Time can be cruel. When I say this, I'm not talking about the ravages of age, although, ChristThe closer I get to forty, the creakier I become – but I think, probably, about the legacy. The very nature of history, especially when told orally, is that it becomes truncated. The short form takes over. For example, think about a prime minister or president (at least when we had normal ones) or a sports team manager, their term of office is often very broadly defined, no matter how many nuances there were at the time. It's often good or bad, with little in between. And that's a shame, because sometimes the nuances are where the most interesting ideas lie.
In the spirit of these thoughts, let's talk about Perfect Dark Zero. In the years since its release, I've seen its reputation increasingly solidify as, well, crap. Garbage. Totally wrong. A warning light flashes on Rare's dashboard in the new Xbox studio role; the crimson flag waving in trouble signaled that the studio magic at Nintendo was waning.
I think this is all wrong. Perfect Dark Zero is a deeply flawed game that clearly took a long and difficult time to develop. No sane person will tell you otherwise. Nobody with a working eye will look favorably on this bizarre choice of character model style, most famously represented online by “The Guy on the Wall”, a terrible looking cardboard NPC cutout shown in an early screenshot that instantly became a meme. And I don't think you really need to look back to understand why one turns away from the creepy Blade RunnerThe original game's move towards something brighter and more colorful, complete with wise twenty-something Jo Dark, was a mistake.
But also, I'm tired of reading and hearing that this game is complete crap. In fact, at least 50% of Perfect Dark Zero is just damn brilliant. Reviews from the time seem to acknowledge this too, with a meta score of 81 (in an era when game reviews tended to skew higher than they are now) and reviews that generally described PDZ as a bit of a mess with a multiplayer mode that “manages to save the parcel“, quoting a Eurogamer review at the time. In this sense, the later reputation, which seemed to lean towards “a complete, unforgivable scoundrel”, is completely undeserved.
My love for Perfect Dark Zero really stems from this multiplayer. In my opinion, it was the best action game on Xbox Live from the launch of the Xbox 360 until the release of Gears of War just under a year later. Even then, if you wanted specifically online first-person action, you'd have to wait even longer for something to cut it. Screw the garbage-looking character models, ill-advised storytelling, and boring mission design—multiplayer doesn't have to worry about any of that en masse.
I believe this is all due to the fact that the GoldenEye line from PD to PDZ (with Timesplitters splitting along the way) was truly multiplayer oriented. I think Zero's multiplayer was ahead of its time in many ways: it allowed up to 32 players and had some very thoughtful modes.
While there were traditional deathmatch modes as people have come to expect from games like these, the best things about Perfect Dark Zero were actually hidden away in the “DarkOps” section of the multiplayer menus. DarkOps had more unusual modes, but this design seems more in line with how Zero is designed as a whole, meaning that the game's unique flaws here can more often be seen as a strength rather than a weakness.
Since DarkOps is more focused on specific goals, deeper than just killing, territory control, or capturing flags, some of the slightly fluid and loose controls of PDZ seem to make more sense. The special dodge button, which momentarily switches the camera to a third-person view for a combat roll, becomes more useful. The weapon's various secondary fire modes suddenly gain a whole lot of usefulness, depending on the target. What is an invaluable power weapon in one regime may be completely useless in another. Essentially, DarkOps makes the game justify its decisions better than any other section.
Onslaught focused on attack and defense – so two large teams of up to sixteen players each took turns attacking and then defending a specific base. This is a normal mode, but Perfect Dark's USP of multiple weapon modes changes how it works. Of course, the laptop pistol can be used as a sentry to protect the base in classic police department fashion. But every team would also benefit from a dedicated sniper – not only to take out enemies from afar, but also to allow the same player to use the sniper rifle's extra fire feature to interfere with enemy radar and mark objects on allied radar as a spotter.
The CMP machine gun has a useful fire rate, but has a fantastic secondary fire effect – projecting a hologram of your character a few steps in front of you. Hiding behind cover and not sure if the enemy is approaching? Turn on the CMP alt fire and push the hologram out to see if it lights up. Even the most basic pistols have unique additional shooting capabilities – the starting pistol in DarkOps mode allows you to eject and throw a magazine like a grenade, where upon landing it fires all the remaining bullets in the clip in random directions – always great for causing chaos and pushing enemies out of tight spaces.
There's some amazing design here, and all this thinking reaches its climax in Infection, the best of the DarkOps modes. Infection is a 32-player, one-life match with the twist that once you die, you are “infected” and can spend your afterlife as a creepy, growing skeleton that preys on the remaining players. The infected win if all players convert, and the uninfected win if they manage to survive while time runs out. Living players can purchase weapons from the budget at the start of each round, and managing the budget from round to round is just as important as everything else.
Infection always starts out with a lot of chaos as the initial group of less focused players are quickly picked off and infected, but over time a real sense of strategy emerges. Good players knew all the bottlenecks and safe areas of the maps. Often you will have a choice: should the survivors try to create a fortress and fight off the infected for a while, or will they hide and sneak from place to place, unable, like a shark, to stop moving? Often, matches developed into exciting battles in the tightest parts of the map.
Often, less experienced players would become infected first, resulting in six of the most experienced players in the game facing off against over 25 enraged skeletons in glorious one-versus-many duels. When I played with friends, I had screams and squeals at the end of rounds. The boys and I still returned to the odd round of infection from time to time even after Halo 3 launched and briefly returned to it in earnest on Xbox One when PDZ was included in Rare Replay – I think that says a lot.
These are the memories I think about most when I think back on my many, many hours with Perfect Dark Zero. I played through the campaign once, correctly identified it as a bit of rubbish, and calmed down. But rest games? I kept coming back to it. As the game turns 20 years old along with the machine it helped launch, it's those hours of multiplayer that I remember most fondly, rather than any of the crap bits. Oh, and soundtrack spanks.
And even what was nonsense, I can forgive in many ways. Perfect Dark Zero is a game that started life as a GameCube title, then moved to the Xbox, and was finally rushed to HD in its final year of development for the launch of the Xbox 360. He had a difficult birth, which may explain how everywhere you can feel a lot in the game. However, what he nails is really good. And, well, despite the difficulties of making it, it was eventually released, wasn't it?
Which, of course, brings us inexorably to today and the cancellation of the Perfect Dark reboot. Thinking about Zero, one can see how easily the reboot could have been undone. This is a franchise with a fractured sense of identity. In fact, even the brilliant original seems like a game consisting of two (or even three) parts. But forget all that: with Zero's multiplayer, and especially its DarkOps mode and unique weapon designs, I can see a path to Perfect Dark with a unique style, design and approach that could set it apart from the rest. Unfortunately, it looks like the series won't be exploring this idea any further in the foreseeable future.
Warts and all, Perfect Dark Zero shows us a world that could have been. I think it's a great series must were. It's also full of ideas, although the complexities of its development (and of reimagining the pre-Halo franchise for a post-Halo world) meant that many of those ideas weren't properly or fully expressed. I will always respect his ambition and love him for his limited success. This will always be one of my favorite games to launch – because what else is every console launch if not a bit of a mess? This is the perfect game to match that energy.
The Xbox 360 turns 20 on November 22, so we've put together lighting week it is remembered as Microsoft's most successful gaming console.
