Perfect Dark HD Remake

You know me, I love to holiday at Nostalgia Resort and to me nothing is more nostalgic than playing a classic game from the Nintendo 64 era. Unfortunately all of my N64 controllers suffer from terminal 'Mario Party Syndrome' and the combination of limp, unresponsive analogue sticks and the use of buttons to control aiming makes playing Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 a nightmare. Luckily Rare have decided to remake many of their classic N64 titles and release them on the Xbox Live Marketplace. They did Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and now it's Perfect Dark's turn.

So yeah it's boring old game review time. That and it's a game I actually like, so sweet burns are looking highly unlikely at this point. I guess you'll just have to wait until next week when I will hopefully be reviewing some high budget porn (I'm not joking, it's gonna be fun for all). So anyway the thing about Perfect Dark is that it reminds me of what's wrong with modern First Person Shooters. Perfect Dark has lovely environments to explore, varied and interesting missions as well as a large variety of rediculous weapons to kill people with. A modern shooting game has about 5 different weapons that you use to shoot boring characters with from behind cover in a long boring corridor. In Perfect Dark you can sneak up behind a stationary guard , literally pop a cap in his ass and watch them leap comically in surprise like a cartoon character in a mouse trap. In Perfect Dark all the enemies all act like they're auditioning for the part of a murder victim in a highschool production of Agatha Christie. "Why...me?" a dying guard will say with his last breath as he falls to his knees. It's fantastic. A modern FPS sacrifices fun for realism and I really miss it. Perfect Dark is acutely aware of what makes a game fun and has seemily developed the whole game around that knowledge.

Not that Perfect Dark is (dare I say it?) a perfect game. The story IS bad, even if it is easy to skip and it has a fun, campness to it. It's all about secret agencies and government conspiracies that (get THIS) eventually lead the story into outter space with peaceful and hostil alien factions. The worst thing of all is the escort segments of the game. There's nothing more annoying than some fuckwit AI running irratically in circles in front of the enemy until they get shot dead. It's not the worst AI I've ever seen, nor are they the most stressful escort missions. It's not even close to being a deal breaker but they can get annoying at times. But you know what? Fuck it. Perfect Dark is one of the greatest FPS games I've played in years and it's 10 years old. The controls, the graphics, the multiplayer and the framerate have all been vastely improved upon the original, which was in itself a fantastic game. If you've never played it before you should buy it. If you HAVE played it before then you'll probably want to buy it again anyway because of it's slick improvements.