“Darksiders” demo: holy moly

The Darksiders demo hit Microsoft and Sony’s respective marketplaces last week, and it completely blew me away when I got around to playing it today. The roughly 90 minute demo (it took me longer, actually) spans one of the game’s early dungeons, the Twilight Cathedral, in its entirety, and features a satisfying variety of gameplay. The story remains mostly a mystery, but apparently War, one of the four legendary horsemen of the Biblical apocalypse, has been stripped of his powers, and is now working his ass off to return to his former glory.

Tiamat, the final boss of the Twilight Cathedral, wants to tear your face off

Darksiders seems to be the perfect marriage of Zelda-style exploration and God of War-style combat, with puzzle elements, like moveable blocks and climbable environments, that draw inspiration from both series. As War explores the cathedral, he’s faced with loads of enemies, some seriously baffling environmental puzzles, and items that, in function, if not form, are exact replicas of Zelda’s bomb flowers, boomerang and even heart pieces.

Despite his similarities with a certain tunic wearing fairy boy, as a warrior War has much more in common with the ferocious fallen god, Kratos. Combat flows with ease and surprising brutality, and even in this relatively small chunk of the game, War’s arsenal is impressive. QTE’s are mercifully trimmed down to a single button press to finish off the bosses and mini-bosses, of which there are several in the Cathedral.

One of the only things that irked me during the demo was the unforgiving edge detection. Darksiders has a ton of platforming, so the repeated missed jumps have the potential to get seriously irritating. Falls into lava send you back to the entrance of a room, but there were a few gaps in particular that-when missed- sent me back several rooms and cost up to 2 minutes in backtracking. Hopefully the platforming will feel more natural with practice, because besides that Darksiders is a ridiculously appealing adventure game.

Image from http://www.darksiders.com/#/media-screenshots

Review: Little Big Planet

I’ve been meaning to write on here a lot more, but unfortunately an adorable game called Little Big Planet is taking up every minute of my free time.

It has got me by the balls. I’m losing sleep because for some reason my brain considers resting less important than tweaking this rubber band and adding that falling fire log and making this other thing move up and down so that my custom level will garner more hearts when I finally decide it’s ready to be published.

The only reason I’ve found the time to write this now is because I have nothing due tomorrow and I haven’t yet figured out how to bring my PS3 to class.

I haven’t even finished all the storyline levels yet. I keep going back to the ones I’ve already completed to get all the items I missed the first time through. There’s another reason though, and that’s for inspiration.

I want to go to there

After completing the tutorials and playing around for a few hours in creation mode, the realization that, given enough time, I could basically recreate any of and all of Media Molecule’s level washed over me like a bucket full of cold, deliciously intoxicating beer. The tools given to players are not so myriad as to cause befuddlement, but they are varied enough to make almost anything possible. In other words, they are perfect.

I suddenly find myself bursting with ideas. The level I’ve envisioned begins on the eyelid of a gigantic, colorful mustachioed face. Adventurous Sackboys will traverse down the cheek, across the mouth, up the nose, and onto the other eye. For a novice creator like me, this is taking a lot more time to create than it should, but I already feel like I’m getting the hang of it.

I play the developers’ levels for inspiration because every inch of every object, environment, creature and everything else they dreamed up is pure, fucking, stone cold genius. The most complex puzzles and objects in the game appear at the same time entirely obvious and hopelessly out of reach. I understand exactly how each object was built, but what I fail to grasp is how anybody even thought of it in the first place.

I haven’t even mentioned the Sackboys and Sackgirls themselves. They are the cutest things ever. They are like newborn kittens combined with that youtube video of Charlie’s unfortunate brother getting his finger bitten off.

hi

And here I thought the video game mascot was dead. On the contrary, Sackboy is just that, in the purest form possible. Like Mario, the Sackpeople have little to say, but lots of personality. My roommate and I spend half of our play time giving our Sackboys angry faces and slapping each other, or just waving their arms around and hula-ing invisible hoops with the Sixaxis’s motion technology (mark this as the very first time I’ve actually enjoyed that gimmicky piece of crap).

I have to give Sony credit for allowing Media Molecule to make this game. As much as I love my PS3, I just did not think they had it in them to come up with a game this unique.

My life’s not completely hopeless yet. I haven’t skipped any classes lately, and I still go to work. I even wrote a 900 word article last night.

Yet relief flooded over me last night when, as soon as I sent in the completed story, I grabbed my Sixaxis and jumped right into the giant face level I’ve been working on for the past several days. This, despite the fact that I had only slept four hours the night before, and the only thing I had eaten at that point was a donut 8 hours earlier. My body was telling me to make a sandwich and take a nap, but something else, something much harder to resist, told me that I needed to keeping creating.