Commenting to feed the algorithm as this came up in my recommended. Excellently worded, spoken, and edited video, with great pacing. Art direction will forever be more important than fidelity as far as games looking good decades from their release. Most proper cell shaded games for example Okami, still look absolutely amazing and play just as well. Dishonored is another good example of art direction over realism I love watching retrospectives of people appreciating games as art and noticing the small details. Thanks for this, I'm now subbed. Fantastic work.
In Zero those fire and reload animations still look absolutely amazing.. makes me want to check it out for myself tbh. And not just cause I'm into cyberpunk and catsuits.
Algorithm comments are always appreciated but ESPECIALLY with this much great insight. I agree about cell shaded stuff, too. I feel it's a bit overdone sometimes but i love seeing it done well.
@@Juwce_86 For the most part, the _animations_ weren't terrible at all. And even the backgrounds weren't terrible at all either. The character models and cutscene animations though, *_oof_* I wish they either committed to the full anime style or just went with realism.
Old dev here trust me, there is a reason why we say character like joana was groundbreaking, most other example are Japanese, and there was a real push from bro publisher to shot down female lead, also all dozens of example pales from the sea of game edited back then ❤ these anecdotes are still in dev interviews from that time. This lead to a massive cultural backlash once someone broke the statu quo, an events that shall not be named
This was the first game I ever played. As a child, like 3 or 4, I watched my uncle’s play and wanted to join so they gave me an unplugged controller. I told my mom and she plugged it in and I managed to kill one of my uncles once. Ever since I’ve loved gaming
while the ads are playing i just wanna say, me and my bro had the best time ever playing perfect dark on n64, we made some stupid custom game one shot kills and poison or something stupid like that, we still talk about that to this day lol gg
I've seen footage! Doesn't really interest me as much as some other huge games all about to release so I doubt I'll look at it anytime soon if at all. Look forward to some other new game coverage soon though!
You do know there is a briefing screen for every objective😂 the game actually did give you context for what to do, it’s just on the intro screen of each mission
Just like GoldenEye64, there is a detailed briefing of objectives in PD64 in the pause menu, which tells you lore about them and the mission and describe them more precisely on how to accomplish them. You can also read about the lore and the PD universe in the Carrington Institute computers. To use the Reaper without too much recoil, you have to crouch. Again, this kind of knowledge can be found on the Carrington Institute shooting range. The issue with PDZ, it's not that it's a bad game (well, it kind of is, IMHO). The issue is that PDZ is way too different from PD64. It suffers from the same issue Deus Ex: Invisible War had, the first game being a much better and classic/masterpiece game, the second one being just average.
Invisible War is the best analogy I've heard as well, besides maybe Mercenaries 2 vs Mercenaries 1 Not necessarily bad games, and you can have a lot of fun with them, but they're crippled by essentially suffering a death by a thousand cuts, and maybe one or two big wounds, that hold them back or severely dampen the experience PDZ isn't a bad game, at least not in the same sense as something like Superman 64 or Ride to Hell: Retribution, it's more than competent and I certainly had a lot of fun with it on its own merits, but it suffers from just about every aspect of it making me think "Perfect Dark did this better" or "Why didn't they just bring back this aspect from the original?"
