By Andrew Liszewski
It seems only fitting that I should follow up my TGWP GoldenEye 007 post from last week with GoldenEye’s own sequel, Perfect Dark. Now after GoldenEye 007 pretty much established itself as one of the main reasons to pick up Nintendo’s last cartridge dependent console, most fans of the game, myself included, started to anticipate what Rare had planned for a sequel. Unfortunately though, it turned out that for whatever reason they were unable to secure the Bond license again, which meant GoldenEye’s successor would end up being an original creation. While this news made a few people worry that the sequel wouldn’t be as good as the original, those concerns turned out to be unfounded as Perfect Dark ended up being better than GoldenEye 007 in every aspect. Sure the catchy Bond theme was gone, and playing the game wasn’t like reliving one of the 007 movies, but improved graphics, better weapons and an amazing multiplayer mode more than made up for it.
And like with GoldenEye 007, it was the multiplayer mode that made Perfect Dark a real hit. In fact, I think my friends and I usually spent more time customizing the ‘perfect’ match than actually playing it. Another thing I particularly liked was the new weapons introduced in PD which included a ridiculously fun remote controlled rocket and the Farsight gun which allowed you to snipe an opponent across an entire level even if you were inside a building. The other thing that made Perfect Dark’s multiplayer entertaining for me was the stat tracking. I can only speculate how many hours of my life were spent playing GoldenEye, but Perfect Dark not only kept track of those hours, but also the virtual miles your character ran, kills, shots fired and pretty much any bit of data you could need to prove you were a batter player than your friends. And isn’t that what was really important?
