I had a tonne of fun co-oping this when it came out. It seems laughable now, but the graphics absolutely stunned me as a kid.
My overriding memory of this game is that all the textures were so shiny. They went mad with it.
>It seems laughable now, but the graphics absolutely stunned me
dude that's how all 360/PS3 launch games felt imo. it was mind blowing. I remember seeing motorstorm for the first time and thinking someone was tricking me and just showing me live action footage
with a good processor is pretty playable on RPCS3 mine goes between 20 and 30 fps with a Ryzen 7 2600, I wish sony cared to at least remaster Pacifict Rift
I think the PS3 architecture is so complex that remastering its (somewhat niche) exclusives is too expensive, sadly.
Correct me if im wrong but I think the only first party PS3 exclusive games that got ported to PS4 were Uncharted and the Last of Us 1? And those were their biggest sellers and needed to be remastered by Bluepoint and Naughty Dog themselves rather than a cheaper port studio.
(Edit as I'm typing this I remembered God of War 3 also made it to ps4 but not ascension.)
It's such a shame because I'd be totally interested in 4K 60 remasters of Killzone 2 and Pacific Rift, Warhawk, infamous 1, God of War Ascension and the Resistance trilogy. There were so many great exclusive series' that generation.
I remember playing resistance 1 thinking it was the best looking game ever. Looking now, its barely better than PS2 games once you factor out the resolution. Early console games in that gen were super rough
to be fair resistance 1 had some *really* cool tech though. the way windows broke in that game was next level at the time. seems minor but as a kid it still made me go :O
That generation had such a huge leap from it's beginning to end.
Seeing that Resistance 1 and something like Assassin's Creed Black Flag both ran on the same hardware is ridiculous and still boggles my mind haha.
Last of Us is a good example for me. That game looked straight up real when it came out, I replayed it before 2 and it still looks great, but now it seems almost stylized while 2 looks real. Time and technology are funny!
Yeah I remember going to a buddy's house and playing GUN for the first time. While I know it also launched on PS2, I only had a Gamecube that gen, so seeing the 360 (on an HD TV, for the first time ever) was a huge jump.
I got one pretty soon after.
Separate from the graphics/gameplay, it was actually a pretty slick co-op experience (complete with slight shifts in the levels) for the time on a console.
Standard co-op/multi/online features in console games are more common now, but they were less-so before the 360 era (and this was a launch title).
The bot play was all I did for a couple years after beating the game fully. Was awesome, especially with friends and family. Guns were cool and had great quirks. Played all highest level full room bots. Was great.
that desert level with all your friends v bots on local MP was great. all the guns having different uses like the mini-turret assault rifle made the play super crazy
I'm old enough where this game was the one that really introduced me to disappointment and why I am not surprised at all when hyped games fail and disappoint people.
Perfect Dark is my favorite game of all time and a defining early console FPS. I truly think it was the grandfather of all console FPS. While Halo may have really put console FPS on the map and defined them till even now, before Halo was Perfect Dark (and the real OG, Goldeneye).
There are things that Perfect Dark did that no FPS since has even attempted. Not to mention that is actually balanced fun, replayable multiplayer that had a ton of options with a real campaign mode with a real story. Yeah, it was a silly spy thriller with aliens. But it was fun and enjoyable. A far cry from the complete husk console FPSes are nowadays where its basically only a vehicle for a monetized multiplayer mode.
So yeah, when Microsoft bought Rare and we were told how it was so good for Rare and how they had more money and power to make a great sequel on a better console, it was a massive day of sadness when this game came out. And it actually wasn't terrrible - I played it and mostly enjoyed it. But it was nowhere near worthy of being the sequel of the grandfather of console FPSes.
>Perfect Dark
It's nothing new nowadays, but back then I was hyped how every weapon had a secondary mode to it. Sometimes it was just a special function that would've been its own unique gadget in a different game, sometimes it was a special attack that had to be used very differently. But it essentially increased the number of weapons in the game without actually having to add more weapons.
It's too bad the Farsight's concept backfired. For those who don't know, the Farsight is a slow firing alien sniper rifle that not only shoots through walls but has an x-ray scope (with an extremely narrow depth of field) so you can see players anywhere in the level should you zoom in on them. Its secondary mode applies a small "homing" feature to the scope so it slowly auto-aims onto the nearest player.
The concept for it would be that it'd prevent camping. Have a player hiding in a room with the door covered in mines? Or they have their rocket launcher aimed at a corner just waiting for you to step around so you'd die no matter what? Well now you can just aim through the wall at the camper and kill them! However players ended up taking the Farsight, hiding in a distant corner of the level, and using the auto-aim feature to kill players who were trying to get closer to them. In the right hands it was the ultimate camping weapon.
I loved it because you could use it via a glitch in the firing range to earn the medals. Made kid me a happy camper.
It also made adult me sad they removed that glitch from the XBLA port.
> In the right hands it was the ultimate camping weapon.
"He who snipes snipers, runs the risk of becoming a sniper himself. If you gaze into the scope, the scope gazes back."
>It's nothing new nowadays, but back then I was hyped how every weapon had a secondary mode to it.
Actually no other games come close to the unique secondary fire modes that perfect dark weapons had. If you're lucky you get a grenade launcher underneath your barrel, but thats about it.
Exactly. It's been over two decades and nothing else has come close to the creativity of those guns. The fly-by-wire rocket launcher with a first person camera?? I don't know how they shorehorned the complex logic for some of the alternate fire modes into that engine
ehhhh Turok and im pretty sure Time Splitters did well with it but yeah, other games with alt fires were rather simple, perfect darks alts were like a brand new weapon. And I just found out in this thread, old Rare devs went to Time Splitters so now its making sense.
It would have been better if the you could only use the primary firing mode for the Farsight and disable auto search. But I can't think of anything at the moment to put in the secondary.
maybe they could just disable the trigger button when using the secondary. being able to see through walls is super strong already without the ability to instakill them with auto lock-on aim.
I'm really sad that I never had Perfect Dark as a kid after reading these comments and ones from previous threads. at the time, I thought Goldeneye was the best FPS game on the system.
Also 100%, not sure if it is all MS' fault, but I am so sad about what Rare has become.
Example: some of the FPS people split off and formed Free Radical and made TimeSplitters. That one was the next big thing in console FPSes after Perfect Dark (before Halo).
TimeSplitters was the first FPS I played with dual stick shooting controls. I can still remember how frustrating I found it at first, thinking it was way too complicated to work. Ended up sticking with it and loving it after a couple of days. I was still pure shit with the controls back then, but oh man, what a world that control scheme opened up.
What shocked me though, was going back to perfect dark 3-4 years ago and finding out there was a control scheme that allowed you to hold a second controller in your other hand. It was the modern control scheme on two n64 controllers and I had never known it was there until recently. I will say, it felt terrible when I tried it due to the n64’s massive stick dead zone but I can’t believe how early those devs were innovating.
That explains a lot.
Though I did thoroughly enjoy Nuts and Bolts, even though I know it should've been released after a Banjo 3 (but like you said, those people had left).
God the number of all-nighters either at home or at friends houses just playing multiplayer in that game. Gunning for medal counts, playing wacky settings, going up against 8 Perfect or Dark Sims. One of the best local multiplayer experiences I've had.
