Time can be cruel. I’m not talking about the ravages of age when I say that – although, christ, the closer I creep to forty the creakier I become – but I’m thinking, I suppose, about legacy. The very nature of history, especially when it’s oral in its delivery, is that it becomes truncated. Short-form takes over. For instance – think of a Prime Minister or President (back when we had normal ones of those, anyway), or the manager of a sports team, their tenure often ends up defined very broadly, no matter how much nuance there was at the time. Oftentimes, it’s good or bad, with little in between. Which is a shame – because sometimes the nuance is where the most interesting thinking resides.
In the spirit of that thinking, let’s talk about Perfect Dark Zero. In the years since its release, I have seen its reputation become increasingly solidified as, well, crap. Rubbish. A total misstep. A warning light flashing on the dashboard of Rare in its new role as an Xbox studio; a crimson flag waving in distress to signal that the magic the studio had at Nintendo was waning.
This is all wrong, I think. Perfect Dark Zero is a deeply flawed game which clearly had a lengthy and difficult development. Nobody sensible is going to tell you otherwise. Nobody with working eyeballs is going to positively look upon that bizarre choice of character model style – most famously represented by the internet’s ‘Wall Guy’, a terrible-looking cardboard cut out of an NPC that featured in an early screenshot who became an instant meme. And I don’t think hindsight is really required to see why turning away from the eerie Blade Runner-esque feel of the original game to something more poppy and colorful complete with a wise-cracking twenty-something Jo Dark, was a mistake.
But also, I’m sick and tired of reading and hearing that this game was rubbish top-to-bottom. In fact, at least 50% of Perfect Dark Zero is absolutely bloody brilliant. Reviews at the time seem to recognize this too, with a metascore of 81 (in an era, admittedly, when games reviews tended to skew higher than they do now) and write-ups that generally outline PDZ as a bit of a mess that has multiplayer that “manages to rescue the package”, to quote Eurogamer’s review from the time. In this sense, the later reputation that appeared to veer towards ‘total, unforgivable stinker’ is totally undeserved.
My love for Perfect Dark Zero is indeed about that multiplayer. For my money, it was the best action-based Xbox Live game from the day the Xbox 360 launched until the release of Gears of War a little under a year later. Even then, if you wanted specifically first-person online action, you’d be waiting even longer for something to unseat this. Rubbish-looking character models, an ill-advised narrative, and uninspired mission design be damned – the multiplayer doesn’t massively have to concern itself with any of that.
All of this tracks, I suppose, because the GoldenEye to PD to PDZ lineage (with Timesplitters splintering off along the way) was indeed very multiplayer-driven. In many ways I think Zero’s multiplayer was rather ahead of its time, with up to 32-player matches and some very thoughtfully designed modes.
While there were traditional deathmatch modes as people had come to expect from these sorts of games, Perfect Dark Zero’s best stuff was actually hidden in the ‘DarkOps’ section of the multiplayer menus. DarkOps featured the more off-beat modes – but these designs seem to more closely fit to the way Zero is designed in general, meaning the game’s unique blemishes could here be more often played as a strength instead of a weakness.
With DarkOps more focused on specific objectives deeper than simply killing, controlling territory, or capturing flags, some of PDZ’s slightly-swimmy and loose controls seem to make more sense. The dedicated dodge button, which whips the camera out into third person momentarily for a combat roll, becomes more useful. The various weapon secondary fire modes suddenly take on a whole utility, depending on the objective. What is a priceless power weapon in one mode might not be all that useful at all in another. Basically, the game justifies its decisions better in DarkOps than in any other section.
Onslaught was about attack and defense – so two large teams of up to sixteen players a piece take it in turns to assault and then defend a specific base. This is a common sort of mode, but Perfect Dark’s USP of multiple weapon modes changes how it functions. A laptop gun can be tossed out as a sentry to protect the base in classic PD fashion, of course. But every team also will benefit from a dedicated sniper – not just for popping enemies from afar, but so that same player can use the Sniper Rifle’s secondary fire feature to scramble enemy radar and flag things on the radar of allies as a spotter.
The CMP machine gun has a useful rate of fire, but has a fantastic secondary fire – projecting a hologram of your character out a few steps in front of you. Hiding behind cover and not sure if an enemy is approaching? Pop the CMP’s alt fire and push the hologram into the open to see if it takes fire. Even the most basic pistols have unique secondary fires – the DarkOps mode starter pistol lets you eject and throw its magazine like a grenade, where upon landing it fires off all the remaining bullets in the clip in random directions – always great for causing chaos and flushing enemies out of tight spaces.
There’s some delightful design here, and all of this thinking comes to its absolute zenith in Infection, the best of the DarkOps modes. Infection is a 32-player, one-life-only match with the twist that once you die, you’re ‘infected’ – and can spend your afterlife as an eerie growing skeleton hunting down the remaining living players. The infected win if all players are converted, while the uninfected win if they can survive while running out the clock. Living players get to buy weapons out of a budget at the start of each round – and managing your budget round-to-round is as important as anything else.
Infection always starts off with a lot of chaos as an initial tranche 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 zones of the maps. You’d often have a choice – should the survivors try to create a stronghold and beat back the infected for the duration, or would they hide and sneak from place to place with a shark-like inability to stop moving? Often, matches tended to crescendo in thrilling battles in the tightest quarters of the map.
Often, the less-skilled players would end up infected earlier, leading to the six most-skilled players in the game facing off against 25-plus raging skeletons in glorious one-versus-many showdowns. I had screaming, screeching finishes to rounds when playing this with friends. Me and the boys would still occasionally dip back for the odd round of Infection even after Halo 3 launched, and briefly returned to it in earnest on Xbox One when PDZ was included in Rare Replay – which says a lot, I think.
It’s these memories that I think of most primarily when I recall my many, many hours with Perfect Dark Zero. I played the campaign once, correctly identified it was a bit rubbish, and peaced out. But the rest of the game? I kept going back to that. As the game turns 20 alongside the machine it helped to launch, it’s those hours of multiplayer joy I most fondly remember – not the crap bits. Oh, and the soundtrack slaps.
And even the bits that were rubbish I can, in many ways, forgive. Perfect Dark Zero is a title that began life as a GameCube game, then shifted to Xbox, and finally in its last year of development was hastily HD-ified for the Xbox 360 launch. It had a troubled birth – which perhaps explains how all over the place a lot of the game can feel. The stuff it nails truly lands well, though. And, well – troubled though its creation was, it shipped in the end, didn’t it?
Which of course inexorably brings us to today, and to the cancellation of a Perfect Dark reboot. Reflecting on Zero, one can see how it might have been easy to kill a reboot. This is a franchise with a fractured sense of identity. Even the brilliant original feels like a game of two (or even three) parts, in fact. But forget all that: in Zero’s multiplayer, and especially in its DarkOps mode and unique weapon designs, I see the pathway to Perfect Dark with a unique style, design, and attitude that could set it apart. Sadly, it seems the series won’t be continuing to explore that idea for the foreseeable future.
Warts and all, Perfect Dark Zero shows us a world that could’ve been. A larger series that I think should have been. It’s also bristling with ideas, even if the complexities of its development (and rethinking a pre-Halo franchise for a post-Halo world) meant many of those ideas aren’t properly or fully-expressed. I’ll always respect its ambition and love it for its limited successes. It’ll always be one of my favorite-ever launch titles – for what else is every console launch if not a little bit of a mess? This is the ultimate game to match that energy.
The Xbox 360 turns 20 years old on 22nd November, so we’ve put together a week of coverage that looks back on Microsoft’s most successful games console.
