Review: Eternal Darkness (Gamecube)

Get Eternal Darkness they said. A teriffic horror game for the Gamecube they promised. Well, I can not resist a good horror game since it is one of my all time favourite genres - and so I purchased Eternal Darkness a few years ago. But I did not really got around to playing it until just recently.

In all honesty the game did not really click with me. It definitely had its moments but I would not recommend it to neither horror fan nor the average gamer. But I still think it is a worthy game to keep non the less. I will try to explain. Eternal Darkness is by far the most original horror game of its time I'd say. It has got the traditional third person view with a lot of puzzles, maps and the twist which in this instance would be the magic. Yes, you are able to cast spells in this game. We'll get to this in a bit.

"When you read about something, you re-live it"

The game centers around a huge mansion where your grandfather lived. Your whole family tree is a mishmash of historically important persons to this fight against the eternal darkness that threatens the world, and you get to read about your relatives adventures in pages you find scattered all over the mansion. When you read about something, you re-live it and have to fight your way through riddles and labyrinth until you reach the end of that particular journal and return to the mansion, which acts as sort of a hub between these adventures.

"There is a lot of poking around in the menus which will get somewhat tiresome in the long run."

Since there is a lot of magic going on there is also a lot of fiddling around with the menus, because there is only so many spells you can assign to the buttons. The map is constantly being brought up because every site you visit is immense and there is even more reasons to go into the menus that I will not go into detail about here due to slight spoilers. Needless to say, there is a lot of poking around in the menus which will get somewhat tiresome in the long run.

One of the game's absolute peaks for me as an experience is the way it plays with that it in fact is a game. From out of nowhere, it seemingly restarts. You get the boot up sequence thrown in your face, you get blue screens, your limbs fall off... And then it jumps back to normal and your character screams "this... is not... really... happening!". It all adds up to a special experience that is interesting, but in the end not all that interesting to actually play. Stiff controls, never ending fiddling with the menus and a lot of backtracking takes a huge chunk of the atmosphere away. So yeah. it is definitely worth a look but do not pay too much for it.

Article: The cube of happiness (Gamecube)

Nintendo's Gamecube makes me happy. It was technically inferior its opponents from the console generation, the controller was worthless in many different genres and the console quite frankly had a toy feel to it. So why does it make me happy?

Sega had just given up on Dreamcast, the market was all Sony and Microsoft. Playstation 2 and Xbox. Performance, hardcore, conformity. Then along came a little rascal cube. What did it have? Certainly not a DVD-player. It did not even have the abillity to play CD's. No support for widescreen worth mentioning and the online service covered about a handfull of titles. A stillborn project? No way. If it was something Gamecube focused on it was games. Everyone was invited. The startupline during launch was pretty decent (plenty of third party developers and good games) and it was about to get better. There was a strong support from both players and developers - the library grew to over 600 differens games with a total sale number of over 208 000 000 sold copys.

But this is all statistics. There is nothing wrong with statistics but screw statistics for the moment. It does not say anything about why Gamecube makes me happy. It is more the feeling I get from just playing with it that makes me want to write a short article about it. The small discs, the different design, the incredible comfortable controllers (when in their element). The "cube" almost feels like an underdog that did not go for technically impressive hardware and flexing of muscles, it was just supposed to be fun to play.

Wii is, as we all know, backwards compatible with the Gamecube games but if I am honest it feels like a shame to play them on a Wii. When I want to play Gamecube games the cube has to show up. Like a big piece of candy in my livingroom, reminding me of a time before the online circus, the constant struggle to achieve some kind of status and the never ending effort to deliver chocking content. A time where it was more important that you smiled instead of said wow.