On Employment

A lot of games coming out around now are Open World style, a result of Grand Theft Auto V making a billion dollars or so. Open world designs mean that objectives can’t be narrowly focused into “get from one end of this level to the other” or “beat this opponent” but instead you’re given an objective and frequently you have a small set-piece inside the larger world in which to accomplish that objective. Frequently this turns into a to-do list called a “quest list” that shows you your objectives in the open world, your progress toward completing them, where to go to complete them, and sometimes the rewards for doing so.

It’s a pretty straightforward design that appeals to a lot of people and functions well in a logical system of checks, triggers and variables. Despite this setup’s obvious popularity, there’s always been a certain amount of criticism for the relatively robotic nature of enjoyment of these games, whether it’s criticizing the rote repetition of tasks or the arbitrary way these tasks tend to decide their completion. One of the larger issues with open world design is that the bigger the world, the more limited the verbs players can perform begin to feel. Grand Theft Auto addressed this by stuffing its open world with all kinds of minigames: ownable properties, clothing options, a virtual stock market and so on. Other games are a bit more limited in scope, usually providing little more than a virtual treasure hunt or two on top of the typically combat oriented gameplay.

The reason this design is so popular – clear tasks, clear rewards, clear direction toward the next task – has a lot to do with how we set up our real world society. In an ideal presentation of life on planet earth:

• you’re born
• you age a bit until you reach schooling
• you’re taught certain things and then evaluated and typically rewarded based on your ability to remember or apply those things
• you graduate and move on into a position of employment where ideally you’re given a series of tasks
• you complete them in exchange for money
• Eventually after progressing in your career to a senior position and becoming old you retire with your accumulated rewards and enjoy a period of time before your death

This is the fundamental backbone of our society, from which all our ideology springs. And it’s not bad as a simulation goes! It works in games, no reason it wouldn’t work IRL. Except, of course, that life offers you endless potential actions you can take outside of your questlist; a questlist that itself is fallible because frequently your tasks are unclear, your rewards are uncertain, and the path to your next objective is unknowable.

What Video Games do that Work fails to do is provide a clarity of purpose, a set progression through a series of conditions that ends with you the victor, triumphant in your prowess. The closest life has to offer you to that kind of clarity is schooling, and even that is subject to myriad systemic issues that prevent it from being as proficient and objective as a machine-executed series of rules that interpret your input without bias or precondition.

So, Games are Work, yes, but Games are an idealized form of Work that cleaves more to the mental construct of what a good and functional society should look like. There’s a lot of thinkpieces and video reviews out there framing games as escapist fantasy but rarely do they bother to examine what folks are escaping into and what folks are escaping from. There’s a lot of writing out there too about power fantasies and it’s inarguable that this is a genre, but to what degree are these a power fantasy and why? Take Skyrim, for instance. You’re given a massive map full of samey-looking barrows and little medieval towns and you’re frequently employed to slay dragons or zombies and promptly rewarded for doing so. Meanwhile, as a digital avatar, you don’t need to eat, you don’t need to sleep, you don’t really need shelter, and diseases are cured as easily as tapping a shrine. You have a clear purpose: defeat king dragon and stop the dragons from destroying the world. The power granted to you is immortality, invulnerability and clairvoyance, a suspension of the normal insecurities of reality. The ability to slay a dragon pales in comparison to run up and down mountains and across plains and though vast fields without pause, shot like an arrow toward your well defined goals.

I’m gonna segue here a bit and talk about the gig economy. Presently a number of older industries are being upended ("disrupted") by relatively miniscule tech companies who can offer a similar level of service at miniscule cost by almost totally eliminating their workforce and handing the responsibility and to technically unemployed individuals who are doing little more than using an app. The app provides accountability and payment processing, the user provides the accommodations. It sounds great on paper because it frankly is great. With airbnb the prices are cheaper and the vacation experience is more authentic than anything a big chain hotel can deliver, all with little ratings-chasing perks that would be an upcharge in a cab or hotel. With Uber the cars arrive faster, cleaner, and friendlier than cab drivers have ever had incentive to be.