*Pulls up to the Wendy's drive thru* I agree that Perfect Dark Zero is _not_ a catastrophic video game like some claim it is. It's worth at least a 7/10 rating. What killed it was the name and legacy it carried. I feel like if the game debut as a launch title called "Zero" with no ties to Perfect Dark, people would have remembered it as that one game that felt like it was inspired heavily by Perfect Dark and probably liked it a great deal more, even though it doesn't quite come close to stacking up. PDZ was "death by a thousand cuts," or maybe even "death by 500 cuts and a few huge gashes." In just about every aspect of the design, they go 80% of the way towards a good mechanic or idea or realizing what people wanted from an HD sequel to Perfect Dark, but then completely stumble at the last 20%, either by failing to do anything with what was set down or using some completely broken new mechanic instead, and this winds up being more frustrating than if they just hadn't bothered in the first place. Even the artstyle. The original anime style would have unironically been better instead of this chimera "realism with slight exaggerated features and animation" if they didn't want to just do pure realism. The weapons too: so many of them are nerfed, and so few of them have the same character or overpowered charm, and a certain few (ahem, the Shockwave and Flashbang) are so totally missing the point of what made their N64 counterparts so great (in those instances, the FarSight XR-20 and N-Bomb) that it used to make me actively _angry_ back in the day how they managed to drop the ball so badly, to say nothing of the aggressive focus on "realism" (such as the weapons now having their own weight and only being able to carry a limited number) I also sometimes get some amusement by people saying "Perfect Dark Zero was tonally way sillier than the first game." Typically because they remember a tiny few scenes from PDZ, like the Zhang Li boss fight, and then compare them directly to the most gritty and cyberpunk scenes from PD (and thus not the majority of that game). I've seen that expressed over the years, and I have no idea where people are getting this from. PD feels like a British SyFy Channel movie turned into a video game, taking up heavily from X-Files, James Bond, and Blade Runner but with that very distinctly and charmingly RareWare/British sense of comedy thrown in to keep it from being _too_ dark or grim. PDZ feels more like a grindhouse-style comic book written in protest to the Iraq War, that just happens to end with a wuxia-style boss fight. It's certainly not "dark" but it's way more "grounded" than the first, which has always been _my_ problem with it. I don't want to be in the MENA shooting a realistic AK47 at "troops" who are just a model swap away from being Al-Qaeda insurgents, I want to either be gunning down aliens or sneaking through a corporate-Fascist-looking skyscraper. I don't even care if you throw some electric demigod shooting ki blasts at me, that's certainly well within Rare's sense of dark comedy. Just anything more than what PDZ was trying to be (you had to be into 2000s-era comics, vidya trends, and geopolitics to "get" what it was trying to be) If someone gave Perfect Dark Zero the same treatment that Sonic 06 got with P-06, maybe we'd see its potential shine better. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone cares enough to try.
In regards to not hating / actually like Perfect Dark Zero these days, versus the hate it had originally. I've always felt that problems games have at release start feeling less problematic as time goes by. Mostly because, I think as we get farther away from the launch, the "higher quality" games that it would have been compared to start blurring together. If that makes sense. To me, many games in a whole generation of consoles start feeling less "different", so the games that weren't as good stop feeling as "bad" when compared to other games in that release. I really hated PDZ when it first came out, because the controls felt sluggish, Joanna felt really "teenagery", and it honestly didn't feel like it had anything to do with the original Perfect Dark. She didn't even seem like the same character. But now that there's been more time between PDZ and now then there was PD and PDZ, the differences just feel significantly less noticable.
I want to like PDZ more, and on its own merits, I find it to be a fine, even fun game. The issue is only ever that I can't help but compare it to the original and feel it keeps coming up lesser in almost every regard. The story doesn't bother me at all, even if I would've preferred the more X-Files feel of the first game. It's really everything else around it.
Something about the camera in PD:Z is really nauseating. I haven't played it since I was a kid, but watching your footage, it looks like you're nudging the right stick and the reticle just sliiides past the enemy. You don't seem to be making any minute adjustments to line up your shots, just big drags and strafing.
Yeah I gotta back this up and say I was 12 when this game released and my favorite game before goldeneye was Super Metroid . No one cares who the character is just make it fun and don't focus too much on social points. We want to interesting characters not to be lectured.
