What's So Great About Perfect Dark? - A Bright Future for First Person Shooters
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- Опубликовано: 28 авг 2024
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#perfectdark #gaming #retrospective
People often shower Goldeneye with praise, but Perfect Dark is just better.
Goldeneye is like GTA 3, it laid the groundwork.
Perfect Dark is like GTA Vice City, it capitalized on the previous groundwork and improved every aspect of it.
Yes!
@@TVans-vs3gn I would further add that Halo is to Perfect Dark what GTA San Andreas is to Vice City.
PD is even more like VC and San Andreas in one.
@@PhantronI think of Halo as the San Andreas of the 3.
@@Spiqaro Halo is a compleeetely different game
I appreciated the fact that in multiplayer, you could create computer controlled enemies with different fighting styles (e.g. vendetta sim, pacifist sim, etc.)
Oh, the hours of play I put into this game. I wish someone gave it the "Metroid Prime Remastered" treatment it deserves.
@Spiqaro, They did remaster Perfect Dark on Xbox 360 for XBLA.
You can play it Xbox One and Xbox Series X consoles too. Definitely a better remaster than the lazy one Goldeneye 007 got on Xbox and especially Switch.
@@Gruntvc I want them to update the graphics to today's standards.
the homies and i used to design some absolutely insane multiplayer matches with some wild sims lol. so much fun
Vendetta sim were the worst when I remember right
Can't talk about this game without also mentioning how incredible the soundtrack is!
I got the full 2 hour soundtrack on my phone, im a truck driver so i listen to it all the time. Never gets old
@@Dannzt Now, every time I'll see a semi, I will have the thought that they just might be listening to the Perfect Dark OST.
I'm curious to know any other N64 soundtrack you might listen to...
People forget about the more subtle things that perfect dark achieved such as full reload animations for each gun, the ability to give multiplayer AI personalities, the ability to add up to 8 AI players along with 4 human players made multiplayer matches feel like online matches before that was even heard of, and the ability to customize your multiplayer avatar!
Rare did all that on hardware that was at the time starting to age, since the Dreamcast had been released 2 years prior, the PS2 was about to be released, and the OG Xbox was announced - Halo and the Xbox weren't released until 2001. It's impressive what Rare was able to achieve with Perfect Dark, and now that gameplay of the new PD reboot (developed by The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics to be published by Microsoft Game Studios) has been released, the same hype I felt 24 years ago is what I feel with the new PD game.
@@ResidentWeevil2077 I hope they bring a good portion of the OG guns back. Or at least some form of them. If there's no laptop gun, I'm going to be pissed 😂.
@@ResidentWeevil2077 also, they should bring Co-Op and counter-op back. And allow us to explore the Carrington institute or whatever the new base will be. Just bring back the nostalgia and what made the OG game a masterpiece. But give it the new 2024 flare. That's what I would do if I was director of this game.
@@kjblade11 the laptop gun was the most interesting weapon in the game, as was the Farsight XR-20.
@@kjblade11 they've already made one major change to how the new game begins: Joanna seems to be working for dataDyne, and is hunting for Daniel Carrington. This is in the new gameplay trailer, so it isn't spoiler-ish. They also seem to have greatly expanded the stealth mechanics and possibly have added some parkour to the game, which would make sense in a spy-based FPS.
This is still my favorite console first person shooter. So ahead of it's time, and the objective based gameplay is still fresh to this day. I hope the new perfect dark captures what this game got right.
It won’t
Came here to say this. @@GeorgeZimmermen
No FPS has surpassed Perfect Dark for its sheer wealth of options of ways to play.
Totally agree
The Timesplitters games definitely compete with Perfect Dark in that aspect. You can create levels and games modes with literal hundreds of different modifiers.
@@SolidSnake240 this is true, timesplitters is another game on-par with perfect dark, especially future-perfect.
I think something that's not considered in the conversation is that GE/PD/TS2 form their own 'subgenre' of shooter. I call this subgenre a 'Gauntlet Shooter', and I feel it has a LOT of untapped potential as an idea. Allow me to explain:
What makes a Gauntlet Shooter?