In many ways this is because the apps come closer to that idealized experience of Work that we expect from life. The app buzzes and sends you a quest or a list of quests to choose from, with a clear destination or guest to care for. You're rewarded almost immediately on a quest by quest basis. The ratings system provides you with instant feedback so you always have a sense of how well or how poorly you're doing the job. Currently the system lacks a real sense of progression, but there's already opportunities present to be "featured" drivers or airbnb locals and access a better pool of clientele. In a lot of ways these apps "gamify" work. It'd be great if it weren't so thoroughly tied to our ability to live. Folks who are bad at playing these new games don't just progress more slowly, they "lose" the game and get kicked of the app, putting themselves at risk of homelessness, starvation and death.

Re: some mario maker early preview coverage

So I don’t normally do this because a) console wars are literally the dumbest possible conflict and b) gamers in generally tend to be aggressively wrong in a way matched only by hardened rightists so the folks who need to hear this probably won't, but this particular article irked me in just the right way that I want to respond to it.

To contextualize this discussion here I want to point out that this generation of video game hardware has, across the board, sold worse than the last generation of video game hardware. The Sony Playstation 4 is the only home console currently doing well, and it’s doing about as well as the ps3 (last gen’s sales loser) did at its peak. Likewise the handheld market has decreased overall, with the 3ds doing about half as well as the DS did in its heyday. There are a couple of reasons for this, but most of them just come back to the current economic doldrums all of western society is facing as a result of a bunch of terrible neoliberal decisions.

Even so, the Wii U is firmly in third place even behind the terribly lagging Xbone, but the quote re: the system not selling as well as even the gamecube is ignoring that actually at about this point in the gamecube’s life (two and a half years in) it had sold about as many units and that overall hardware systems can’t be expected to sell as many units as the seventh generation, let alone the sixth.

Concerning the Wii being “seen as slightly faddish” this is some typical gamer rigmarole where anything that sells to “casuals” in an unacceptably high amount (literally every facebook game, mobile gaming, the wii, so on) is in some way an abhorrent aberrance to the true gaming community which only buys “serious” consoles without “gimmicks.” It’s this bullshit language that helps maintain the atmosphere where anyone insufficiently versed in gaming shibboleths (ability to manipulate complex controllers to move a character in 3d space, willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a computer that only plays games instead of a few dollars on a game for a computer you already own) is perpetually an outsider despite the theoretical definition of “gamer” being “one who plays games.” It’s both a failure of empathy and taking the skills built into gaming for granted.

The Wii sold specifically and explicitly on a platform of making games easier for average people to get into, and it’s ironically this same platform that created the Mario being valorized in this same article. That it sold tremendously well is an explicit demonstration of the validity of this approach and the Wii U’s problem isn’t that the wii’s popularity is a flash in the pan, but that the wii u is poorly positioned in the market. Instead of retaining the market that the wii successfully capitalized on, the wii u chose a terrible name and returned to a more complex control scheme that alienated their non-gamer market.

The article attempts to position the problem, as so many comments sections do, as a problem with the tablet screen, suggesting that consumers didn’t respond well to it. This is mostly conjecture, but I’d suggest the issue is less with the screen itself, which is actually broadly popular with actual wii u owners, but with the aforementioned failure to position itself on the market and more importantly a failure to interest developers in creating unique experiences for the screen. Not mentioned at all in this article are both Nintendoland and Game and Wario, arguably the two games that most significantly utilize the various features of the screen and demonstrated a variety of possible control schemes for future games, none of which have been later reused even by Nintendo itself. (That said, it looks like the upcoming star fox heavily leans on the design of the metroid game in Nintendoland)