Five stars for the video going in-depth. But Zero is an abomination and a huge middle finger to the original game for a lot of reasons. The cheesy music and cartoon-ish style didn't follow the feel and shadowy nature that people loved, especially the last level of Zero. Rare's original intention was to immerse players into a very dark plot on how institutions and corporations made contact with alien life and required the surgical precision of a highly skilled stealth agent to prevent an all out war with extraterrestrials using experimental weapons derived from alien technology. The fact that the Zero team couldn't even connect Caroll's human form with the sentient AI from the original, along with the information lost when Joanna's father was murdered, left a lot to be desired in conjunction to *how* the gameplay felt when players realized it wasn't as ominous as the original. We need a game where you get that "creepy" vibe, venturing into the presence of unknown entities, human clones, and slowly discovering the antagonist's intentions while using advanced gear. That's the feel we want.
*Edit: Sorry for the mini-essay. I just wound up having a lot to say in response* I'm gonna have to disagree a bit with the read of Perfect Dark being an aggressively dark game, especially now that I'm more versed and immersed on British writing and science fiction. PD is a very cheesy game, it's the type of story that would be a SyFy Channel direct to TV movie if it was adapted into film. A lot of the creepiness was the amazing atmosphere it set up and the soundtrack more than anything, and it was suitably zany while also being subtly unsettling in an X-Files sort of way. Trying to make Perfect Dark out to be this grimdark story is exactly why I wasn't at all excited by the idea of Perfect Dark Core and Vengeance, which felt like they completely missed the mark and went with that mid-2000s all-American lust for "dark, edgy, and joyless" over the delightfully British "sardonic, serious but playful" that PD was. Perfect Dark Zero, contrary to the typical opinion that tends to get trotted out, actually suffers by going too far in the _opposite_ direction tonally. It's _too_ gritty, _too_ grounded for what it is. It's a shlocky grindhouse comic book in video game form that devolves into being a crypto Iraq War parody, and then suddenly veers into a _wuxia_ boss battle at the absolute end point. It's the most "Year 2005" game I've ever played, to the point that it feels like Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc" should be playing over the opening cinematic like the iPod commercials. Generally whenever I hear people say "Perfect Dark was dark and gritty, Perfect Dark Zero was a cartoon," I get the idea that what they're comparing the two games are two entirely different scenes: the fight with Zhang Li for PDZ, and the Chicago mission for PD. But the thing is, PD is a game where your closest ally is an unironic Gray alien _named Elvis_ who speaks with a Yoda voice you rescued from an Area 51 modeled exactly off the one from _Independence Day_ and you execute an unironic clone of the US president meant to replace him, and you're kidnapped and brought to a warlike alien's home planet to kill their high priest. And yet somehow _Zero_ was the goofy game? The game where, again, it felt like the devs were more or less trying to make a statement about the Iraq War and the last two missions are basically you in the MENA region with an M16 and AK47 in a _literal_ warlike skirmish complete with the units being called "troops"? The only really unironically goofy part was the final boss, which turns the game from "Perfect Dark Zero" into "Perfect Dark Z" I mentioned in another comment that the biggest issue with Zero wasn't that it was actually an abomination, but in fact that it's actually a _pretty good game at its core_ that is SEVERELY handicapped by several bad decisions ("death by 500 cuts and 3 huge gashes") and the Not!FarSight Shockwave rifle is my go-to symbol for this, in that it's a weapon that goes 80% of the way of bringing back one of the best parts of the original, then drops the ball hard and makes it arguably the worst weapon in the game- that's PDZ, it's "almost" there but fails in just the right ways that makes it more frustrating and disappointing than it should be For example, PDZ was let down by its stylized graphics, which were at this awful point of trying to be cartoony and realistic, but veering way too far towards realism and yet stopping at a point to add vague cartooniness so it's like 90:10, and it just doesn't hold up well, mainly for the character models or animations.
this series has too many "origin stories" - a comic, a prequel 360 game, a GBC game, the new game coming out.... and they all slightly contradict each other. Why can't they just make a sequel? I don't need another origin story.