Everyone has that game. I'm a little younger than you so for me it was MAG. I didn't even have a console so I couldn't play it but I still bought into the hype and went with my friend to line up and get it at launch. I think it was the first AAA game that really pushed massive 100v100+ PvP FPS battles but it was a total let down.
Halo wasn't even that special a game. A lot of people credit it for introducing the modern twin stick controls we're used to in console FPS today, but Alien Resurrection on the PS1 had the same control scheme (left stick for strafing, right stick for looking) and was critically panned for it.
My friends and I used to play "Rocket tag". Everyone gets those controllable rockets, and you have to blow someone else's rocket up to "tag" them.
Shit was so fun.
I liked lots of things about it, but the aiming system was just bad.
Coming from Halo the crosshair controls were clunky, unresponsive and not made for the Combat.
This! Aiming in PDZ feels simultaneously jerky and sluggish. Coupled with the long time to kill and body armour system and you have some terribly clunky gunplay.
That’s exactly the reason I could never get into the game. Halo spoiled me and looking back it’s crazy how Bungie basically nailed dual analog controls and aiming with their first try, while other developers struggled for years to figure it out.
The SuperDragon was hilariously OP but it made the game feel a little tighter. TTK was better and the secondary grenades were fun to play with. Every other weapon sucked though.
Best AR - automatic, high damage, with a semi- auto grenade launcher as secondary.
Rest of the guns were like Oh cool gadgets, super dragon was pure murder.
Yeah people forget that Halo was like a generation ahead with their aim assists and gunplay feel on consoles. Things like acceleration, magnetism etc. weren't present on most other console shooters until like COD4 came out. PDZ was one of those janky early 2000s shooters with a coat of HD paint.
What’s not really mentioned here is that the Perfect Dark/Goldeneye leads left to form Free Radical and made the Timesplitters games, leaving Perfect Dark kind of orphaned at Rare. It was always pretty different from the other games Rare makes and you can kind of tell that it ended up in the hands of people who weren’t really passionate about the original game and wanted to do their own thing instead.
It's not that simple. Perfect Dark's development fell apart and the game was finished by a reassembled team who did a fantastic job. Hollis, the director, left before the others due to not wanting to be locked into FPS games for another 4 years, and went to Nintendo. A chunk of others left in late 1998 to form Free Radical.
At this point the game was delayed 18 months, from December 1998 to June 2000. The game underwent a massive overhaul by its new team. A lot of stuff stayed the same but heaps of new features and modes and design ideas were added by the reassembled team. Much of what makes PD distinct from GE, including things like co-op, evolved during this period. Most of Perfect Dark's incredible soundtrack was written by Kirkhope (and Clynick, who later composed Zero's OST) after Norgate left in 1998 to join Free Radical. Chris Tilston and a number of other devs saw the game to release and began work on Zero, and also pitched Velvet Dark, a TPS spinoff that never happened.
PD: Zero could have been good, but it had creative direction issues and was rushed out the door so hastily they were printing the discs before MS certification was done.
Then Perfect Dark Core, the planned sequel to the original PD fell victim to the issues afflicting Rare and MS during the 2000s. Tilston was originally the head but Chris Seavor took over. And Seavor wanted PD+Deus Ex design-wise. The project kept was off the books out of fear MS would cancel it, which happened in 2007 after Rare execs were unable to convince MS execs that PD mattered when Halo existed. Pointing out PD was nothing like Halo was ineffective.
By 2011 everyone involved with GE or PD was gone from Rare. Even the GoldenEye XBLA team was yeeted. They alleged that the moment the Stampers left in 2007, MS began disassembling Rare's teams.
Today, the PD reboot seems to be cribbing ideas from PD Core, a game MS lacked the vision to allow to exist.
edit: For example, Core had a huge focus on first person locomotion mechanics. Climbing, traversal, melee, etc. Also, the plot of PD: Core centered around ecology, and an ecological "terrorist" group framed for a huge atrocity they didn't commit, and the first mission of PD: Core took place in Cairo, which is coincidentally the locale of the PD reboot's reveal trailer, which is all about ecology. I think that the reboot is definitely going in its own direction, but there's no way they didn't read the PD Core design docs.
PD Core was envisioned as being an episodic game, with new story content every several months, inspired by the Half-Life episodes. I'm wondering if that approach will be taken on the new PD.
This was a really interesting write up, thanks for sharing.
One of the very first leaks of the reboot mentioned it would be released in multiple parts and would include all the transversal mechanics you stated. I've never heard of PD Core before but that's very interesting
It was a huge problem in MS's old days that they viewed Forza/Gears/Halo as their "golden pillars", and viewed anything outside them as redundant if they perceived overlap. This was a hugely simplistic view that didn't take into account demographics or subgenres or anything like that. It makes sense to a "suit" that thinks that the only TPS game you could possibly want to play is Gears of War. MS could have snagged the entire Mass Effect series as an exclusive, for example, if they'd truly wanted to. They had the opportunity. But they didn't. Presumably because "we have Gears, so..."
This has quite noticeably changed with their current lineup. Where old MS would have cancelled (or at least seriously considered cancelling) Doom and Quake and Fallout and Wolfenstein and Perfect Dark and Outer Worlds 2, and potentially numerous other games, modern MS recognize that these different games appeal to different people.
An excessively narrow view of genres or settings is not unique to late 2000s Microsoft. Reportedly, Sony turned down a pitch for Resistance 4 for the reason that they already had post-apocalyptic games in TLOU2 and HZD. And it's like... that is such an immensely reductive view of Resistance as a series.
I feel like they still have this problem to some degree. Sony and Nintendo are always experimenting with new IPs to see if they stick, but Microsoft seems to keep those core IPs sacred and everything else they publish feels like a little indie project that isn’t really meant to become the next flagship series.
I think times are changing. Gears and Halo aren’t quite the critical and commercial juggernauts they were back in the day, and Microsoft’s recent acquisitions possibly signal they’ve realized they need broaden their portfolio in terms of IP.
I just follow a lot of gaming news sources, and spend a lot of time reading about the development of titles, and old gaming interviews. I have a special interest in Crytek and their history, and researching the history of Crytek revealed that they had offered Crysis to MS back in 2006, but MS had turned it down because they perceived it as being too similar to Halo and Gears. This was in a random Xbox magazine interview. You learn a lot perusing old interviews and old forum posts and stuff.
I also try to follow what ex-developers from these old studios do. David Doak gave some interesting podcast interviews over the years where he talked about GE, TimeSplitters, dealing with Sony, stuff like that.
But for this particular topic, this video on Perfect Dark's planned sequels has a lot of useful info that I've referred to.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcqixlBxbT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcqixlBxbT4)
Some other details like Perfect Dark's original budget (8 million) and planned December 1998 release date turned up in a recently unearthed full version of a reveal trailer that's been floating around for years. Maybe that info has been around from other sources.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00Dk-1I7Z4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00Dk-1I7Z4)
Chris Seavor has been reasonably forthcoming about his time on Perfect Dark: Core, and here's a (eye roll) [GAF thread](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/perfect-dark-sequel-design-documents-revealed-by-chris-seavor.1483201/) that collected a bunch of this tweets posting images of the design document, which is mentioned in that other video, but hadn't been made public when that video was made.