Which brings me to the next issue here, where the article suggests that Nintendo has dragged its feet about putting out major franchises. This shit is a goddamn gamer Gregorian chant at this point, and a chant that frustratingly ignores two things.  One, Mario is their biggest franchise by a very wide margin and they won’t stop making goddamn Mario shit. Mario Kart 8 has something like a 60% attachment rate and there hasn’t been a year since the console came out that some kind of Mario shit hasn’t. What gamers mean is “why hasn’t [series that doesn’t sell as well as Mario] come out yet” which is number two: Nintendo is having to make HD games now, which have much longer development time and thus much greater development costs. So far this generation Nintendo has explicitly been trying to offset those costs by outsourcing a great deal of its design work to other companies (smash 4 with namco, wonderful 101, the new star fox with platinum, hyrule warriors with koei tecmo) and this is 100% the reason Nintendo is shy of creating new entries in franchises that aren’t guaranteed to sell  Mario or Zelda numbers (it’s also why Splatoon almost had Mario characters until the team convinced Nintendo it could be made on the cheap, and indeed they got it out in about a year with just four maps and three major weapon types, more coming on free dlc. Speaking of DLC this is why Nintendo suddenly seems to be so confident in creating and putting it out, because Nintendo’s DLC, like all DLC, is designed to offset the costs of production, which I’ll reiterate are dramatically higher than the costs for producing a Wii game.

Nintendo is literally dealing with exactly the same issue the rest of the industry is, which is that development costs have vastly outstripped the profitability of selling games at $60 and what we’re seeing across the market is publishers scrambling to deal with this paradigm in all kinds of wildly unpopular ways. This is not a case of blatantly terrible decision making, except most prominently the name of the system (market positioning), but a case where Nintendo is having to adapt to the status quo of other console-makers and is trying to still make a profit. Microsoft loses money on every single xbox sold, Sony presently is only making money through their games division as the rest of their electronics are crashing and burning. Nintendo pretty much only makes games, so they can’t afford to take a bunch of business risks, hence a million fucking Marios.

Tl;dr the wii wasn’t a fad, the controller isn’t the problem, and gamers have no idea how games get made.  And the fucking NX is a handheld.

Six Totally Unexpected Reasons Reviewing Games is Harder Than You Think

I gotta stretch this out into more of a personal blog entry to cohere this into something that isn’t just a real facile aphorism. So, I’m reading Nathan Rabin’s latest year of flops on av club, since I guess the spinoff website thing didn’t work out and Nathan is back at the site that loves/hates him. Anyway it’s a review of So You Wanna Marry Harry, a singularly puerile (and those who know me know I don’t use that term lightly [nah I’m just fucking with ya]) reality show where a handful of ladies are apparently coerced into believing they’re competing for the affections of Prince Harry, who is I guess british royalty of some sort. It’s a reality show, so it has reality show morals, so of course the standpoint of the show is the winner should be someone who “deserves” it, which means someone who is honest and genuine and unassuming and whatever other traits society has deemed love-worthy. This is the biggest thing Nathan wrote about in his review, that the typical moral construction of the reality show narrative comes across as particularly flat and tasteless when built on a construct of deceit above and beyond most reality shows; “Harry” was to be interested in the most “genuine” of possible suitors while pretending to be British royalty.

This makes for an interesting angle to talk about, and invites the reader to find value in a theme not necessarily explicit in the text. In short, it co-operates with a good review.

Naturally this got me thinking about video games. One of the more pervasive concepts in critical readings of games is ludonarrative dissonance, the mismatch of the themes presented by the narrative of a video game and the mechanics present within a video game. A good general example is when games present you with an objective that is implied to be time-limited (e.g. we must find the bomb before it blows up the city!) but in reality the game will simply wait for you to eventually complete that objective before moving on. Another common example is presenting characters within the narrative who are supposedly morally correct and relatively pacifistic (usually as opposed to morally bankrupt and deadly antagonists) who violently murder hundreds or thousands of faceless humans over the course of the game. In practical terms this is no big deal, the gameplay mechanics allowing for time for players to explore or practice without the pressure of a time limit or offering a series of combat challenges that break up the platforming sections and pad out the time spent with the game. In terms of video game thematics, though, this dissonance can create ravines of meaning that make it difficult to extrapolate coherent themes out of a game. Ultimately it fosters a certain kind of cynicism in both the reviewer and the player: the story doesn’t really matter because the mechanics are just going to undermine it anyway.

