When idly messing around with the Cloud Gaming part of Game Pass onmy homemade Steam Deck(see: old Moto G7 with a controller strapped around it), I stumbled upon the Xbox 360 remaster ofPerfect Dark. It played really nicely, and I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth it all felt at 60fps despite being beamed to me via Wi-Fi waves coming from my router.
But at the risk of sounding a bit ‘psycho,’ you know what really popped out at me? It’s the same thing that pops out each time I dip back into Perfect Dark andGoldeneye 007: just howdamngood it feels to shoot people in the face specifically in these games.
Yes, physics and animations have come a long way since then (with physics usually being a convenient way for devs to cheat their way around the matter of death animations), but there was something about these two shooters, developed by Rare in their proprietary engine for the N64 in 1997 and 2000 respectively, that just hitdifferent.
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First, there was the ridiculous impact sound upon hitting an enemy; a nice highly compressedthudof bullet on body that probably sounds nothing like it would in real life (I’m imagining it’d be sadder and squishier). You’d get a little flash where you hit the enemy, and then get ablood blotchexactly where you shot them.
This not only was incredible to me back then, but it stillisextremely satisfying to me today. To this day, the majority of shooters don’t register bodily damage on the people you shoot. All the biggest shooters, from your CoDs to your Battlefields, to my beloved Hunt: Showdown just don’t bother, and yet it’s such a satisfying element of the whole ‘shoot people in the face’ equation.
Don’t get me wrong: you can swing too far the other way, and I’m still not sure what lasting psychological damage I picked up from Soldier of Fortune 2, where they modelled the organs and wobbly bits on the inside of human bodies, and I’d spend disturbing amounts of time as a kid just slashing my way into the brain (yet to reenact this IRL, so I’m probably safe at this point), but those little blood splats of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark felt like an elegant compromise.
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Then there were the animations themselves. Sure, well-implemented physics are more ‘realistic,’ but these games were campy spy thrillers, and the collection of pre-fab animations suited the tone that they were going for perfectly. There was the extremely slow drop to the knees, before falling flat on the face; the dramatic fall backwards with the arms going out into a spread-eagle position; the agonised gut grab and slow curl-up in a foetal position.
Perfect Dark actually went a step further, and when enemies died close to a ledge they’d deliberately fumble back towards it then fall off. I couldn’t recreate it last time I played, but didn’t Perfect Dark also have people falling back against walls, then sliding down them and dying in a kind of sitting position?
All this stuff did and still does feelfantastic, and it’s made me wonder whether this unique, distinctly ‘Rare N64’ flavour of shooter could be next to get picked up by the indie scene and reimagined with more modern design. We’ve got the Build Engine-style late pixel-era throwbacks like Ion Fury, Cultic, and X Slayer. We have the lumpy low-poly Quake-a-likes like Dusk, Amid Evil, and Ultrakill. Even the much later FEAR’s received its modern homage through Trepang2 (which I’m checking out this weekend), so it feels inevitable that the Rare-like shooter, with its boxy photographed faces, dramatic death animations, and blood splotches, is gonna get picked up at some point.
But even if it doesn’t, the originals still hold up so well that 25 years on, they still give me thrills quite unlike any other shooters today.
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