On its face, the core feature of 'Gauntlet Shooter' is that of expanding levels based on difficulty. You are incentivized to play on higher difficulties by being given more raw things to do - the amount of places you can physically go increase, as do the goals, giving you more actual challenges. For example, in Timesplitters 2 the first level works as follows:
Easy - Go from one side of the facility to the other, and leave
Medium - Go from one side of the facility to the other, fight your way BACK through zombies, and leave
Hard - Go from one side of the facility to the other, fight your way BACK through zombies, and fight a helicopter on the top of the dam, and leave.
The Second feature, to help facilitate challenge, is that you DO NOT GAIN HEALTH BACK. Unlike games of yore where you could restore health, and later games where it just recharged, a 'Gauntlet Shooter' has constantly draining health as you get injured, with no way to restore it. You DO get armor, but unlike most games (where you still lose health, but fraction of the damage goes to the armor), armor in a Gauntlet Shooter acts as your health. This makes the game much more stringent about resource management and not getting shot.
To balance this, you have a collection of other small features.
1 - as difficulty increases, more physical enemies appear (rather than just changing their numeric damage values), presenting more actual opportunities to be killed. Enemies don't get tougher, rather more enemies appear to fill out the expanded level.
2 -ALL weapons are projectile based, not hitscan. This allows both you and enemy alike, to successfully dodge anything shot at you.
3 - Weapon aiming is decoupled entirely from the camera - this allows the player to perform extremely tricky shots while maintaining maximum speed.
4 - Head and limbshots are special because of the decoupled gun aiming. Limbs cause the enemy (in most cases) to stagger, and headshots ALWAYS kill.
5 - Enemies stagger a bit upon noticing you, and on easier difficulties, before firing. **This was more of a balance feature for the low framerates back in the day**, but, it serves as a balance to orient the decoupled aiming camera.
The core gameplay of the Gauntlet Shooter is thus a resource-management game that rewards good players with more things to do rather than trinkets. Levels become a 'gauntlet' in which you must manage your health and plan out how you will approach every room. Extremely skilled players turn each level into a dance of precision, pulling off incredibly difficult one-taps on enemies as they move around at the speed of Doomguy.
This is an extinct subgenre that NEEDS to come back.
Interesting idea and I see what you are saying, although both GE and PD don’t match several of what you are suggesting are core features of gauntlet shooters
listening to the soundtracks makes me instantly feel my childhood again
Same!
Perfect Dark is a work of art!
I feel the same about Jet Force Gemini and Kameo
The best FPS of all time, even to this day! I am so glad I bought back in the day and dis so by accident after thinking some images inside a gaming magazine were from the game. Even if it was a mistake, it is one of my best mistakes ever, I love this game so much! I can't even begin writing about the amazing things it does, because they are too many!
I STILL am amazed that in the second mission, in the first 2 difficulty levels, you start as a sniper trying to save the negotiator who is a hostage, but in the 3rd and hardest difficulty setting, you start AS the hostage and there is a voice line for this change on the game as well, mentioning that you knew it was a setup and you couldn't risk an innocent life!
Such an amazing game, it stands entire LEAGUES above the rest of the FPS titles, even today! It is one of the very few games that I can easily and without any doubt say it is worthy of a 100/100 score, hell even a 1,000/1,000 score (even though it's not perfect).
THIS is how magical this game is and it remains like that even to this day! I'd rather play PD64 than play amy of the Battlefields, Halos, CoDs, Armas, Deus Exs, etc...
Oh, the memories!
Bwahahahahahaha! Cry more!
Still, the best FPS game ever made.
I like the Halo trilogy more than anything else but I would agree that I like PD as my no.2.
By 2000 there was loads of other great games out there but the design and music in PD is something else. often underrated title. Great video brother man
I feel like when it comes to the battle between Playstation and N64, Rareware is the deciding factor. N64 wins because of this game developer.
For consoles only, Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor Underground were pretty much the only solid PS1 FPS exclusives trying to compete with Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark.
I liked both MOH games, but Perfect Dark was the better FPS.