I could be wrong, but I think this is one of the reasons why the notion that game reviews should be “objective” clings to life in a way that criticism in other media doesn’t have to deal with. It is already widely accepted that game stories are bad, and ludonarrative dissonance is but one part of that puzzle (the other parts being how incredibly stereotypical most of these narratives are under guise of adherence to genre tradition and the relative disinterest most publishers have in foregrounding narrative as an essential part of the product they’re selling rather than simply a tool of market positioning) but the problem with bad game stories ripples outward and affects how we think about and talk about games.

One of my favorite game reviewers is a weird dweeb named Tim Rogers, who writes reviews not as straightforward gamepro-style 300 word affairs but as 14-20k word anecdotes about his life that usually border on shaggy dog stories. When he does write about the games in question, he mostly writes about how the game /feels/ and what the mechanics do to create that feeling. Narrative is rejected wholly as an interesting aspect of games.

Roger Ebert talked about games once and caught a really silly reputation among the gaming crowd, up there with shibboleths about Uwe Boll and Jack Thompson in those days. He suggested that games weren’t Art as he understood it, that the nature of games, the structure, the objective, the win condition, the series of rules themselves precluded games from being Art. It’s not a very unreasonable position, but it struck a nerve with a segment of folks hoping for a cultural legitimacy beyond Hollywood stereotypes of nerdy losers. Ebert only elaborated once before his death, mostly just reinforcing his position and pointing out that a lot of the counterarguments were fundamentally misunderstanding his position.

I don’t wholly agree with him, but I think it’s a worthwhile position that can be explained pretty well through the analogy of playing an instrument. While the music produced through instruments is widely regarded as Art and has been for some time, I think you’d be harder pressed to find someone who would describe chords and scales and hertz values as art, but rather as a necessary study in the process of creating art, much as learning proportions is a necessary study in doing painting. The paintings are the art, and the process is sometimes art. The rules governing both are not themselves art. This holds true for games as well. What resonates with players is the experience of playing the game, the emergent narratives they’re experiencing. The experience can be and is often shared through youtube or meandering anecdotes and these representations can too be art, but the actual process of crunching variables or detecting player input or wrapping a virtual skeleton in a bitmap? Not art.

The reason I bring up this particularly navel-gazey and moot critical argument is because it’s directly related to how narrative is often confused as the artistic part of games. Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, is often described as a sort of “Rosebud of games” owing largely to its relatively somber narrative, rare for its time. The gameplay of Shadow of the Colossus, however, is fairly typical of a 3rd person action title. You have a horse, you ride it to a boss fight, which is more accurately a platforming segment followed by tapping a button, and… that’s about it. Sometimes you perform platform action to get to the boss to platform on it.

This is definitely a reductive description, but think about the elements being reduced here. What happens to a game if you strip away the music, the background textures, the user interface, the narrative? You’re left with a series of systems, appreciable mostly as elegant objects designed to produce an outcome, which in game terms is usually just creating a functional input/output feedback loop from the player. It’s all that other stuff that’s designed to make players believe they’re an assassin in 1500s Damascus. So you can see how the two collide. On the one hand you have a series of systems designed to produce, more or less, a Skinner box response from players, and on the other you have another set of artistic systems designed to make you believe that the skinner box you’re participating in is actually driving forth a narrative about invading an alien planet in the past to save the present from being destroyed.

This duality plus the fact that both sides of the system are constantly improving makes critically discussing games kinda weird and endlessly debatable and it’s unique from other forms of entertainment in that by the very interactive nature of video games it’s difficult to achieve the kind of suspension of disbelief that foregrounds the narrative over the tools used to convey it. It’s much harder to believe that you’re a pirate when you’re conveying all of your piratical things by using tiny buttons and some sticks than it is to believe that you’re simply watching pirates do their day to day business through an omniscient window that works kind of like our dreams do.

