Dark…..Joanna Dark.

When Goldeneye for the N64 was released, FPS games had made a new name for it self, at least for the console market.  While FPS games were already on the PC, it wasn’t exactly a mainstream.  The term “shooter” elvovled into “FPS,” going from  shooting in only 4 or 8 directions to virtually any direction in real life.  On May 22th, 2000, Goldeneye’s “sequel,” was released, or at least it’s better half.  While not exactly an outright “sequel,” Perfect Dark was basically Goldeneye 64 on steroids, but with a completely different theme.  Goldeneye’s big brother, or sister if you will.  Taking Goldeneye 64’s engine, Rareware took what made Goldeneye 64 so great and just went bannanas, pretty much making the “Halo” of the N64.

Perfect Dark introduced a lot of FPS things that we see today, things that we take for granted, and even some things that no other FPS has.  At least, based on what I played, it was the first FPS to have an actual reloading animation, something other than just “bring the gun off screen and back.”  It also had character leaning, the first weapon selection wheel and even a target range for each weapon.  It had co-op play, something that not enough FPS games do.  (Although it was quite funny as the second player was just an unimportant backup named “Velvet Dark” I believe, that for some reason never played a role in the game’s story, or showing up anywhere in the game’s cutscenes.)   It even had “Counter-Co-op” play, a game mode that so far…only Left4Dead does.  It’s the same as co-op only the 2nd player has the option of helping the 1st player, or playing as random enemy soldiers throughout the level.  You had limited health, but your human intelligence and respawning hopefully would make up for it, especially when a 3rd or 4th person could jump in as enemy soldiers and start planning on how to stop the 1st player playing as Joanna.  It’s a great feeling to try and blend in with the AI soldiers and gang up on the 1st player before he can find out which soldiers are AI and which are the other players.  The game also had what it calls a combat simulator, it’s version of multiplayer.  Now, I find it strange that despite all the advances Perfect Dark made to Goldeneye, in various magazine awards Goldeneye STILL won over it.  Goldeneye is only fun when you had other people to play with, unless you constantly play a campaign which everyone has pratically memorized.  Perfect Dark fixed all these with besides 4 player split screen, the addition to add up to 16 AI bots, ranging from extremely stupid to tough as nails.  Granted playing against a bot is never as fun as playing against a friend, but Goldeneye was winning awards for it’s multiplayer presumably you always had company.

Let’s not forget PD’s weapon selection, which, I dare admit, is better than Halo’s, or any other FPS I’ve played.  Besides various types of pistols, SMG’s, assault rifles, (unfournatly one shotgun) it also had unique weapons such as the laptop gun, a laptop looking gun that fires like an assault rifle but could also be deployed on a wall as a portable gun turret.  Also throwing knives, crossbows, a “Gears of War like Lancer” gun called a Reaper, and a tranquilizer that causes your target’s vision to blur, or if you want to get really nasty, get up close an personal with it an “inject” them for an isntant kill.  And the of course, everyone’s favorite cheapskate, the Farsight.  The Farsight was the lazy man’s sniper rifle.  The gun could not be fired accurately with the hip (or not at all I believe) but aiming it caused your character to enter a alien heat like vision and automatically track  a random opponent, no matter where you where.  If for example, you were hiding in one room and your opponent was 3 or 4 rooms nearby, you could bring up the scope and shoot him….through the wall….all 3 or 4 walls.  It wasn’t “completely” cheap however, while the tracking did elimiante the need to actually find the player, you couldn’t control the tracking directly, and it wasn’t like the player would stop moving.  Lose the track, and you had to reposition yourself.  Also because it was splitscreen it’s not like the other player didn’t know you had them in your sights.

Perfect Dark will remain a classic for years to come, but the problem is it’s on a console that’s over 10 years old.  Well not anymore.  Hopefully, coming this winter in 09 Xbox Live Arcade will be re releasing Perfect Dark.  The game is supposed to come with new features, but what features we don’t know.  The only new enhancement anyone knows of is that it will be in 1080p and will support up to four in multiplayer.  The shot above are the improved graphics, (the rest is from the original N64) but to be honest it doesn’t look like much of an improvement.  I wouldn’t expect much though other than sharper textures.   Now I never owned Perfect Dark Zero, and I haven’t played it enough to really find out what was so “bad” about it, but I’m wondering if the negative ratings for Zero will have any effect for this XBLA release.  To one not willing to do the research, they’ll base their buying decision off of Perfect Dark Zero and won’t give the original a chance.  As far as enhancements go, I can’t exactly imagine that much to enhance, but up to 4 multiplayer?  What is this, the stone ages?  Give us at least 8.  And even if they don’t improve the graphics much, I also really despise the look of Joanna’s sneaking suit and her hair.  Wearing her sneaking suit, you can really see the N64’s limitations.  Essentially her character model is completly naked with a skin wrapped around it, and she’s built like a stick.   Joanna’s hair in her CG artwork does not even depict what she looks like in-game as you can see below.  The CG you see below is the promotional artwork designed at the game’s first release:

Now it could just be me, but she looks like G.I. Jane with slightly more hair.  Really cut short, kind of looks like a boy if it wasn’t for the lipstick.  It definitely does not match what the XBLA shot is depicting.  I understand this is mostly due to the N64’s limitations, but there are other characters in the game that actually have depth in their hair, not this flat pasted on look that Joanna has.

I’m usually reluctant to buy remade versions of games I already own, but this one is an exepction.  Let’s just hope the whatever improvements Microsoft plans to do are worth it.

