User Reviews

This is one of the best videogames i have ever played. The multi player has so many options it's awesome. IMO the best game for the N64 and one of the best games ever. If you havent played it you should at least give it a rent.

Perfect Dark played on an N64 with the 4MB expansion pack is truly and utterly one of if not THE best video game ever. Goldeneye was fantastic but this has took it to the next level. Games like Quake 3, Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament might have better graphics but when it comes to sheer gameplay Perfect Dark is the king. The graphics for it are maybe not quite as polished as its predecessor but the amount of great ideas are unrivaled in video game history. Loads of cool meaty weapons (got to love the missile with the camera!). It's over 4 years old and still beats any first person shooter by far. Even though the sequel is to be released sometime in the future on the X-Box i doubt it will play the same as the original did. The missions are so cool and laid out well with a good story and character interaction. The thing that kept me coming back for more was the death matches with up to 8 players playing at the same time (human or sim) which was especially cool because there are so many modes and tweaks to make you play Perfect Dark for years to come. Forget Doom 3 with all it's eye candy but no depth. Keep with this little baby stuck in your N64. I found that i've never took the cartridge out the slot in over 2 years. LOL!

The year 2000 will always be remembered for the Y2K scare and the Sydney Olympics. But I'd like to look back at a game that pushed the N64 to it's limits. That game was Perfect Dark, from the makers of Goldeneye comes a game that some would call a sequel, but I wouldn't. it's a game that uses the same engine, and the same shell of a story, but instead, the hero has 2 Perky boobs on her chest instead of hair.

Joanna Dark is a 23 year old Secret agent on a mission to rescue an AI named Dr. Carroll. But what starts as a rescue mission for a Flying computer (literally) unfolds into a much bigger story, taking Joanna to a private villa where her boss lives, Chicago, Area 51, and outer space.

For the N64, The game was amazing when it came out. if you were a fan of goldeneye at the time, you knew PD was going to rock your socks off. the Single player mode was a vast improvement; the Guards would conversate and yell taunts while shooting at you, and their guns would sometimes Jam. They would get scared, and some would scream when they got shot. in goldeneye, all they did was groan when they were shot, and scream when you ran them over with a tank (And Goldeneye was rated T for teen. wonder where good ol' Jack Thompson was then.) Also, you don't just read the in-game Dialogue, The characters actually Speak! On top of that, there was a language filter, but it was more of a joke than anything, cause all it did was cut out the dialogue that had words like Hell and Damn in them, and sometimes that would cut out important dialogue to move the story along.

Multiplayer was probably the biggest improvement. In goldeneye the multiplayer was revolutionary, but in PD the Multiplayer was Amazing. if you didn't have friends, that's OK, PD had Bots! you could have up to 12 people (thats if you had 4 controllers and 4 players) and 8 computers running around killing each other. and unlike goldeneye, you could actually customize Weapon Sets, Character bodies and heads, and music! all in All, Perfect Dark on the N64 was probably it's best title.

Now, for the Xbox 360 Remake.

What can I say about this one? Well, it's not so much a vast improvement, although the 60 Framerate Per Second improvement was the best part.

As for the characters, they certainly made the jump. Their voices are much clearer and their looks are too. Joanna looks downright sexy and so do the female staff at carrington institute. One drawback? the distinct faces are gone. the weird databank guy in the one room? his face is as stock as the rest of the institute's male employees. Cassandra De Vries doesn't look so old anymore. Elvis lost his cuteness (I kinda thought he was) now he just looks ugly.

A few more add-ons; Achievements (shooting all of Daniel Carrington's wine bottles in the villa gives you the "Act your age, Joanna" achievement.) and the addition of online play. I haven't experimented with it yet, so i can't comment whether it's good or not, but i'm expecting it to be good.

Bottom line, I'm proud that Rare created this gem, and I only wish that they could release a good new PD game.

Make Joanna's Fans happy, Rare.

10/10

Special Agent Joanna Dark works with the Carrington Institute. When the Institute recieves a distress signal from Dr Caroll, Joanna is sent into the headquaters of sinister corporation DataDyne Inc to rescue him. With him in tow they find that DataDyne has made deadly connections with an alien race that seeks to bring it's rule to earth. With the lives of earth and other planets in the balance Joanna works to stop the alliance.