Not terribly long ago, games were pretty incapable of presenting a convincing narrative at all and were instead more interested in simply providing compelling things to look at (this paradigm lasted about midway through the original playstation era, plus lots of later games doing it for retro reasons) and to a certain degree the present backlash against critical analysis is a nostalgic yearning for the times of yesteryear (as is most of rightism, really) when gaming magazines would simply check a few boxes and rate games based almost entirely on technical competence + audiovisual appeal. It’s this particular style of critical analysis that lead to the current Metacritic paradigm and it’s this style that quite a lot of smaller outlets are explicitly writing against.

Skylanders: Swap Force

Three years after its initial iteration, Skylanders shows no sign of slowing down, cannabilizing entire store aisles with cartoon bits of plastic and innovation. The first real adaptation of NFC technology in video games has been a wild success, nailing a vulnerable target market (children) with consumer capitalist dream toys: little devices that a video game requires in order to function. A game that takes all of the best elements of grindy lootfests aimed at older players and combines them with a compulsive and coherent marketing structure doesn’t merely suggest purchasing as many toys as you can but demands that you acquire them or face a drop in euphoric hormones.  

There are 80 Skylanders characters now, 10 each categorized across eight basic elements. Swap Force, the latest iteration, adds in an additional eight movement types spread across its unique mix/match figures while Giants, the previous iteration, had 8 larger than normal figures required for play. In optimal configuration, players only need about eight figures (one of each element, or in the case of Swap Force, one of each element and one of each movement type. These two requirements do coincide, a small mercy) in order to unlock every area in each game and collect all the secrets. This optimization is obscured, however, by both the game’s target market (5-12 year old boys) and features in the game itself. Throughout the game world you’ll find “soul gems” that unlock new powers and feature a promotional video for skylanders you don’t have. They’re toy commercials dolled up as super-secret rewards. On top of that there’s an extensive collection screen that encourages you to seek out and complete the full collection of little dudes with little fluff details and links to the in-game advertisements.  Even the mechanics of the game encourage you to collect more. Beyond the gates that bar entry to all but specific kinds of skylanders, the number of available lives you have for a certain level is hard limited by the number of skylanders you have. The more skylanders, the more lives you have to play with.

It’s brilliant, from top to bottom, and the game would be so easy to condemn if not for the fact that it’s well made and well designed. Attacks have an appropriate amount of friction, enemies are smartly varied, the level design is engaging. All told this game plays as a thoughtful Diablo variant for children.

But that’s just a physical description of the game. If you’re wondering if it’s worth picking up, wonder no more. A bunch of outlets have given Swap Force (the most recent iteration) perfect scores. The game is indubitably fun. What’s more interesting is the questions that the game itself and its runaway success bring up. Why do we sell these things to children? What is it about kids that make marketing a consumerist wet dream to them so much more lucrative than selling to adults? A cynic might suggest that adults are too jaded for this kind of thing to work on them, that kids with their inherently more trusting nature are more likely to buy bald marketing pushes such as these. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer, as I’ve watched plenty of adults buy and collect plenty of stupid things in my life. I think it has more to do with what we consider childish in America. Collecting things just for the sake of collecting things has simply never been in the stable of sane activities for mature adults to do. Instead we describe adult collecting as a somewhat strange and shameful hobby, to be kept secret and gently mocked when it sees the light of day. At the extreme we consider it a form of hoarding and we put these folks on trial on television, a warning to the rest of us to become anxious about our personal lives. This attitude is slowly and somewhat changing, though. We’re learning to understand and appreciate the collection impulse through things like mobile games, which feature more and more “get this thing to complete your virtual collection” hooks. Maybe in the future there’ll be a more adult oriented form of skylanders, with sexy women and hooded, goateed bald dudes. Or ideally games will have gotten over that impulse too and truly become something transcendent and imaginative. A game with an NFC pass-along mechanic, say, where you send one object from person to person to accrue social power, each person leaving a small stamp on the figure in game terms. A game that works in conjunction with a 3d printer to, rather than put a physical object in the game, uses the game to produce a physical object. Lots of interesting places for this tech to go.