This remake (also previously made on the DS and PSP) changes all that.  While it still is good old Space Invaders, the game takes on a combination of Pac Man’s Championship addition style of gameplay and Lumines’ side for audio and visual.  Just like Pac Man Champ, the game is more fast paced.  Instead of filling up the entire screen with invaders that will just repeat over again once you kill them all, it fills up the screen with fewer invaders that appear in different waves and patterns after each one.  Your little pea shooter fires faster than the oringial (still one bullet at a time however) and will get faster the more invaders you kill as your cannon “levels up.”  Killing mulitple enemies in a row stacks up chains and increases your score multiplier, but stray too far inbetween kills and it will go down.  Don’t get reckless either, as losing a life also drops your cannon down by two levels.

The game takes on a more strategic approach than the original, almost like a puzzle game and shmup combined together.  Invaders come in multiple colors, and if you kill four in a row of the same color without changing, they will drop a powerup.  Green invaders drop a spread gun, (do not think Contra, that would just be insane) red invaders drop a gun that shoots bombs that can explode on impact, killing nearby invaders, and blue invaders, my favorite, drop a super sweet pulse laser where you can simply drill through multiple invaders with just one swoop.  There are also gray invaders which drop shields, protecting you from bullets, and crappy white invaders that don’t drop anything at all.  (However killing them does not break a color combo.)

The game is far from difficult, even the last stage.  Enemy bullets travel very slow and usually only in straight lines.  Some will explode, others will ricochet of walls.  (If your good at weaving in between projectiles in a shmup game, this should be cakewalk for you.)  About the most difficult thing is random invaders that will just start careening towards the ground in a straight line, which means instant death. The game can be finished in less than an hour, and under a half hour hence after.  But as many arcade gamers know, simply finishing the game isn’t the main point of a game like this, it’s getting a high score.  As tempting as it sounds to just use the powerups and shoot as many invaders as you can, that won’t cut it to get a high score.  After finishing the first stage (which was about 10 waves), even without dying, I got a rank of D.  The game  heavily rates you on how well you do with your combos, which means using the powerups all the time isn’t always a good idea, (but they do help to keep your chain combos high) because the powerups can easily shoot adjacent enemies that will break your color combo.  This doesn’t mean you should avoid the powerups all together though.  Holding down RB or LB will freeze the weapons timer, switching you back to your pea shooter for more accurate shots.  (Unfortunately you have to hold it down the entire time you don’t want to use it, so it can get a little confusing constantly letting it go just to shoot off your powerup for half a second.  Powerups only last about 5-6 seconds.)  So if you’re looking to get a high score by just shooting everything in sight, look somewhere else.  Ideally, use powerups to keep chain combos up but using your single shot to pick off certain invaders will keep your score going.

The game sports bonus rounds, caused by shooting certain UFO’s that appear depending on player’s actions.  The rounds give you a random target to kill a specific amount of within the time limit.  This ain’t always easy as often there are other random targets that get in the way.  Successfully finishing one of these rounds will upgrade your current weapon that can simply dominate multiple waves of invaders within seconds.  Your combo count is temporary disabled at hits time, so go crazy.  After about 10 waves, you will face a boss.  Each boss has their own weakness, which isn’t too hard to figure out.  But don’t spend too much time dilly dallying, because losing your lives forces you to restart at the beginning of the stage.

The game’s graphics keeps the player’s cannon, invaders and all projectiles simple to simple pixels, but everything else is changed.  The background is actually an audio visualizer, similar to programs like Windows Media Player or Winamp plugins .  The game’s soundtrack consists mostly of techno and trance riffs, and the main menu and boss music are remix versions of the simple “beep…beep…beep…beep” sound that the invaders made in  the original .  Following Lumines’ example, different things like bullets firing, the player moving, and invaders dying all produce different sound effects that  go in synch with the music, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself tapping your toes.  If you don’t like the audio though, you can turn music and sfx off separately, or just blast some other song over it.

Although the game says it comes with 11 stages, you will only see 5 of them in one setting.  After playing your first game (whether you finish it or not) you will unlock stage mode.  This is where you can see all the game’s stages and go straight to them, but only if you’ve been to it before in Arcade mode.  The stages branch out starting at Stage 3, 3-A, 3-B, etc.  How you get to these I haven’t figured out yet however, it’s not like I was prompted a choice.  And of course, there’s multi-player.  There’s “Survivor,”  in which 2-4 players compete online or locally.  Shooting UFO’s sends extra invaders to the other players’ screens, ala Tetris or other puzzle games.  Unfortuantely, this is played split screen, but it helps so you can look at other’s screens to predict when an attack will happen.  Given that this isn’t a FPS game however, your screen will always be the biggest with the other three on the side, so it’s not much of a big deal.  “Score Attack” has all players play on the same screen (you can move through other players) competing who can get the highest score.  “Co-op” is exactly as it sounds, play through the arcade mode with friends.  Lastly, there’s “Endless” mode, unlockable by playing through all the game’s stages.

Now because of all these updates to the game’s formula, to be honest it doesn’t feel like the original.  (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to preference.)  The original game was focused on eliminating the oncoming force of invaders before they hit the ground.  The closer they got to the bottom, the faster they would move, making the player nervous and know if he doesn’t react quickly he will die.  Well, the four bases are gone.  Powerups drop like no tomorrow, so while invaders will kill you when they do get to the bottom, they hardly ever do given the advanced weaponry.  (Save for those damn suicide bombers.)  However, being as I never really liked the original, this isn’t much as a problem for me, but it might be for you, depending on your tastes.

I was looking for a decent shmup game on XBLA, that didn’t have the difficult curve or game length of Ikagura, or just have one game mode.  While not exactly my favorite shump, the extra features made to update the gameplay to a more fast paced style of the original was well worth the 800 MS points.