642: Perfect Dark Zero

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Perfect Dark Zero for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[moobaa]

Four months prior to its release here in Australia, the only way to pre-order an Xbox 360 was to purchase a "VIP Pack" - a tidy little box containing a wireless controller, an Xbox Live Gold card, and a copy of Perfect Dark Zero. The game was not something I would have bought - I have no experience with the previous title - but it was my key to a launch-day console. Whilst my friends in the UK were already playing their 360s - it released in November in the US & UK, and March here - I was left to savour the feel of the controller and page through the PDZ manual.

Despite the overall "meh" critical response, PDZ was the first thing I played when I eventually got my 360. I was wowed by the Bond-esque opening movie, and drawn in by the shiny new HD graphics in the intro... but as soon as I started playing the Campaign mode, I knew something was wrong. Controls felt awkward and disconnected - I was reminded of how Timesplitters 2 felt on the Xbox after I had been introduced to console FPS controls via Halo CE. But I plodded through the game, and eventually completed the nonsensical narrative to receive a massive ten GamerScore smarties.

But other, much better, 360 games had triggered my Achievement OCD, and so I continued to fire up PDZ. I spent maybe seventy hours setting up local multiplayer games to get the many (many!) grindable multiplayer Achievements - and I'll admit it was amusing hearing the announcer recite his kill-streak barks (Killtacular! Killamanjaro! Killharmonic Orchestra!)... well, the first couple of times, anyway.

Then I returned to the Campaign, intending to work my way through the four difficulty levels to snaffle the rest of the Achievements. And the combined soggy crapulence of controls, naff narrative, and brutal level design very nearly broke me. I tried multiple times to rope in friends, friends-of-friends, and even toxic politically-offensive finance bros to help with the co-op Campaign. In all, it took fifteen years of on-again-off-again self-flagellation to wrap up the last of the Achievements on this game.

It's fair to say that, save the opening movie and accompanying Morrison Poe song, I genuinely disliked every part of Perfect Dark Zero. In fact, there's only one game on the 360 that I hated more. It may have initially appeared to be an attractive early foray into the HD era, but I'm so very glad that we've learnt lessons from its multiple mistakes and consigned it to the dustbin of history.

[ashman86]

Perfect Dark Zero was, if I remember correctly, the only launch title I initially picked up with my Xbox 360. I had never owned a Nintendo 64, but I had played enough of Perfect Dark and Goldeneye at friends' houses to have reason to be excited about a successor, and I didn't know better as far as the state of Rare as a company post-Microsoft was concerned to have any reason to doubt that this game would live up to its lofty expectations.

That said, I was underwhelmed by the look of the game in the lead up to release. Halo 2 (texture popping aside) had pushed the first-gen Xbox to its limits and looked, at least to my eyes, superior to this "next-gen" shooter in virtually every way. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 on my PC looked lightyears ahead of it.

Even still, without a Halo game to play on Microsoft's new console, PDZ felt like it would be the next-best thing, and Greg Kasavin (pre-Supergiant) had given it a glowing review at Gamespot.

Unfortunately, my friends and I tired of the multiplayer after a single session. A surprising amount of the game felt archaic in its design, and it had failed not only to recapture the magic of Rare's 64 titles, but also to have grown with modern shooters.

In singleplayer, whatever fun was to be found in PDZ was entirely neutralized by the game's AI, which had enemies literally queuing up in doorways for me to take out one by one. With a sigh, I popped the disc out of my console and replaced it in its limited edition steelbook, which I would never again reopen.

The game would have had me doubting my console purchase if I hadn't picked up Call of Duty 2 the following week and Dead or Alive 4 the following month. I rank it among the worst launch titles I've ever bought, and, of those, I'd even claim that, for my money, Mortal Kombat Gold on the Dreamcast was a better purchase.

[Tolkientaters]

I tried this via gameplay and didn't play much for a very simple reason, it just felt bad to control which is a big issue in a first person shooter.

[AndrewElmore]

In 2005, my best friend got an Xbox 360 around launch. With it, he got Kameo, Call of Duty 2, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, and Perfect Dark Zero. Maybe this is just because we were American teenage boys still riding the highs of Halo 2, but a brightly colorful cooperative first person shooter that followed up one of our favorite N64 titles was exactly the kind of thing we were looking for. We weren't exactly blown away by the game itself, but by the promise of a new era of dramatically increased visual fidelity that Perfect Dark Zero teased us with. The emphasis on specularity maps gave everything in that game a sort of futuristic plasticine sheen, all polished and verdant with its heavily saturated palette. Of course, that also clashed hard with the more obviously dated elements of the game, like the way that character models skate across the ground--their movement speed and momentum physics all comically out of sync with fixed-rate walk cycles--making the game still feel like it was still rooted in GoldenEye, somewhere under all the layers of chrome paint. Perhaps there's a comforting familiarity there, though I imagine it must look even sillier out of context.

