#oneaday, Day 63: Act Your Age, Joanna

Late again. And I hold one thing entirely responsible for this: Perfect Dark. Actually, two things. Perfect Dark and Cody “NintendoTheory” Winn.

I know I wrote about Perfect Dark the other day but I feel I should enthuse a little more about it because my experiences with it over the past few days have been highly entertaining. First up, I played some online co-op with Calin Grajko (who was brave enough to interview several members of the Squadron of Shame a while back and has stayed in touch since) – specifically, through the first few levels on Perfect Agent difficulty. This was great fun, as Perfect Agent difficulty is pretty brutal in its difficulty – you don’t get much in the way of life, there are lots of (failable) objectives to complete and there are tough enemies all over the place. The best thing about playing co-op, though, is that it gives you the opportunity to have a laugh along with the game. Perfect Dark may appear at first glance to be taking itself rather seriously, but you only need to jump into a co-op game to see that really isn’t the case. This is a game that shines when played with friends, be it co-operatively or competitively.

Which brings me to the next point – Counter-Operative mode. This is possibly the most broken game mode I’ve ever played, but it’s brilliant in its stupidity. One player controls Joanna Dark, just as in single-player, and has to complete the missions. The other player, on the other hand, repeatedly respawns as random enemies around the level. Jo has one life. The Counter-Operative can keep coming back over and over again, and it’s their job to make life a pain for Jo.

It’s tempting for the Counter-Operative to rush in and confront Jo as soon as possible, of course, but if this happens the match can be over rather quickly. What is far more entertaining is when the Counter-Operative decides to play mind games with Jo’s player, as Calin did to me.

As I made my way down the dataDyne building, I noticed it was oddly quiet, and there seemed to be something of a trail of destruction, like someone had got there first. The building was completely devoid of enemies, until I got to the bottom floor. I stepped out of the elevator and headed towards the level’s exit when suddenly…

BIFF!

Jo’s vision blurred and I whirled her round to discover an incompetent-looking guard in spectacles punching me repeatedly. It was Calin. He punched me again and knocked my gun out of my hand and suddenly, we were engaged in the sort of cack-handed fistfight that only ever happens in first-person shooters. As Calin realised that the enemy characters weren’t capable of picking up weapons that had dropped to the floor, I seized my opportunity and grabbed my dropped pistol, shooting him in the head and escaping the level.

It’s not entirely clear whether or not anyone bothered to playtest or balance Counter-Operative mode, but one thing’s for sure – it’s so ridiculous it is one hell of a lot of fun.

The thing that’s kept me up tonight, though, is something which is always dear to my heart in online gaming: leaderboards. As anyone who battled against me in the Geometry Wars 2, err, Wars of last year will attest, leaderboards inspire great competition. And it so happens that Mission 1 of Perfect Dark on its easiest difficulty level provides an ideal arena for bitter competition to see who can clear it the fastest. Cody and I were ping-ponging times back and forth earlier until, as of this time of writing, I sit on the top spot of my friends leaderboard with a time of 40.95 seconds. I invite any of you to try and beat that – without using the apparently-infamous glitch that I’d never heard of before today which allows you to beat the level in 6 seconds flat. Challenge set!

As you can tell, I’m smitten with Joanna’s adventures. I was back in the N64 days and I am again now. Perfect Dark is such a complete package that it is almost without a doubt one of the best uses of 800 Microsoft Points on XBLA. There is so much to do besides the basic single-player missions. There are the various multiplayer modes. There is co-op. There is counter-op. There are tons of secrets to discover in the Carrington Institute that forms the backdrop to the main menu. There are challenges. There are leaderboards. There are Achievements. It’s a game that will keep you busy for a very, very long time.

The thing I’m most impressed by, though, is the fact that as a game it still plays brilliantly today – ten years later – with no modifications besides the resolution and framerate upgrades. It takes some adjusting to playing a game which doesn’t point out your objectives in gigantic neon-coloured HUD arrows, but I find it far more satisfying than any shooter I remember playing in recent memory – both in single-player and multiplayer.

So if you haven’t bought it yet, stop bitching about the N64, stop moaning about the framerate on the old version, stop complaining that it gave you motion sickness (at least until you’ve turned off “Head Roll” in the options to see if that makes you feel better), stop whingeing that the characters’ mouths don’t move when they talk… look, just buy it and enjoy it, okay?

Act your age, Joanna.