While not all of them are used in the Campaign, every single level has an "X" version of their respective themes, each being a more tense, adrenline-filled remix. It helps that these tracks play during the more suspenseful moments in the levels.
dataDyne Central: Defection blasts into the scene once Jo reaches the ground floor with guards trying to surpress her.
Carrington Villa plays a heroic piece when saving the diplomat (or yourself on Perfect Agent) and apprehending the hackers.
G5 Building encapsulates an all-out magnum battle while retrieving some backup data from a safe.
Deep Sea is even more awe-inspiring. It's the best example of how the change in tempo can drive home the change in mood as Joanna and Elvis escape the Cetan Ship.
The SWAT 3 inspired music for "Defense" and the end credits, or the intro for Zero.
"Limelight" by Kepi & Kat in the Nightclub Stakeout mission in Zero.
The opening theme for Zero, "Glitter Girl", which almost feels like a James Bond opening credits theme.
Cheese Strategy: The Phoenix's secondary firing against enemies using explosive weapons (or human Mooks, in general, because of the nature of explosions). The small explosive radius will chain with the enemies' explosive shooting, causing them to eat their own launched explosion instead, killing the enemy and anyone around them instantly except for the Skedar King(s). Against the final boss, the Phoenix can be used to not only conserve ammo but also cause the leader's slayer rockets to blast in front of his face, causing him to instantly retreat into the center area.
The original featured some of the best visuals on the Nintendo 64. However, the biggest complaint among critics was how slow and uneven the framerate could be, especially on high-res mode. Many agreed that the game would have been better if the developers had sacrificed their ambitious graphics for a smoother framerate.
To a lesser extent, just the fact that Nintendo — known until this point for their squeaky-clean image — had willingly distributed an M-rated game. Sure, it wasn't directly published by them per se, but it was still a surprise to many nonetheless. Conker's Bad Fur Day would later follow suit with this, and Eternal Darkness became the first ever game directly published by Nintendo to receive an M-rating.
The dataDyne Shock Troopers from "Carrington Institute: Defense" are extremely frustrating, since they all have shields and wield K7 Avengers. The only practical way to deal with them is to either magdump into their chests or use the Combat Boost and go for headshots. The RC-P120 is designed to cut through their shields quickly but it has limited ammo.
The platoon of cloaking device-equipped, plasma rifle-wielding babes at the very end of Perfect Dark Zero that guard the path to the final boss. They can kill you in just a few shots, and dying to them drops you all the way back to the beginning of the bridge, forcing you to spend another thirty minutes fighting your way past the entire fricking dataDyne army.
In multiplayer, Perfect and Dark Sims with the right weapons are formidable foes who know every bit of the multiplayer map you're on. They also know where the best weapons are and won't waste time trying to kill you with them. However, thanks to Artificial Stupidity, they can be reduced to a joke if you put Remote Mines as the only weapon because they cannot detonate them.
Funny Moments: Upon meeting Dr. Carroll, Joanna seems almost mesmerized by the fact that he turns out not to be a human, but a floating A.I. with a distinctly British disposition. When he witnesses her knock out a guard in the beginning of the next episode, he gasps out an "Oh!" of disgusted shock not unlike what you'd hear from C-3PO.
The FarSight XR-20, oh so very much. One-Hit Kill weapon that shoots through walls and has an alt-fire that slowly auto-tracks other players? If you're fighting someone with one of these, you'd better hope he's a bad shot.
The K7 Avenger. It has a reduced magazine capacity compared to the AR34 or the Dragon and its heavier variant, is less accurate, and dispenses ammunition much quicker than most auto-weapons. It makes up for these apparent drawbacks with its devastating damage-per-bullet and lightning-fast RPM, especially in comparison to the other assault rifles. Another thing about this weapon is that it has one of the most useful secondary effects in the game: Threat Detector. For multiplayer, this effect is a godsend to avoid getting hit with a Proximity Mines or a well-hidden Laptop Gun.
The SuperDragon counts as well, considering how explosives work in both this game and GoldenEye. With six grenades in a mag, forty in reserve, this lent itself well to Grenade Spam. In addition, you can always switch to rapid-fire bullets.
