13 Video Game Sequels Better Than Their 'Classic' Originals
3. Perfect Dark > GoldenEye 007
The first comment I expect about this selection is that Perfect Dark isn't a sequel to GoldenEye. Which is fair enough; I suppose technically, the successor to Rare's Bond-blaster would be Black Ops Entertainment's mediocre Tomorrow Never Dies. It's clearly not though, is it?
No, despite being shorn of the British super-spy, Perfect Dark is 100% the follow-up to the N64's surprise breakout hit; the entire game is built upon an improvement to GoldenEye's already pretty tip-top engine.
GoldenEye wasn't just a great game; it was a monumental one. Though many like to point to Halo as the title which changed the landscape for FPS games on consoles, the honour truly rests in the hands of 007. The mission based gameplay, a control scheme which worked without a mouse, even the hastily added multiplayer mode, were all leaps and bounds beyond anything the genre had cooked up so far. Most had simply expected a hum-drum license cash-in.
If GoldenEye had pushed the envelope, Perfect Dark stuck a dozen first-class stamps on it and sent it all the way to the moon. Rare essentially asked fans what they'd like to see in the successor, and then pulled out all the stops to include as many of them as possible. Almost nothing was off limits.
The result is a game far superior to the first, one that introduced new ideas and broke technological barriers as it strafed around every corner. And it had a little grey alien called Elvis. Perfect Dark's the king, baby.