I'm a bit mixed up, but I'm mainly focusing on different things. It's not a Crapsack world. But the story can be spun into dark, depending on how you stress it, so it has dark "elements" (unless those don't exist): (I'm skipping most of the details you can take directly from the storyline, such as what is War, who set him up...)
But here's the thing - you can reinterpret anything into a "dark" story, whether it has elements which suggest it or not. You can re-interpret any dark story into a "happy" story, too. See: Cthulu Saves the World. You can no less reinterpret a story than you can write a brand new one, and tons upon tons of fanfiction exists that does exactly this. But what you're arguing is, essentially,
Death of the Author. And yes, I'm still quoting from TVtropes. My apologies. But you're arguing for our interpretation of an author's work based on what we think it could represent over what the author himself meant to imply. Yes, it's sometimes difficult to tell, but that's not always as nebulous as it might seem. Especially because...
But, per my own definition of dark and your own elements I don't quote for brevity, I realized Darksiders' ending is not dark at all. Quite the contrary.
Exactly. It doesn't always come across through my explanation because I'm cutting down a 10 to 12-hour game down to a few sentences. However, playing it, there's no mistaking what the writers were focusing on, and it wasn't the horrors of the apocalypse. It was, basically: "ZOMG Angels with rifles! Oh, wow, demons are so cool! Check out War's giant sword! Woah, he just cut that bug guy in half! Aaawesooome!!!" Yahtzee describes it as "a 10-year-old's view of masculinity," and it is. But that's precisely why I can't take the game as being dark - it's not a soliloquy on the futility of life, it's a game which celebrates its own style and awesomeness with an almost child-like glee. Penny Arcade describe Darksiders 2 as "fucking bitchin'" and that applies just as well to the original. That, at least as far as I can tell after a dozen or so playthroughs, is the whole point. Angels fighting demons at the end times is COOL!
There are a lot of technically identical stories to MLP 
but yeah, I acknowledge. But, "feelgood" should be improvement, which, however little, is going to end into perfect, whatever you say. What of "back to normal" ? Depends on the setting, which is either perfect, improveable, or needing improvement.
Not necessarily, and you seem to be basing your argument on the notion that "back to normal" is a bad thing, presuming the characters disliked their normal lives. Maybe that's just personal experience, but I like my life, and I'm perfectly happy with stories of characters who liked their lives before the "call to action" yanked them out of their normal existence. See Commando's John Matrix living a postcard-perfect life with his daughter until she's kidnapped and he's forced to fight the entire army of a small third-world country to get her back. He picks up a girlfriend along the way, saves his daughter, kills a lot of dudes and then what is his reward? Well, he tells off the Colonel, so presumably he goes back to living an idyllic life with his new girlfriend and his child daughter. And there's nothing wrong with that. For him, "normal" was good. He didn't want to change everything, he didn't set on a quest to save the world. All John Matrix wanted was to be left alone in peace. And at the end of Commando, he achieved that. Could more bad stuff happen to him in the future? Meh, sure. But that's for another movie, if it ever gets made. For NOW, we have a happy ending.
So you don't buy "they lived happily ever after", even if it's written black on white by the story writer ? You're saying that this epitome of happiness is folly ? What have you been read as a child ?
By your own admission, you can spin that to be a bad ending because someone died along the way and someone was hurt and innocence was lost. It's a happy ending, but it's not a PERFECT ending. A perfect ending would be Mass Effect 2 where I save everybody because quite literally nobody has to suffer this entire game if I play my cards right. I talked Garrus out of being a murderer, I talked Thane out of killing his own son, I saved Tali's ass (for later) during her tribunal, I stopped Jacob from doing something he'll regret, I saved Amanda's sister... God, I'm forgetting half of it now, all the good stuff that happened. Point is, that's quite literally the only story I can think of that had a perfect, happy ending, and even then only because it had every opportunity for that ending to go wrong, yet I played my cards right in every one of them. Thank you, online walkthroughs!
But aside from that, I've never seen a perfect ending ever. Any good ending has its own sombre parts, but that doesn't make it any less good.
That's what I said, didn't I?
Not how I read it. What I read you implying was that any story, no matter how it's written, is always dark unless you specifically skip the dark parts it will always have. In essence I read you implying that the only way a story can be "not dark" is if it's written for children and simplified.
What are those ? Dark but short games with no or short storylines ? Can you put the entire storyline (setting and story told by the game) in a single line ?
I was under the impression you were asking for games like the old ones with almost no story made today, not such that are specifically dark. And I can:
Portal: Malfunctioning AI has taken over a base and is forcing Chell to test.
Quantum Continuum: Q from Star Trek is lost from a failed experiment and a young boy needs to save him with his own gadgets.
McPixel: Haven't actually played it, so I don't know the plot.
Orcs Must Die 2: The villain of the previous game has lost her power and must now team up with the hero to survive and prevent an Orc invasion.
Serious Sam: Aliens are invading the past in ancient Egypt and Sam has to stop them.
Aquaria: An old boy was lost in the depths and gained the power to create an underwater world, including a creature who ended up something more.
Limbo: What plot?
Vessel: A man has developed machines that make robots out of liquid which take a life of their own, leading him to believe they're the next step of evolution.
Holdover: Nuclear war once destroyed the world and left a little girl forgotten in a stasis pod, who must now find rescue in the new world. And get naked a lot.
Gish: A living ball of tar has his girlfirend kidnapped and must descend into the underworld to save her.
Blade Kitten: The plot was so thin I don't actually remember.
Alien Swarm: The bugs from Starship Troopers have taken over a base and a team of four Marines must go there and deal with it.
Also Trine: Three unlikely heroes are bound to an artefact and must find a way to free themselves, defeating the evil which rules the kingdom now.