A+B to blow remote mines without the detonator was kept from GoldenEye. Seeing as how the detonator is just the secondary fire for the mines, though, this has a lot less utility than there.
The AI cannot see any kind of trap, whether it's mines, a Dragon set to proximity destruct, or a Laptop Gun. This can be exploited handily in multiplayer, especially in Deathmatch-styled Combat Simulator Challenges.
Ending a stage with the Infrared Googles or X-Ray Scope shows the ending scene in Infrared or X-Ray, respectively. So the cameraman is wearing Joanna's classified tech now? It also works with the RC-P120's cloaking device as well as the normal cloaking device, so you can be invisible in cutscenes.
Shoot an ammo box up into the air in multiplayer, then pick it up. When it respawns, it'll be floating in mid-air!
Sometimes when the Dragon is thrown to engage its booby-trap setting, it will just bounce around instead of landing. This can be very entertaining when an enemy gets close to it.
Crouching increases the accuracy of all weapons. Including the Cyclone and Reaper. But who doesn't like their extreme prejudice delivered across the level?
Thanks to glitches, it's possible to skip over huge parts of certain levels, such as the extendable bridge in "Skedar Ruins", and the entire first level can be completed in about five seconds on Agent this way.
A glitch in multiplayer occurs when you throw poisoned knives into another player's body before the body disappears and respawns - they respawn as if they had just taken a full dose of poison. Have fun when you start up and your vision goes away fast and your health goes down to almost zero.
In Maian SOS, there are four guards dressed in blue hidden in certain areas of the level that serve as placeholders for the guards that will be infinitely spawned to hunt you down after the alarm is triggered. By killing them, you can completely prevent them from spawning and attacking you altogether.
The third level has a hidden room in the foyer that can be unlocked with an office keycard dropped by a dataDyne Shock Trooper. It has two of Cassandra’s bodyguards guards and Mr. Blonde standing stock-still and invulnerable to anything you may want to dish out. With the all guns cheat, you can pepper them (and Cassandra herself, if you go back after her guards ambush you in the darkened room) with remote mines, thrown knives, and crossbow bolts, then go to finish the level and watch as the cutscene uses those exact models, which are now walking pincushions. You can also (if you move very quickly) catch up with Cassandra right after her guards ambush you, which prevents her from spawning back in the hidden room like she normally would, and allows you to similarly shoot her to your heart's content.
Remote Mines cannot be detonated by Simulants due to a bug. This comes in handy in multiplayer because it reduces Perfect and Dark Sims to sitting ducks.
Harsher in Hindsight: In the Air Force One mission, guards who spot you will yell "It's a terrorist!"... while you try to prevent the plane from crashing.
The controversial Perfect Head mode where you could use custom faces for Sims and thus was dummied out in wake of gun violence in the US, was all but brought back for Rainbow Six Vegas as a feature that (protagonist-only) you can take pictures of yourself as the protagonists face. That feature also pop up in several sports games as of now.
Narm Charm: The voice acting sometimes slips into this, due to the developers hiring British talent.
Trent Easton's American accent is horrid. It's extremely clear every time he opens his mouth that his voice actor was not American, but was trying to force it anyway. He still slips into Britishisms left and right.
The President's actor is generally more convincing, but a pretty amusing faux pas pops up anyway when he says the word "assume" as if he were a Brit.
Particularly jarring are any of the three horrible gurgling sounds made if a human character is shot in the head or killed with the Tranquilizer's secondary function: "Lethal Injection".
Stand in the nerve gas in Area 51 or nail an enemy with a poisoned knife, and you'll hear some pretty visceral choking and gasping coming from the affected party as they slowly succumb to it.
DarkSims are able to teleport right next to you in matches with the radar off and have nearly perfect accuracy.
Older Than They Think: The removed "Perfect Head" feature was preceded by Taito's arcade game Real Puncher as early as 1994, which features a large camera above the screen to take pictures of yourself or somebody for the digitized punching target.
The XBLA port of the original has consistently-smooth framerates, support for HD resolutions, a modernized, twin-stick control scheme, and online multiplayer.
