How Video Games Became the Addict's Art

Editor's Note: this article contains ending spoilers for Papo y Yo and Demon's Souls.

Video games are addictive, but they also offer an opportunity to reconsider what addiction actually is; to ask ourselves why we fear it, and why it produces guilt in those who suffer from it. And video games can actually do something unprecedented: they make addiction a directed part of the player's experience. In games, addiction can become a familiar and survivable part of the human experience, not a devastating weakness lying dormant in our genealogies. And in that way, games can both translate addiction into art and make addiction itself an art.

The Fallout games used the basic tension between moderate consumption and full-blown dependence as a way of balancing its buffs and boosts. Drinking wine or whiskey before a fight, for instance, provides a temporary boost to strength and defense but comes at the cost of intelligence and precision. If this trade-off suits your play style, the game will eventually punish you for the preference, simulating an addiction withdrawal state with impaired vision and inhibited movement. The same mechanic applies to a number of substances in the game, from Stimpaks to Med-X.

Max Payne 3 ties its health regeneration system to the plot point of haggard Max's addiction to pain pills. When he's wounded he can take a bottle of pain pills to numb the effects of damage and bring him back to a state where he can be maximally aggressive. In a way, drugs are the engine of postponement in Max Payne, keeping the monstrous hero from confronting the consequences of his lifestyle for a few moments longer.

Rockstar's other cynical opus, Grand Theft Auto IV, depicts its impression of drunkenness when Nico take dates to a local bar. After a few drinks even basic actions like walking or aiming a reticule in a game of darts can become overwhelmingly imprecise, mired in controls that respond late to inputs and then wildly overcompensate for them. The sequence is at its best when drunk Nico gets back into a car and tries to drive drunkenly, turning the game's already loose driving mechanics into an impossible-to-control mess of dead pedestrians, side-swiped cars, and broken traffic laws.

The recently released Papo y Yo makes addiction a central metaphor for its mechanics. A young boy must use coconuts and poisonous frogs to bait a giant monster through environmental puzzles. The innocuous coconuts cause the monster to feel full and fall asleep, which allows the boy to use his belly as a trampoline to reach new areas, but the poisonous frogs turn the monster into a flaming beast who becomes obsessed with hunting the boy down and throwing him into the ground again and again.

Developed by Vander Caballero, a former Army of Two designer, the game can be taken as a petite fantasy diorama the child of an alcoholic and abusive father might make. The boy in the game occasionally slips into black and white flashbacks where his drunk father appears to have killed someone on a drive home. The ending directly connects the boy's cowering in fear of the frog-dosed monster to his hiding from his drunken father, who is trying to whip him with a belt. This is as naked as metaphors come, and its conclusion -- in which the boy sacrifices a mirror image of himself to the monster, lures it into a trap, and kills it -- is an effigial cutting of ties with the worst of his past.

In the broadest terms, addiction can be bisected into those that involve chemicals that actively change a person's body chemistry, and psychological/behavioral addictions more closely associated with the dependence video games can engender. With Papo y Yo we have a game that might lightly trigger some behaviorally addictive people, used as an evocation of the suffering that can come from chemical addiction. This distinction actually offers some insight into just how superstitiously we approach chemical addiction in the first place, an affliction which is rooted in biology and yet has its most successful treatment in the form of 12 step programs and group therapy.

Alcohol is an ideal substance to capture this duality -- the biological malaise that can only be healed through psychoanalysis. For all the daydreams of hedonistic house parties and amber-lit happy hours, there is a dark but constant acknowledgement that all of that joy is also a loose gamble with one's propensity toward addiction.

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The easiest and surest self-medication for that guilt and worthlessness is another distracting high.

In many cases this negative interpretation of the act contributes to an addictive cycle, where the person feels guilty and worthless because they have slipped into a category of social derision and shame, and yet the easiest and surest self-medication for that guilt and worthlessness is another distracting high. The stigma exaggerates the distance between someone with an addiction and everyone who identifies as a non-addict.

The word itself derives from Latin, addicere, to assign. Addicts are assigned a new identity, one that separates them from the normal flow of society. They are no longer us, but are defined by their sicknesses, an outwardly normal person who contains an untrustworthy beast within. When we ask whether or not something is addictive -- games for example -- what we're really asking is whether or not we have done something that will label us as an addict. In this view, addiction is not a capacity we all have in varying intensities, but a thing that happens to some of us, something that comes from outside, brands us, and leaves us forever assigned to another category.