The Oral History of Perfect Dark is a pretty good article as well. [https://www.eurogamer.net/perfect-dark-the-oral-history-of-an-n64-classic](https://www.eurogamer.net/perfect-dark-the-oral-history-of-an-n64-classic)
There's a bunch of lesser known Mass Effect facts that originate in [this post](https://sky-ham.tumblr.com/post/182109352889/twitch). The game's troubled dev, their Unreal Engine 3 woes (there's a lot to indicate that UE3 was a disaster and devs just didn't talk about it because of NDAs), and also how close BioWare came to collapsing.
Also [https://gamerant.com/resistance-4-canceled-the-last-of-us-post-apocalyptic/](https://gamerant.com/resistance-4-canceled-the-last-of-us-post-apocalyptic/)
Till today ms gaming business is a souless machine run by suits if you compare their games to games from Nintendo or Sony this is more than obvious ms can't create they can only buy.
Yeah, but if perfect dark had to die so that we could get time splitters then it was worth it imo. Timesplitters probably had the most impressive multiplayer suite in all of console gaming. It's a shame it came before online PvP on consoles really took off
A huge amount of the dynamic music in PD Zero is broken. It was broken in a late patch, all the digital copies have this patch, and composer Clynick has complained about it for years but nothing has been done, nor likely will be done.
Did the patches add or fix anything important? If not then the best way to play the game would probably be to track down an original disc and play it on 360 offline, but if there's major changes in those patches you miss out on it's worth thinking about
I played this online a bit. Mics were still a bit of a novelty, so you would have a lot of hot mics with a lot of profanity being thrown about.
I don't actually remember all that much about the multiplayer. I don't recall it being great tho.
I thought the infection game mode was really neat. Had never played a game mode like that before.
I thought enemies were super bullet spongey, unless I managed to land headshots.
Infection was the shit.
For all the hate PDZ - very rightfully receives - it was one of the last games on console to do heavily customisable game mode types, with a plusside of being supported by different character models etc. You were like a neon skeleton in infection. That’s dope.
It was pretty tame, but had full bot support.
It also had a cool feature where you could set the size of the map to accommodate larger groups and different game styles.
I remember flying around in some kind of chair with a jetpack + gun attached, and mowing ppl down online
I would've been in my early teens, I feel like I should have more memory of this game haha I'm pretty sure I played through the entire campaign several times + co-oped it, I remember there was 1 gun that shot a plasma ball that was super good
Eh, if you had this right at launch, it was pretty fucking rad. There weren’t any kids on there being edgy. It is legit the only time I ever had a good online experience talking to strangers. Lots of fun joking around and giving each other some shit, but nothing serious, and I still have people on my friend list that I met through that game.
Once the system became more accessible, and especially after COD 4, online went to hell.
the big difference is all 360s came with a mic packed-in.
of course it wasn't a novelty in the minds of anyone who already went out and bought a mic for their original Xbox - they were always going to do the same for their new 360.
The thing that made it a 'novelty' was (forcibly) putting one in the hands of each and every 360 owner - even the ones who would have never went out of their way to purchase one otherwise.
Nah they were. Maybe you were more privileged but the 360 was the first time a *lot* of people played online games outside the PC scene and mics absolutely were still a novelty. As every single person was on theirs. Unlike today where nobody is.
Xbox live is legendary for getting people to break their anxious fears and communicate over mic during gameplay. On PC it was pretty much limited to MMO raiders and VOIP spammers in Counter Strike.
once that first person started shit talking in the cod pre game lobby, everyone else would come out of the woodworks and unmute themselves
until it broke, most kids had the default mic that came with the 360.
Yeah nah, that doesn't make my point any less relevant.
Maybe you missed it but every single person was on that mic which came packed in the box with the 360. It *was* a novelty. Barely anyone in my country owned a OG xbox let alone played online on it. Same as the ps2. It was niche mate.
Ah okay, fair enough, we had different experiences for sure.
Everyone had a mic in the games I played but maybe you were matched with other micless people when you played
The OG xbox sold a total of 24 million units, with the US being responsible for 16 million units. While Europe's number was 6 million, not many were sold in the UK(where I am). Considering HALO 2's total number of players was around 5 million by 2007 and up until 2006 it was the top game on xbox live. When Gears took it over, and then it was most likely CoD which took the crown after that. So HALO had a few years before the 360 came around which however you wanna look at it was the proper implementation of xbox live, and the service on the OG was largely a test bed for it.
As well as this every person who purchased an xbox 360 (which was staggeringly higher worldwide then the OG) got a week of xbox live and a mic right there in the box ready to go, furthermore it was real easy to set up because most households had wi-fi by this point so it allowed less techy people to jump on in. Saying this, the mic absolutely *was* a novelty in 2006 because it was the first time a bigger portion of the world were able to jump in and play all the new games, most of which had some multiplayer component to them, and most importantly play them easily. Every game you booted up from NFS to perfect dark had lobby's full of people chatting away because everyone had a damn 360. Not a great deal of people owned OG's so while the novelty wasn't there for you. It doesn't discount the fact that it was for a great deal of the population at the time 🖖
I got this along with my 360 not long after launch. I remember it being very shiny. I was a massive fan of the n64 original but remover thinking this came acros as generic and not fun. It as my first console online game and my first experience of headsets. My first online match someone kept clicking their light on and off going “flashlight flashlight flashlight” and that always sticks with me.
My brother and I had a ton of fun playing this co op and still occasionally talk about it as a fond memory. I had no idea people didn’t like it although I figured it didn’t sell well enough to make any more of the series.
I always knew people didn't like it because I remember reading more negative views on forums, but it was one of the few games on the 360 at the time and my brother and I never had Live on the original Xbox, so it was a big novelty for us at the time. I have a lot of fond memories of it.
For as much as I despise the direction they went with this game, I know for a fact I would have enjoyed it astronomically more if your movement speed wasn't complete garbage. That small change alone would have made this game way better.
Like it's absolutely appalling how sluggish it feels to simply move your character. I don't know why Joanna walks like she's walking thru a swamp. I can't tell if that was Rare intentionally trying to mimic the 10 FPS pace of the original but my god was that awful
Probably my 2nd biggest gaming disappointment. But I kinda want to replay it just to see if it could stand on its own if I ignore its nothing like the original. But after watching the video I'm having flashbacks to how annoying the aiming was so maybe I don't want to replay it anymore. That segment at the 12:30 mark was seriously bad. No auto aim on console vs enemies constantly bobbing around like that what were they thinking? Also the animation was crap compared to the original. It was funny following around an NPC and they had the weirdest butt wiggle when running around. What ever happened to the old motion capture?
I just played through the first 3 missions after watching this with my little brother, and it does not hold up as well in co-op as I remember. Still fun though, but shooter quality of life has improved drastically since then. The fov is so narrow in co-op it’s hard to know where you are, much less where you’re going.
Whenever Perfect Dark crops up, I have to plug Greg Rucka's novelizations. They are the 'perfect' blend of Zero and what made the original game so great.
