While I think Dark Souls is the best ever made, or at the very least the best game made since Ocarina of Time, I cannot recommend this game to everyone.

Dark Souls will crush your balls into a powder and mix it in with your tears and drink it. It’s harsh and brutal at times. If you are unfamiliar with Dark Souls or have not played it yet, nothing can really prepare the level of difficulty and challenge you will face. You may say to yourself “I’ve played hard games before what’s the big deal?” Dark Souls is at a level of difficulty that is hard to perceive based on prior experiences with video games.

Sure there are harder games out there, the difference is Dark Souls is always fair. You die in Dark Souls because you fucked up. Other hard games (for example the new Ninja Gaiden 2) are hard because there are unavoidable cheap tactics by the enemies. Dark Souls challenges you to get better at the game. You will die over and over, but then it will click. You will figure it out and win. You will have a feeling of accomplishment that almost feels like a rush. “I did it!”

And when you think you have a part figured out you can still fuck up if you are not careful. That’s what I love about Dark Souls it remains a challenge even after you have it all figured out.

I think everyone should try this game. You should also have your friends over and watch you play. Or watch your friends play. Trust me seeing someone being tortured by Dark Souls is freakin amusing as hell. Be warned, Dark Souls is not for those who give up on games at the first sign of frustration. You will get frustrated. You will want to smash your controller and tv at some points. However, that is the point of this game. It designed to frustrate you off. Darks Souls as a game is quite aware of this fact. This is what makes the Dark Souls playing experience different than the typical game with a harder difficulty setting. Those other games just have parts that are difficult or is artificially difficult because of a combination of game mechanics working against you in way that does not seem intended.

Dark Souls is designed to be hard. Each encounter teaches you something about the game, a lesson you need to learn so you can use later. Darks Souls will give you a quiz you many times then present to later with a test. If you passed the quiz with an “A” you will do well on the test; you correctly learned everything you needed. If you failed the quiz, ironic that is helpful too. It means you need to learn something. 

However, in Dark Souls it’s when you pass the quiz with a “C” or “D” that Dark Souls rips you to pieces. You got the victory but did not learn everything. When that test comes up this is when you will punch a fucking hole in the wall!

On certain parts of my first playthrough of Dark Souls I was screaming so much my throat was sore. But it’s okay! There are other people experiencing the same pain you are. You are not alone in your agony, due to how online play works. You can see other players working on the same stuff you are as “ghostly spirits.”

It’s such a good game with smart design and great level design. Definitely a must play in my book. But if you are unfamiliar with Dark Souls (which nothing can really prepare you for it anyway) you really don’t know what you are getting yourself. That is until start working your way through tutorial level.

That’s right the tutorial level! The first things you do in the game that teach you the controls and how to play will destroy you.

OMG OMG OMG! Dark Souls PC trailers. Have I mentioned that I am totally in love with this game and after playing through the game again this weekend it is officially my number 1 on my list of favorite games of all time; knocking down Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past to the number 2 spot. Defiantly will be buying this game again on PC. The new bosses is a bonus.

Why do I love Dark Souls so much? It hit all the right notes. It’s what the Legend of Zelda used to be before Ocarina of Time (OOT is 3rd on my list).

Zelda used to be a game with an opened world waiting to be explored. There was a sense of mystery as to what would be around the corner (or next screen as it scrolled). In the original Zelda games you could travel in any direction and the world would just unfold. One could get lost in the world and uncover dangerous dungeons and perilous caves. There was a minimalistic plot as you were just dropped in the middle of the adventure. It was up to you to explore the world and uncover mysteries in order to figure out how to achieve the goals of the quest. Zelda was once among the most challenging games of the time, especially Zelda II.

After Ocarina of Time the Legend of Zelda series became a gated story-driven experience. What you can and can’t do became a directed experience based on how far you advanced the story. So places and locations designated as totally off limits because the story says you can’t go there yet.

Sure, in the originals item collection was a big factor to allowing you to explore new places just as much as it is now. However, the originals never gated off entire areas at a time with a wall of black fog. The originals never had large open areas with nothing going on. In the original Zelda games every place had something going on whether it was enemy placement, secret caves, underground passages and NPCs with strange requests.

I love the Zelda series. It’s is my favorite series. However, I just miss the stuff that made the 2D games great that have been left out or diminished in the 3D incarnations. Being able obtain certain items at any point in the game that serves to vary things up in subsequent playthroughs is one. Most of these items required you to go out your way, more importantly explore, to find them. You had to be observant and have knowledge of how the game’s mechanics works.

One example is the Ice Rod in A Link to the Past. The Ice Rod is hidden in a cave that is quite off the path of your objectives and is necessary for a boss near the end of the game. However, you can obtain this item before then and with some experimentation (exploring the mechanics of the game) one will find out it makes a much earlier boss significantly easier. With further experimentation you will find it can be used in combination with another item to aid you further. Now that’s depth in gameplay!