It's the same problem as the Legend of Zelda where the developers still haven't created a sequel to the NES games after nearly 40 years, and everything is either a prequel or a sequel to a prequel. Though at least in that case, that's kind of the point since it's always a sort of fairy tale legend, not really standard fantasy lore. Here, it just feels like they have no idea of what to do with the story of Perfect Dark other than "Hey, do you wanna know how Joanna became a super spy agent? Do you wanna know again? How about again?" It's not like Joanna's some mythological figure, it feels like a constantly aborted attempt to tell a cyberpunk/conspiracy thriller narrative Also constantly having prequels gives them an excuse to not include aliens or kooky alien weaponry so the story can be taken more "seriously".
Perfect Dark Zero is a mess. The talentless team behind the game attempted to rip off the Timesplitters aesthetic but failed because they lacked the artistic skills. Then they went all in on making levels into massive complex labyrinths that make no sense. Then what is it with the robotic enemy animations? It's just a hodge podge of everything that isn't Perfect Dark.
It's not a mess as much as it is an incomplete game that just so happens to miss the "core" of what Perfect Dark is, and I feel like I figured out the best analogy. There is a weapon in the game called the Shockwave. It's a futuristic sniper rifle that allows you to see through walls as well as shoot high-energy gamma ray bullets. _And yet you're not allowed to_ *shoot* _through walls_ Any Perfect Dark fan knows what this weapon is setting itself up to be, only to stumble _hard_ at the last mile If the gun had simply been nerfed to not be a one-hit kill, that would have been fine, even preferable for balancing reasons (not that "Perfect Dark" and "balanced weapons" really deserve to be used in the same sentence but hey, this was 2005, the HD game era when aggressive "realism" at the expense of "dumb fun" was the name of the game) But instead, the devs completely missed the point of what made the FarSight so cool by going 80% of the way, then stopping there. I remember when I was younger, it was to the point that it's a gun that actively makes me angry whenever I see it in the menu because I always kept thinking "This just makes me want the FarSight." That's Perfect Dark Zero. Functionally, there _is_ a good game here. I fully agree with Evan Prince that it was over-hated and treated as this abomination of a video game that it isn't. But what it _is_ is deeply _frustrating_ because it all the mechanics and even ideas, but fails to commit to that core soul and, as a result, just makes you want to play the original game or an HD remake of it.
To play devil's advocate it had a few good ideas. I even enjoy it's shooting mechanics when they give good combat arenas. Like you said though the majority of stage designs are awful. While the art style is a huge downgrade it at least looks decent for an early 360 game, and has some great locations (the mountains, temples and underwater base have their moments).
28:00 why does it have to be funny to play a morally gray character who guns down american soldiers on some missions? you don't have to work in knots thinking if they are "complicit in alien torture" and thats why the game is letting us feel okay about it, its just... a work of art or fictional with an interesting main character at least for me
My go-to comment: "Perfect Dark is the Boomer Shooter version of Deus Ex and Deus Ex is the Immersive Sim version of Perfect Dark" Maybe the new game will be able to fuse the two? Especially since the Deus Ex series is sort of in dire straits right now
Commenting to feed the algorithm as this came up in my recommended.
Excellently worded, spoken, and edited video, with great pacing.
Art direction will forever be more important than fidelity as far as games looking good decades from their release.
Most proper cell shaded games for example Okami, still look absolutely amazing and play just as well.
Dishonored is another good example of art direction over realism
I love watching retrospectives of people appreciating games as art and noticing the small details.
Thanks for this, I'm now subbed. Fantastic work.
In Zero those fire and reload animations still look absolutely amazing.. makes me want to check it out for myself tbh.
And not just cause I'm into cyberpunk and catsuits.
Algorithm comments are always appreciated but ESPECIALLY with this much great insight.
I agree about cell shaded stuff, too. I feel it's a bit overdone sometimes but i love seeing it done well.
