Either you’ve played Perfect Dark before, or you haven’t. Most readers who find their way here probably have, and the ones who haven’t, well, you’ll probably need some serious convincing to play a decade-old game that pretty cheerfully ignores the innovations the FPS genre gained from games like, say, Half-Life, and came out on a console that wasn’t exactly known as the cutting edge of graphical holyshit-osity. For that first bunch it’s really easy to say, yeah, with the HD upgrade Perfect Dark on XBLA looks every bit as good as you remember it. Which, if you actually pop in the cart these days, you’ll Realise is a hell of a lot better than it actually looked back in the day. Between the replaced textures and multi-player over Live (in splitscreen, no less) this is a great way to re-enjoy a game you already love. It deserves that love. You should be proud to love it. More so now that it’s been touched up without losing a single bit of its original character.

On the other hand, Perfect Dark is old as hell and likely to alienate anyone who cut their teeth on games that came after. If you’re one of those people…I’m sorry, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a reason to say that this is kind of a major gap in your videogaming experience that you absolutely have to go back and fill in. Unlike some other genres, most first-person shooters are pretty far from timeless. We can’t look back on, say, Tetris, and think, “Man, this would be way the hell better with snappier graphics, more block shapes, and an epic storyline that makes us question the nature of our humanity or whatever.”

Related posts:

1. See How the N64 and XBLA Versions of Perfect Dark Compare
2. IGN Daily Fix, 2-5: LA Noire For PS3/360, & Perfect Dark
3. Perfect Dark (Xbox 360) – First 10 Minutes of Gameplay HD
4. Classic Game Room HD – TIMESPLITTERS FUTURE PERFECT Part 3
5. Classic Game Room HD – TIMESPLITTERS FUTURE PERFECT Part 2