Perfectly Dark Sounds

I took advantage of the Xbox Arcade sale this past friday and got myself, along with Magic: The Gathering, a copy of the remade Perfect Dark - originally for the N64 in 1999. Perfect Dark was originally made by RARE, creators of Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye 64 and Conkers Bad Fur Day... It's safe to say that with franchises like that, RARE were kings of their day, and certainly kings of the N64 console. After the success of Goldeneye 64 (arguably one of the greatest shooters, and most certainly a genre defining moment) RARE moved onto Perfect Dark, a spiritual successor to Goldeneye - since they didn't own the rights to make a direct sequel - they did the next best thing.

The retexturing and lighting look great in the XBLA Version.

I'll be perfectly honest - i got Goldeneye for my n64 but that was it. Forsaken, Pokemon Snap and Podracer don't really count as games. I switched to Playstation pretty early on because it was sexier and more violent so by the time Dark came out i was pretty oblivious. But my friend had it, and i know all about how it was revolutionary for the time.You even NEEDED the N64 memory pack to make it work correctly, which doubled your 4mb of RAM to 8mb... Just listening to the polished music and sound effects you can tell why - RARE clearly didn't give a shit about technical limitations - they just wanted to make an amazing game.

So now it's 12 years on and this re-release of PD is on sale. I'd forgotten, i think, what 1999 looked like. If you've forgotten:

Alone in The Dark: New Nightmare also suffered from performance issues by hardware limitation. It wasn't until i got a PS3 i could see the cinematics and hear the music.

Final Fantasy 9 - perhaps the most accessible and polished of the series to date. A delight to play.

Resident Evil 3 - Graphically and musically it was as high concept as you could get. Shame a lot of the atmosphere had gone in place of heart attack triggering jumps.

And Perfect Dark was no exception. So i expected, from Xbox, a polished port, upscaled to HD - pretty much exactly how Deus Ex looks on a modern PC. But 4J Studios haven't ported it, so much as gutted the original program and replaced everything in the game with how RARE had intended it to be. The textures and lighting have been totally re-done - now characters look human, Jo Dark looks like a really filthy porn actress by way of Victoria Beckham and Carrington looks like a Rainy Day Theatre rendition of Winnie The Pooh. Puddles and shiney floors reflect the world around them and windows shatter into little triangles without any affect on frame rate - where other ports use emulation to run on modern hardware, this version of Dark has been re-done entirely for the xbox engine, and as such has no trouble running at 30fps without any hiccups.

Hard to argue, 4J studios have done as well as they could whilst sticking true to the source material.

Onto the sound side of things!

What i love about Dark's soundtrack and effects is that everything oozes quality. This is 1999, memory is an issue, consoles can ONLY READ WAV FORMAT and the finance for a video game's sound department is usually bugger all. The only reason a sound guy working on games back then had any incentive to put effort in was to hopefully move onto bigger and better things. To be massively blunt - console music prior to 2000 is often ignored in regard to quality and lasting appeal - it's phoned in, it's pretty shit. My only real memories of good console music were Tomb Raider III (which used a huge chunk of it's memory on the title music), Resident Evil and Silent Hill (these will have a specific article to themselves.)

To compare Dark to 99% of the market at the same time is just harsh, man. The three guys who worked in house at RARE also did music on the company's other franchises really went to town on this. While Goldeneye had some classic music, wonderfully dark and subtle textures layered over chilled bass grooves and trip hop percussion - it ultimately lacked any kind've warmth or relatable production. In other words the music was there but it didn't really strike the player with any use of dynamics... no bass punches or searing klaxxons. Dark truly shines in this department and although i have my niggles with the music... i can't fault it. It's actual music... Not just background noise.

The opening theme is droning, moody and dark. There's percussion in there directly from Goldeneye. The main menu and first level themes are pure throwbacks from Goldeneye, the bass and the percussion respectively. But the synth textures and melodies are fresh and engaging. Unfortunately by level 4 i'm starting to get slightly irritated. The main problem with Dark (the original that is) is that it uses an old system of putting a single sound onto the game, and then having a series of signals PLAY the sound in real time. So instead of a hefty WAV file on the game, you're able to have an entire orchestra section occupy maybe 300k, and an arrangement file which merely tells the orchestra sample when to play and what notes to use - you see how it's more ergonomic? Since no single sample is confined to a single song. 

Because of this, Dark has A LOT of different songs, but those songs always draw from the same pool of samples, perhaps 5 melody sections, 5 chord sections and 10-15 individual drum sounds. You get the idea. And unfortunately a lot of this music is poorly cued... If anything it simply loops through the entire level. So for someone like me, who takes their time in a game - it's hypnotically punishing. However by the time we reach the infamous Chicago level, we're treated to this little beauty:

This is image-to-sound perfection at its best, and you can REALLY hear the quality of the samples they used. Along with this and a few other levels, Deep Sea and Airbase spring to mind, Dark is wonderfully characterised by it's music. While somtimes the synth melodies sound like ropey dungeon music from Mario Brothers there's always an edge to the music that stops it being comical. My favourite aspects to the music are the classic saw wave synths that often run underneath the melody, either playing broken chords or arpeggios just to keep the game's pace going. It's a cute little mixture and i firmly believe that without Perfect Dark's pushing, intricate and somewhat optimistic soundtrack, we wouldn't have Deux Ex's more mature, gloomy music or aesthetic. 

Techfags will be saying to themselves 'If it's a full conversion and not an emulation or port, how does the music work?' Well, simply put, as far as i can tell 4J Studios have taken the original software driven instruments from the 1999 game and loaded them into modern software and hardware. From that they've added a little polish and a few minor tweaks (Some mixing and panning work most notably). Music crossover is a little rough around the edges, betraying that 4J have hard-rendered the music as looping MP3s, which is fine - as the music sounds superior to the original.

Sound effects (sorry to go on) are top notch. A lot of older games used low-end WAVs for their audio (Playstation Games are infamous for their dust-bin sound dialogue) but here, it's clear to see the entire sound department had put their foot down and demanded more space. Gunshots punch through the mix like they don't care about the neighbours and everytime something explodes (everything you shoot explodes btw) there's a crystal clear, bottom end rumble that makes me grin. Dialogue, although being criminally daft and camp as christmas is about as clear as it can get. It's just mixed badly, during cutscenes with a lot of action - characters not only talk casually but get drowned out by all those 200-500hz gunshots. It sounds like two deaf people happily nattering away to each other in a club, whilst you're leaning in to hear what they're saying... and they make no effort to make it easy on you. Due to this very problem i'm half way through the game and have no idea what's going on. The only reason i'm vaguely aware of why i'm killing people is because the training level has leaflets that tell you ALL the plot's characters and their hidden secrets. At one point i lol'd hard as Jo Dark was surprised to find the person she's trying to rescue turns out to be a floating laptop with a mind of it's own, when on the training level i'd read all about it. I'm going to have to feign surprise when white-coat-white-hair man reveals to my oblivious entourage he's actually a snake-alien wearing a power-tie.

You cant go wrong for £5 though, do it, it feels good, man.

Now if only they'd seen how she looked in-game in 1999...