@@Juwce_86 For the most part, the _animations_ weren't terrible at all. And even the backgrounds weren't terrible at all either. The character models and cutscene animations though, *_oof_*
I wish they either committed to the full anime style or just went with realism.
Old dev here trust me, there is a reason why we say character like joana was groundbreaking, most other example are Japanese, and there was a real push from bro publisher to shot down female lead, also all dozens of example pales from the sea of game edited back then ❤ these anecdotes are still in dev interviews from that time. This lead to a massive cultural backlash once someone broke the statu quo, an events that shall not be named
I'm sad I dont have the original case, but I still have a copy of Perfect Dark! Loved playing this in my youth.
I was very surprised that Perfect Dark for GBC had voice for dialogue scenes. Thats is unique for see on the GameBoy Color.
The best game by far! Love the music!
This was the first game I ever played. As a child, like 3 or 4, I watched my uncle’s play and wanted to join so they gave me an unplugged controller. I told my mom and she plugged it in and I managed to kill one of my uncles once. Ever since I’ve loved gaming
thanks
while the ads are playing i just wanna say, me and my bro had the best time ever playing perfect dark on n64, we made some stupid custom game one shot kills and poison or something stupid like that, we still talk about that to this day lol gg
Gotta feed that algorithm.
Algorithm comments are always welcome, king.
New Evan Prince review! Woooo!
Any chance you’ll look at Lollipop Chainsaw? Was a quirky 2012 game and they just released a remaster of it
I've seen footage! Doesn't really interest me as much as some other huge games all about to release so I doubt I'll look at it anytime soon if at all.
Look forward to some other new game coverage soon though!
Yay!
Nostalgic
You do know there is a briefing screen for every objective😂 the game actually did give you context for what to do, it’s just on the intro screen of each mission
Just like GoldenEye64, there is a detailed briefing of objectives in PD64 in the pause menu, which tells you lore about them and the mission and describe them more precisely on how to accomplish them.
You can also read about the lore and the PD universe in the Carrington Institute computers.
To use the Reaper without too much recoil, you have to crouch. Again, this kind of knowledge can be found on the Carrington Institute shooting range.
The issue with PDZ, it's not that it's a bad game (well, it kind of is, IMHO). The issue is that PDZ is way too different from PD64. It suffers from the same issue Deus Ex: Invisible War had, the first game being a much better and classic/masterpiece game, the second one being just average.
Invisible War is the best analogy I've heard as well, besides maybe Mercenaries 2 vs Mercenaries 1
Not necessarily bad games, and you can have a lot of fun with them, but they're crippled by essentially suffering a death by a thousand cuts, and maybe one or two big wounds, that hold them back or severely dampen the experience
PDZ isn't a bad game, at least not in the same sense as something like Superman 64 or Ride to Hell: Retribution, it's more than competent and I certainly had a lot of fun with it on its own merits, but it suffers from just about every aspect of it making me think "Perfect Dark did this better" or "Why didn't they just bring back this aspect from the original?"
*Pulls up to the Wendy's drive thru*
I agree that Perfect Dark Zero is _not_ a catastrophic video game like some claim it is. It's worth at least a 7/10 rating. What killed it was the name and legacy it carried.
I feel like if the game debut as a launch title called "Zero" with no ties to Perfect Dark, people would have remembered it as that one game that felt like it was inspired heavily by Perfect Dark and probably liked it a great deal more, even though it doesn't quite come close to stacking up.