Does the Rare Replay collection make Perfect Dark Zero a good game? Hell no. Does it stabilize the framerate, upgrade the visuals to a higher resolution at least somewhat and effectively make it playable at the bare minimum compared to how much of a mess it was on the original hardware? Surprisingly yes.
Scrappy Weapon: The game has so many guns; it would have been impossible to balance them all:
The MagSec 4. Decent in burst mode up close, horrible everywhere else. When firing in single shot mode, you'd better hope you get headshots.
The Magnum fires too slowly in an FPS where automatic weapons outclass it significantly. Its damage output is also quite disappointing, because submachine guns will typically outpace it. On Perfect Agent, enemies will often survive if a Magnum bullet hits anywhere besides the head. There's the annoying pre-fire delay between shots, the fact it can only penetrate one enemy, and its slow reloading time. There's also no room for error with its gun challenges - a miss will cost you the gold medal challenge.
For what Perfect Dark does well (which is a LOT, by the way), it may be known as one of the few FPS games to have a shotgun that is straight-up one of the worst weapons in the game. Its spread is too tight to serve as crowd control, too wide to serve as a precision weapon, deals less damage than it feels like it should (on Perfect Agent, basic mooks can sometimes survive a point-blank shot), and both fires and reloads painfully slowly.
However, the overall worst weapon in the game would probably have to be the Reaper. A Skedar "SMG" that is simply too large for human hands to handle, it takes a second after pulling the trigger for the weapon to start firing bullets, most of which will not hit their intended target - and even the ones that do will leave nary a scratch. The secondary function is a melee attack with no practical application in the game and leaves you vulnerable to enemy gunfire.
The Sniper Rifle wasn't a bad weapon by itself, but it was overshadowed greatly by the FarSight XR-20, which is widely considered one of the best weapons in the game.
The Hand Grenade is outclassed by the SuperDragon's grenade launcher function and the Devastator. Its secondary function, proximity pinball, adds to its scrappiness because it will often get yourself killed more times than not. Enemies in campaign mode get a more effective version that you don't that explodes the moment it hits the ground.
Sequelitis: More like Prequelitis. Notice how little talk there is of Perfect Dark Zero? That's because it's considered an infamous game, and a perfect example of franchises making the jump to the next generation that botched the landing, even if critics were more receptive to it at the time. Not only did it play nothing like the first game beyond "first-person-shooter with alternate firemodes", the performance was abysmal, the controls were sluggish with near impossible aiming, and the story was a mess. Even the multiplayer, which should've been a redeeming value, felt half-baked and inept. Most people would just prefer to forget the game ever existed were it not for Rare Replay carrying it, and it became a rather infamous Franchise Killer for fifteen years until another game was announced in 2020.
That One Level: Many of these missions on Perfect Agent can qualify, but the most glaring examples are:
"Area 51: Infilitration" has turrets that can rip you to shreads, Mooks from the exterior of the base wielding the MagSec 4 — a wholly inaccurate and inconsistent weapon with a damage input that is dependable on how close one of the guards are to you. The grenades that the guards throw explode the moment they hit the ground, despite them running on a "four-second" timer. A hole in the fence near the entrance which reveals a Rocket Launcher but there are hidden explosives in front. You'll use a grenade and clear the path, then proceed to the crawlspace, only to die by that one mine right near said crawlspace which only happens by random chance.
"Carrington Institute: Defense" houses K7-wielding Shock Troopers — dataDyne's finest who can kill easily kill Jo in a single burst. Perfect Agent offers multiple objectives which require relatively precise timing and fast-movement. Breaking into the safe is bad enough, note though mitigated if Jo escaped Area 51 on the hoverbike — leaving Johnathan to escape with Elvis on the latter's ship, and speedrunnders often cut down the time by using the Devastator (though this only works in the N64 version, for some all reason), provided they saved the first pair of hostages in the upper floor. there is no easy method for the bomb - it's required that the player stays out in the open holding the Data Uplink; otherwise, the connection will break. By this point in the mission, the auto-guns are almost assuredly destroyed, along with most of the friendly CI soldiers, so hostiles are to be expected. While the time for the bomb is generous, the amount of dataDyne Troopers and Mr. Blondes tracking the player makes this a do-or-die situation. Rushing to the escape ship at the mission's end is arguably the easiest part, but once the RCP-120 runs out of ammo for its secondary function, Joanna has to contend to fast-approaching guards coming down the ramps, making it possible to die inches away from victory!
