The Darkness. The lovely melatonin bought me this several years ago as a Secret Santa gift. I played it for a couple of hours, got bored, and stopped. Many years later I played Syndicate, a game by the same team that made The Darkness. Having loved Syndicate, I decided to revisit The Darkness to see if I was a little hasty in my judgment.
I was!
While it’s not exactly amazing, it is a solid enough game, and has a decent open-world feel to it. Maybe that’s why I dropped it in the first place, I wasn’t particularly used to the open-world formula back then. Something just clicked on this second play-through, I think I had realised by then that not all first-person games handle like Halo. It’s a bit of an odd one – for the first section of the game, no-one seemed to want to comment on the giant tentacles coming out of my jacket, like it was the most normal thing in the world. The gunplay is decent enough (the auto-aim does make it a tad too easy to be honest), but the enemies are either your standard gangsters or mindless undead zombies, so altogether they are pretty boring to fight. That pretty much sums it up – a lot of nice touches, but there’s always something that breaks or ruins the atmosphere.
I have also been playing Splinter Cell: Conviction. Great game, just need to go back and mop up some Achievements. Jane and I loved co-op, although she’s not too keen on trying out the non-story based co-operative modes. The story was pretty good too, there was this one moment where Sam Fisher was getting really angry and I was hearing these faint notes in the background. I thought I recognised them, and soon realised that I did know them. I didn’t know exactly what the tune was, but knew I’d heard it before, knew I loved it. I also knew it wasn’t some mainstream rubbish, but at first I thought it was UNKLE. Turns out I was half right, because after a quick YouTube search, I had found it. Building Steam with a Grain of Salt by DJ Shadow. Fucking class tune, and it fit Sam’s rage perfectly. If I had to do my Memorable Gaming Moments again, I’d include that one.
It’s funny – playing those two games back-to-back – they both involved shooting lights out, (for wildly different reasons though). I’d be walking home from work, look up and see a street light, and subconsciously shoot it out with my subconscious gun. A bit like when I used to play Halo a lot and I wanted to see something far away, and I’d subconsciously click my subconscious right thumb-stick. Speaking of Halo, I’ve been mostly playing Halo 4. I’m planning on doing a non-review soon, so stay tuned for that.
What’s been going on with me? I guess I’m in a bit of a rut after the excitement of the wedding really. Work is super crazy busy what with Christmas nearing, and I’m in two minds. One is “GET OUT OF RETAIL”, the other is “STICK WITH RETAIL, IT’S WHAT YOU KNOW”. On the one hand, I could progress into management and earn more money that way, on the other hand, it’s really depressing. Even more so now that I’m not some random 33 year old guy who works for minimum wage, I’m some married 33 year old guy who works for minimum wage. As I said to one of my friends earlier this week, “I prefer to work to live, not live to work – unless I can find work I love” or something like that. 2013 has to be the year when I make my art count for something, I cannot spend another year in retail, let alone another Christmas.
