Email: Dark Souls

Magical Mystery Malstrom,
Have you taken a look at Dark Souls for PC yet? I highly recommend it. You may want a gamepad of some kind though as the mouse support is pretty awful; I haven’t got a gamepad for my PC at the moment, but this has definitely made me want to invest in one (due to targeting being extremely spastic and uncontrollable on the mouse). If you’re looking for a game that challenges, that requires concentration, thought and strategy, this is the game for you. Attention can be the difference between life and death; the difficulty is incredibly organic; at the start of the game you’re confronted with an Asylum demon or something, and you have only a broken hilt of a sword. It is possible to beat the demon then and there; and you’re rewarded for it, however you can also avoid the demon at first and choose a path that will net you a sword and shield, and also a free quarter of the bosses health taken away with a jumping attack from a ledge.

I’ve only invested 3 hours so far, but I’m really enjoying the difficulty, even with the mouse, the game has no map as far as I can tell, and no targeting certainly makes for a challenge. It’s a test of patience, pattern recognition and concentration. The dying mechanic is quite fair, you start again at the last bonfire you visited, with the chance to recover your body/souls. But die again, and you lose that first body forever. It can be frustrating at times, and I’ve had to put the game down several times because of the difficulty (exasperated by the targeting problems). Something modern day games have not really captured in a long while; the drive to win against all odds, without feeling extremely cheap. 

My only complaints besides the controls would have to be the UI, it’s hard to tell what the fuck is happening there. Also items when they offer no clue what they do, I can’t figure out how to find information on items in game and I haven’t resorted to google, as I’d prefer to learn through my own experience. Anyway, check it out!

I plan to pick up Dark Souls months from now once I’m done with Pandaria. I do need to pick up a gamepad as well which is one reason why I didn’t rush to buy the game. The concept of using a gamepad on the computer is wrong and totally mars the game. However, it saves me from buying a PS3. (I actually have many gamepads for the PC but they all suck. I’ll probably  just get a Wii->USB converter.)

Usually when a game gets all this hype and praise, people go, “Ohhhh, you must try this game. Ohhhhh…..” But if you wait a while, all that hype and praise evaporate for the next “greatest game ever” and the cycle repeats. “But this game is different!” Yeah, I’ve heard that too.

The commotion has been longstanding enough to make me warrant a check into the game. What I expect to find is familiar gameplay that an old experienced gamer like me will immediately recognize but is ‘novel’ to the young people. A great example of this would be that DayZ mod. “We have never seen anything like this!” Sure we have. This was how most of my multiplayer games were done before the stupid locking of teams and all. My favorite way to play a RTS game was with ‘anything goes’ where no teams would be established and people would ally and make enemies, backstab, and whisper and plot in order to achieve success. “But this is different. There are zombies.” I’ve heard that before.

Nintendo also seems to have ‘noticed’ Dark Souls and likes how the multiplayer was done. However, I think that is more to do with geography. If Dark Souls was the same exact game but made by the West, Nintendo would choose not to notice it.