"Attack Ship: Covert Assault" starts Jo off with nothing but a knifenote In the Japanese version, which was released later, the player instead starts off with the Falcon 2. The only effective uses this blade has is a lucky backslash on a (hopefully) unsuspecting Skedar or throwing the knife at it and letting the poison do the work. And since this is the second mission which involves you fighting them in their mechs, which requires you to use the Mauler against them, trying to one-shot them is a challenge all of its own.
The bonus levels can also be this; it doesn't help that two of them are mirrored versions of previous missions:
"Mr. Blonde's Revenge" is "dataDyne: Extraction", but with three instead of five objectives, and you play as Mr. Blonde. Mr. Blonde has to place a Skedar bomb in the lab lift, kill an Elite MookGuns Akimbo Captain, and escort Cassandra out of the building and leading her to Blonde's ship — while having to deal with her Artificial Stupidity and her having to stop every few paces to berate Blonde about how he "won't shoot me, foolish child!". Cassandra guards on the higher floors are armed with shotguns, and the standard dataDyne Shock Troppers have magnums that pack quite a punch. This mission is even worse in Co-op, because Simulants will always follow you, even if they have to break the "Stealth" command to do it, and Cassandra's guards will always shoot at your Bombspy. Oh, and by the way: watch out for N-Bombs!
"Maian SOS" on Perfect Agent, while not as difficult as the other two, can still be difficult if you don't know what you're doing. It's a shorter (three instead of five objectives), mirrored version of "Area 51: Rescue", and you have no choice but to complete it with a portion of your health missing.
"WAR!". The mission gives you a Phoenix — which, even with its secondary explosive ammunition, isn't effective against the Skedar, and you need a fully-charged Mauler to One-Shot the three Skedar Kings, which is easier said than done, due to how finicky the game's Auto-Aim can be, especially with the Mauler (which isn't always an instant kill with a charged shot, depending on where you shot the enemy). The Skedar spawns more frequently than your Maian companions — Hell, you might need to take one of the Callisto NTGs that your comrades carry because they do a much better job dealing with the regular Skedar than the weapon you start with. Any method of trying to reach even the second Skedar King requires plenty of luck that's most likely out of the player's reach. Anyone who is able to complete this mission deserves a gold medal.
The Combat Simulator Challenges will start to get difficult past #10 and even rage-inducing past #20. One of the most notorious examples of these is #29 where you are double teamed by two DarkSims that will just hunt you down and make sure you stay unarmed and dead.
Like the Conker's Bad Fur Day remake (Live and Loaded), the Xbox Live port got its share of criticism for its updated graphics making the characters look stiff and awkward at best (faces and fingers still don't move, for one). In the once-adorkable Maian's case, they look just plain wrinkled and hideous, having pointed toes, pot-bellies, gray eyes instead of black, less rounded heads, and small lips.
Perfect Dark on the Xbox 360 & One uses a modernized control scheme featuring dual-analog control without another controller (see the 2.1-2.14 control schemes on the N64 version). This is a fine improvement on paper, but doesn't translate as well as some people like to believe as aiming is more sensitive than it used to be, and speed-strafing is harder to do because the 45° angle movement is much stricter with the Left Stick than it is with the C-buttons.
Despite running on a higher framerate, animations aren't timed properly to accommodate the framerate. This is especially noticeable during cutscenes.
Much of the game's tools of destruction appear a lot different from their original designs.
The entire soundtrack is slightly off — certain instruments play earlier than they should, while other tracks sound almost completely different or remixed in some way. The best example would be "Maian SOS". See N64 vs. XBLA for comparison.
Joanna's weapon-of-choice, the Falcon 2, appears to be coated in silver, rather than the reflective-chrome, as in the N64 version.
Notable dataDyne weapons, such as the K7 Avenger, are even more obvious (see N64 and XBLA).
The Maian Weapons suffered this the most. In attempt to add more detail into them, they added features such as what appears to be moss to make them appear more "alien" in appearance.
, which was programmed into the game, but can never be heard without hacking.