One thing would be missing in a more adult oriented version of skylanders: sheer whimsy. The game is silly as all get out, from the ultra-serious announcement of silly enemy characters (“Grumblebum Blunderbuss”) to the goofy hat options to the characters quipping lines throughout play. It’s cutesy and mostly charming, at least until the cutscenes. The plot of Swap Force is utterly ridiculous and ridiculous in the worst “talking down to children” sort of way, featuring “evilizer” devices powered by solidified evil and cartoony, unbelievable villains. The only saving grace is Patrick Warburton doing his Kronk voice as a self-important airship pilot. The game is aggressively kid oriented, even to the point of rendering its powerups as a variety of foods that kids would find appealing, hot dogs, hamburgers, even a Kid Cuisine tv dinner. Marketing for the game is tailored to the inevitable adult purchasing the $75(!) starter set, extolling it’s value and virtues as unequivocally providing a fun experience to children that provides some sort of nebulous real-world benefit.

It’s gross, really. Reading marketers selling kid stuff always gives me the heebie jeebies. These children aren’t old enough to work or drive or technically sign the 63 page EULA(!) that innocuously appears under a button push on the title screen (the EULA of course states that by playing the game and not returning it to the store immediately, you agree to these terms. Contract lawyers are the devil) yet here we are, marketers playing on unexamined personal wants to inspire them to pester their parents into buy the stuff. I’m never sympathetic to the argument that parents should just be the dividing line between advertisers and their children because these advertisers are well aware that they’re creating conflict within a family, palpable interpersonal drama that can be resolved (if only for the moment) by purchasing a thing. It’s bald emotional manipulation and It’s gross. It’s such a dishonest way to make money.

Darksiders Review

THQ is a member of an old guard of publishers, names and logos of which appeared before countless titles throughout the nineties. Like other members of the old guard, the company got huge and fat and rich off of producing 5-10 games a year and selling them between $40-80 a pop to parents who bought games for their kids entirely based on the license attached to the box. “Oh hey, my reprobate overweight douchebag suburban son likes wrestling; let’s buy him the newest looking wrestling game with the longest title and latest roster.” Not kidding, that shit sold like gangbusters. 

                Then the future happened and every game had to have fancy three dee graphics and interesting mechanics and later some king of online multiplayer component or else it wouldn’t sell. Games got more expensive to make and the strength of a popular license wouldn’t go as far as it used to. So they’re all shutting down and collapsing and folding into larger companies because producing three or four games a year just isn’t instantly generating cashflow like it used to. Right now in the news 38 Studios and subsidiary developers Big Huge Games are both unilaterally collapsing after producing just one game together, a game that took three years and some unreasonable number of millions of dollars to make. Rhode Island actually lent them $75 million to bring the studio to the state because they were probably still thinking in 90s terms where games are instant money+job generators for skilled white men to flow cash into the state. Unfortunately the studio made some godawful decisions in the current gaming climate, opting to produce a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, a genre where if a game isn’t named World of Warcraft, it’s probably going to lose dicktons of money because of the sheer development size of it (World of Warcraft’s data is up to 25 GB. And this is a game made in 2004, before any of these HD-DVD things or nonsense) and the fact that you’re automatically competing with a game that’s 8 years old and still has around 10 million players. 

                So now the studio is collapsing and they can’t make payroll and it’s really not the fault of anyone in the studio. Their first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, wasn’t that bad and moved around 1.2 million copies, but in order for it to have broken even it needed something like 3 million copies sold thanks to its multiplatform nature and development cost. These numbers are astronomical, I shouldn’t need to tell you. Back in the 90s, the “golden age of gaming,” a game could sell maybe 100,000 copies and be considered a moderate success. Games were priced more reasonably to their development costs, and everything overall was cheaper to do. In the modern games era we’re tacked to the $60 new price point, just $10 more than the last generation’s price fixing scheme (you know it is) while games cost around twice as much to develop, a bump from around $8 million to $20 million on average. Games also take more time and effort to generate the high definition textures and models and 30fps animations and bug testing. What’s ironic about all this is that games themselves haven’t gotten any more complex or longer, but in fact the opposite has happened in interests of cost savings, which brings us to Darksiders.

