Real Men Love Perfect Dark

The Heroine

You play as a chick, Joanna Dark, which already means you have to carry a set big enough for two, but she also has a hot British accent, some of the most badass weaponry in any videogame before or since, and the attitude and appetite for ending lives.  She's up there with Samus Aran as one of the most hardcore females you're going to find in videogames.

Trained as an advanced agent at the Carrington Institute, Ms. Dark is an expert in gunplay and has no qualms about mowing down anyone/thing that gets in her way.  Perfect Dark sends players through armies of well-armed guards, then takes the fight to a race of aliens that would rip your fucking face off if given the opportunity.  Joanna's response:  kill.

The Competition 

In addition to the femme fatale Ms. Dark and her propensity to wipe out anything with a pulse (or sometimes without), Perfect Dark came equipped with one of the most robust multiplayer modes in existence up to that point in gaming history.  What's more manly, in videogame terms, than rounding up a bunch of guys and spending the night kicking the shit out of one another while aggressively taunting them every time your machine gun sent them for a dirt nap?  Everything was customizable, too, from the deathmatch arena to the available weapons to CPU-controlled opponents to player handicaps.  Want to play against a dozen highly-skilled bots in closed-quarters using nothing but rocket launchers?  You got it.

There were a shitload of pre-made challenges to conquer, too.   These ranged from no-sweat cakewalks to this-shit-can't-be-this-fucking-difficult ordeals that would keep you locked on the screen for hours.  Real men completed those challenges - and liked the torture.

The Weapons

Let's talk weapons for a minute.  When you think of badass videogame weapons, it's impossible not to think of Perfect Dark.  This game had the Farsight XR-20 sniper rifle - a super long-range weapon with x-ray vision that could shoot through ANYTHING that happened to lie between you and your target.  It killed with one shot, no matter what.  Hit a guy in the head or in the damn toenail and you got yourself a notch in the barrel for yet another frag.

Another ridiculous instrument of death was the Laptop Gun, which was not only an incredibly rapid-fire machine gun, but also doubled as a turret that you could place anywhere, just waiting for your hapless victims to turn a corner and get raped by a storm of lead.  This thing was a QUICK killer, and nothing felt better than hearing the buzz of bullets followed by the comforting "oh FUCK" that your buddy would inevitably shout as he took HEAVY damage - usually ending in death.

That's just two examples of the game's weapons, but the entire arsenal was deadly.  From high-powered shotguns to lock-on machine guns to small guided missiles, there were many ways to erase your opposition from existence.

Co-op Play

So we've covered the fact that deathmatches are some of the best things in videogames, and Perfect Dark delivers that in spades, but how about running through the entire game with someone there to watch your back every step of the way?  Perfect Dark had one of the earliest full-game cooperative modes for a first-person shooter, and it was definitely awesome.  Forget two guns blazing; with another player manning the controller, you had up to four very deadly ways to exterminate aliens, guards, machines - whatever.  

New games like Gears of War, Halo 3, and Army of Two all use cooperative play as a big selling point, but Perfect Dark was letting us team up to kill shit way back in 2000.

Elvis

About two-thirds of the way through the game, you meet up with an alien named Elvis.  The name alone is enough to earn plenty of man-love, but it's his combat skills that really do it.  A few levels later, Elvis takes the fight to the other alien scum equipped with none other than the Farsight XR-20 I described earlier.  This little fucker can wipe out enemies even faster than you can, and on top of that truly efficient death-dealing, he even taunts his much bigger opposition with phrases as vulgar as you're going to get out of a midget area 51 escapee.  Plus his ride is an intergalactic spaceship. Pimp.

Perfect Dark was, and still is, badass.  It took the Goldeneye formula to a sci-fi world and expanded on it tenfold.  Real men love Perfect Dark.