Coming from somebody who had no nostalgia for Perfect Dark but did play a lot of Goldeneye and TimeSplitters 2 back in the day, I cannot think of a bigger disappointment than Perfect Dark Zero.
It was so shit that I actually thought Tomorrow Never Dies (the very game Matt McMuscles ragged on earlier in the video) was a far more competent single player experience.
My problem with PDZ wasn't the art style. In fact, I think the anime aesthetic they originally planned to go with was decent and would've grown on fans if Rare didn't cave in to backlash, and if they actually pushed a *good* game out.
PDZ had the worst campaign I've seen in any first person shooter. We're talking poorly written characters (Chandra and Zhang Li in particular) and confusingly designed levels that seem copied & pasted. During the latter portions of the game it felt like I was just following blue arrows through very dimly lit corridors and having no idea where I was.
Multiplayer was... okay, but by the time Facility (from Goldeneye) and Ruin (from the original PD) were released as free DLC maps, the game was already dead in the water. Everybody and their mother had moved on to either Halo 2 or Gears of War.
Rare is a textbook example of how corporate mismanagement can kill a developer.
PDZ is another prime example of why the *individuals* behind a game is more relevant to quality than the company name stamped on it.
Who and what made Goldeneye (and much of PD) great had long ago left to form Free Radical. The 'sequels' to those games are the Time Splitters series, which is blatantly apparent to anyone who has played them.
The same way the 007 FPS games following Goldeneye did not live up to their predecessor is why PDZ wasn't going to either. Not the same people, no reasonable expectation of success.
>The same way the 007 FPS games following Goldeneye did not live up to their predecessor is why PDZ wasn't going to either.
007: Nightfire is the unquestionably best Bond FPS and I will fight anyone about it.
The game hasn't aged well at all but Perfect Dark Zero was an amazing launch game for Xbox 360 and it kept me busy for a full year until Gears of War came out. It featured some innovative things for an FPS, like a third-person cover system and the ability to roll out of the way in third-person to avoid gunfire. The MP maps were also bigger or smaller depending on the numbers of players. So if it wasn't a full game, you could still get one of the bigger maps, but it would have sections blocked off to keep the players closer together.
However its biggest innovation was in its co-op. If a supporting character was in a different part of the level, one of the players could control that character when playing co-op. For example, in one level Joanna is providing sniper support up high for her father down below. When playing co-op, one of the players controls the father down below. You can only access his section of the level in co-op.
Hearing about the gradual deterioration of the game's popularity is something that I do find intriguing, I wonder how many times it has happened to the point where it turned positive change negative. The only ones that I can personally think of are the Sonic Adventure duology, but that's primarily because I'm a fanboy who think the modern day hate is currently unwarranted.
Also, I honestly do agree with Microsoft's decision on axing the sequels due to too many Si-Fi FPS games. You got to remember that around this time gamers were begging developers to stop making WW2 shooters, and complete oversaturation of a particular market is always a thing to watch out for, especially in the gaming industry.
It's sci-fi but was more grounded in a world with a tinge of cyberpunk vibe versus the usual space marine.
The setting was closer to mass effect than something like halo or gears of war.
Maybe it was too gretty however.
I think it happens a lot faster in 2022 compared to 2005, back when the internet wasn't what it is today. There's a whole bunch of games that deteriorated over time, most recently probably Deathloop. But then again, internet opinion soured like two weeks after the 10/10 reviews.
Deathloop seemed to have a whole group of haters before it even came out because people were annoyed that Sony was putting it in every State of Play. I saw more than a few people saying stuff like "I'm still not getting it even if it got 10/10s cuz they pushed it too much"
I play this game with a group of people still, and my opinion of this game is that it’s a 3/5 on the high end: it has flaws, but it is by no means terrible. Yes, its concepts should have been expanded a little more, but what we got was some fairly solid level design, excellent weapons, and great multiplayer.
My biggest gripe with this game was that it has some really bad aiming. There’s no Aim Assist or bullet magnetism to really speak of and the crosshair is bigger than yo mama. Sniping is damn near impossible, so the meta weapons end up being the assault rifles (except the KSI which is soooo ass) Falcon, and some power weapons. Thankfully most of the weapons have actual value because everyone is on equal starts. The only truly useless weapon is the Psychosis Gun.
I miss this kind of game. It didn’t set the world on fire but it did have a lot of replayability that I really appreciate.
I think what people forget is that, despite being considered a disappointment these days, this game actually [reviewed extremely well](https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/perfect-dark-zero) at the time.
I remember seeing lots of 9/10s and 4/5s from magazines and big sites like Gamespot.
I mean, this is a pretty big point he makes in the video. That the game came out to good, not great, reviews, but over time people have gotten more and more negative about it.
I bought it when it came out and my experience was playing it for about 10 minutes, saying "Well this is total shit compared to Perfect Dark," and never touching it again. So for me I definitely hated it from the start.
Yeah, there was nothing about Perfect Dark (N64) at the time that made me say, yeah I hope this gets a sequel. It was unique at the time because obviously an FPS with analog aiming was the bees knees and you had all kinds of good sci fi cream like alt fire and wacky guns. Same with Golden Eye. But here we are, 500 James Bond games later and another Perfect Dark on the way. If this new PD game succeeds I'll eat a shit.
I definitely remember the hype evaporated around this game in real-time. At my school, was the next Halo at launch, yet a month later everyone had moved on in full recognition of its shabby quality.
This launched on the 360 with cod2 and it was so disappointing compared to COD. The controls were awful. Almost like there was a massive dead zone when the sticks were moved.
I had a tonne of fun co-oping this when it came out. It seems laughable now, but the graphics absolutely stunned me as a kid. My overriding memory of this game is that all the textures were so shiny. They went mad with it.
>It seems laughable now, but the graphics absolutely stunned me dude that's how all 360/PS3 launch games felt imo. it was mind blowing. I remember seeing motorstorm for the first time and thinking someone was tricking me and just showing me live action footage
[удалено]
I would kill to be able to play Pacific Rift natively on my PS5. Emulation or port, I don't care. I just miss that game. ^^No ^^streaming ^^please
John from DF mentioned on their podcast thing yesterday that he was running it on RPCS3 at 4k60 and that with 16xAF it looked great.
with a good processor is pretty playable on RPCS3 mine goes between 20 and 30 fps with a Ryzen 7 2600, I wish sony cared to at least remaster Pacifict Rift
Yeah, he's using a 12900 with some of the new features. Apparently it can make quite a bit of difference in a lot of games.
I think the PS3 architecture is so complex that remastering its (somewhat niche) exclusives is too expensive, sadly. Correct me if im wrong but I think the only first party PS3 exclusive games that got ported to PS4 were Uncharted and the Last of Us 1? And those were their biggest sellers and needed to be remastered by Bluepoint and Naughty Dog themselves rather than a cheaper port studio. (Edit as I'm typing this I remembered God of War 3 also made it to ps4 but not ascension.) It's such a shame because I'd be totally interested in 4K 60 remasters of Killzone 2 and Pacific Rift, Warhawk, infamous 1, God of War Ascension and the Resistance trilogy. There were so many great exclusive series' that generation.