                Darksiders is the very first step in the new direction that THQ intends to move as a publisher, away from licensed kids games that are getting too expensive and too difficult to sell (Yet they’re still making a Spongebob Squarepants game for the Wii U. Maybe they’re just reprioritizing towards their best-selling kids games) and towards original IPs wholly owned by the corporation and thus completely monetizeable. Darksiders was produced by Vigil Games, a studio founded by a pair of guys who met in college and started a bromance that has lasted over ten years and Comic Guy Joe Madureira (Portugese for “incredibly sexy”) who was the only reason I went to the first Wizard World convention here in New Orleans, but he canceled last minute because he was busy working on Darksiders 2, crushing my hopes and dreams (I still love you please call me). Also some other dude that I can’t find any info about online. 

                The game on the surface is about Prince Arthas War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and his super-manly quest for vengeance after the apocalypse happens early and everything goes wrong. There’s some background mythology on a “three kingdoms” approach to this where there’s three kingdoms of reality, man, heaven, and hell; and there’s some loosely explained third party called the charred council that created and operates the horsemen. Big props for the way the game tells the story, nothing is explained to you in didactic style, either by a magic codex or by grating, supercilious NPCs. The game actually ends with a pretty open-ended cliffhanger, as all that really gets done is War’s vengeance quest (and you beat the final boss guy). The only problem is that the story is mind-crushingly stupid. Every single character oozes testosterone from their giant, muscly pores. The dialogue reads like it was written by a WH40k fan that got C’s in high school English. The plot apparently dispenses with the concept of motive, instead simply saying “this character does this” and leaving it there. The real problem is that none of these characters feel like sentient people, much less intelligent or interested people. They feel like excuses to propel a game forward. And hey, that’s exactly what the plot here is. 

                Which actually turns out okay, because as a game it’s pretty darn great. It’s derivative as all hell, but most of the best video games are, and the game picked the right franchises to be derivative from. It’s a third person action game that plays almost identically to The Legend of Zelda, albeit with more manly and complicated combat. Sections are divided between puzzles and combat and the occasional gauntlet-of-enemies-to-be-defeated-with-special-weapon segments.  Like I said, this is not a bad thing. There are not enough legend of Zelda clones on the market, and Nintendo seems content with releasing one ever 5 years, which is awful and terrible and totally unsatisfactory. 

                Everything of course is much more gory and manly than Zelda. The game even has a mature rating, though aside from the ridiculous blood everywhere (this games versions of Zelda’s keys are actually little daggers you stab through the eyes of barriers to your progress, eliciting a huge spurt of blood) there’s nothing particularly mature about this game. The only time vulgar language is used is towards the end when the sole female character is called a “bitch” and a “whore,” both pretty jarring as the only severe insults throughout the game (other than ludicrous threats of murder from silly-looking demons) and both towards the only woman in the game. This is a boys only club, folks. Women aren’t allowed.  But hey, that’s not really out of the norm. What was the one female in Gears of War 1 again? Some woman literally half the size of the protagonist wearing a short skirt?

                Anyway, overall Darksiders is not that bad. It’s probably worth your time if you like Legend of Zelda and you can check out from the library for free like I did. Just be prepared for everything that’s wrong with modern games on this disc. We’ve got gameplay pretty down, but presentation still leaves a lot to be desired. Darksiders 2 is out this August, to star another horseman, Death. THQ is doing slightly better financially, and the success of this game is probably going to be a major factor of the publisher’s health going forward. 

                THQ is a great story, though. They had a CEO that became really adamant about producing a drawing tablet peripheral for kids to play games with, a fiscally untenable move in any case that isn’t Guitar Band or Rock Hero. The uDraw tablet underperformed massively and is the number one reason for the publisher’s stock sliding so badly at the end of last year. They fired that guy (and I’m pretty sure he wrapped a corvette around a tree afterward, as is the natural life cycle of sociopathic executive)  and a bunch of other people, but they took the smart move of leaving their dev studios intact and simply refocusing their efforts to other games. Darksiders is one of the original wholly owned IPs that THQ hopes to turn into a comic series, a cartoon, a series of novellas, a card game, maybe a movie, and so on. Viva Capitalism!