Aliens, sci-fi, area 51, spy espionage, shapeshifting reptilians, conspiracies. Fug I love that game so much.
I loved Goldeneye 007, but once Perfect Dark came out? It became my favorite N64 FPS. So much content on that one cartridge it puts many modern games to shame.
The Xbox 360 Remaster for Perfect Dark was great too. Be nice if it came to pc and Switch too.
I'd like to see a new AA/AAA FPS follow the design of Perfect Dark/Timesplitters.
Maybe do a video on Black 2006 for PS2/Xbox. Pretty impressive for a late console release.
Goldeneye got all the fame and glory, but Perfect Dark was oh so much better. And then of course the team that made this then became Free Radical and gave us the first-person shooter perfection that is Timesplitters 😍
My fave N64 game I still play it to this day
I love the pc port. I think it's a decompilation. It's awesome
This game had such an impact on me as a young teen. I was blown away by just how ahead of its time it was. My friends and I spent endless hours playing through every bit of content it had, from the co-op, counter op, to the amazing FFA multiplayer modes. This game sent the bar for my expectations to what an FPS should bring to the table. Sadly very few titles have measured up over the years. Halo feels like the best potential successor but it's had it's ups and downs.
It really wasn’t “ahead of its time”. It was in its time. It wasn’t doing much new things, just a slight improvement on its predecessor and regressed in many ways as well
@@GeorgeZimmermenGoldenEye single-handedly made FPS viable on console. Perfect Dark then added a multiplayer mode that was leagues ahead of its time, with bots, team commands, large weapon variety, secondary firing and many options to customize matches. Unseen up until that point. It set the bar for all future FPS games to come. There's a reason these games are so fondly remembered and subject of countless retrospectives.
@@desamster games like quake and other pc shooters were doing bots way before perfect dark. Maybe for consoles this was true, but perfect dark was a game of its time
All they did in the game should be a standard for FPS games. The amount of work Rare and their company put into it will never really be beat. It's worth a play, even today, with the de-compiled release for PC with native mouse and keyboard support - seriously, find it and play it. It's free to get now and reverse engineered for PC support.
The game is still difficult on the highest difficulties and challenge 29 is still as much absolute hell as I remember it being as a kid lol
But Rares' team in 2000 had done such a flawless job that... no company today will ever be able to remotely replicate the amount of worth and time put into a properly soul-infused project.
My guess for how they did the reflections in the Institute's floor is by mirroring the geometry, softly tapering off its visibility and making the floor semi transparent. This effect can also be seen in puddles in Chicago. I was fascinated by graphical effects and creative solutions under technical limitations. It started my interest in 3D. Looks like they also added shadows in vertex information as well as a "grid" shadow texture in select places. At 6:36, the sharp vertex info shadows seem to respect the sun's position, but the grid texture on the wall looks like it's been shadowed from straight-on, rather than at the sun's angle.
I’ve been to Chicago twice. Can confirm this is how puddles work there.
@@jamesbrincefield9879 I knew it! Great, next, please report from Carrington Institute's floor.
Remember coming up with the strategy to close ny eyes and just listen to the sounds at the firing range. My mates went crazy when I did some of them blindfolded. Good times!
Damn... I've just found this channel which seems like a genuine treasure trove about some of the best 'retro' games that still fill me with nostalgia from playing in my childhood.
Keep it up - you've found yourself a new subscriber (especially from a very avid gamer) 🙂
This is a truly amazing game. The story, the art style, the music. Everything is great!
Loved this on n64 and recently replayed it on game pass, great video, love to see this underrated gem get more and more recognition
Playing the PC port, this game has a lot of content!
This game was an immediate purchased back when it released on XBLA. Still have the cartridge for N64 as well, my brother was better at getting the times for cheats than i was.
I love this game. I stood in line to get it at EB games
"Perfect Dark is Forever."
Late N64 releases like Conker's Bad Fur Day pushed the system to the point of framerate losses, and Perfect Dark is no exception. But that is nothing compared to what Rare managed to do with this game.
