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Review  Perfect Dark
- Combat Simulator Menus
- By Mike Schneider,
-by Andrew Weatherton
, 6.30.00
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the Challenges, you'll come up against a few other possible options within the
first menu of the Combat Simulator. The next option you will come upon in the list is
“Load/Preset Games.” With
this option you are able to pick from a list of preset games or load your own
game settings that you have saved (you can save up to four preset games on the
game pack itself, and an additional four on any single controller pack). |
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First menu you'll encounter in the
"Combat Simulator".
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With a game in which you can control as many aspects of a multiplayer
battle as Perfect Dark, this option helps save a tremendous amount of time.
With a little bit of practice and some experimentation you can have
some awesome setups primed, labeled, and ready to go if you need to get into a
battle quickly and efficiently. However,
the settings that come loaded onto the cart are rather boring and uninspired
so I wouldn’t recommend using them.
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The "Quick Start" menu.
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Ah, the third choice on the list “Quick Start.”
As you can probably tell just by reading the title, this option is
meant for getting you into a battle and quickly, but there’s a cost.
Quick start doesn’t offer players total control over all of the
various options, but it gives novices a chance to get a feel for how
everything works. It simplifies
everything and makes getting into a multiplayer battle more intuitive for less
experienced players. We recommend
that you use this setting when you are playing Perfect Dark for the first time
so that you don’t
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become completely overwhelmed with options.
Upon choosing “Quick Start” you will be sent to another menu with
five choices. The first two
choices are “Players Only” and “Players and Simulants.”
These options are for free-for-all (no teams) death matching and lead
to simplified setup menus that give players control over the major variables.
Players can control the scenario, some basic combat options, and the
arena, weapons, and battle limits such as maximum number of kills or time
limit. They can also control the
number of simulants (up to 8!) and their difficulty, but not their
personalities. The next three
options in the menu are for team battles and their names speak for themselves
they are “Player Teams”, “Players vs. Simulants”, and
“Player-Simulant Teams”. Each
of these options leads to the same simplified game setup menus as the first
two options did.
| Finally, the most in-depth and variable option on the list
“Advanced Setup.” This is the
option that Perfect Dark vets are going to use the most. It offers players control over basically every aspect of a
multiplayer battle, the only downside to this being that it can be confusing
if you don’t know what you’re doing.
With a little practice though, players will feel right at home.
Through the “Advanced Setup” menu players can mess around with
everything from which songs they want to play |
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The Advanced Setup menu.
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during a battle to whether they
want simulants to run around taking every weapon they see and never use one or
if they want to which weapons they want to appear and how often (there are
nearly 40 weapons and power ups to choose from).
So exactly what all can you control when using advanced
setup? Well, the first thing you
will have to choose is the game scenario.
There are a total of six scenarios to choose from, each one giving a
completely different purpose to a multiplayer battle. The first scenario is called “Combat,” it’s your basic
all out kill-anything-that-moves (as long as it’s not on your team) that
First Person Shooter fans have grown to love.
The next scenario, “Hold the Briefcase,” is basically “Flag
Tag” from Goldeneye with a briefcase in place of a flag.
Players earn points by holding the briefcase for a certain amount of
seconds (set by the player); however, in this version of the game, it is
possible for the player that is holding the briefcase to defend themselves
with their weapons. “Hacker
Central” is the next scenario available.
The goal of this scenario is to find a data uplink and get near a
computer terminal (both of which are randomly placed in a level).
Once you are near the computer terminal (a small laptop computer) you
can start downloading points from the computer. Players are completely vulnerable and unable to use a weapon
while uploading, making this scenario very challenging.
In fact, it’s too challenging if you set the download time too high.
Not exactly one of my favorite scenarios, but it’s something new, and
can work well with teams. The
last scenario not specifically designed for teams is “Pop a Cap.” In this scenario the computer randomly picks a player and
labels them the cap. Everyone who
isn’t a cap is trying to kill the player who is, ala Turok 2’s Frag Tag.
If you kill the cap you get three points, and if you are the cap you
earn a point for every minute that you are able to stay alive.
This is a fun and addicting new scenario, well thought out, and it’s
fun whether you are the cap or not. Next, there is two different “Team
Work” scenarios within Perfect Dark, both of which are very addicting and
excellent inclusions to the game. “King of the Hill” is a mode in which
one small segment of the level is colored green, and your objective is to hold
that segment, or “hill”, for as much time as possible. Under the default
setting, you get one point for every 20 seconds in a row that you or your team
holds the hill. Also, you can set the hill to stay in one spot, or change to a
new location with each successive time that it is successfully captured for 20
seconds. The other team scenario is “Capture The Case”, which is basically
another name for the popular capture the flag game that other first person
shooters possess. Each team has one briefcase at a designated location within
the level, and their goal is to steal the other team’s briefcase, bring it
back to their own base, while not allowing other teams to take their
briefcase. This mode requires more teamwork than any other mode because in
order to succeed, you need to have at least one person guarding your
briefcase, and people going out together trying to capture the other team’s
briefcase.
You may recall being amazed
at the number of options and variations available in Goldeneye's classic
multiplayer mode. If so, you are
likely going to be surprised at how many more Perfect Dark offers.
Just about everything you could possibly ever want to control or modify,
you can. What could possibly be bad
about that? Well, it's confusing
and intimidating for beginners, so Rare has included several options depending
on a player's experience level. If
this is someone's first time playing Perfect Dark then they should go into
"Quick Start" which offers simplified menus, which are less confusing
for new players. Once you become
more experienced though, it's time to move onto "Advanced Setup" where
you are given control of virtually every variable and option imaginable.
Perfect Dark lets you do everything you could have ever wanted to do in
Goldeneye, and it does it with a better framerate and better character models
than Goldeneye ever could. Don't
throw away Goldeneye just yet though; the fact that Perfect Dark has improved on
a classic doesn't detract from the classic in my mind.
Goldeneye is still very fun, albeit a little simplistic when compared to
its new sister, but it is this simplicity that may bring you back to the
classic. Simple can be good, every
once in a while it's cool to go back to the basics.
Continue on, after this fact based page, to some opinions about the multiplayer
level design, on page 13...
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