Looking for a cooperative FPS on Xbox, my oldest daughter and I recently began a playthrough of Perfect Dark Zero. At time of writing this, we're near the end. This is the first time I've revisited much of the game in almost twenty years, and the thesis looping in my mind the whole time is that the game couldn't be more 2005 if it tried. I mean that truly in every way, good, bad, ugly, and charming. The writing is bad, the acting is worse, it's casually racist and chauvinistic, the movement's sloppy and imprecise, the aiming and gunplay are a few years behind even its contemporaries on previous-gen hardware, the chevron-based navigation solution to level design issues is like slapping a band-aid on a crack in the Hoover dam, checkpoints are few and far between, AI pathfinding is straight up unfinished, all vestiges of spy gadgetry and secondary objectives feel flimsy and unconfident, there are numerous shoehorned boss fight-style encounters that feel constructed from a previous draft of the design document, it's shockingly easy to soft-lock yourself or have progress gated by buggy event triggers and unreliable doors, the camera's auto-adjusting exposure is slow enough that it can and will get you killed, the story is a big raucous ball of nothing, and all in all I kind of love it.

The music is fun, almost all of it is either genuinely great or too dumb not to enjoy, which is precisely what I look for from a Rare title. I love the sheer amount of work and thought that went into all of the art direction and environmental design--the level layouts may not be best in class, but they're furnished beautifully. I love its commitment to goofy modernizations of space-age Moonraker pastiches. I love the way that body armor flies off in big chunks of shattered ceramic. I love that nearly every weapon has an alt-fire. I love those big stupid hovercrafts. I love all the color and the visual contrast; the beauty and the bloodshed, as it were. But above all, I love playing a co-op shooter that has an identity and a personality, regardless of any qualitative measurements. Perfect Dark Zero may not be a great game--heck, I'm not even sure it's a good one--but it's got a soul, even if that soul seems a bit confused most of the time. And I'm always going to be more endeared to a weird game than a "good" one. Most "good" games are a bit crap, if I'm honest. But this is one goofy little steelbook case that will always have a place on my shelf. My only request is that we as a species not refer to the game as "PDZ", as that crown belongs to Panzer Dragoon Zwei. Wait, I almost forgot, they retroactively made Jo an American for some reason? Forget everything I just said and "bin" all this "rubbish".

[Alex_117]

Looking back this is objectively not a good game. But as the introduction to a whole new generation of HD graphics and online play, I loved it more than the quality would suggest. Hours spent on the co-op and multiplayer genuinely were great times. I even have a soft spot for the odd shiny plastic looking graphics, but I know that is pure nostalgia as my god who thought this was a good art style.

[sheeldz]

Perfect Dark is a bit of a masterpiece that still holds own today, and Zero is a bit of a mess that is dated to play today.

At the time, though, I remember thinking games couldn't look better, and some of the ideas around it actually show a bit of forward thinking in the FPS space, but it would quite quickly be left in the dust with Microsoft's own Halo and, later, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare.

In truth, going back via Game Pass these days on Series consoles shows an ambition hampered by technology and I presume a complicated development. It was meant to be the Halo, I guess, for the 360, but of course... Halo. Was the Halo for the 360.

Curious to see what is next for the franchise name, but beyond that, a curio rather than a lost gem.

[KevinPDZ]

Perfect Dark Zero was the sole reason I even bought an Xbox 360. I remember seeing the short snippet of gameplay revealed on the console's MTV special, followed by the killer live performance of "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers, no pun intended. The realization that Perfect Dark Zero was releasing in holiday 2005, the same year of the reveal meant i had to purchase it, no matter what.

Due to many Xbox 360's being sold out from the holiday rush, I didn't receive mine until December that year, but I did purchase Perfect Dark Zero in November right on launch day. I opened the case, its manual and CD staring at me, just inching for me to play even though I could not. It was a harrowing wait.

While not as innovative and addicting as the original Perfect Dark, the multiplayer in Perfect Dark Zero is the game’s saving grace, for better or worse.

From the slower movement mechanics, the forced Halo-style two weapon system, the silly dodge roll, the terrible third person perspective cover mechanics, and the disastrous aiming system all make for a frustrating albeit fun experience depending on what gametype is selected. The awkward control scheme is a hybrid between Perfect Dark and Halo that is broken. I’ll never understand who thought it was a great idea for controlling long range weapons to zoom in and out depending on how far you clicked into the L trigger.

The multiplayer maps were good, but not outstanding by any measure. However, Desert and Urban were my favorite of the six launch maps, because the expanded base areas offered more variety in its locales. An interesting easter egg is that the DLC map Gasplant includes an area reminiscent of the central tunnel area of Goldeneye’s Facility map.

The best multiplayer modes were the DarkOps modes akin to Counter Strike: Eradication, Onslaught, Infection, and Sabotage. I felt the Dark Ops modes played better since it involved strategy, hence you only had one life and a weapon purchase screen before each round. This made matches tense and suspenseful.

Overall, Perfect Dark Zero is quite a peculiar game. On one hand, Microsoft hoped it would garner launch title success for Xbox 360, as Halo: Combat Evolved had done for Xbox. On the other hand, it would never compete on the same level as Halo. For all its strengths, it carries more weaknesses that are difficult to overlook.

Fans were hoping for more of the same; just Perfect Dark but better. And better it was not, not by a long shot. Prequel success is hard to come by in both movies and video games. This game had ZERO chance of receiving the same critical acclaim as its predecessor, pun intended.