Addictive properties are almost imperceptible in Papo y Yo, with its short length and relatively simple puzzle design, yet it offers a decent template for what many posit as the basic addictive formula. Writing in the BBC, Tom Stafford suggests video games' addictive properties can be explained through the Zeigarnik Effect. The phenomenon was first outlined in the 1930s by a Russian psychologist who noticed that waiters had outstanding memories for customer orders, but then completely forgot them after the food had been served. The Effect claims that the human mind is disproportionately more drawn to unfinished tasks and disorder.

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Video games are a powerful problem delivery device.

By this logic, video games are a powerful problem delivery device, regularly administering new forms of incomplete tasks and unordered items. Our ability to see what remains undone in a game world, and the powerful compulsion to reach in and do it, ordering the disorder, creates the addictive compulsion loop wherein players are drawn to completing one more task in perpetuity. This particular quality of video games can be exceptionally powerful, causing mild hallucinations and obsessive thought patterns, sometimes known as Tetris Syndrome.

Many games edge toward a self-aware commentary on the emptiness in these structures, but Demon's Souls is among the most intense, a near-perfect combination of artistic pathos and inescapable compulsion. The game is a nightmare of subtle complication that besets even simple goals with an exhausting number of secondary requirements and branching alternatives.

To turn your +4 Falchion into a magically charged Crescent Falchion, you'll first need 12 shards of Sharpstone, hoping they'll drop from the Miners in Stonefang Tunnel. Once you've farmed enough by repeating runs in one area, you'll be able to upgrade the Falchion to +6, and then you'll have to go harvest Darkmoonstones from Reapers in the Shrine of Storms, then return to the Stonefang blacksmith and have him convert the weapon. It's not complicated, and at no point is it especially difficult to imagine doing the necessary work to reach your goal. Yet the complications are just significant enough to trigger the part of the brain susceptible to the Zeigarnik Effect.

You can see the desirable endpoint, and the steps between it and your current state are systemically palpable. To this acquisition lust Demon's Souls adds several other systems that ask players to prioritize several simple goals -- each with their own slightly more complicated achievement paths. In the hour or two it will take to farm upgrade stones you could instead grind to increase your strength and dexterity, or else learn to use another weapon already in your inventory. Or else you could simply go on with the quest, choosing to sharpen your technique against the next tough boss and find a way to beat him with your current gear and stats. Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced against one another so that even when the player is diligently on her way to completing one, it comes at the cost of knowing there are several others left undone by that choice.

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Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced.

From Software seems to have been well aware of the torturously irresolvable desires Demon's Souls would evoke in players, appointing its lore and art with avaricious bastards, imprisoned liars, and a smothering sense of rot and waste. The game seems to taunt bleary-eyed grinders with its absence of musical accompaniment in most areas, filled with distant echoes that can't immediately be placed (the ghostly ringing of tiny bells in the Tower of Latria, the smoldering of torches in the distant haze of the Valley of Defilement). As one runs through these spaces where everything wants only to kill you, to prevent you from retrieving the ornament of order nested at the far end of the level, one's thoughts drift off into craven, irritable obsessiveness like a drunk returning to the liquor cabinet after everyone's gone to bed.

The game's apparent ending is a masterful play on the anguished but incessant need to solve, order, and advance. The penultimate boss has an attack that can in a few seconds drain an entire level of experience from your character. By the end of the game, each of these levels will have become symbolic of hours of toil, dutiful grinding in overfamiliar locations, falling into the same attack patterns against the same old enemies. It has the emotional effect of seeing a freshly bought bottle of whiskey shatter and spill its precious contents on the floor. And after this overwhelming fight, where players can see the dozens upon dozens of hours preparing to finish the game cruelly erased, they're drawn into the final encounter with the Old One, the source of all the rot and evil. The boss is a writhing, wilted worm of formerly human flesh, who can barely move let alone attack.

After killing him he delivers the game's summary motto, "No one wishes to go on." With this he dies, and the game throws you back to the very start. What seemed like a self-contained heroic epic is, in fact, an endless cycle of obsession, upgrading, grinding, and laboring in ignominy, encountering the same constrained characters that begin to seem more and more like road blocks on an infinite loop. Demon's Souls is an addictive hell. Its modular presentation spoking outward from a central hub, and its thorough absence of beauty in favor of rubble, filth, and toxicity, perfectly evoke the emotional meaning of its nihilistic system. Players become the addict who says he doesn't want to use anymore, knows it's killing him, and then takes another dose.