This "sequel" to Goldeneye uses the same engine to drive it and looks similar in style - the controls being identical in fact. However the graphics are considerably better, everything moves much faster, speech is involved in both the game and the cut sequences and the cinema scenes are longer. The game isn't just a shoot 'em up - it's not just a matter of shooting constantly. Some levels are, but the majority require some thought and plenty of stealth tactics. In some levels silencers must be used to avoid setting off the alarm, while in others you must capture staff alive in order to complete your objectives. With three difficulty levels on each stage (not only increasing the ability of your opponents but adding more objectives) and a range of challenges on each this will last you for a long time. Some of the levels are really difficult and you almost need to slowly work your way through by stealth. Even when you finish the level - for many if you complete it within a set time then you get a cheat (some of these are really hard).

Outside of the game you have the traditional multi player game. The degree to which you can tweak this is astonishing - you can set all types of weapons, all types of games (combat, king of the hill etc - not just games where you shoot everything in sight), time, scores and a set of 30 challenges to play against. This will keep the game alive for long after you finish the main game and, unlike Goldeneye - you can still play it even if you're alone!

The game has a gradual learning curve in both the game and the challenges, meaning that you will occassionally get stuck but not to the point of frustration.

Overall this is a perfect game - I'm sure the graphics etc will be superseeded with time, but the heart of the game is strong.

I can't say enough good things about Rare's Perfect Dark, and as of this writing, I haven't even finished the game!

Using their incredible Goldeneye engine, the folks at Rare have improved upon their success 1000% - on the technical side they've added speech, longer cinematic cuts to keep you involved in the story, and great music. Within the game itself, FPS nuts like myself will thrill to the new weapons and gadgets.

The game is not just "shoot everyone and take everything you see," however; there are many sequences where your guile and intelligence will serve you much better than a machine gun.

The single or multiplayer Combat Simulator is what every FPS game from now on will use as the industry standard; the ability to tweak every nuance of your deathmatch is unparalleled, and the skills of the computer-run "simulants" will challenge even the most jaded console warrior to the fight of his or her "life."

Highly recommended, Perfect Dark scores a Perfect 10.

Perfect Dark is the long awaited sequel to GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 Entertainment System. Following the exploits of new Carrington Institute Special Agent Joanna "Perfect Dark" Dark, who achieved a more than perfect score in her agent training. Right away, she is caught up in an interplanetary conspiracy to unleash Armageddon on Earth. At the heart of this conspiracy is NSA Director Trent Easton, dataDyne Corp. CEO Cassandra DeVries, the President, and a man known only as Mr. Blonde, who represents the alien species called the Skedar. Soon Joanna is not only fighting for herself, but for the fate of the universe.

Combining first person shooting action, sci-fi drama, and thrilling espionage, Perfect Dark received PERFECT ratings from most reviewers. Perfect Dark takes the innovative GoldenEye multiplayer to a new level, where you design your character, customize the settings (including guns and limits of the match), choose different scenarios (King of the Hill and Capture the Case), to going against 6 levels of CPU Simulants (from the stupid MeatSim to the smart and evil DarkSim). This game is one of the last great N64 titles, and is now a Player's Choice - Million Seller Game.

You would be wrong not to check out Perfect Dark.

What can you say about a game where you are a female agent protecting the world from alien domination? Or having more than a dozen action-packed levels with unique guns and realistic, talking enemies? And an alien who has more personality than your math teacher? It is excellence, my friend, sheer excellence. Rare could not come out with a better sequel to Goldeneye than PD. The graphics are stunning and clear, and the effects are a novelty ( This is true to throwing knives: when you stick one in an enemy, they gasp and the screen gets blurry and their health drops). The plot is especially good, and Elvis is the coolest alien you ever done saw.

If you don't own this game you better rush out and buy it! *****/

Perfect Dark is hard to review because in many ways it is the same as Rare's previous shooter, GoldenEye 007, but in other ways it is so much better. In short, Perfect Dark is the perfect, non-official, sequel to GoldenEye 007. Sure, the settings are different, and there are some different weapons (after all this IS a science fiction based game), but overall you can still see the loving touches the developers brought back from GoldenEye.

The game is set in a well developed science fiction environment and many of the levels provide difficulties that are handled by the new features added to the character's options. The wide range of weapons is one of the major improvements over its predecessor, GoldenEye, as well as the unique plot (after all, this one isn't based on a movie). So the plot is an interesting one involving alien invasions and government conspiracy and does keep the gamer interested throughout its run, but without a doubt my favorite feature of this game that I found lacking in GoldenEye 007 is the actual use of voice actors. Joanna Dark and all the other characters in this film have a voice we can link to their image, while with GoldenEye we'd have to go back to the film to recall the voices of our characters.

