Dark Side

Strange mood yesterday. Sorta bleakly depressed. Scoured the bookshelves trying to find a good book that would reflect the dark futile fey emotion that was upon me, and couldn't find any. (Warhammer 40k books were excluded because I was altogether too familiar with them.) I'm sure there must be some buried away somewhere but none of the ones within reach enabled any wallowing in dark, grim, awfulness.

The internet came to the rescue as random Googling slowly ascertained that I was in the mood for some darkfic, though I could have done without the fanfiction aspect. Unfortunately, the published authors in my collection weren't being cooperative - I'm sure some have written dark things, but they've buried it away in short stories and scary books which I do not display in the front of my shelves.

Fortunately, all the tvtropes contributors came to the rescue as they cheerfully (oxymoron?) suggested examples of darkfic. Random browsing revealed two oldies, but goodies.

The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing

Sometimes fantastic things emerge from even the most unlikely places. Apparently conceived in 2007 on the Something Awful forums (go figure), this turned from a joke attempt at making fun of Animal Crossing's idiosyncracies into a dramatic tale of twisted horror. It quite satisfied my craving for something dark and awful.

The Sacred and the Profane

A Good Omens fanfic, it explores the plot twist of "What if the demon was the angel and the angel was the demon?" while still maintaining the core characterisation and recognizability of the two major characters in question. I think I've read it before, once upon a time, but it's still pretty good.

Good fiction is cathartic. I'm better today. So much better in fact that my main dilemma of the day (besides being forced to go back to work on a freakin' Sunday because VIPs were here) was whether I wanted to pay full price for Warhammer: Space Marine and play it in two days' time as it launches.

On the one hand, it is a THQ game. THQ is solidly reliable for slashing its prices very quickly as time wears down on a game, lowering the barrier to trying out their games to near freaking zero. (Dawn of War and all its collections for 5 bucks or so? Completely possible in a THQ bundle during summer and winter sales.) I am positive, can guarantee, in fact, that Space Marine will be selling at 50% off at some point during the Steam Christmas sale. If I can wait a year or two more, it will go down even further.

Except because it is a THQ game, with Warhammer 40k to boot, it seems inconceivable to wait till even Christmas.

I waited it out with the expansion for Dawn of War 2: Retribution since I wasn't done with the first expansion yet. But Space Marine? They launched a demo that was technically excellent and gleefully visceral and lore faithful in all the right ways. I may not be as rabidly a fan as TotalBiscuit is (but then he's a Brit and Games Workshop is a UK company that has spent a while brainwashing its converts there) but then I was mad enough to order the Ultramarines movie and like it, and by golly, the demo demonstrated that being an insane choppy choppy Space Marine is a lot of fun.

So yeah, after 12 hours of arguing back and forth with myself (gotta have something to think about while answering numerous queries on where the toilet is, y'know), I have caved in and bought it, full price.

Ah well. A good company deserves larger profits. And it is a rare game that I am desperately craving to play at launch. (Even Deus Ex: Human Revolution I can wait for to come down in price.)

On the bright side, they offer a free copy of Darksiders. Ostensibly worth $20, a Steam watcher like myself can confirm irregular sales of it at around 5 bucks.

On the other hand, I already own it, thanks to one of those said sales. Haven't played it yet, but heck, it's a THQ action game with good scores on Metacritic, how bad could it be?

Being that THQ is nice (and fiendishly cunning) though, they have allowed gifting of the extra copy. After all, they must figure, all our games are good games that can stand on their own merits. We will build fans in the long term if we release our older games at cut rate prices, to the point where they start to rabidly anticipate our new games and buy them full price.

So uh yeah, free copy of Darksiders.