Perfect Dark

[Dark Jaguar]

Holy karp, engagement!  Precious engagement!  Take THAT Youtube!  And thank you Sacred Jellybean.  I'm sure you're not even one of the ones that taste like a bug or a slug.  (Random aside: I hate jellybeans now... it's so hard to find a bag that's just like.. normal flavors?  Cherry and lime and the literally poisonous black licorice?  C'mon help a sweet tooth out!)
 

Great write-up! There's a lot of things in here that I didn't know. Various thoughts:

PD in high-res (or is it just higher framerate?) sounds incrediballs. I remember framerate being a big issue back in that time, and especially, Matt Castallarammalammadingdong in IGN mentioning it in every review (to the point of it being irritating). I remember Dreamcast being a big game-changer in this regard. I feel like that was the last time I was blown away by a graphical upgrade in video games. The last noticeably large and impressive step-up from what we were used to.

I know what you mean.  The jump to that generation (Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, XBox) really was a massive change right out the gate, and everything after felt like less and less of a jump, to the point where it really is a struggle for me today to tell the difference between a PS4 or PS5 game.

If you're talking about the XBox 360 remaster, yes it runs at higher resolution, a nearly solid 60 FPS, and with fully replaced textures and somewhat more detailed character models.  (That last point's a bit contentious and your mileage may vary on whether or not their interpretations of the artwork are better or worse.)
 

ANYWAY! All that being said, I don't know if I can vibe with a two-stick controller. I revisited Time Splitters 2 a few months ago, and I could not for the life of me get used to the controls. It felt unwieldy no matter how many different ways I configured it. This may be a GameCube specific problem, because I don't seem to have that issue in more recent FPSs. It was always much simpler to have the four directional buttons on N64 and using the analog stick to look around.

As an aside, I have no idea why, but it seems like the convention back in those days was to have an inverted direction for looking. The opposite (which should probably be more intuitive) seems to have become standardized since then, meaning it's retrograde become my default preference for old games too.

Since I originally played TS2's XBox version instead, I handled it a lot better.  I teethed myself onto twin stick with Halo and so switching over came more natural, but well, yeah the Gamecube controller can be a bit awkward that way what with the C-stick not having a proper "cap" to rest your thumb on.

The "inverted" up and down looking is a historical relic of the joystick era they were copying when they were originally trying to come up with good shooter control schemes for analog sticks.  Back then, joysticks were almost exclusively being used for flight games, from simulators to the Star Wows to Wing Commander, which has a Star Wows in it too.  Point is, those old joystick controls mimicked how real world flight sticks work, which is pull back to ascend and push forward to descend.  Left and right turned instead of (somehow) strafing the aircraft, which was also mimicked down the historical line to those early console FPS games.  This one isn't something I picked up on Gaming Historian but something explained to me by my dad when I was a kid and he was playing Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator for DOS.  These sorts of controls "made sense" in that historical context, but as we both know were pretty terrible for first person shooters, and Turok's developers were the first to figure out the right way to control... except for one thing.  The earliest Turok game on N64 won't let you set non-inverted up/down, so in order to not confuse myself utterly I play the other two Turok games with them inverted too, and then extended that to Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for consistency across... all the N64 FPS games.  But, I much prefer the now standard FPS controls when I'm playing their XBox equivalents.

Holy crap, you're kidding me. Without an expansion pak, the game is literally just a two-player combat game and nothing else? It's hard to imagine Nintendo allowing that. They were reticent for games to require the expansion pak, to my recollection. They didn't want people to buy a game and feel ripped off when they only later realize they need an additional accessory just to run the damn thing. Like... a game that's exclusively a pvp shooter barely qualifies as a game imo. I'd have thought the same would be true for Rare, who emphasized polishing a game, even at the expense of prospective players' patience. It was delay after delay in their time, but it was almost invariably worth the wait.

(it was disappointing that Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64 did not match the expectations, at least for me )

That being said, a lot of the time I spent in Perfect Dark was me, solo, playing against bots. "Sims", heh. I completely forgot about that term.

Oh yes, and that detail was in a lot of articles around the time too.  It was a very limited version indeed.  Nintendo did make some very rare exceptions for expansion pak requirements, three specifically.  Two of those were Rare's own DK64 and PD.  Frankly we're lucky the game had anything playable at all without the pack I suppose.  It could have been pak or nothing just like DK64 and the other game, Majora's Mask.  Yep, one of Nintendo's big core title releases even required it.  Nintendo's solution to the problem of accessibility was to include the pack with DK64, a game they expected just about everyone to buy anyway.  Frankly, it was a miracle they got Perfect Dark to run WITH the pack, much less finding some way to get it's larger levels to run with half the memory.  Oh and apparently there would have been a third N64 game to require the pak had Dinosaur Planet been released for the system.  It seems the development ROMs that were leaked all only run with the expansion pak inserted/emulated.

Anyway, you've made me want to do another playthrough of Perfect Dark. Incidentally, I recently started one, but didn't really follow through. I think I got distracted by Time Splitters 2, which turned out to be much less impressive than I remembered. No wonder I hardly ever scratched the surface with that one. On top of the poor controls, the first level feels underwhelming. Kinda crappy level design, difficult to kill enemies (but probably that's only because of the bad controls), the game is stingy with ammo, and... eh. I just found it really hard to care about what was going on on-screen.

It also felt tedious to play a whole hour of a level with only one checkpoint. I suppose I'm spoiled by modern games, where you can literally pause and pick up at any point in time, can typically create save files at will, and are granted ample auto-saves.

I'd recommend playing the XBox 360 version of PD.  Even with a few misgivings about it, it really is the best way to enjoy the game at this point.  You mention only having one check point... well remember that Perfect Dark has no checkpoints at all.  That said, the levels are on average a lot shorter, so if you're prepared to restart a lot in that "Rareware" way, you shouldn't be as frustrated by that, hopefully.

Time Splitters 2 is in a weird place.  I haven't gone back to that one yet myself.  I do intend to to complete this trilogy, but yeah, I couldn't really get "into" it's story as much as I could the others.  All the time hopping just feels so disjointed narratively, like I have no idea why I'm in any of these places except that the time portal is just randomly picking places.  TS3's narrative is a lot more cohesive.  Of coruse, the whole thing's very tongue in cheek, but without that connective tissue that actually makes each location feel connected to a greater whole, it really was tough to get invested.  I do remember that, way more than I actually remember any of the story.  That said, that first level?  It's basically a recreation of the Dam level from Goldeneye, only you're at the bottom of the bridge working up to it instead of t the top jumping down.  Cute.  When I do get around to it, I'll put up a review in... well the XBox section since that's the version I have.