Addiction is a difficult and irreducible subject, but coded into the language of game systems we find a deployment of addiction's most basic properties in a way that intends to be emotional and artistic rather than destructive and stigma-laden. Games can make addiction art, and in doing so they point us toward an irrational fear we have about addictions in the first place. They begin in us; they are not exogenous spirits that invade us, but ways in which our best and most human characteristics can sometimes turn against us.

We are surrounded by addictive things, most people live with their lives in a matrix of complicated consumption choices with major positive and negative repercussions. We joke about being caffeine junkies, accept the modest thrills of a sugar high, and advertise pretty people having libidinally-charged conversations at cocktail hour.

And so a simple pleasure or a quirk of rationality can become unmoored from its purposeful context and turn into a histrionic tautology, both a means and an end. How this can happen to some of us, and to such extremes, is still unclear enough to leave room for our worst and most parochial superstitions, filling the void with dull stereotypes about zombie-eyed addicts who have abdicated their human dignity.

Games can free us from these separatist desires, if only by nudging us a tiny bit closer toward those we'd subconsciously forced into new identities: addicts, failures, broken people. In games we might yet discover our own weakened seams, which, when led on in the right environment, could rupture and leave us obsessively thinking about our next fix, our next level, our next button press. And with this comes the implicit challenge that everyone must answer for themselves: when will you stop, when will you have gained enough levels, chased after enough rarities, pressed enough buttons? We end with ourselves, after all, and it was only ourselves that we secretly feared when we set out to escape.

Michael Thomsen is a freelance writer based in New York. He subsides entirely on offal and intoxicants. Follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dark Souls' Miyazaki Talks Artorias of the Abyss

[Note: This is an interview with Dark Souls' director Hidetaka Miyazaki about the recently-released DLC content, and contains plot spoilers. Why haven't you played it yet?]

Dark Souls is an all-time masterpiece hall-of-famer, and one that's met with enough success to warrant an extension. The 'Artorias of the Abyss' DLC, now available on all platforms, adds a series of substantial linked areas, plus some superb new bosses and equipment – and also manages that Miyazaki trick of filling in blanks while suggesting a few new ones. The DLC is set in Dark Souls' past, in a kingdom called Oolacile beset by the Abyss, all accessed through the minor detail of a pendant.

“Oolacile is a kingdom of sorcery that had been ruined when the original story unfolded,” explains Miyazaki. “The additional content is set about a hundred years before Oolacile was ruined. In this kingdom, the sorceries are peculiar light spells that are different from the common ones in the original story.” Oolacile spells from the original game tended to be non-offensive and even charming magic – producing light, hiding things, disguising yourself. Tricks.

But in this Oolacile you find ridiculously strong dark magic and pyromancies. Sorceries designed to kill in direct, high-damage ways. “As one of the main themes of Dark Souls is 'fire and dark', these light spells also include darkness that occurred from the gap between them,” says Miyazaki. “The darkness leads to the Abyss, which is a keyword this time.”

The Abyss is your ultimate destination, but before that comes Knight Artorias the Abysswalker – a name that resonates throughout the original game's story. The DLC ties up the Artorias thread neatly, but introduces some seemingly contradictory details about his past. Or perhaps we're taking too much at face value.

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As one of the main themes of Dark Souls is 'fire and dark', these light spells also include darkness that occurred from the gap between them.

“There is not a contradiction,” says Miyazaki. “The lore of Artorias that prevailed in the original story is very old, so that it is uncertain.” Things we thought we knew may be false? Argh Hidetaka, don't do this to me! “Hence by experiencing the story of the additional content there's a partial view of new facts, and the newly unveiled lore will show players another dimension. I suppose this is what lore is like and why it is attractive.”

Amen to that. After Artorias the DLC's final stretch goes to the bottom of the Abyss, where its father Manus dwells. This boss isn't just one of the best fights in the entire Souls series, but carries many answers about the nature of the Dark Soul itself – as well as being, at bottom, a human who goes crazy over a pendant. Sound familiar?