Th average player will use the Ice Rod as intended, to beat the boss it needs to be used on. The smart play will find new uses for the item. However, the reason there is depth here is because the game rewards the smart player for finding that new way of using the item. That’s brilliant game design! The original Zelda games had alternative paths and alternative uses for items if one could find them. One could do certain dungeons before others and “sequence break.”

This is certainly missing from recent Zelda games. Sure the dungeons and puzzles are still brilliant. But there is only one way to do things in the current outings. It’s really missing that level depth that smart players will find and then tell their friends about.

When Link to the Past came out it was fun to talk about at school, secrets I found and shared with friends and ones they shared with me. There’s hardly any that of that stuff in the recent games. I am not really including Ocarina of Time and Major’s Mask as part of this because they had their secrets. Ocarina did have Skulltula, which was very rewarding, and the ability to deflect Phantom Ganon’s energy ball with the Bottle. And Major’s Mask was all about exploring and figuring out and finding secrets based on the whole Day cycle mechanic. But, Ocarina is when I first noticed a lot of things I loved about the older Zelda games were missing; namely challenge.

The original Legend of Zelda was a tough game. Zelda II was even harder. A Link to the Past was technically easier than it’s predecessors but still offered challenging enemies and bosses that you would die on.

So why am I talking about Zelda in relation to to Dark Souls? As I mentioned above, it what Zelda used to be. It has all those traits I mentioned that is missing from current Zelda games. It’s a pure video game experience which is very rare in this age of gaming. There is nothing like it, yet it hits the same notes I experienced when playing the Zelda games for the first time when they came out. Much how there was nothing like the Legend of Zelda games when each came out (up to Ocarina of Time) there is nothing like Dark Souls. Indeed the foundation of Dark Souls was laid out in Demon’s Souls, but most would agree that Dark Soul is it’s own unique beast.

What I like about Dark Souls is it’s a video game first and knows it. It’s modern with all the old school video game sensibilities, 8-bit and 16-bit era. It does not get bogged down in scripted cutscenes, dialogue, story and quick time events. It’s a pure game and a hardcore one at that. Very hard to come by a game like that these days.

So finished my final playthrough of Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. All I have left to do is buy a space hamster! ;)

I will be doing youtube videos of Mass Effect 3 of some kind of course. But not until later tonight after I’ve played the game significantly. My Mass Effect 3 playthrough will be on Insanity difficulty.

Me playing some Skyrim earlier this week.

In this video I explain how to take down a Mammoth early on in Skyrim and not have to worry about those pesky Giants. Requires a bow or magic.

I am playing the game on Expert, so it may prove to be even more helpful at higher difficulty modes.

Doing a playthrough of Deux Ex: Human Revolution with commentary. Here is the playlist link: http://www.youtube.com/user/SolidDave666#grid/user/742B508E77F44775

Played it 8 hours yesterday. So good and polished for being an early build of the game. Graphic are nuts on Directx 11 highest available settings.

And getting 60 FPS on WoW. This with using 99% CPU utilization over 8 threads (because I am encoding). Hahahaha. I love having an awesome PC.

I think I might do a weekly top 5 Steam buy/deal. Good shit on there.

Picked up Call of Duty Black Ops for 40 bucks over the weekend. Also, picked up an excellent indie title called Jamestown for $8.99. Right now Resident Evil 5 is up for $14.99 and Dead Rising 2 for $19.99.

Get it!

WoW 64 bit client seem imminent ! Seriously, I want something to eat up my 8 gigs of RAM. WoW has some performance issues that would totally remedy it’s self if it was allowed to use more RAM. Can’t wait.

LOL. I tried multitasking like shit before, having WoW open a bunch of web pages open, youtube, and running The Witcher 2 at the same time. With all that I can barely break 3 gigs used.

My mouse mat came in today. I got the Razer Vespula dual-side mat, speed side or control side, Goes really well with the feet of my Razer Imperator, which is expected because they are both designed by the same company. So freakin awesome. It’s like the mouse glides on air, so smooth. I found the control side works the best with the Imperator’s feet. The glide is like butter on the control side with a nice tactile feedback when you move the mouse across the mat for better precision. 

The wrist pad is nice for playing WoW after a couple hours. Took a couple hours to get used to it though.

Definitely worth 30 bucks. 

It’s been a week since I’ve built my new computer. Still running smooth. Got it overclocked to 4.6 ghz. :)

Had to buy a dust filter for the intake fan in the rear. After three days, the radiator to my CPU cooler was already started be caked with dust. O_O

Filter is nice though, and goes quite well with the case. It’s magnetic and fits perfectly over the rear fan.