Those are my points. Simple games that have no storylines (most early games in history) are provably neither bad or good, you assume it's good, that's all. That's why I took Sonic as a counterpoint of your point that they did the most horrible thing by turning him in dark stories. In fact they did nothing contrary to what they did before because what they did before had no intent.
A game with an uncomplicated story is not the same as a game with no story. You should know better than this. The original Mass Effect had a very simple story, which is why it worked out so well. Also, I never said that turning Sonic the Hedgehod (rather, Shadow the Hedgehog) "dark" was a horrible thing. I didn't even comment on it, but my implication was it was a STUPID thing to do. It didn't make the game darker, it made it ridiculous in much the same way as Warrior Within.
If all you played while a child was Blackthorne, Dune II and Mortal Kombat and the likes, I don't see why you're complaining we are in a dark age of gaming nowadays.
That's not ALL I played. In fact, you quote three titles out of a much longer list and implied that's ALL I played. I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. And OK, let's say that's all I played for the sake of argument. Just HOW depressing were those games? Let's go by endings. I don't remember Dune II, it was something like 20 years ago, but I do remember the other two. In Blackthorne I defeat the demon and save the world. In Mortal Kombat I (well, Liu Kang) defeats Shang Tsung and saves the world. For all the blood and gore those games had, neither was anywhere as depressing anywhere as consistently as so many modern games today.
Maybe you need to put this into perspective too. Having such dark, grim and gritty stories told does make real life not this dark, grim and gritty. And allows you to enjoy it to its fullest.
No it doesn't. It makes me want to sleep and never wake up. It makes my head throb like I've been headbutting Pride of Fullmetal Alchemist fame. It makes me not want to watch TV, speak with people or DO anything for a good few hours, and the only way I can recover quickly is to rant about it to friends and family. Ending a story feeling like crap does not make life feel any better any more than smashing my finger with a hammer makes my headache feel any less painful. It just makes my head AND my finger hurt. A HAPPY story showing me that life doesn't have to be rotten makes me feel better about the world. It gives me hope, optimism and the kind of light, aerie feeling I need to take on life's everyday challenges with a smile on my face. You can actually trace my posting history on the City of Heroes forums based on what I was watching or playing at the time, and the times when I was by far the biggest jerkass bastard were exactly the times I had the misfortune to misjudge the tone of a game or movie and it ended up souring my mood for a week.
You can't say "we are in a "dark" age of gaming" without looking at all the consoles, which I did direct you to one specifically. If your idea was specifically for PC, you should have said so.
You're right, I should have. I have literally never owned a console in my life, so it's easy to forget there are more games out there than just for the PC, and I should have specified. I like to think I'm "up" on what's being sold for consoles, but clearly that's not the case, and for that I apologise. Yes, I'm speaking specifically for the PC. Hell, if I were including consoles, I'd have had to account for Uncharted, which I'm told is a pretty upbeat game.
That's both for adult and not for adult, those are not contradictory. I don't think you can see "drugs", "swearing" and "violence", which is all Saints Row is about, for children, and not for normal adults either. So yeah, it's Mature. Duke Nukem shoul be rated M for Manly
Oh, of course, of course. It has nudity, it has drugs, it has violence, it has prostitution, it has giant purple floppy dildo bats, it's not for kids. But what I'm saying is that it's not "mature" in the sense of the word which implies wisdom, responsibility and dignity. I think we need to strike a line between "adult" entertainment and "mature" entertainment and stop trying to slap the "mature" rating on "adult" material because it makes us feel more grown-up. Other than the literal nature of the content, there's nothing "mature" about Saints Row The Third. Or Duke Nuken Forever, for that matter. They're some of the most immature games I've ever seen. Well, at least Saints Row is funny, unlike Duke Nukem, which is just crass.
All I'm saying is I object to seeing "mature" games as being somehow better when even the simplest, most child-friendly games can still be just as powerful. And that, to me, is part of the problem. The gaming industry seems to have gotten it in its head that "dark" is somehow "better" and that's why they keep making those games. Critics, in their infinite wisdom, are constantly praising those games so OF COURSE they're going to keep getting made. But to me, a lot of video game critics approach games with a mentality that's very alien to that of a player. Take, for instance, Extra Credits (google it, it's a smart web show) - they're game DEVELOPERS, so they interpret games as developers. They're also high-brow critics who are convinced that "games need to move beyond fun" and are endlessly amused by horrible retro games, boring art/walking games and literary drama games. I'm sure there's room for that in gaming - to each his own - but the rising popularity of this stuff has made it so prevalent it's next to impossible to find a major release that's not "gritty" these days. I'm basically down to old games and indie stuff, and the indie stuff is mostly 8-bit simulacra games or goofy self-referrential parodies. Or horribly depressing survival horror games.
I mean, seriously - look at Steam's Greenlight and tell me what you see.
Agreed, but we didn't have much choice in the matter before either, as it was much more goody. And consumers did "change" the Mass Effect ending. And like all games with multiple endings, you have to work a lot to have a "good ending", so it is rewarding to play.
Dark games have always existed, and they will always exist. What I take issue with is how they've been turned into a fad, to the point where they're poisoning existing franchises. Why the hell did Lara Croft need to be tortured, sexually assaulted, strung up on a cross, nearly drowned and literally dragged through the mud, all proudly displayed as the POINT of playing the game? Again, I've heard the arguments that they didn't want to sexualise her, but if they wanted to do that, why not simply make a regular adventure game which doesn't do that? Why go so far in the other direction that you circle right around and make it feel even more uncomfortable than before? At least before it was pretty...
I guess that's my whole point. Once upon a time, games strived for better graphics so they could look pretty. Now they strive for better graphics so they could be even more ugly. What the hell, guys?