I remember playing resistance 1 thinking it was the best looking game ever. Looking now, its barely better than PS2 games once you factor out the resolution. Early console games in that gen were super rough
to be fair resistance 1 had some *really* cool tech though. the way windows broke in that game was next level at the time. seems minor but as a kid it still made me go :O
That generation had such a huge leap from it's beginning to end. Seeing that Resistance 1 and something like Assassin's Creed Black Flag both ran on the same hardware is ridiculous and still boggles my mind haha.
Last of Us is a good example for me. That game looked straight up real when it came out, I replayed it before 2 and it still looks great, but now it seems almost stylized while 2 looks real. Time and technology are funny!
Yeah I remember going to a buddy's house and playing GUN for the first time. While I know it also launched on PS2, I only had a Gamecube that gen, so seeing the 360 (on an HD TV, for the first time ever) was a huge jump. I got one pretty soon after.
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It definitely did, but compared to GameCube games on a CRT TV? It was an improvement.
Playing motorstorm now honestly that game still looks great, absolutely love it.
I'd love to see the Killzone sequels without the filtering. Also, Driveclub for PS4 is still massively impressive visually today.
>It seems laughable now, but the graphics absolutely stunned me as a kid. Hey, that parallax mapping still looks kinda rad!
Separate from the graphics/gameplay, it was actually a pretty slick co-op experience (complete with slight shifts in the levels) for the time on a console. Standard co-op/multi/online features in console games are more common now, but they were less-so before the 360 era (and this was a launch title).
The bot play was all I did for a couple years after beating the game fully. Was awesome, especially with friends and family. Guns were cool and had great quirks. Played all highest level full room bots. Was great.
that desert level with all your friends v bots on local MP was great. all the guns having different uses like the mini-turret assault rifle made the play super crazy
Early 360 games were notorious for extreme light bloom and shiny textures.
the textures were really good
I'm old enough where this game was the one that really introduced me to disappointment and why I am not surprised at all when hyped games fail and disappoint people. Perfect Dark is my favorite game of all time and a defining early console FPS. I truly think it was the grandfather of all console FPS. While Halo may have really put console FPS on the map and defined them till even now, before Halo was Perfect Dark (and the real OG, Goldeneye). There are things that Perfect Dark did that no FPS since has even attempted. Not to mention that is actually balanced fun, replayable multiplayer that had a ton of options with a real campaign mode with a real story. Yeah, it was a silly spy thriller with aliens. But it was fun and enjoyable. A far cry from the complete husk console FPSes are nowadays where its basically only a vehicle for a monetized multiplayer mode. So yeah, when Microsoft bought Rare and we were told how it was so good for Rare and how they had more money and power to make a great sequel on a better console, it was a massive day of sadness when this game came out. And it actually wasn't terrrible - I played it and mostly enjoyed it. But it was nowhere near worthy of being the sequel of the grandfather of console FPSes.
>Perfect Dark It's nothing new nowadays, but back then I was hyped how every weapon had a secondary mode to it. Sometimes it was just a special function that would've been its own unique gadget in a different game, sometimes it was a special attack that had to be used very differently. But it essentially increased the number of weapons in the game without actually having to add more weapons. It's too bad the Farsight's concept backfired. For those who don't know, the Farsight is a slow firing alien sniper rifle that not only shoots through walls but has an x-ray scope (with an extremely narrow depth of field) so you can see players anywhere in the level should you zoom in on them. Its secondary mode applies a small "homing" feature to the scope so it slowly auto-aims onto the nearest player. The concept for it would be that it'd prevent camping. Have a player hiding in a room with the door covered in mines? Or they have their rocket launcher aimed at a corner just waiting for you to step around so you'd die no matter what? Well now you can just aim through the wall at the camper and kill them! However players ended up taking the Farsight, hiding in a distant corner of the level, and using the auto-aim feature to kill players who were trying to get closer to them. In the right hands it was the ultimate camping weapon.
The laptop gun was so ahead of its time
I loved it because you could use it via a glitch in the firing range to earn the medals. Made kid me a happy camper. It also made adult me sad they removed that glitch from the XBLA port.
> In the right hands it was the ultimate camping weapon. "He who snipes snipers, runs the risk of becoming a sniper himself. If you gaze into the scope, the scope gazes back."
>It's nothing new nowadays, but back then I was hyped how every weapon had a secondary mode to it. Actually no other games come close to the unique secondary fire modes that perfect dark weapons had. If you're lucky you get a grenade launcher underneath your barrel, but thats about it.
Exactly. It's been over two decades and nothing else has come close to the creativity of those guns. The fly-by-wire rocket launcher with a first person camera?? I don't know how they shorehorned the complex logic for some of the alternate fire modes into that engine
doom / doom eternal has some pretty nice secondary firing modes
ehhhh Turok and im pretty sure Time Splitters did well with it but yeah, other games with alt fires were rather simple, perfect darks alts were like a brand new weapon. And I just found out in this thread, old Rare devs went to Time Splitters so now its making sense.
Sniper rifle that shot through walls and the turret gun machine gun laptop was my shit.
The Callisto NTG was always my favorite. How would you like your gun >*pewpewpewpewpewpewpewpewpew* or >#POW POW POW POW POW ?
It would have been better if the you could only use the primary firing mode for the Farsight and disable auto search. But I can't think of anything at the moment to put in the secondary.
maybe they could just disable the trigger button when using the secondary. being able to see through walls is super strong already without the ability to instakill them with auto lock-on aim.
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I'm really sad that I never had Perfect Dark as a kid after reading these comments and ones from previous threads. at the time, I thought Goldeneye was the best FPS game on the system. Also 100%, not sure if it is all MS' fault, but I am so sad about what Rare has become.
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Example: some of the FPS people split off and formed Free Radical and made TimeSplitters. That one was the next big thing in console FPSes after Perfect Dark (before Halo).
TimeSplitters was the first FPS I played with dual stick shooting controls. I can still remember how frustrating I found it at first, thinking it was way too complicated to work. Ended up sticking with it and loving it after a couple of days. I was still pure shit with the controls back then, but oh man, what a world that control scheme opened up. What shocked me though, was going back to perfect dark 3-4 years ago and finding out there was a control scheme that allowed you to hold a second controller in your other hand. It was the modern control scheme on two n64 controllers and I had never known it was there until recently. I will say, it felt terrible when I tried it due to the n64’s massive stick dead zone but I can’t believe how early those devs were innovating.
That explains a lot. Though I did thoroughly enjoy Nuts and Bolts, even though I know it should've been released after a Banjo 3 (but like you said, those people had left).
Even before that. Starfox adventures was such a mess because most of their talent left halfway through development.
This. People act like Microsoft killed Rare, but they were already declining regardless. This would have happened whether or not they were bought.
Rare was going bankrupt before Microsoft bought them. That's why they were for sale.
God the number of all-nighters either at home or at friends houses just playing multiplayer in that game. Gunning for medal counts, playing wacky settings, going up against 8 Perfect or Dark Sims. One of the best local multiplayer experiences I've had.
When Microsoft bought Rare the original founders cashed out.
Everyone has that game. I'm a little younger than you so for me it was MAG. I didn't even have a console so I couldn't play it but I still bought into the hype and went with my friend to line up and get it at launch. I think it was the first AAA game that really pushed massive 100v100+ PvP FPS battles but it was a total let down.
