To do this weekend:
Find The Darkness fandom; or, failing that, create it, because hot damn, this game is fantastic! I figure the main reason people are not fapping over this one is that they aren't buying PS3s; I know most of you are going to shell out for 'em when FFXIII is released anyway, so go snap up one of the nice 60 gig backwards-compatible ones (you'll thank me later; they aren't making any more!) and amuse yourself with this in the meantime.
Yeah, it's a dot shooter, but it is not terribly twitchy--if you could string decent combos together in FFX-2, you will do just fine--and that aspect of gameplay becomes largely irrelevant after the first half hour or so if you really, really hate it. The Darkness itself is the major element of gameplay, and... well, frankly, I'm not quite sure how to describe it as I've never encountered a mechanic quite like this. Have you seen Legend of the Overfiend? The super-fast, first-person perspective demons in Evil Dead? The graboids from Tremors? Yeah, you get to do all of that and more. When confronted by swarms of police, you can run in there under a hail of gunfire... or you can send one of your pseudopods crawling carefully through the sewers to emerge from a grate beneath a cop car, hoist the car up and smash them with it. And that's one of the more generic uses!
But the story is what really sells it. I actually followed the comic book this was based on back in the late nineties--was hesitant to buy it because I'd followed the source material. That was too-cool-for-school generic antihero wish-fulfillment garbage with a few neat ideas sprinkled through it. The game version gleaned those neat ideas and placed them in the hands of writers who actually have a grasp on things like plot, characterization, coherence, and spelling, and it turns out they really were that neat! We've got pathos, drama, tragic love (and built-in slash, if you prefer; it really is practically canon), mobsters, demons, tentacles, guidos, Mafia wars, nightmare realms, and... and... and... I've got to shut up or I'm going to spoil it (no, I haven't already! seriously!). I was honestly, genuinely shocked that they were able to wrangle such a deep, moving, and surprisingly realistic story out of the source material, but they really went for the gusto here, and it works fantastically.
So, yes, I am actually saying something nice about something - take heed! In the meantime, I am off to go write the most depressing porn ever.
Yeah, it's a dot shooter, but it is not terribly twitchy--if you could string decent combos together in FFX-2, you will do just fine--and that aspect of gameplay becomes largely irrelevant after the first half hour or so if you really, really hate it. The Darkness itself is the major element of gameplay, and... well, frankly, I'm not quite sure how to describe it as I've never encountered a mechanic quite like this. Have you seen Legend of the Overfiend? The super-fast, first-person perspective demons in Evil Dead? The graboids from Tremors? Yeah, you get to do all of that and more. When confronted by swarms of police, you can run in there under a hail of gunfire... or you can send one of your pseudopods crawling carefully through the sewers to emerge from a grate beneath a cop car, hoist the car up and smash them with it. And that's one of the more generic uses!
But the story is what really sells it. I actually followed the comic book this was based on back in the late nineties--was hesitant to buy it because I'd followed the source material. That was too-cool-for-school generic antihero wish-fulfillment garbage with a few neat ideas sprinkled through it. The game version gleaned those neat ideas and placed them in the hands of writers who actually have a grasp on things like plot, characterization, coherence, and spelling, and it turns out they really were that neat! We've got pathos, drama, tragic love (and built-in slash, if you prefer; it really is practically canon), mobsters, demons, tentacles, guidos, Mafia wars, nightmare realms, and... and... and... I've got to shut up or I'm going to spoil it (no, I haven't already! seriously!). I was honestly, genuinely shocked that they were able to wrangle such a deep, moving, and surprisingly realistic story out of the source material, but they really went for the gusto here, and it works fantastically.
So, yes, I am actually saying something nice about something - take heed! In the meantime, I am off to go write the most depressing porn ever.