Perfect Dark Zero (Xbox 360) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing a little more about Perfect Dark Zero.

If you want to read part one, click HERE.

I mentioned last time that Perfect Dark Zero had a bit of a troubled development, but that seems to be true for all the Perfect Dark games to an extent. Even the first game had its problems, as half the team left Rare to start Free Radical Design and make TimeSplitters.

Somehow Perfect Dark  and TimeSplitters both released in 2000, and both continued the spirit of Rare's legendary GoldenEye 007. But Perfect Dark came out late in the Nintendo 64's life and was made by N64 veterans who'd had years to learn the system inside and out, while TimeSplitters was basically a janky stripped-down PlayStation 2 launch title.

Five years later, both games got sequels but this time the situations were reversed. Free Radical's TimeSplitters: Future Perfect showed off what the venerable PS2-era consoles were capable of in the hands of experts, while Perfect Dark Zero was reworked in a hurry to become a launch title for the shiny new and unfamiliar Xbox 360.

And none of these first-person shooters ever got a release on PC, what the hell guys?

Perfect Dark Zero (Xbox 360) - Part 1

Developer:

Rare

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Release Date:

2005

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Systems:

Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the last of Rare's Perfect Dark games, Perfect Dark Zero! All that great Perfect Dark taste, zero sugar.

The title's actually indicating that this is a prequel, like Resident Evil Zero and Street Fighter Zero (but not Mega Man Zero). Funny thing is, the series already had a prequel, on the Game Boy Colour, so the plot's been moving in reverse. There was a fourth game in development by The Initiative, announced in 2020, but five years later they made another announcement saying that it had been cancelled. And that The Initiative had been cancelled too. (To be fair it seems like the developer barely existed to begin with, as it was shedding staff like crazy.)

Perfect Dark Zero was also in development for five years, which was pretty long for a game back in the early 2000s. It was originally going to be on GameCube, but then Microsoft bought Rare so they had to switch to Xbox. Then it needed a quick next gen upgrade to become an Xbox 360 launch title!

There were 18 games available for the Xbox 360 at launch, including Call of Duty 2, Quake 4, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, so not a bad list. Though the most successful game by a Microsoft-owned studio... was this! I always assumed the game bombed, but nope it did fine. It sold over a million copies and made four times its money back.

Okay I'm going to be playing the game with Xbox One backwards compatibility, which promises higher resolutions, faster frame rates and improved texture clarity, so hopefully this will be a more pleasant experience for me than people had back in 2005.

Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

Hello, welcome back! It's Super Adventures' 13th birthday today and I've got some good news for you. Four years ago I replaced around 14,000 screenshots across 1000 articles to improve their quality, and everything was great... until I started getting complaints that images weren't loading. It didn't happen to everyone, just some people some of the time. Eventually all the images stopped working for me entirely, which was a good thing because it meant I could see what needed fixing and sort it out.

Long story short, I've replaced all those screenshots across all those articles again, so everything should be fine now and you can go browse the archives. Even the really old posts where you'd be lucky to get one sentence under each picture. In fact, if you're nostalgic for the classic Super Adventures style, I've retconned in a mysterious never-before-seen authentic guest post from 2013 that originally didn't get published for whatever reason. Go look for frogs, that's your clue.

Developer:

Rare

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

SNES, GBC, GBA

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about something else that's celebrating an anniversary this year: the legendary Donkey Kong Country!

It's known as Super Donkey Kong in Japan, because putting the word 'Super' in front of names is awesome, especially if the name of a game for the Super Nintendo... a console I have really neglected these past few years. I don't even know how that happened, it's not like I want to avoid showing off 16-bit game art.

I'm really trying to make up for it here, as Donkey Kong Country was one of the biggest releases of the 16-bit era. In fact, it was the best-selling game of 1994, almost doubling the sales of its nearest rival Street Fighter II and selling over seven times as well as Super Metroid. Though in Japan it got utterly thrashed by Final Fantasy VI and Americans spent more money on NBA Jam. Actually, I'm not sure that second fact is true. Sure NBA Jam sold more copies in the US in '94, but DKC was an unusually pricey game if I recall. Around £60 in the UK (£120 today, or $150 USD).

The game was able to get away with its exorbitant price tag due to the sheer force of hype around it. Not because it was the first Donkey Kong game in like a decade (aside from the Game Boy game that came out a few months earlier), but because of its incredible visuals. It featured fully ray-traced graphics that players could enjoy without buying a CD drive, or a 32X add-on, or a shiny new 3DO console. The cartridge didn't even include a Super FX chip!

Alright, my plan is to play the game for about an hour and hope that I can think of something to write. I mean, it's been like 3 years since I've covered a SNES platformer, so I've probably forgotten all the things I used to whine about.

Perfect Dark (Xbox 360)

Developer:

Rare

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Release Date:

2000

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Systems:

N64, Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the spiritual successor to Rare's legendary N64 FPS GoldenEye 007: the slightly less legendary Perfect Darkﾞ!

It came out three years later for the same console, runs on the same engine, and was developed by a lot of the same people, so it's basically GoldenEye 2 (or GoldenEye 008?) There were proper sequels to GoldenEye, but Rare had been outbid by EA and decided they'd rather do their own thing anyway, so Black Ops gave us third person shooter Tomorrow Never Dies on the PlayStation and Eurocom got to make the next first person N64 Bond shooter, The World is Not Enough. Both considerably less legendary.

Perfect Dark was was released late in the N64's life and was so ambitious that it required the Expansion Pak installed in order to access 65% of its content. Though even with double the RAM under the hood, the game still suffers from framerate issues. Fortunately I'm mostly going to be playing the remastered Xbox 360 version on the Xbox One, which has about 2000 times the RAM. I would've played the PC version and used a mouse but to this day the game still hasn't got a PC port.

If you're wondering why there's an N behind the title despite the letter not appearing in either word, that's so that the Nintendo logo can spin around and morph into the logo! It's a little different in the Xbox Live Arcade version, as 4J Studio's logo takes Nintendo's place. Not a lot of Nintendo logos on Microsoft games I've noticed. If you're wondering why there's a dakuten (ﾞ) after the K... I've got no idea. They thought it'd look cool I guess. Like how Street Fighter II′ has a dash.

Alright I'll put this on and give it an hour or two then. I used to love the game but I can't remember if there's anything notable I should be playing up to (mostly because it's the multiplayer I was obsessed with), so I'm just going to play the first few levels and document my findings.