After initially beating the game back in December of 2020, I have found myself coming back to GoldenEye 007 whenever I couldn't think of much else to do, and because of that, the game has always been on my mind all this time. Granted, most of what I did for these past three-ish years was just replay the "Facility" level with at least one of the two cheat codes I'd unlocked turned on, but I still do really like the rest of the game, even if I won't pretend like some of its elements have aged all that gracefully. Although I have known about Perfect Dark for about as long as I'd known about GoldenEye 007, I was a bit hesitant to play it due to me not knowing if my emulator had any settings regarding the Expansion Pack that the game required, but once I found out that it worked just fine, I immediately sat down to play it and kept doing that for three days. I had pretty positive expectations for the game going into it, but I really wasn't expecting to love Perfect Dark as much as I did, and I'd honestly consider it to be my favorite game made by Rare so far.

Since this game was a spiritual successor to Rare's landmark first-person shooter, it would make sense for them to retain a lot of what made that game unique, but Perfect Dark went beyond that and vastly improved on everything that GoldenEye 007 had initially set out to accomplish. The maze-like level design and objective-based missions that increase alongside the difficulty are still here, but breaking said missions down into smaller levels that were linked made it so that it wasn't as easy to get lost while still giving you the opportunity to move around the game's environments freely in order to see where your next objective was. Speaking of which, the visuals in Perfect Dark were much more varied and detailed than in GoldenEye 007 (although that game was definitely limited by the fact that it had to stay true to the film that it was based on), as the cyberpunk artstyle made the shootouts and exploration go from taking place in sleek office buildings and grimy city streets to neon-lit alien spaceships and planets all while having the game retain its atmosphere of espionage and secrecy through its cool gadgets and wildly over-the-top storytelling. The gunplay here generally felt the same as it did in GoldenEye 007 (although this game features actual reload animations and some better aiming), but there were many more weapons this time around, and everything from the pistols to the laptop guns to the alien rifles feels great to use. Perfect Dark also fixed one of my biggest issues with Rare's previous shooter and drastically increased the draw distance, which made the game's outdoor snow level fun to explore due to the fact that I wasn't being gunned down by enemies that I couldn't even see this time around.

Like I mentioned earlier, Perfect Dark features a bizarre and unpredictable story that quickly kicks into high gear, and one of the elements that made it so entertaining for me would be the voice acting. Unlike the exclusive use of text boxes in GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark is fully voice acted, and both the dialogue and performances had a level of cheesiness to them that both fit right at home with the game's spy theme and also made the characters more distinct and likable, with the grey alien named Elvis being my favorite of the cast. Despite how long I've been playing GoldenEye 007, I didn't get to experience the game's iconic multiplayer mode until just a few months ago when a flatmate and I decided to play it on a whim, but I got to play a lot more of it here in Perfect Dark. Not only was the multiplayer fun here, but it also featured more gamemodes than just different variations of deathmatch, and it even allowed for a lot of mode customization. I also really enjoyed exploring Carrington Institute in between missions and Combat Simulator matches, as I found it to be a compelling hub world with a lot of personality. Not only would I consider Perfect Dark to be one of the best games on the Nintendo 64, but I'd even go as far as to say that it's one of my favorite first-person shooters, and while I still think that GoldenEye 007 is worth playing, Perfect Dark was easily the far superior experience.