Every system was better but Rare just decided to do their shit, or should I say those who worked there then, and just mashed out hits. We don't see that anymore.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. Nowadays half these features would be DLC. Still love playing this on XBLA / Rare Replay. I have no hope for the newest Perfect Dark to be like this but maybe it will be a bit better than PDZ(which I still cherish all the memories to this day with my clan).
The more games I see released, the less hope I have for existing franchises like Perfect Dark.
I hope it’ll be a solid game, but the creative process that made PD so great most likely won’t be utilized.
The devs had a lot of power and implemented their ideas into the game which is unheard of unless it’s a tiny studio.
Perfect Dark nailed it. Game had everything, plus had an unmatched soundtrack.
Cannot wait for the new Reboot. Seeing what they can achieve without the hardware limitations.
i’m not a big retro gamer but i decided to give it a try because the upcoming reboot intrigued me and ever since i finished the first level i fell in love with perfect dark and the game is absolutely incredible
I think what made this good was it's era. A bunch of good things came within the decade Perfect Dark came out. Terminator 2 came out within the decade, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Kill Bill and a bunch of others. The game was a mood of corporate conspiratorial ambiance and ambition.
You should cover the splinter cell series. Seems like nobody ever gives it the attention it deserves
at the 6 min mark about shooting guns out of there hands.
Im sad that you also did not mention that some enemies will draw a pistol and use that (that you also can disarm).
or just straight up surrender and then dispersal as soon as they can (and they will not attack the player again).
Elvis best alien
Lighting is cool, I recommending checking out Jet Force Gemini.
I ran into this game, by chance, on it's release date - had no idea what it was but decided I needed to get it. A marvel.
Wait, this takes place in 2023!?? I thought it was far more futuristic, flying cars already! Dont quite exist in our timeline :)
I still maintain that Perfect Dark still does a lot of things better than all shooters after it. I was shocked at how bare-bones Halo was when it came out, and couldn't understand how it was rated so high. After playing PD, nothing compared or was even close until TimeSplitters.
Man I can’t wait to play this with other people this was and still is a great was one of top titles
I liked how in the multiplayer mode, you could move the ammo spawns by shooting them into another location.
I'm glad to see a video like this. For hiw wonderful it was Perfect Dark always seems to be strangely forgotten about. Even a RUclips search yields shockingly low results regarding it.
Definitely on my top 5 video game
Interesting fact, Rare first used 'sourced lighting' (real time lighting) in Jet Force Gemini
If you ever found the Big Bug Fun Club on the planet Ichor. Shoot the lights out on the dancefloor.
Those reflections? Mizar's Palace.
Perfect Dark, 007 Golden eye and World is not enough, are my child. But Perfect Dark I played often the game was so fun and I really enjoyed the coop options. I cant say enough about this game, the sound track was awesome. the levels , the animations . I would laugh at the death animations they were funny
we were 10 to 12 years old playing 4 player split screen on a 480p ancient box TV. everyone had a screen the size of a sheet of paper but we still loved it.
good times. fk Im old :)
This game was so good.
There's a pc decompilation port 😄
Absolutely everything ❤
2 handed Mauler was my favourite guns... and Nbombs, laptop rifles and CMP150 akimbo.
Perfect Dark 64 has to be my all time favorite FPS and I'm not an FPS fan.
The XBLA remaster has me replaying the game so many times man. Not to mention the co-op mode is addicting especially when you have a co-op partner who's good at the game
Perfect Dark had the exact opposite type of production modern day AAA games do.
Devs were actually listened to and added their ideas to the game.
No unrealistic release date either.
11:02 yeah? did you forget Star Fox 64?
I loved this game so much! I need to figure out how to play it on my modern PC
There is a PC port of the game that was recently released. Check it out!
Hmm, you're making want to stream this game! GG
What's so great about Perfect dark? Two words "Combat Simulator!
The Joan of Ark reference has been refuted by the developers.
Lmao, what? They literally state in the RareReplay docu that they took the name from Joanne D'Arc, wth are you smoking?