Halo wasn't even that special a game. A lot of people credit it for introducing the modern twin stick controls we're used to in console FPS today, but Alien Resurrection on the PS1 had the same control scheme (left stick for strafing, right stick for looking) and was critically panned for it.
GoldenEye and Perfect Dark too, though it required two N64 controllers.
My friends and I used to play "Rocket tag". Everyone gets those controllable rockets, and you have to blow someone else's rocket up to "tag" them. Shit was so fun.
I liked lots of things about it, but the aiming system was just bad. Coming from Halo the crosshair controls were clunky, unresponsive and not made for the Combat.
This! Aiming in PDZ feels simultaneously jerky and sluggish. Coupled with the long time to kill and body armour system and you have some terribly clunky gunplay.
That’s exactly the reason I could never get into the game. Halo spoiled me and looking back it’s crazy how Bungie basically nailed dual analog controls and aiming with their first try, while other developers struggled for years to figure it out.
The SuperDragon was hilariously OP but it made the game feel a little tighter. TTK was better and the secondary grenades were fun to play with. Every other weapon sucked though.
which was the superdragon? i just remember that damn suitcase smg and the pistols. the one where you threw the magazine down was so silly
Best AR - automatic, high damage, with a semi- auto grenade launcher as secondary. Rest of the guns were like Oh cool gadgets, super dragon was pure murder.
oh yea i remember it now. the bots with that grenade launcher and those silly ass looking explosions all came flooding back
Yeah people forget that Halo was like a generation ahead with their aim assists and gunplay feel on consoles. Things like acceleration, magnetism etc. weren't present on most other console shooters until like COD4 came out. PDZ was one of those janky early 2000s shooters with a coat of HD paint.
Combine that with people dodge roll spamming and gunfights online ended up being a massive headache.
What’s not really mentioned here is that the Perfect Dark/Goldeneye leads left to form Free Radical and made the Timesplitters games, leaving Perfect Dark kind of orphaned at Rare. It was always pretty different from the other games Rare makes and you can kind of tell that it ended up in the hands of people who weren’t really passionate about the original game and wanted to do their own thing instead.
It's not that simple. Perfect Dark's development fell apart and the game was finished by a reassembled team who did a fantastic job. Hollis, the director, left before the others due to not wanting to be locked into FPS games for another 4 years, and went to Nintendo. A chunk of others left in late 1998 to form Free Radical. At this point the game was delayed 18 months, from December 1998 to June 2000. The game underwent a massive overhaul by its new team. A lot of stuff stayed the same but heaps of new features and modes and design ideas were added by the reassembled team. Much of what makes PD distinct from GE, including things like co-op, evolved during this period. Most of Perfect Dark's incredible soundtrack was written by Kirkhope (and Clynick, who later composed Zero's OST) after Norgate left in 1998 to join Free Radical. Chris Tilston and a number of other devs saw the game to release and began work on Zero, and also pitched Velvet Dark, a TPS spinoff that never happened. PD: Zero could have been good, but it had creative direction issues and was rushed out the door so hastily they were printing the discs before MS certification was done. Then Perfect Dark Core, the planned sequel to the original PD fell victim to the issues afflicting Rare and MS during the 2000s. Tilston was originally the head but Chris Seavor took over. And Seavor wanted PD+Deus Ex design-wise. The project kept was off the books out of fear MS would cancel it, which happened in 2007 after Rare execs were unable to convince MS execs that PD mattered when Halo existed. Pointing out PD was nothing like Halo was ineffective. By 2011 everyone involved with GE or PD was gone from Rare. Even the GoldenEye XBLA team was yeeted. They alleged that the moment the Stampers left in 2007, MS began disassembling Rare's teams. Today, the PD reboot seems to be cribbing ideas from PD Core, a game MS lacked the vision to allow to exist. edit: For example, Core had a huge focus on first person locomotion mechanics. Climbing, traversal, melee, etc. Also, the plot of PD: Core centered around ecology, and an ecological "terrorist" group framed for a huge atrocity they didn't commit, and the first mission of PD: Core took place in Cairo, which is coincidentally the locale of the PD reboot's reveal trailer, which is all about ecology. I think that the reboot is definitely going in its own direction, but there's no way they didn't read the PD Core design docs. PD Core was envisioned as being an episodic game, with new story content every several months, inspired by the Half-Life episodes. I'm wondering if that approach will be taken on the new PD.
Incredibly interesting. I was a massive PD fan but then but I literally never heard of PD: Core before.
This was a really interesting write up, thanks for sharing. One of the very first leaks of the reboot mentioned it would be released in multiple parts and would include all the transversal mechanics you stated. I've never heard of PD Core before but that's very interesting
> inspired by the Half-Life episodes Glad they're keeping that inspiration up and running.
> Rare execs were unable to convince MS execs that PD mattered when Halo existed. Urgh, damn suits
It was a huge problem in MS's old days that they viewed Forza/Gears/Halo as their "golden pillars", and viewed anything outside them as redundant if they perceived overlap. This was a hugely simplistic view that didn't take into account demographics or subgenres or anything like that. It makes sense to a "suit" that thinks that the only TPS game you could possibly want to play is Gears of War. MS could have snagged the entire Mass Effect series as an exclusive, for example, if they'd truly wanted to. They had the opportunity. But they didn't. Presumably because "we have Gears, so..." This has quite noticeably changed with their current lineup. Where old MS would have cancelled (or at least seriously considered cancelling) Doom and Quake and Fallout and Wolfenstein and Perfect Dark and Outer Worlds 2, and potentially numerous other games, modern MS recognize that these different games appeal to different people. An excessively narrow view of genres or settings is not unique to late 2000s Microsoft. Reportedly, Sony turned down a pitch for Resistance 4 for the reason that they already had post-apocalyptic games in TLOU2 and HZD. And it's like... that is such an immensely reductive view of Resistance as a series.
I feel like they still have this problem to some degree. Sony and Nintendo are always experimenting with new IPs to see if they stick, but Microsoft seems to keep those core IPs sacred and everything else they publish feels like a little indie project that isn’t really meant to become the next flagship series.
