Rest in Peace you crazy THQ fellows: Darksiders 2: Death Lives: This title makes no sense: Attack of the Colons

It's kinda hard right off the bat to take a game seriously when the title is just so grimdark. I feel like it's the most evident flaw in the game's marketing. Tell me I'm in for a treat when I play Darksiders 2, the prequel sequel to a nice looking new IP? Alright! Tell me I'm in for a treat when I'm up to play Darksiders 2: DEATH LIVES and my mouth does that thing where I try to sound out the words because they were so stupid in the air a moment ago. It's just a struggle.

I mean, are we going for Lovecraft here, twisted eons, even death may die? Probably not. It's just an odd looking marketing blurb, but hey we live in an era where Microsoft knowingly marketed into a press release where people came out of it going 'Ah yes, the Xbone' rather than giving their console a name that didn't shorten into a phallic reference. C'mon guys, it isn't hard. You just look at the words and go 'can this be shortened into a penis joke?'

Then again, it worked for Nintendo. Maybe dongs are the new hotness. Or wait, maybe they were when the Wii was burning up sales they were and now Microsoft is riding coat tails of a dying trend? I'm getting sidetracked here. Darksiders 2: Death Lives. Terrible title. And honestly, after finishing Darksiders itself, terrible sequel concept. I mean right from the get go you end with this super bad ass moment and instead you swerve, make a U turn, and get to work on a Death-centric parallel prequel? Death the guy, not Death the concept, which is centric in like 99% of video games.

It's not all that difficult to look at stuff like this and realize why the game was, to my understanding, a bit of a failure. I'm not trying to rag on the Vigil boys, because they seem like cool dudes, but rather the marketing team that dreamed this one up. Ugh. Seriously, Death Lives? Death Lives where? Detroit? The other decisions rapidly scale up to form a game more cobbled together, less unified, but none of them really stand out like that.

But this is probably the last true Darksiders game, unless the IP ends up back in Vigil crew's hands over at Crytek. Granted, that doesn't mean the next game will be bad - Assuming it exists at all, which it probably won't. I guess Death doesn't live. (The Nordic guys did comment here here but that's well into the territory of All Well and Good, But)

A year in the making: Darksiders!

The time played on this, which I provide to give a vague idea how much play I got out of a game, is all sorts of screwy. I picked up Darksiders like, last year? The summer sale I want to say? I was pretty excited to play it or at least vaguely interested. Mostly on the basis of really liking the art style. Also, I waited a while, because I wanted a controller to play it with but was looking for a deal.

Problem being is my previous PC had little interest in running Darksiders, or at least enough disinterest that I eventually gave up about half-way through. I'd blame the game, but tons of stuff was crashing on that PC for a variety of reasons. Mass Effect 2, which I noted back in its review, would crash in the exact same way and had the same engine. I fixed that by going to windowed maximized mode, but Darksiders being more of a port wouldn't let me. So it got shelved and now it's back.

Darksiders is a weird experience for me in that I've never really played 3D Zelda games. I've been told repeatedly Darksiders is a huge rip-off primarily of Zelda, but I largely don't see it for lack of experience. Zelda is a weird one for me, in that I picked up the first 3D version and it sort of became the figurehead for how much I hated the transition to 3D from 2D. I played through the proverbial golden age of PC gaming and was never too impressed with where 3D took most games. So I never played past the first dungeon, and more for baseline reasons like 'I hate how this game looks' and 'I hate 3D controls'. LTTP was like Super Metroid, I wish they'd made another like ten of that game. So much so that I played the gameboy Zeldas. No, the original Gameboy. Have you looked at that thing? Horrifying. My old eyes can't even tell what's on a Gameboy screen nowadays. Is that Link? Or a turtle? what

So I really have no idea how innovative Darksiders probably isn't. To be honest, when people say games are innovative or whatever, I just think they're showing their ignorance. Games and books feel creative because we have pretty limited perceptions of the vastness of the medium. I probably say it too and I'm probably showing my ignorance when I do it. The only real spot you can have truly exciting creativity in games is in controls and UI, which I doubt Darksiders, Zelda or whatever the fuck else have really broken new ground in

And seriously if you count a game as unique because of storytelling: BOOKS.