PDZ was "death by a thousand cuts," or maybe even "death by 500 cuts and a few huge gashes." In just about every aspect of the design, they go 80% of the way towards a good mechanic or idea or realizing what people wanted from an HD sequel to Perfect Dark, but then completely stumble at the last 20%, either by failing to do anything with what was set down or using some completely broken new mechanic instead, and this winds up being more frustrating than if they just hadn't bothered in the first place. Even the artstyle. The original anime style would have unironically been better instead of this chimera "realism with slight exaggerated features and animation" if they didn't want to just do pure realism. The weapons too: so many of them are nerfed, and so few of them have the same character or overpowered charm, and a certain few (ahem, the Shockwave and Flashbang) are so totally missing the point of what made their N64 counterparts so great (in those instances, the FarSight XR-20 and N-Bomb) that it used to make me actively _angry_ back in the day how they managed to drop the ball so badly, to say nothing of the aggressive focus on "realism" (such as the weapons now having their own weight and only being able to carry a limited number)
I also sometimes get some amusement by people saying "Perfect Dark Zero was tonally way sillier than the first game." Typically because they remember a tiny few scenes from PDZ, like the Zhang Li boss fight, and then compare them directly to the most gritty and cyberpunk scenes from PD (and thus not the majority of that game). I've seen that expressed over the years, and I have no idea where people are getting this from. PD feels like a British SyFy Channel movie turned into a video game, taking up heavily from X-Files, James Bond, and Blade Runner but with that very distinctly and charmingly RareWare/British sense of comedy thrown in to keep it from being _too_ dark or grim. PDZ feels more like a grindhouse-style comic book written in protest to the Iraq War, that just happens to end with a wuxia-style boss fight. It's certainly not "dark" but it's way more "grounded" than the first, which has always been _my_ problem with it. I don't want to be in the MENA shooting a realistic AK47 at "troops" who are just a model swap away from being Al-Qaeda insurgents, I want to either be gunning down aliens or sneaking through a corporate-Fascist-looking skyscraper. I don't even care if you throw some electric demigod shooting ki blasts at me, that's certainly well within Rare's sense of dark comedy. Just anything more than what PDZ was trying to be (you had to be into 2000s-era comics, vidya trends, and geopolitics to "get" what it was trying to be)
If someone gave Perfect Dark Zero the same treatment that Sonic 06 got with P-06, maybe we'd see its potential shine better. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone cares enough to try.
10:25 She never holds her gun like that in the original game. It's something done for the decompilation.
15:46 Chicago, Illinois 😅. I know we're not the big deal we used to be, but come on now, we're still on a first name basis right 😅
She holds her pistol sideways because she's jamming the gun point blank. It's more natural to tilt your arm
Is this a reupload btw I’m getting Deja vu watching this
It's a compilation, new content available as part there in description
There is no link for that project for PC. Or I'm just not seeing it. Could you add that?
Thanks for pointing that out! I've gone in and added it!
@@evprince thank you
In regards to not hating / actually like Perfect Dark Zero these days, versus the hate it had originally. I've always felt that problems games have at release start feeling less problematic as time goes by. Mostly because, I think as we get farther away from the launch, the "higher quality" games that it would have been compared to start blurring together. If that makes sense.
To me, many games in a whole generation of consoles start feeling less "different", so the games that weren't as good stop feeling as "bad" when compared to other games in that release.
I really hated PDZ when it first came out, because the controls felt sluggish, Joanna felt really "teenagery", and it honestly didn't feel like it had anything to do with the original Perfect Dark. She didn't even seem like the same character. But now that there's been more time between PDZ and now then there was PD and PDZ, the differences just feel significantly less noticable.
I want to like PDZ more, and on its own merits, I find it to be a fine, even fun game.
The issue is only ever that I can't help but compare it to the original and feel it keeps coming up lesser in almost every regard. The story doesn't bother me at all, even if I would've preferred the more X-Files feel of the first game. It's really everything else around it.
Something about the camera in PD:Z is really nauseating. I haven't played it since I was a kid, but watching your footage, it looks like you're nudging the right stick and the reticle just sliiides past the enemy. You don't seem to be making any minute adjustments to line up your shots, just big drags and strafing.
Yeah I gotta back this up and say I was 12 when this game released and my favorite game before goldeneye was Super Metroid . No one cares who the character is just make it fun and don't focus too much on social points. We want to interesting characters not to be lectured.