When Dark Souls first came out, an answer Miyazaki gave in a Famitsu interview said he'd choose either nothing or a pendant for his starting gift in Dark Souls. The pendant, which has no in-game function, became a focal point for the wilder elements of the community, and the centre of every conspiracy theory going.

I ask Miyazaki whether Manus is a little dig at the series' more obsessive players. “That is a very interesting consideration,” says the devilish fox. “But I suppose I did not include the meaning.” And as for the original pendant speculation, brace yourselves Dark Soulers for Miyazaki's final word: “When it comes to the pendant, I actually had a little bit of an intention to play a prank.”

On that bombshell, perhaps it's time to move onto practical matters. The DLC adds several new weapons acquired in typical Souls fashion, such as the pimpin' sweet tracer set that can be acquired by killing the grieving lover of a guy you also killed. “It is hard to pick up one weapon for players to see but the tracers you point out are good ones I would like them to check,” says Miyazaki. “Since we did all the basic weapons in Dark Souls, these additional ones may look different. Most have a specific image of the user in them, so they tend to be peculiar according to that. I suppose the tracers strongly reflect an image of a particular user – they look like a rare set of weapons, both of which are different in the way they are handled.”

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It was at the latter development stage of Demons Souls when I began to think that I would like to try creating a huge connected map, so it was not planned to be adopted for Demons Souls.

There's only one thing you can say to that: gnomic. I asked Miyazaki about some more specific ongoing aspects of Dark Souls play, such as the Gravelord covenant – is it true players can only see the black phantoms in NG+ and above? “That is almost true,” Miyazaki almost answers. “In Dark Souls' design the position of enemies is fixed, so we could have intended to make the effect of Gravelord Covenant a new element seen in the second try after the game's ending. To be honest, I suppose I could have made it better.”

This leads us to the murkier waters of Dark Souls' entire online experience, a rather partial realisation of its wonderful concepts on which Miyazaki politely declines to comment. He's much happier talking about general principles than concrete information, the big ideas rather than the tiny details – like the difference in world design between the two Souls games. “It was at the latter development stage of Demons Souls when I began to think that I would like to try creating a huge connected map, so it was not planned to be adopted for Demons Souls,” he says. “But at the first development stage of Dark Souls I drew up a plan to implement the huge seamless map.”

I wonder about how fleshed-out some of the Dark Souls world is – do these names on the wind like Salaman have a specific history, did they ever even exist in some form? “Salaman is a character that has an important role, along with the witches of Izalith, in the story of pyromancy rather than in the story of Dark Souls,” says Miyazaki. “Salaman’s story was created to introduce a concept of pyromancy but, as you say, only his name appeared in the original story. His visual image has actually been created and he is one of my favourite characters. I have many favourite characters related to pyromancy as well as him.”

One of the few cheerful faces in Dark Souls is a pyromancer, Laurentius, but it's kind of interesting that there are any at all. I ask Miyazaki why he puts jolly characters in such a grim world, and with such grim endings. “As the creator of them I am very happy with your description of 'jolly characters',” Miyazaki says. “I think of serious characters like seedlings scattered over waste lands, hiding sorrow in their minds. But if I try to draw such characters, sometimes the seeds bloom unexpectedly. Having said that, I believe that some of the endings were what the characters hoped.”

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I placed giant-sized women in the world since I am attracted by motherhood and 'huge women' as an expression of generous motherhood.

The man's a poet. We move onto Dark Souls' iconography and specifically its veneration, in a traditionally religious sense, of femininity and the associative bounty, fertility, etc. It's the main reason Gwynevere's such a good gag, I think. Then there's that strange female-only role of the Firekeeper, one that seems to be pretty crucial but is never fully explained, in a game about fire.

“I placed giant-sized women in the world since I am attracted by motherhood and 'huge women' as an expression of generous motherhood,” says Miyazaki. “Also, one of my favourite Japanese cartoons is 'Yasuragi no Yakata' written by the famous Fujiko Fujio. A huge woman appears for a little in that scary story. When it comes to firekeepers, I assume that there is a kind of illusion for women in my mind.” You ain't seen nothing yet. “Finding a reason why I am attracted by huge women would be possible but I would not like to do it so far.”

