Games

[icycalm]

I am going to miss this reviews's deadline too, so whoever voted first is getting a free subscription. It's either that or I'd have to cancel my Crackdown game with feelingbetter for today, and fuck doing that. So here's the first part of the review. It's a pretty simple game so I don't expect there will be more than a couple of pages more than that. Both this and the Torment review should go up sometime on Sunday, and then the one-week deadline for the next two games will start.

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I played this game one night in the living room of a charming little apartment in the high Alpine town of Briançon -- altitude 1,326 metres (the highest city in the European Union), population barely 11,000 souls. Large French windows looked out on a cold, windy night that rustled the branches of a multitude of trees, while I, alone in the center of the dark room, lounged in a sofa in the middle of this idyllic environment and had eyes only for the screen. And the screen held my complete attention throughout. I don't think I've ever been so enthralled and surprised by a game ever, especially not one as relatively simple mechanically as this. So yes, this game's appeal lies mostly on aesthetics, which goes to show how important this side of the equation can be and why, at a time when the scales have swung too far -- absurdly far, indeed -- to the OTHER side of the equation, and there exist hordes of ludicrous little people who run around claiming that the purpose of videogames is to create an army of expert button-pushers, one is compelled time and again to champion the opposite viewpoint, and never tire in underlining and emphasizing the ultimate, all-conquering and all-consuming importance of aesthetics in art. But let's back up for a second and take it from the start.

At its heart, Eternal Darkness is a fairly straightforward 3D brawler with some limited special powers mixed in. Please note that the game was released in 2002, and it was still not commonplace at the time for brawlers to feature anything much beyond the basic moveset, and these basic movesets were basic indeed. It was Devil May Cry which changed that, and since the two games were in development at the same time, for at least part of their development cycles, one can't really blame Eternal Darkness for not having a much deeper combat model. Even Onimusha must have come out sometime after Eternal Darkness entered production, so it is important to realize what the genre's landscape looked like when this game appeared.

Indeed, there were so few and so primitive examples of the genre available at the time, that Eternal Darkness, unexceptional as it was in terms of its fighting model, could even be said to have been among the better ones, and it is largely owing to the multitude of offbeat avatars that it gives the player to control that it was not such an enjoyable brawler as brawler like games with a single, more traditional brawler protagonist such as say, DC Berserk or Zombie Revenge or the Dynamite Deka or Spikeout games. And it sure as hell was prettier than most of them, with the notable exception of DC Berserk, which was indeed easily the pinnacle of the genre, both mechanically and aesthetically, before Onimusha arrived.