Of course, the major improvement over GoldenEye 007 is the multiplayer feature which is fun, and do to a wider range of weapons the gamer is allowed to execute new strategies, so overall Perfect Dark really is an expansion of GoldenEye 007 as well as being a great gaming experience by itself.

This is a game that is great to play back-to-back with GoldenEye 007, because you should probably learn the controls from GoldenEye before you play this game because it makes it a lot simpler (but I suppose you could play this before you play GoldenEye, but I'm someone who likes to play/view in chronological order).

So if you enjoyed GoldenEye 007 (as so many other people have over the years) you should certainly dust off the Nintendo 64 and come back to this perfectly worthy successor.

Yeah, Bond gets all the love because it came first. And it deserves it.

But this was better. And it was kind of better because of sims. If you had a slow night and couldn't get all your friends to sit around the TV and kill one another, you could at least load up a bunch of sims and have that feeling.

Or, you could load them up to pad the scores a little, make the friend on friend violence a little more chaotic.

Oh, yeah, there were solo missions too, and those were fun. New Chicago still stands out pretty vividly in my memory.

But it wasn't about the solo missions, it was just Bond brought to the next level of friend-on-friend digital violence.

Like Goldeneye before it, it's one of those games where the vivid memories come from playing it with friends, all in the same room, and not so much going out on your own.

When i heard that RareWare were bringing out a sort of sequel to Goldeneye i thought great this is going to be much more better. Once it finally arrived after numerous delays i was most pleased, it was worth the wait. It was perfect!!!!!!.

Compared to Goldeneye, this could have been amazing. The first half of the campaign is excellent, however, after the Area 51 missions, it becomes lackluster in enemy design, level design and story. The voice acting is so awful it's hilarious (watch the final cut scene on the second Area 51 mission). The multiplayer however, is much better than Goldeneye's multiplayer, with custom weapon sets, the best bot system I've ever seen, and better game modes. Overall, it's a great game, but it's burdened by the last half of the campaign.

This is my favorite game for Nintendo 64. This game is basically Tomb Raider + Goldeneye + The Matrix. The graphics are great and the weapons and characters are also great. My favorite part of the entire game is the Multiplayer, its so much fun to play with 4 people. This is a great game.

I am addicted to this game. After beating it (completing everything, cheats, levels and the thirty horrible hard multiplayer levels - damn proud) I have gone into some sort of dvala, just waiting for Perfect Dark 2. I do have a life (gotta check, to be sure... yes I DO have a life, phew) but this game is simply something amazing!

10 of 10.

"Goldeneye" was one of the first games released for the N64 and was a huge success. Many gamers still consider it one of the finest first person shooters ever made. The success of the game was mimicked in the years to come with more and more Bond games emerging, but none of them lived up to the originality and intense gameplay of "Goldeneye." But in 2000, Rareware (the makers of Goldeneye) announced plans for a sequel of sorts named "Perfect Dark" - based on almost identical gameplay, it would be about a female secret agent/spy, and when the game was released it was an instant success (it was also one of the first games to make use of the "Rumble Pak").

"Perfect Dark" is a brilliant FPS and very unique. It mixes different genre staples - spies, aliens, UFOs, puzzles, everything. The sequel is coming out soon for XBox 360 and I'm thinking of purchasing an XBox platform just to play the sequel - that's how impressed I was with the original "Perfect Dark" video game.

Perfect Dark is one of the most different shoot em up video games on the N64! The characters, the action, and the sure thrill of adventure makes this game a fun non-stop playing time! Below is a brief look how I think the game is!

Game Play: The game play is very good. There is really basic controls here and is easy to perform. Novice gamers should have a good time here!

Graphics: The graphics are wonderful. The backgrounds are really beautiful!

Difficulty: The game is easy but as it goes on you find out that it will become more difficult!

Music: The music is great! Just fantastic catchy tunes through out the game! In My opinion its some of the best music ever in a video game!

Sound: The sound is great. Nuff said!

Overall: I have always loved Perfect Dark! If you like excellent adventure shooting games then I strongly recommend you play this game!

To purchase this video game check out Amazon.com!

This game far surpasses it's inspiration (Goldeneye). It has a far higher replay value on account of more variations of simulants, and several different winning conditions. A "perfect" game for parties. If you liked Goldeneye, the only thing you won't like about this game is that fast animation isn't nearly as quick as Goldeneye.

PD is truely a great game and deserves all the credit it receives. A great first person shooter and combat game. Let's hope the movie is just as good. Rare and Nintendo did a great job.

The fact that the main character is a female secret agent adds a little sarcasm to the stories. She's brilliant, beautiful and a professional with guns.