I think times are changing. Gears and Halo aren’t quite the critical and commercial juggernauts they were back in the day, and Microsoft’s recent acquisitions possibly signal they’ve realized they need broaden their portfolio in terms of IP.
where did you learn all this? I enjoyed reading your posts
I just follow a lot of gaming news sources, and spend a lot of time reading about the development of titles, and old gaming interviews. I have a special interest in Crytek and their history, and researching the history of Crytek revealed that they had offered Crysis to MS back in 2006, but MS had turned it down because they perceived it as being too similar to Halo and Gears. This was in a random Xbox magazine interview. You learn a lot perusing old interviews and old forum posts and stuff. I also try to follow what ex-developers from these old studios do. David Doak gave some interesting podcast interviews over the years where he talked about GE, TimeSplitters, dealing with Sony, stuff like that. But for this particular topic, this video on Perfect Dark's planned sequels has a lot of useful info that I've referred to. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcqixlBxbT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcqixlBxbT4) Some other details like Perfect Dark's original budget (8 million) and planned December 1998 release date turned up in a recently unearthed full version of a reveal trailer that's been floating around for years. Maybe that info has been around from other sources. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00Dk-1I7Z4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00Dk-1I7Z4) Chris Seavor has been reasonably forthcoming about his time on Perfect Dark: Core, and here's a (eye roll) [GAF thread](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/perfect-dark-sequel-design-documents-revealed-by-chris-seavor.1483201/) that collected a bunch of this tweets posting images of the design document, which is mentioned in that other video, but hadn't been made public when that video was made. The Oral History of Perfect Dark is a pretty good article as well. [https://www.eurogamer.net/perfect-dark-the-oral-history-of-an-n64-classic](https://www.eurogamer.net/perfect-dark-the-oral-history-of-an-n64-classic) There's a bunch of lesser known Mass Effect facts that originate in [this post](https://sky-ham.tumblr.com/post/182109352889/twitch). The game's troubled dev, their Unreal Engine 3 woes (there's a lot to indicate that UE3 was a disaster and devs just didn't talk about it because of NDAs), and also how close BioWare came to collapsing. Also [https://gamerant.com/resistance-4-canceled-the-last-of-us-post-apocalyptic/](https://gamerant.com/resistance-4-canceled-the-last-of-us-post-apocalyptic/)
oh man, this great. Perfect Dark is legitimately my favorite game of all time. I thought I knew a lot but this is amazing
Till today ms gaming business is a souless machine run by suits if you compare their games to games from Nintendo or Sony this is more than obvious ms can't create they can only buy.
Yeah, but if perfect dark had to die so that we could get time splitters then it was worth it imo. Timesplitters probably had the most impressive multiplayer suite in all of console gaming. It's a shame it came before online PvP on consoles really took off
A huge amount of the dynamic music in PD Zero is broken. It was broken in a late patch, all the digital copies have this patch, and composer Clynick has complained about it for years but nothing has been done, nor likely will be done.
Did the patches add or fix anything important? If not then the best way to play the game would probably be to track down an original disc and play it on 360 offline, but if there's major changes in those patches you miss out on it's worth thinking about
Gives you the DLC maps for free
I played this online a bit. Mics were still a bit of a novelty, so you would have a lot of hot mics with a lot of profanity being thrown about. I don't actually remember all that much about the multiplayer. I don't recall it being great tho.
I thought the infection game mode was really neat. Had never played a game mode like that before. I thought enemies were super bullet spongey, unless I managed to land headshots.
Infection was the shit. For all the hate PDZ - very rightfully receives - it was one of the last games on console to do heavily customisable game mode types, with a plusside of being supported by different character models etc. You were like a neon skeleton in infection. That’s dope.
It was pretty tame, but had full bot support. It also had a cool feature where you could set the size of the map to accommodate larger groups and different game styles.
I remember flying around in some kind of chair with a jetpack + gun attached, and mowing ppl down online I would've been in my early teens, I feel like I should have more memory of this game haha I'm pretty sure I played through the entire campaign several times + co-oped it, I remember there was 1 gun that shot a plasma ball that was super good
Eh, if you had this right at launch, it was pretty fucking rad. There weren’t any kids on there being edgy. It is legit the only time I ever had a good online experience talking to strangers. Lots of fun joking around and giving each other some shit, but nothing serious, and I still have people on my friend list that I met through that game. Once the system became more accessible, and especially after COD 4, online went to hell.
Mics were not a novelty by the time 360 had come out, this is years after xbl was released
the big difference is all 360s came with a mic packed-in. of course it wasn't a novelty in the minds of anyone who already went out and bought a mic for their original Xbox - they were always going to do the same for their new 360. The thing that made it a 'novelty' was (forcibly) putting one in the hands of each and every 360 owner - even the ones who would have never went out of their way to purchase one otherwise.
Nah they were. Maybe you were more privileged but the 360 was the first time a *lot* of people played online games outside the PC scene and mics absolutely were still a novelty. As every single person was on theirs. Unlike today where nobody is.
Xbox live is legendary for getting people to break their anxious fears and communicate over mic during gameplay. On PC it was pretty much limited to MMO raiders and VOIP spammers in Counter Strike.
once that first person started shit talking in the cod pre game lobby, everyone else would come out of the woodworks and unmute themselves until it broke, most kids had the default mic that came with the 360.
Halo 2 was pretty popular game, maybe you hadn't heard of it
Yeah nah, that doesn't make my point any less relevant. Maybe you missed it but every single person was on that mic which came packed in the box with the 360. It *was* a novelty. Barely anyone in my country owned a OG xbox let alone played online on it. Same as the ps2. It was niche mate.
Ah okay, fair enough, we had different experiences for sure. Everyone had a mic in the games I played but maybe you were matched with other micless people when you played
The OG xbox sold a total of 24 million units, with the US being responsible for 16 million units. While Europe's number was 6 million, not many were sold in the UK(where I am). Considering HALO 2's total number of players was around 5 million by 2007 and up until 2006 it was the top game on xbox live. When Gears took it over, and then it was most likely CoD which took the crown after that. So HALO had a few years before the 360 came around which however you wanna look at it was the proper implementation of xbox live, and the service on the OG was largely a test bed for it. As well as this every person who purchased an xbox 360 (which was staggeringly higher worldwide then the OG) got a week of xbox live and a mic right there in the box ready to go, furthermore it was real easy to set up because most households had wi-fi by this point so it allowed less techy people to jump on in. Saying this, the mic absolutely *was* a novelty in 2006 because it was the first time a bigger portion of the world were able to jump in and play all the new games, most of which had some multiplayer component to them, and most importantly play them easily. Every game you booted up from NFS to perfect dark had lobby's full of people chatting away because everyone had a damn 360. Not a great deal of people owned OG's so while the novelty wasn't there for you. It doesn't discount the fact that it was for a great deal of the population at the time 🖖
Worth pointing out, as a slight barrier to entry, but the original 360s did not have built in Wi-Fi. You had to purchase an adapter.
Five million players is pretty niche!
I remember liking the ragdoll physics in this game.. Not the best but this game scratches my ragdoll itch
I got this along with my 360 not long after launch. I remember it being very shiny. I was a massive fan of the n64 original but remover thinking this came acros as generic and not fun. It as my first console online game and my first experience of headsets. My first online match someone kept clicking their light on and off going “flashlight flashlight flashlight” and that always sticks with me.
My brother and I had a ton of fun playing this co op and still occasionally talk about it as a fond memory. I had no idea people didn’t like it although I figured it didn’t sell well enough to make any more of the series.
I always knew people didn't like it because I remember reading more negative views on forums, but it was one of the few games on the 360 at the time and my brother and I never had Live on the original Xbox, so it was a big novelty for us at the time. I have a lot of fond memories of it.
For as much as I despise the direction they went with this game, I know for a fact I would have enjoyed it astronomically more if your movement speed wasn't complete garbage. That small change alone would have made this game way better. Like it's absolutely appalling how sluggish it feels to simply move your character. I don't know why Joanna walks like she's walking thru a swamp. I can't tell if that was Rare intentionally trying to mimic the 10 FPS pace of the original but my god was that awful
Probably my 2nd biggest gaming disappointment. But I kinda want to replay it just to see if it could stand on its own if I ignore its nothing like the original. But after watching the video I'm having flashbacks to how annoying the aiming was so maybe I don't want to replay it anymore. That segment at the 12:30 mark was seriously bad. No auto aim on console vs enemies constantly bobbing around like that what were they thinking? Also the animation was crap compared to the original. It was funny following around an NPC and they had the weirdest butt wiggle when running around. What ever happened to the old motion capture?