Perhaps that is it. There's always a reason for everything, it's just whether you're prepared to look – the Souls games put enormous care and attention into details that only a handful of their players will ever see or think about. I ask Miyazaki if he likes this idea or not. “I am glad if users think so,” Miyazaki says. “I would like Dark Souls to be a broad exploration game filled with so many veiled things and details. A broad map that lacks details cannot be attractive for users who want to explore it in depth. Having said that, the reason why I put a lot of care into details might be much more simple. I enjoy the process of adding elaboration into games, and like to communicate with users through the details I create.”

The success of Dark Souls suggests a new entry in the series should be cooking away in From Software's wonder factory – we can only pray. I ask if the Artorias of the Abyss DLC finishes things for Dark Souls. “We are not planning to release more additional content so far,” says the gnomic Miyazaki, gnomically.  Come on then, is the next game called Dragon's Souls or what? “This is also a very interesting thought,” says the probably uninterested Miyazaki. “But so far I can not say anything about sequels. I am sorry but it is uncertain whether I can get involved in the next sequel yet. I would also like to avoid giving confusion by saying something wrong at this stage.”

Well, you can't say fairer than that.

One does not really interview Hidetaka Miyazaki so much as temporarily observe him. The director of both Demon's and Dark Souls is that rarest of things in videogames – a creator that, like his works, remains something of a mystery. When you play them it all makes sense. Miyazaki's games do anything but give the player answers, slowly unfolding their few concrete details into even more questions. Straight talking from Miyazaki, in other words, would in some way betray his creations. And what creations they are.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dark Souls Artorias of the Abyss DLC Hits 360, PS3 Today

The Artorias of the Abyss downloadable content for Dark Souls is now available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Artorias of the Abyss adds PVP mode to Dark Souls, allowing players to battle against each other, as well as new maps and environments, new bosses and enemies, new NPCs and new weapons and armor.

Artorias of the Abyss is available now for $14.99 on PlayStation 3 and 1200 Microsoft Points on Xbox 360. The content was first released on PC in the Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and was confirmed for consoles in May.

“Artorias of the Abyss is primed and ready to bring console gamers more destruction, more pain, and more ways to die,” said Namco Bandai vice president of marketing Carlson Choi. “Our console fan base absolutely loves the challenge the Dark Souls franchise has given them. Artorias of the Abyss is sure to up the death toll with the inclusion of PVP and its Match-Making features.”

For more on what’s new in Artorias of the Abyss, read about what’s in the new content and our breakdown of how it affects the game. For more on Dark Souls, look no further than our Dark Souls wiki guide.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dark Souls Director ‘Thinking About’ Adding Easy Mode

Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki is “thinking about” adding an easier difficulty option. In an interview with Metro, Miyazaki said he knows the game’s difficulty turns off some players, and a less challenging option could convince more people to play.

“It is true that Dark Souls is rather difficult and a number of people may hesitate to play,” Miyazaki said. “This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete or carefully send all gamers the messages behind our difficult games.”

Having said that, Miyazaki appreciates that some gamers want a challenge, and that making the game easier may actually turn some people off. “I suppose gamers do not particularly prefer easy games,” he said. “What they want is interesting and worthwhile games to play, so I think it is natural that hindrance or stress that does not attribute to such interesting and worthwhile elements will be removed in the end. If the number of easy games is increasing nowadays, I guess it is because difficulty is not related to interesting and worthwhile game elements in many games among players.”

Dark Souls originally launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October 2011. A PC version, the Prepare to Die Edition, launched on August 24th. For more on its PC debut, check out what’s new in the Prepare to Die Edition as well as our Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition review. The new content is also set to come to consoles some time this winter.

Are you playing Dark Souls and having trouble? Find out how to die less in our Dark Souls wiki guide.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition Review

Praise the sun! A Souls game has arrived on PC. It is surely weary. We'll let it rest, and get to the new edition's bonus content and the quality of the port in a moment. On the off chance you've been off collecting beetles for the last three years and missed Dark Souls entirely, here's a recap of why to be excited.

On consoles, this began with 2009's Demon's Souls, a sleeper hit that offered a quest so hard, so hefty, so immaculately crafted that developer From Software might have hewn it from rock. It and sequel Dark Souls summoned staggering review scores, gifting a generation of jaded gamers with a cocktail of fear and self-respect.