I also love the fact that one of the aliens is named Elvis. He fights by Joanna's side when in space.

This game has the same controls as Goldeneye, but this game is way better. Its got a variety of characters to play with, plus you can switch around the heads of the characters. The guns are more futuristic with maybe a couple of modern weapons like a shotgun.

Personally, my favourite guns are the laptop gun and Farsight.

Anyways, people who enjoy games like CS and Goldeneye, i recommend this game. It's easy to play and fun for everyone!

Yeah, you are right. Perfect Dark IS modeled right after GoldenEye (though the rights for the James Bond games were swiped by EA at this time). However, the elements of GoldenEye still belong to Rareware, since EA hasn't even dreamed of recreating the original GoldenEye (though they are releasing their own version of the game next month; now they're buying up most GoldenEye knock-offs, like TimeSplitters).

GRAPHICS: Not really improved since GoldenEye's reign of terror, but there are some add-ons, such as how every gun has its own reload animation and now you can see your hand as you're holding the gun (unlike GoldenEye, where you could only see your hand on handguns. With bigger guns, you could only see the gun). Other than that, same stuff. Environments are pretty big, especially in the multiplayer levels.

SOUND: Improved over GoldenEye, but only slightly. At least this time you can hear your footsteps as you walk around. An amusing thing about the sound is how you can hear the simulants in the combat arena shooting at each other in the distance, letting you know there must be one heck of a blazefest going on across the building. The music is also gloomy and a little Gothic, but it's necessary. I think there's a function that changes music pace as tension changes, but that's an Expansion Pak extra. It wasn't built into the cartridge itself. I had to play without the Pak, so I'm missing all the yummy-ness the game was supposed to be built with.

GAMEPLAY: Again, same as GoldenEye, except this time, the Deathmatch multiplayer allows one player to pit themselves with or against teams of computer-generated beings called simulants. You can have up to 8 simulants, but in order to get that 8, you must work for it (preferably in the Challenges). The only gripe I have is how unfair challenges seem to be after a while, like this one I'm stuck on where I have a simulant to work with against one enemy simulant, and there are one-hit kills. That simulant seems to have a really big shield, but it can cap both of us easily. Also, you need the Expansion Pak for the N64 in order to live the entire Perfect Dark experience. Without that Pak, you can only do Challenges and Deathmatches. This is probably because there was enough information already on the cartridge, and everything else had to be loaded in through a different resource. Hey...that's why cartridges suck.

BOTTOM LINE: Though this is a LITTLE better than GoldenEye, I wouldn't say too much. It was modeled after it but it still feels a little...misplaced. Overall, you can check it out and see how nice it is, and it should be real easy to get used to if you've played GoldenEye before this. 8.5/10.

This game didn't get much recognition as opposed to Goldeneye (which this was based on). Perhaps because of the reliance of the expansion pack. However this game constantly amazed me and the as you first start to play it becomes apparent this game is very special.

The one player game starts off where Goldeneye's outstanding one-player game left off and is even better. You play Joanna Dark (codenamed 'Perfect') investigating sinister behaviour of a megacorporation called Datadyne. It soon becomes apparent that you are dealing with something much more. In fact, the future of the planet and maybe even the universe is in jeopardy.

This artificial intelligence is brilliant, the graphics are amazing for the Nintendo 64, the multiplayer mode is great (but a little overcomplicated) and it's full of innovation from the word go. It would be easy to get carried away on call this the best game ever made...

This game starts to lose it's greatness when it gets to the later missions. This isn't so apparent when you play it on the easier difficulties but play it on 'Perfect Agent' (the equivalent to Goldeneye's 00 Agent) and you start to realize that this game is extremely hard and success becomes a lot to do with luck as well as skill.

As with all stealth games you are outnumbered, however, this game doesn't give you as many opportunities for being stealthy. You are often in a position where you have to confront masses of guards and have no stealth options. You really do have to a perfect gamer to be able to deal with the incredibly hard situations you are put in the game. This means you have to replay the missions. Again... and again, and again, and again, and again, and again etc.

However, despite this I still highly respect it and I hope the issues are addressed in the eventual sequel on the X-Box. Then, we could be looking at the greatest game of all time. Interesting to note, Perfect Dark was going to feature a multiplayer feature where you would be able to scan in your face picture with a Game Boy Camera and map it onto a deathmatch character (in full-colour despite the fact the GB Camera took pictures in greyscale). If this feature had been implemented I feel this game would have become very famous but controversial due to children being able to do this. Nintendo of America removed this option and that leaves me wondering what could have been.

8/10