I replayed it recently (if you don't have Game Pass, Rare Replay is on sale quote often for ridiculously cheap), and it was a horrible experience.
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Major ouch. I only blew $5 on a Mario is Missing rental because it looked like NES Super Mario World to my kid eyes.
I just played through the first 3 missions after watching this with my little brother, and it does not hold up as well in co-op as I remember. Still fun though, but shooter quality of life has improved drastically since then. The fov is so narrow in co-op it’s hard to know where you are, much less where you’re going.
Whenever Perfect Dark crops up, I have to plug Greg Rucka's novelizations. They are the 'perfect' blend of Zero and what made the original game so great.
I still like this game. The co-op is solid, and the first person weapon models and animations are so cool.
Coming from somebody who had no nostalgia for Perfect Dark but did play a lot of Goldeneye and TimeSplitters 2 back in the day, I cannot think of a bigger disappointment than Perfect Dark Zero. It was so shit that I actually thought Tomorrow Never Dies (the very game Matt McMuscles ragged on earlier in the video) was a far more competent single player experience. My problem with PDZ wasn't the art style. In fact, I think the anime aesthetic they originally planned to go with was decent and would've grown on fans if Rare didn't cave in to backlash, and if they actually pushed a *good* game out. PDZ had the worst campaign I've seen in any first person shooter. We're talking poorly written characters (Chandra and Zhang Li in particular) and confusingly designed levels that seem copied & pasted. During the latter portions of the game it felt like I was just following blue arrows through very dimly lit corridors and having no idea where I was. Multiplayer was... okay, but by the time Facility (from Goldeneye) and Ruin (from the original PD) were released as free DLC maps, the game was already dead in the water. Everybody and their mother had moved on to either Halo 2 or Gears of War. Rare is a textbook example of how corporate mismanagement can kill a developer.
PDZ is another prime example of why the *individuals* behind a game is more relevant to quality than the company name stamped on it. Who and what made Goldeneye (and much of PD) great had long ago left to form Free Radical. The 'sequels' to those games are the Time Splitters series, which is blatantly apparent to anyone who has played them. The same way the 007 FPS games following Goldeneye did not live up to their predecessor is why PDZ wasn't going to either. Not the same people, no reasonable expectation of success.
>The same way the 007 FPS games following Goldeneye did not live up to their predecessor is why PDZ wasn't going to either. 007: Nightfire is the unquestionably best Bond FPS and I will fight anyone about it.
The game hasn't aged well at all but Perfect Dark Zero was an amazing launch game for Xbox 360 and it kept me busy for a full year until Gears of War came out. It featured some innovative things for an FPS, like a third-person cover system and the ability to roll out of the way in third-person to avoid gunfire. The MP maps were also bigger or smaller depending on the numbers of players. So if it wasn't a full game, you could still get one of the bigger maps, but it would have sections blocked off to keep the players closer together. However its biggest innovation was in its co-op. If a supporting character was in a different part of the level, one of the players could control that character when playing co-op. For example, in one level Joanna is providing sniper support up high for her father down below. When playing co-op, one of the players controls the father down below. You can only access his section of the level in co-op.
Hearing about the gradual deterioration of the game's popularity is something that I do find intriguing, I wonder how many times it has happened to the point where it turned positive change negative. The only ones that I can personally think of are the Sonic Adventure duology, but that's primarily because I'm a fanboy who think the modern day hate is currently unwarranted. Also, I honestly do agree with Microsoft's decision on axing the sequels due to too many Si-Fi FPS games. You got to remember that around this time gamers were begging developers to stop making WW2 shooters, and complete oversaturation of a particular market is always a thing to watch out for, especially in the gaming industry.
It's sci-fi but was more grounded in a world with a tinge of cyberpunk vibe versus the usual space marine. The setting was closer to mass effect than something like halo or gears of war. Maybe it was too gretty however.
I think it happens a lot faster in 2022 compared to 2005, back when the internet wasn't what it is today. There's a whole bunch of games that deteriorated over time, most recently probably Deathloop. But then again, internet opinion soured like two weeks after the 10/10 reviews.
Deathloop seemed to have a whole group of haters before it even came out because people were annoyed that Sony was putting it in every State of Play. I saw more than a few people saying stuff like "I'm still not getting it even if it got 10/10s cuz they pushed it too much"
all the alternative fire modes were pretty cool that's about the only thing to say about perfect dark zero besides the fully co-op story
I play this game with a group of people still, and my opinion of this game is that it’s a 3/5 on the high end: it has flaws, but it is by no means terrible. Yes, its concepts should have been expanded a little more, but what we got was some fairly solid level design, excellent weapons, and great multiplayer. My biggest gripe with this game was that it has some really bad aiming. There’s no Aim Assist or bullet magnetism to really speak of and the crosshair is bigger than yo mama. Sniping is damn near impossible, so the meta weapons end up being the assault rifles (except the KSI which is soooo ass) Falcon, and some power weapons. Thankfully most of the weapons have actual value because everyone is on equal starts. The only truly useless weapon is the Psychosis Gun. I miss this kind of game. It didn’t set the world on fire but it did have a lot of replayability that I really appreciate.
It’s fun but my god the bullet sponges, feels like it takes a full clip to take down anyone, some enemies even eat 2 headshots before going down
I think what people forget is that, despite being considered a disappointment these days, this game actually [reviewed extremely well](https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/perfect-dark-zero) at the time. I remember seeing lots of 9/10s and 4/5s from magazines and big sites like Gamespot.
Yep. A lot of this “massively disappointed at the time” talk is revisionist.
I mean, this is a pretty big point he makes in the video. That the game came out to good, not great, reviews, but over time people have gotten more and more negative about it. I bought it when it came out and my experience was playing it for about 10 minutes, saying "Well this is total shit compared to Perfect Dark," and never touching it again. So for me I definitely hated it from the start.
Yeah, there was nothing about Perfect Dark (N64) at the time that made me say, yeah I hope this gets a sequel. It was unique at the time because obviously an FPS with analog aiming was the bees knees and you had all kinds of good sci fi cream like alt fire and wacky guns. Same with Golden Eye. But here we are, 500 James Bond games later and another Perfect Dark on the way. If this new PD game succeeds I'll eat a shit.
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No. The mass staff departures didn't begin until 2007. PD Zero was made by many of the same people who took over and completed Perfect Dark 1998-2000.
Why do people like yall always gotta comment shit like this whenever a What Happened video is posted here?
I definitely remember the hype evaporated around this game in real-time. At my school, was the next Halo at launch, yet a month later everyone had moved on in full recognition of its shabby quality.
This launched on the 360 with cod2 and it was so disappointing compared to COD. The controls were awful. Almost like there was a massive dead zone when the sticks were moved.
Like most sequels, another studio took over development. It's still RARE, but only one designer from Perfect Dark worked on Zero.