25:30 You can read in greater detail the specifics of your objectives in the pause menu.
Five stars for the video going in-depth. But Zero is an abomination and a huge middle finger to the original game for a lot of reasons. The cheesy music and cartoon-ish style didn't follow the feel and shadowy nature that people loved, especially the last level of Zero. Rare's original intention was to immerse players into a very dark plot on how institutions and corporations made contact with alien life and required the surgical precision of a highly skilled stealth agent to prevent an all out war with extraterrestrials using experimental weapons derived from alien technology. The fact that the Zero team couldn't even connect Caroll's human form with the sentient AI from the original, along with the information lost when Joanna's father was murdered, left a lot to be desired in conjunction to *how* the gameplay felt when players realized it wasn't as ominous as the original. We need a game where you get that "creepy" vibe, venturing into the presence of unknown entities, human clones, and slowly discovering the antagonist's intentions while using advanced gear. That's the feel we want.
*Edit: Sorry for the mini-essay. I just wound up having a lot to say in response*
I'm gonna have to disagree a bit with the read of Perfect Dark being an aggressively dark game, especially now that I'm more versed and immersed on British writing and science fiction. PD is a very cheesy game, it's the type of story that would be a SyFy Channel direct to TV movie if it was adapted into film. A lot of the creepiness was the amazing atmosphere it set up and the soundtrack more than anything, and it was suitably zany while also being subtly unsettling in an X-Files sort of way. Trying to make Perfect Dark out to be this grimdark story is exactly why I wasn't at all excited by the idea of Perfect Dark Core and Vengeance, which felt like they completely missed the mark and went with that mid-2000s all-American lust for "dark, edgy, and joyless" over the delightfully British "sardonic, serious but playful" that PD was.
Perfect Dark Zero, contrary to the typical opinion that tends to get trotted out, actually suffers by going too far in the _opposite_ direction tonally. It's _too_ gritty, _too_ grounded for what it is. It's a shlocky grindhouse comic book in video game form that devolves into being a crypto Iraq War parody, and then suddenly veers into a _wuxia_ boss battle at the absolute end point. It's the most "Year 2005" game I've ever played, to the point that it feels like Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc" should be playing over the opening cinematic like the iPod commercials.
Generally whenever I hear people say "Perfect Dark was dark and gritty, Perfect Dark Zero was a cartoon," I get the idea that what they're comparing the two games are two entirely different scenes: the fight with Zhang Li for PDZ, and the Chicago mission for PD. But the thing is, PD is a game where your closest ally is an unironic Gray alien _named Elvis_ who speaks with a Yoda voice you rescued from an Area 51 modeled exactly off the one from _Independence Day_ and you execute an unironic clone of the US president meant to replace him, and you're kidnapped and brought to a warlike alien's home planet to kill their high priest.
And yet somehow _Zero_ was the goofy game? The game where, again, it felt like the devs were more or less trying to make a statement about the Iraq War and the last two missions are basically you in the MENA region with an M16 and AK47 in a _literal_ warlike skirmish complete with the units being called "troops"? The only really unironically goofy part was the final boss, which turns the game from "Perfect Dark Zero" into "Perfect Dark Z"
I mentioned in another comment that the biggest issue with Zero wasn't that it was actually an abomination, but in fact that it's actually a _pretty good game at its core_ that is SEVERELY handicapped by several bad decisions ("death by 500 cuts and 3 huge gashes") and the Not!FarSight Shockwave rifle is my go-to symbol for this, in that it's a weapon that goes 80% of the way of bringing back one of the best parts of the original, then drops the ball hard and makes it arguably the worst weapon in the game- that's PDZ, it's "almost" there but fails in just the right ways that makes it more frustrating and disappointing than it should be
For example, PDZ was let down by its stylized graphics, which were at this awful point of trying to be cartoony and realistic, but veering way too far towards realism and yet stopping at a point to add vague cartooniness so it's like 90:10, and it just doesn't hold up well, mainly for the character models or animations.
