "Simulants", AI controlled Multiplayer characters which are typically referred to as bots. The bots in Perfect Dark are very well done, because not only can you choose how difficult they are, but you can also take pick of any number of how they act. Want a bot that'll hunt you down like a dog if you so much as look at him badly? Pick a VengeSim. Want one that'll go the way of the Lemming, as long as he takes you down too? Try a KazeSim. These bots add a capacity for some almost Team Fortress-like multiplayer games. A very, very good thing. Of course, Rare refused to make things easy for you by allowing you to access these groovy options form the outset, as you'll have undergo several pre-set challenges in which you engage Simulants in order to earn your multiplayer goodies, making a game with arguably the longest half life of any title of this generation have even MORE replay value.

The only real universal complaint I've heard about Perfect Dark is the frame rate. I quite personally don't see what the big deal is. It's no worse than it ever was in Goldeneye, in fact, I think it's a bit better. I guess folks used to playing deathmatches over high speed modems with no ping, clipping, or slowdown just can't take their game down a notch...but for those of us who aren't (aka those of us who aren't rich or college students) Perfect Dark's framerate'll suit us just fine. What really bugs me is when people who went ape-nuts over Turok 2 start complaining about Perfect Dark's framerate, but que sera sera.

In the end, Perfect Dark is everything thatGoldeneye was, and then some. And that's saying a lot. It's because of titles like this, that no matter how much 3rd party support they lose, or how many cash cow Pokémon games they make, or how many "kiddie" platformers they pop out that Nintendo (and Rare subsequently) will always kick ass. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go slaughter a hapless team of simulants.

· · · Riisuke