You're best off not taking your cues from Dark Souls' charming marketing slogan of “YOU WILL DIE.” While it's best known for being nipple-rippingly difficult, ultimately, it's all about the weight I was talking about earlier. That dark heft. First and foremost, this is the physical weight of your character, and the foreboding atmosphere of From Software's stunning world.

Dark Souls tells the story of your hero trying to save an intriguing world which, by every possible metric, fell long ago. Abominations make their homes in the forgotten nooks of a lost civilisation. A handful of enigmatic survivors are all that's left, but you're as free to talk to them as kill them, and they're as liable to help you as to lie. Best of all, the game literally kills you off somewhere between character creation and the first cut-scene. Above all, Dark Souls seems to thrill at escaping expectations.

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Dark Souls can happily scare the crap out of you in broad daylight, with something as simple as a giant insect dive-bombing your head as you cross a narrow walkway.

An example is how your character controls. Just to swing a sword sees your avatar putting their back, shoulder and wrist into the blow, leaving you to wince at the weapon's weight. Hit attack again, and you'll roll the weapon around down, up and around, maintaining its momentum to strike once more, quicker this time. But every single attack, every block with your shield, every panicked evasive roll, takes a fat bite out of your endurance meter. Never mind whatever action games you've played before, you have to learn to fight all over again because, simply put, you're only human.

That might not sound so bad when you're gleefully taking apart a zombie with a mace. How are you going to deal with a pack of feral dogs? Or a rat as big as a Land Rover? These are the questions Dark Souls asks you, before leaning back in its high-backed leather chair to light a cigarette. It never rushes you. It never needs to. It simply tells you, to your face, that certain death lies this way. And then it tells you to walk.

Which brings us to the radioactive feather in Dark Souls' cap. Death is something you fear. If you die, you don't just get cast back to the nearest waypoint. You run the risk of losing any unspent XP or precious humanity points. Never mind fleeing from ghosts in brooding catacombs. Dark Souls can happily scare the crap out of you in broad daylight, with something as simple as a giant insect dive-bombing your head as you cross a narrow walkway.

All of which is why Dark Souls has a reputation of being a colossal beast, but also so addictive. If a game's capable of making you grin with each new item you furtively recover, imagine how it feels to stand over a slain boss. On a minute to minute level, though, what makes Dark Souls moreish is its suffocating consistency. That down-to-earth, tactile combat is a reason to play Dark Souls in and of itself, but it also functions to immerse you in the game's similarly plausible world.

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What defines Dark Souls is the moment you decide you're literally out of your depth, and turn the hell around, with all your precious XP intact, to go explore somewhere else. But for the most part, you won't do that. You Will Die.

You're not completing levels, or even doubling back in the Metroidvania style. You're just exploring, taking step after nervous step through a foul wonderland that oscillates between great cruelty, and moments of sweet relief. Its great achievement is in not feeling like a game world at all, much as Minecraft didn't, and it's a similar joy to explore. This simply feels like a place where you really, really shouldn't be, where every step is heavy with dread.

Let's put it this way - it's not the petrifying Capra Demon boss that defines Dark Souls. It's not the key he drops, that leads you to a room where you fight a disgusting, cannibalistic chef. It's not the labyrinthine sewer that the chef guards, or the village you find beneath the sewer, or the putrid moat the village is built above. It's not the nauseating creatures that live in the moat, nor is it the terrible beast that lays its eggs in them. It's not the staircase you find behind her, leading you down still further. What defines Dark Souls is the moment you decide you're literally out of your depth, and turn the hell around, with all your precious XP intact, to go explore somewhere else. But for the most part, you won't do that. You Will Die.

Saving Dark Souls from the loneliness that haunted the open worlds of say, Metroid, is its online functionality, which was designed with the same blend of accuracy and fearless creativity that defines the rest of the game. Players can scratch messages into the ground, which are pulled at random into your own world. Watch Out For Wizard, you'll find, lying ominously before a closed door. Or more dubious stuff still - Step Off, written over a chasm into blackest darkness.

More traditional multiplayer is limited to blue and black phantoms - other players invading your world, to help or assassinate you, for their own selfish aims. Offering some of those moments of relief are the game's bloodstains. Touch one, and you'll see the final seconds of a real-life player, which is a bit like opening a present. Perhaps you'll get a poignant warning, as they flee from something you didn't spot, or you'll just laugh as they go cartwheeling lackadaisically off a ledge.