🍀👑🎲
this series has too many "origin stories" - a comic, a prequel 360 game, a GBC game, the new game coming out.... and they all slightly contradict each other. Why can't they just make a sequel? I don't need another origin story.
It's the same problem as the Legend of Zelda where the developers still haven't created a sequel to the NES games after nearly 40 years, and everything is either a prequel or a sequel to a prequel. Though at least in that case, that's kind of the point since it's always a sort of fairy tale legend, not really standard fantasy lore.
Here, it just feels like they have no idea of what to do with the story of Perfect Dark other than "Hey, do you wanna know how Joanna became a super spy agent? Do you wanna know again? How about again?" It's not like Joanna's some mythological figure, it feels like a constantly aborted attempt to tell a cyberpunk/conspiracy thriller narrative
Also constantly having prequels gives them an excuse to not include aliens or kooky alien weaponry so the story can be taken more "seriously".
"it takes a bit of work to get it running" The reason I stopped gaming on PC
Perfect Dark Zero is a mess. The talentless team behind the game attempted to rip off the Timesplitters aesthetic but failed because they lacked the artistic skills. Then they went all in on making levels into massive complex labyrinths that make no sense. Then what is it with the robotic enemy animations? It's just a hodge podge of everything that isn't Perfect Dark.
It seemed unfinished.
It's not a mess as much as it is an incomplete game that just so happens to miss the "core" of what Perfect Dark is, and I feel like I figured out the best analogy.
There is a weapon in the game called the Shockwave. It's a futuristic sniper rifle that allows you to see through walls as well as shoot high-energy gamma ray bullets.
_And yet you're not allowed to_ *shoot* _through walls_
Any Perfect Dark fan knows what this weapon is setting itself up to be, only to stumble _hard_ at the last mile
If the gun had simply been nerfed to not be a one-hit kill, that would have been fine, even preferable for balancing reasons (not that "Perfect Dark" and "balanced weapons" really deserve to be used in the same sentence but hey, this was 2005, the HD game era when aggressive "realism" at the expense of "dumb fun" was the name of the game)
But instead, the devs completely missed the point of what made the FarSight so cool by going 80% of the way, then stopping there. I remember when I was younger, it was to the point that it's a gun that actively makes me angry whenever I see it in the menu because I always kept thinking "This just makes me want the FarSight."
That's Perfect Dark Zero. Functionally, there _is_ a good game here. I fully agree with Evan Prince that it was over-hated and treated as this abomination of a video game that it isn't.
But what it _is_ is deeply _frustrating_ because it all the mechanics and even ideas, but fails to commit to that core soul and, as a result, just makes you want to play the original game or an HD remake of it.
To play devil's advocate it had a few good ideas. I even enjoy it's shooting mechanics when they give good combat arenas. Like you said though the majority of stage designs are awful. While the art style is a huge downgrade it at least looks decent for an early 360 game, and has some great locations (the mountains, temples and underwater base have their moments).
28:00 why does it have to be funny to play a morally gray character who guns down american soldiers on some missions? you don't have to work in knots thinking if they are "complicit in alien torture" and thats why the game is letting us feel okay about it, its just... a work of art or fictional with an interesting main character at least for me
I hope the new game is way less a shooter and way more an immersive Sim. Perfect dark 64 was much more than a shooter. As much as a 64 game could
Immersive sim would suit the style like a glove for perfect dark.
My go-to comment: "Perfect Dark is the Boomer Shooter version of Deus Ex and Deus Ex is the Immersive Sim version of Perfect Dark"
Maybe the new game will be able to fuse the two? Especially since the Deus Ex series is sort of in dire straits right now
32:15 the craziest part of perfect dark 64 is how it predicted Barrack Obama would become president.