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I think The Darkness II's Jackie Estacado deserves an award for being more utterly screwed in a single instance than any other videogame character in history. So here's the tale of the tape: I – playing as the main character of all first-person shooters: camera-glued-to-the-main-character's-forehead – was locked in a dark, dingy room while a horde of vaguely supernatural mob goons turned my mega-mansion (and my horde of vaguely competent regular mob goons) into a gory pile of mob goop. “Mansion under attack, lol #firstworldproblems,” I could almost imagine Jackie tweeting if he hadn't also been, you know, crucified at the time.
Then one of my none-too-subtle foes wheeled a TV inches away from my eyes so as to – both literally and figuratively – rub my face in what was to come. “It's your own personal snuff film,” he proudly announced. On the screen were two of my particularly talkative underlings – beaten, bound, and on their knees, with backs mercifully turned away from the pistol pointed in their general direction. “One lives, one dies. Pick.” And I should have cared. I really should have.
But I didn't. Not in the slightest. So, what changed between the original Darkness' masterclass in characterization and this sordid tale of heartlessness and heart-eating? Simple: time.
And I'm not referring to the intervening period between Darkness I and II's respective releases – nor, for that matter, one of the most well-known songs off Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon.” Rather, I'm shining the demon-snake-disintegrating spotlight on in-game time or, in this case, lack thereof.
See, the first Darkness is, in my opinion, among the few games that have really leveraged one of the most underused gadgets in gaming's arsenal: the lack of a predefined time limit on our experiences. There's no clock ticking things away – the hours that make up a dull day, for instance. A book's pages will eventually run out. Films have to squeeze all manner of meaningful plot and character development into the cramped confines of a couple hours – a task I imagine to be much like putting a ship into a bottle the wrong way. And, of course, all good TV shows inevitably get canceled by Fox.
Games, however, are free to paddle down the timestream at their leisure, hard drive/disc space willing. So The Darkness crafted the now-infamous sofa scene. In it, players were given the option to stow their guns, temporarily shut off the portion of their brains scientists are now calling “The Rambo Cortex,” and watch a movie with Jackie's girlfriend, Jenny. For an hour-and-a-half. As I've written countless times, it was brilliant. I spent real-life quality time with a human-shaped stack of zeroes and ones, but it felt entirely authentic. There were no cars, rockets, or Kool-Aid Men crashing through walls. The screen never faded away into infinite swirling abyss of black that is the jump cut to another scene. It may not have been real in the strictest sense, but it was damn close.
The Darkness II, meanwhile, is akin to a rollercoaster ride that abruptly and haphazardly leaps onto other rollercoasters. It barrels forward at breakneck pace, pausing only briefly between levels to let you chat with your motley crew of meticulously dressed mobsters at Jackie's mansion. Admittedly, even throwaway conversations are very well-written and acted, but when I had to choose which friendly mafio-so-and-so to execute on the spot, it felt like I was indirectly splattering the brains of a casual acquaintance – not someone I'd rather take a bullet for. And most certainly not a close friend I'd worked with and fought alongside for two years. Because, in truth, I'd been around these guys for a combined total of roughly two or three minutes. I barely knew either of them.
Comments are closed on this article
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February 29, 2012 at 8:51pm
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February 28, 2012 at 8:16am
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FKSSR
February 24, 2012 at 1:13pm
Great article, though I think that there are substitutes for time. I'm finally getting around to Metro 2033 right now, and while I have not spent a considerable amount of time in the world or with the people, I do feel a connection. This is partly due to the slower pacing, but it's also due to the characters that are largely believable and the world that seems to be living around me. I have not seen any changes to the world yet, but I am given a sense of how it has changed before through the characters and narrative voice-overs.
bling581
February 24, 2012 at 10:38am
"Skyrim, for instance, bases its entire existence on the idea that you'll eat, sleep, and breathe it for days or even months – probably at the slowly fatal expense of eating, sleeping, and breathing. And yet, even as in-game years fly by, nothing changes. Seasons stagnate, cities neither rise nor fall, and the world's inhabitants may as well be starring in Groundhog Day. It's jarring, to say the least – less like a living world and more like the occasionally writhing corpse of one."
Unless you ramp up the time ratio I have a hard time believing that you've played Skyrim long enough for more than a few years to go by. What do you expect to see change in that short amount of time? Believe it or not there are some events that occur in the game that are based around certain dates such as holidays and other events. The Elder Scroll games may lack apparent change in the average game day, but each game represents different periods of time on a larger scale. Could they have done both? Yeah, but I find that lore is more important to the game experience then being able to visual see change as the days go by.
t.y.wan
February 24, 2012 at 12:19pm
Like the time when someone killed a dragon in the middle of a city, or assassinated a person in the middle of city square...
Yet, people walks by everyday for "game time" months, like a dead insect.The wait function is really wtf... they must have known people hated to wait 30secs at a time just for some dude to show up at the right time, ingredients to respawn... Vendors to replenish products from their asses and maybe gold as well (like in fallout3 and New Vegas).
bling581
February 27, 2012 at 10:51am
"Like the time when someone killed a dragon in the middle of a city, or assassinated a person in the middle of city square...
Yet, people walks by everyday for "game time" months, like a dead insect."Perhaps that's a bug? The dragon corpses always despawn for me.
Yeah, I agree that the waiting is tedious, but what else would you suggest? They have to manage time somehow. If you're trying to make several days go by instead of a few hours try using the console codes. You can change the timescale as much as you want. Set it at 1 for real time, or make it 1,000,000 and watch months fly by in a matter of seconds.
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CatherineMcClarey
February 23, 2012 at 2:56pm
Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan (New World Computing, 1990) did pay some attention to the calendar: your party couldn't buy food on one day each week ("Fastday"), and one of the 2 weapons which could kill the main boss in the game (Leotra'ah) could only be used during a specific 5-day period at the end of each game year. King of Dragon Pass (A-Sharp, 1999 (Windows/Mac), 2011 (iOS) does have characters growing up, aging and dying over the course of the game, as well as definite seasonal restrictions on what activites can be done when. Sid Meier's Civilization series, however, is the one game I've played myself where the whole look of the game environment changes over time, as learning certain technologies propels your civilization into the next era.
Ghok
February 24, 2012 at 12:21am
I remember when I first got Grand Theft Auto 4 and was really into it, I'd come home, make dinner, then sit in front of Niko Bellic's TV and watch it while I ate. Then I'd go drive around and do missions for a few hours.
