Grandma has Destroyed The Darkness

Here's Grandma doing her best Darkness infused Jackie Estacado impersonation, complete with glowing, demon snake heads, upon completing this god-awful, piece of shit game. Even Mr. Bungle couldn't salvage this thing. For me- Mike Patton growling evil things into a microphone would have been reason enough to buy it but they somehow managed to fuck that up too.

This one was my fault; I take full responsibility. On Monday we read on Joystiq about some lucky bastards getting their hands on BioShock from Toys-R-Us early. Wednesday, (without checking, mind you) I took her to get a copy of her own, figuring the Toys-R-Us mistake was someone jumping the gun by only a day or so. Surely it would be out then. Well it wasn't. NEXT Tuesday, we were told, would be the day for BioShock awesomeness. But Grandma was bored NOW. She needed a new game and we didn't have much from which to choose. And so- it was I who pointed at The Darkness on the PS3 rack and said "hey look, that one is made by 2K as well. Let's get that one for now. I heard it's good."

That was a goddamned shameful lie.

Grandma:

"Jesus, where do I even start with this? It was DUMB. I don't know if the game was supposed to be funny or serious or what but it sure didn't make any fucking sense. So it's supposed to be this guy, Jackie's 21st birthday, and he ends up getting in a car accident by being chased by the cops and some guys paid by his Uncle Paulie (the bad guy) to kill him, but he ends up in this building that just happens to have a television set with a message from Paulie that he now, out of the blue, really fucking hates Jackie because of a thing that just happened that day, and he planted a bomb in the closet and it blows him up and now he's hearing voices and has demon heads coming out of his shoulders and shit and he decides to calmly GO SEE HIS GIRLFRIEND.

You know, any normal person that has fucking demons coming out of their body is going to freak the fuck out, find a doctor, crawl in a ditch and scream for awhile, anything! But to head down through the subway saying hello to everyone he meets like he just had a slightly bad day at the office? It doesn't make any sense! Maybe I could have gotten passed the shitty dialogue if the graphics on the characters didn't look like they were Guitar Hero singers just moving their mouths up and down a little bit. And it was really obvious when they zoomed in to show how great the skin textures were or something. I mean- they can make a guy have really sharp looking stubble but they can't make his mouth move when he talks?

And that's the other thing. He NEVER SHUTS THE FUCK UP. I don't mean he's like Dante in Devil May Cry 3 or anything, I mean- and this might be the worst part of the whole game- whenever you go from one area to another, like going from Chinatown to the Canal Street station, you have to sit through a stupid fucking cutscene of him sitting in the dark playing with a gun acting all stupid. EVERY TIME. Sometimes he's talking about what's going on in the game, and that's fine, but he repeats himself every time you go into that area.

You enter the Subway a LOT in this game. They couldn't make it so you could just walk down the street, no- you HAVE to go through the station. So that's two stupid cutscenes you have to sit through. You can't skip them, you can't turn them off, they're always there. It would have been better to just have a black screen with a loading bar at the bottom but I had to listen to the same goddamn quip about Crazy Abdul given in a ridiculous, cartoony New York-Italian accent about fifty goddamn times.

And if you accidentally step back into the area you just left? Fuck you- you have to watch the cutscene again. And then another one when you correct your mistake.

Then there's the 'collectables' thing where you pick up pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them. You call the number, listen to an occasionally funny message, and it says "Extra Content Unlocked" every time you do it. I still don't know where this 'extra content' is, and I really don't care at this point.

It has minions like Overlord, kind of, only they're called "Darklings." They're good for shit. They don't always go where you tell them to go and when they do get there they don't always do something. It was funny at first when they would say stupid shit like "let's kill a commie" or "up yours asshole" or something like that, but it gets old. It was FUNNY when the minions in Overlord peed after getting drunk in a pub. The Darklings seem to pee on every corpse they pass, even if you're being shot at and need them to do something! It ceases to be funny and just gets annoying.

The game isn't really fun at all until you get the Black Hole Darkness Power and start sucking groups of people up into the air. It's easy enough to aim the weapons because it sort of drifts into whatever there is to shoot at, but the weapons are nothing to write home about. Then there are these parts that go back to World War I trenches with his grandfather or something and everyone looks like Frankenstein and those whole levels are just dumb as hell to anyone who's played a decent WWII shooter recently. They could have made it so much better. Make it scary. Make it funny! WHATEVER. Just make it not suck.

I haven't played Multiplayer yet so maybe that will justify what I paid for it but I doubt it.

Maybe I'm just pissed I didn't get BioShock and ended up with this crap. I don't know. But this was really, really lame."

I haven't finished it yet, but Grandma finished it tonight. She even went back to her save to see if there was an alternate ending if you make a different choice at the end.

She didn't find one.

We've gotten a few postcards (more on the awesomeness of what's going down with that contest coming next post) so if you haven't already, send us one! Here again is the address:

One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway Thing
c/o Barbara St. Hilaire (aka Old Grandma Hardcore)
PO Box 553
Mantua, OH 44255

I cannot stress enough how much Grandma loves getting mail.

So send her a postcard! And unless you haven't already- for the love of GOD, avoid The Darkness, out now on the Xbox 360 and Playstion 3.

Just to review:
The Darkness = quirky, crazy band from the UK
The Darkness = mediocre television show
The Darkness = mediocre vampire movie
The Darkness = shitty video game

If you remember that, then we will have done something good this week.

Next week: BIOSHOCK, motherfuckers!! Wooooo!!!

Game on!