Perfect Dark Zero: If you were, or indeed still are, the proud owner of a Nintendo 64 these three, relatively mundane words are almost guaranteed to stir your Christmas-stuffed brain into some semblance of its once cognitive self.

For me, these three words were one of only two reasons to get the Xbox 360, the second being the promise of everything I enjoyed about the Xbox crammed into a pretty package and fed on a mix of steroids to rival the results were one to smash Chuck Norris and Mr T into a sharp, yellowy lemon.

Okay, so right now you may be thinking;

"Oh no! A PDZ fanatic, surely this can only mean a slew of ignorant PDZ love!"

Well, you'd be wrong.

Gather closer those of you debating the purchase of an Xbox 360. You, the boy eating the imported Twinkie and screaming blindly how Perfect Dark Zero is terrible without ever picking up a controller. Put said Twinkie in your mouth and rest a while, as I explain to you with a mix of old school Perfect Dark fan and reasoned logic why, whilst not all of you will enjoy Perfect Dark Zero, you would all be greater fools than a little grey chap called Elvis, were you to ignore it.

Not everyone who picks up PDZ is going to like it, this I can promise because much like its predecessor on the N64, it is vastly different to your usual first person shooter. Of course, this may not be immediately apparent, but there is something to Perfect Dark Zero, something strange, at times it feels almost mystical, at others baffling and more often than not, a little intangible. It is the logical continuation of Perfect Dark, but its not; it feels like Perfect Dark, but it doesn't. This likely sounds increasingly negative to you, but actually it's a very good thing indeed and I'll get to why in a minute.

In Perfect Dark Zero as I am sure you are aware, you have 4 flavours of play, single player, co-operative play, standard Deathmatch and a Counter-Strike-esque Dark-Ops mode.

Much has been said of the single-player and whilst I can appreciate the negativity surrounding it, I don't personally agree with it. Perfect Dark has a cult following almost, although whilst not a game on the scale of Halo in terms of fans, it is easily a more important title in the grand scheme of things. Rare knows all too well the loyalty of PD's fans and it knows all too well that most of them were never going to be happy unless all they got from a new Perfect Dark was the same thing, to the last bit of code, with naught but a new story and maybe a few new things in Multiplayer. Indeed, Perfect Dark with online multiplayer and new graphics would likely have been adored by fans and despite a few journalists pointing out the conservative route Rare had taken, little more would have been said.