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The mouse and keyboard controls in the Prepare to Die edition are a war crime. Losing the gentle acceleration of analog movement would have been bad enough, but the mouse doesn't control the camera so much as wrestle it around on a rubber leash.

All of this survives, totally intact, in the PC port, with a single caveat - you must own a Xbox 360 pad, or suitable equivalent.

The mouse and keyboard controls in the Prepare to Die edition are a war crime. Losing the gentle acceleration of analog movement would have been bad enough, but the mouse doesn't control the camera so much as wrestle it around on a rubber leash. Meanwhile, the GUI's adaption to the keyboard is just awkward. All told, you could be playing on an emulator. If you don't own a pad but somehow end up with Dark Souls running on your PC, remove the power cable from the back with a barge pole.

But if you do own a pad, and quickly grab this 80Kb fan hotpix, which unlocks the game's resolution from 1024x720, you'll be able to enjoy the definitive edition of Dark Souls until the Artorias of the Abyss DLC arrives for consoles this winter. That content's packed in the PC version for free, and we're pleased to announce that it's... fine. It's just fine.

The best thing we can say is that it's not ungenerous. It's three whole new areas for you to plunge through like a nervous knife, each packed with the epic bosses, new items, new spells and unsettling NPCs that you've come to expect during the rest of the game (Artorias of the Abyss is, sadly, squirreled away towards very end of Dark Souls).

You'll cut off the tail of a chimera to use as a whip. You'll descend deeper than you've ever been before. But throughout, there's the niggling sense that this wasn't the work of the entire From Software team.

This being DLC that's basically a given, but it shouldn't feel that way. The first new area, Royal Woods, repurposes a ton of art assets from Dark Souls' other trembling forest of Darkroot Garden. The next area, Oolacile Township, is a definite high point – a cluster of slumped towers you have to pick your way down – but it fails to surprise in the way that Dark Souls' best areas do. Finally, the Chasm of the Abyss itself is as barren, rather than as bleak, as the name implies. All of that said, of the four new bosses, the duel with the disturbingly fast Knight Artorias is my new favourite of any Souls game. Good luck with that.

Source : ign[dot]com

Upgrade Dark Souls' PC Version Visuals

If you purchased the PC version of Dark Souls, you may have noticed it doesn't look all that great after cranking up the in-game resolution. Well, as pointed out by GameSpy, thanks to a motivated user, there's a workaround to the general muddiness of the visuals.

Simply drag and drop the files from this download into the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition's data directory and you'll see a definite upgrade. Be sure to consult the read me file for extra steps, including turning off in-game anti-aliasing and blur.

Below you can see the results. The first screen was taken from the unmodified Steam version, and the second taken after installing the fix.

As stated in the mod's read me, "The mod makes *no* permanent changes to *anything*". To uninstall, you can remove the d3d9.dll file from the Dark Souls directory. That being said, as usual with mods, use them at your own risk.

Expect a review of Dark Souls on PC to show up on IGN sometime soon.

Source : ign[dot]com

Report: Sony Showing Two Unannounced Games at Gamescom

This year have provided PlayStation gamers with a deluge of new announcements, from God of War: Ascension and Beyond: Two Souls to PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale and The Unfinished Swan. And according to PlayStation Universe, the new game reveals will continue unabated at this year’s Gamescom show in Cologne, Germany.

PSU reports that it “has received details on Sony’s line-up for Gamescom,” and that Sony “will indeed showcase two previously unannounced games” during the show. Based on the information it has received, “one of the games is from a ‘Japan Studio,' while the other is apparently a new 'Move IP'."

The reference to “a” Japan Studio is confusing. Could this be referencing Sony’s full-owned Japanese developer Studio Japan, or another second or third party developer from Sony’s home country? Also confusing is the announcement of a new IP for PlayStation Move, a peripheral that has largely failed to resonate with both the hardcore community and the general consumer. It's worth noting that the latter description is confirmation that this new IP, if it actually exists, will be for PlayStation 3. However, the former rumored title could be for PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita.

Nonetheless, this report joins other Gamescom-related PlayStation rumors, including that the company may be prepared to show a new version of the PlayStation 3 at the show, which takes place from August 15th through August 19th.

We’ve reached out to Sony for more details on both of the rumored game reveals and will update with any new information we receive.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.

Source : ign[dot]com