Top 25 of this Decade: #2

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Perfect Dark
Nintendo 64
US Release Date: May 22, 2000

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What is it?
Follow Joanna Dark through a story with more oddities, excitement and action than most game encountered this decade. Run through or try sneaking through numerous stage, picking up loads of weapons with secondary fire options, dealing with competent enemy AI, all within the confines of the single player adventure.  Oh, and there’s some epic multiplayer mode somewhere in the mix.

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Why did it make my list?
They say FPS are better on a PC. Well, yeah, control wise, you won’t ever find a better precision. But Perfect Dark, like GoldenEye before it, played extremely well on the N64. That goofy looking controller was built for games like this. IMO, Perfect Dark took the established formula of GoldenEye, and refined it to a near perfection. The end result was a behemoth of an N64 title, that doesn’t just stand up be the second best game I have played this decade, but one of the greatest titles I have ever played.

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There's so much to love about Perfect Dark, and nearly nothing to hate.

I could go on forever talking about how great of a single player experience Perfect Dark had, without even mentioning the multiplayer aspects. There’s great voice acting, a perfect pace to the story, some of the most imaginative weapons in gaming history, a competent AI and so much more. The weapons alone held more imagination than full retail games this decade. The laptop gun was just awesome, featuring regular burst fire as a primary, and a deployable sentry gun as a secondary. Then there was the Farsight XR-20, a laser gun capable of shooting enemies through walls, thanks to x-ray capabilities on the zoom.  Probably the best line up of weaponry ever in a FPS. There’s also a series of challenges you can take part in, which are all preset, and can be played with a bot or another human

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Oh yeah, I keep forgetting to mention the multiplayer portion of the game. Arguably the greatest offline multiplayer FPS experience ever, Perfect Dark has so much diversity, depth and replay value, that nearly ten years later, you’ll find yourself still coming back for more. With the 4mb memory expansion pack, you can add a good amount of bots to your multiplayer experience, whether its 4 humans and multiple bots, or multiple bots and one human. You can change numerous settings, including cheats unlocked during the single player experience, change what weapons you want to appear in each stage, game length, game type and more. It’ll take a long time before you play the same game twice, if you really change things up. There’s also a few levels from GoldenEye that appear in Perfect Dark, adding nostalgia to the gameplay.

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Enviorments change up quite a bit throughout the game, eliminating any form of monotony from appearing.

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You’d be hard pressed to find any video game with as much versatility as Perfect Dark. You have the magnificent single player game, complete with multiple difficulty settings and secrets you can unlock. Then you have the Challenge modes that increase in difficulty as you progress, with preset weapon sets, bots, stages and timers. Finally, you have a multiplayer mode with so many options, variables, and so much class, that it blows away any other offline FPS experience. There’s no Prestige mode, no kill streak bonuses, but there’s a ton more to see, a ton more to do and so many ways to do it all, that you don’t really miss such things. While there are plenty of people who say GoldenEye is the superior, I find myself coming back to Perfect Dark more than  GoldenEye. With so much content and so many reasons to come back time after time, Perfect Dark is truly one of the greatest games to have ever been released, and the second best game this decade! Now here’s to hoping the XBL HD release of Perfect Dark will not have any gameplay changes whatsoever.

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Proximity Mines….
Are the absolute greatest worst weapons in FPS history They are so good in GoldenEye, and they are so good in Perfect Dark, thanks in part to static spawn points with no temporary invulnerability on respawn, that they are just horrible. They are not horrible, like the morons that use nothing but rocket launchers and shoot at your feet in Unreal Tournament titles, or horrible like the three shot burst guns that no one can win a game of Halo without. I mean proximity mines are just so damn good, that they are so damn horrible. Nothing, I mean NOTHING beats death looping a friend with a well placed proximity mine at nearly every respawn point you can think of. Well, other than an X Ray gun shot from seven rooms away.

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Joanna Dark. So awesome.

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Top 25 of this Decade: #3