Before PD was "Wolfenstein 3d". and before that was all the lame "Doom II wads". Only other game that made FPS fun was "Halo" and "Metroid Prime" ( which is not a FPS ) and that was more or less about recruiting children into the military ( since 2001 media will not stfu about the Marines ).


Perfect Dark was(is) the Apex of FPS. While yes Rareware was using it's unexpired license of "GoldenEye" to create there own series that takes place within the same realm, they made something extra-ordi-narly new, fun, and challenging. You had to had steel bullocks to play this game.

It was an up to date bond set in the future of "Batman Beyond" or ( Robocop/Sherlock Holmes futurist )
the antagonists was original, and more importantly explored the idea of Artificial intellegence ( not Machine Learning ), Extra-terrestrials ( like E.T. + MIB combined ), including a presidential assasination, abduction of counter-agencies, along with with an invasion looming under the entire thing.

You went from being counter-spy-v-spy-terrorist to waking up in the morning and seeing talking Yoshi-T-rex's who literally can jump half-way into your direction and stomp you flat while using hand guns, in your workplace.

The only other game that did this was "Tomb Raider II" in the after-game and you had these alien agents. Did I mention "PD" also did the two handed gun thing, and you could control each gun idependent of each other with two controllers at the same time while playing the game, with rumble......only on a N64. Can you do that with an x-box 360 controller..........nope nada. When was the last time you saw one player action using two controllers for each gun and targeting point? Maybe the wii, but beyond that there is none.

There are other spy-games but nobody cared she was a girl, nobody cared about her because that was the cover art. Just like FF6 the in-game sprites does not match but at least we know she is lean.

When was the last time you had a game, that gave you the option to take chasers ( or enhancers ) that slow down time, and allowed you to get the drop on the enemy while blackening the entire room ?