On the N64 version of this game... the cheats were (at least for me) legitimately difficult to obtain. For that reason, it really irked me how when you completed a mission while using your hard earned cheats, the completion screen would say "DISHONORED" and "CHEATED" as if you did something wrong. And don't get me wrong! I'm not upset that you couldn't unlock more things *while* using cheats... but the cheats themselves were so hard for me to unlock that being berated for using them at all just left me scratching my head and had me thinking "if it's that bad to use them, then damn, why add them to the game at all?"
And the OST is so good
This game was before it's time. I hope we get a movie. Everyone wants a female 007... Joanna Dark fits the bill with a sci-fi element.
Cool to see more videos!
I know nothing about Perfect Dark, I hear more about Goldeneye 007 when it comes to Rare first-person shooters, but it's not like I'm unaware of how beloved Perfect Dark is either. Once again FPS's are a blind spot for me, though I'm sure this game is as good as everyone says it is.
Perfect Dark story is set in 2023...Very ironic
This remaster game needs to be released on Steam
FAR OFF FUTURE OF 2023
guys perfect dark just had a fan made pc port made but nothing will tell me how to download and play it any help T^T ??.....
I wonder if the rumored new sequel will be more akin in Gameplay to modern FPS or stealth, Deus Ex-like
People thought 2023 was gonna be crazy
They should release the Xbox 360 remaster on Switch
yup it easily holds up and I often play it. Goldeneye is absolutely brilliant too but I'd give the nod to PD. The only game that for me comes close to holding my attention is Halo1
Great video, great game
Btw i never saw Carrington walking like this in the 6:48
How do you do that ?
I remember it was for the training session, before selecting missions
In Counter operatives, If you play as an NPC, does that still make it an NPC?? 🤔
man I wish they just released this for the gamecube the N64 was way underpowered. Playing the PC makes me really think so.
The Gamecube controller's control stick was nowhere near as precise as the N64's. I'm thankful it was released on the N64.
@@nothanksnoname7567 im not the fps sucked
@@anthbobo2783 Sure, it was noticeably bad at times, even during those days when it was expected. But the controls made up for it IMO. As I mentioned, the GC's controller just didn't have the finesse, and it showed in games such as Timesplitters (which I disliked). The gameplay was dumbed down for the inaccuracy of that stick.
@@nothanksnoname7567 How doesn't the controller have the "finesse" when it played metroid prime just fine. N64 perfect dark is a slide show and doesn't hold up well today. Luckily the PC port is amazing and runs at 144fps.
@@anthbobo2783 Yeah, the PC port is great, but that is many years after the original release, isn't it. The Gamecube FPS games feel quite different, and Metroid Prime relies heavily on lock-on mechanics for its 'precision'. There is no argument, the GC control stick is objectively, mechanically inferior.
I thought it was cool you could use 2 controllers to get duel joysticks
What so great is Jo shield 😂😅😂😅❤❤
Comment for the algorithm
Or: Aeon Flux meets The X-Files
Perhaps if Perfect Dark had been released before GoldenEye it would have done better and become the mega franchise answer to Tomb Raider Nintendo was hoping for. The problem is GoldenEye was first to the party and became a huge success. Perfect Dark was released late in the N64's life cycle and seemed like an inferior GoldenEye clone featuring an unknown female protagonist that gamers did not care about. Joanna Dark did not have the star power to carry a video game franchise a fact made painfully obvious in Perfect Dark's weak sales numbers.
Idk anyone who looks at it as an inferior Goldeneye clone. Everyone I know loves both, but thought PD you improved on the template quite a bit
Wait you can play co-op with an ai buddy? Why didn't i know this?
us 90s babies knew that
@@taelrmade I'm one of them!!
@@cikame what year
@@taelrmade '89, i played the game in co-op before with a friend when i was in primary school, i just for some reason had no idea you could do it with the ai.
@@cikame Same.. But I knew about the character customization. That part was hilarious 😂 I remember making a cool humanoid alien with Elvis's head
:)
Time splitters
And
Culdcept saga
How is culdcepta connected?
@@erik3371 I want to see a culdcept game. Probably saga or revolt
You forgot to mention that the player can give orders to AI bots in Combat Area… not to mention that music 🤌
Perfect Dark > GoldenEye 007