VAGINA DENTATA!

A game was released last year, by the name of Dark Souls. This game is infamously bastard-hard and as a result, didn’t sell as well as most games also released during the ludicrous run-up to christmas. One of the more interesting game mechanics it features is the ability to invade other player’s worlds or be invaded yourself, while they/you’re just going about the difficult business of simply trying to survive the F*cking Hostile game world.

Once you’re in possession of an item called a Cracked Red Eye Orb and in a suitable part of any level in the game world, you can invade a random player’s world by using the Orb, instantly challenging them to a duel by trapping them in the section of the world that you’re both inhabiting. In at least 9/10 of all such invasions, the invader wins, usually because the invader has already kitted themselves out with better gear from further in the game than the defender has reached.

This is largely a poorly thought out feature, because the Orb cannot be gotten until you’re at least a third of the way through the game, and yet it can be used as far back as the first level after the tutorial, meaning that unless the invader simply wanders away from the controller while invading, then the defender has zero chance of winning such duels, shy of the occasional  attacker rolling off a cliff or some such.

Not to mention the fact that willfully invading someone else’s game world in the first place is an act of pure malice, as the rewards are negligible and everyone playing Dark Souls is perfectly aware that this game is hard enough to play without some fucking tit adding one more enemy trying to wear your flayed skin as a scarf into this immersively bleak gaming experience.

The Stranger thing about Dark Souls’ online mode is that you can’t cherry pick which parts you’d like active, you either get all or nothing, which is frustrating as all the other online features are added fun that can lighten up yet another trek through Blighttown and relieve a little tension. Seeing a message written on the floor by another player on your server claiming “I just can’t take this” or “Imminent boss fight” can be fun, and seeing a bloodstain (re-playable echoes of other player’s final moments) in the middle of an entirely unoccupied section even more so, but the prospect of an aggressive stranger randomly materializing behind you is quite off-putting, even more so than this oppressively dark world already is.

I often end up taking the easy way out and simply enter an Xbox Live party before loading the game up, which for some reason disables all online functions, though being in a Private Chat with someone does not. Ultimately this game’s Online mode absolutely deserves to be played at least once by those brave/foolhardy to even be playing the game in the first place. And a game’s tag line has never been more appropriate: Prepare to Die.