Why I Like Eternal Darkness (and Maybe General GameCube Discussion)

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It came to my attention yesterday that Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is not universally acknowledged to be one of the best GameCube games. It’s definitely one of the top games on my list, and I thought I might follow @meauxdal’s suggestion and create a GameCube thread so that I can talk about it.

When I played Eternal Darkness, I had not yet tried the Silent Hill series or the Fatal Frame series. I suppose it’s relatively tame compared to those games, but I found the atmosphere effective. I remember the stormy night in the church especially.

I liked that the game had exactly one scene calculated to startle the player. While that’s generally a boring crutch in horror, it worked well in isolation here. (I also like the one such scene in the entire Silent Hill series, which is found in Silent Hill 3. I was playing that game late at night and it sure got me.)

Although modern popular culture has attempted to ruin H.P. Lovecraft through overexposure along with so many other things, I have long been a fan of his stories and was happy to find a video game that obviously took direct inspiration from his work. (Has there ever been another good one, other than Bloodborne?)

I’m trying to remember things that bothered me about the game, and I can only think of one offhand. I remember wishing that the sanity meter were not visible and not so easy to keep full. I quickly realized that it was in my interest to intentionally keep the meter empty to experience the best version of the game.

I think my favorite moment in the entire game is when Alex climbs the main staircase in the mansion and the painting suddenly changes from a typical landscape to a nightmare scene.

I’ve been meaning to revisit this game eventually, even though my copy is scratched up and the cutscenes stutter significantly.

Oh, that’s right. I also wished that the characters would not say, “This can’t be happening!” after every sanity effect.

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I don’t want to derail this immediately, but: RE4, definitely.

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One thing I didn’t like about this game was the colour coding for things like sanity and health, where you would flash green or red when being drained. It seemed too obvious and video gamey instead of the subtle horror it was going for.

I really liked the approach to having different characters for each chapter, and I think I remember the music for the Arabian prince chapter being pretty good.

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My favorite part was being the colonial era surgeon, dissecting dead enemies

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The Call of Cthulhu game on Xbox is not a good game but it is pretty good at being Lovecraftian.

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I really enjoyed Eternal Darkness. It was my first proper exposure to Lovecraft, and probably the one that sticks with me the most.

I agree that the sanity system would be much better off if it was invisible - the perfectionist part of me will keep that meter at full, and that part overrides the “wants to experience the systems as narrative devices” part of me.

The most interesting thing it does is the structure of playing multiple characters through multiple timelines. It does feel like a series of Lovecraft short stories, especially in the way that most of them end in abject failure. Even the main quest can be considered a failure when you get the “best” ending, i.e. the one where you play through the game three times, each with a different deity, and it turns out this was Mantorok’s plan all along, and he merges all of the realities so there is no evil deity but him. Pretty good. (Are we spoiler tagging this very old game?)

I’m trying to think of other games that capture that Lovecraft feeling and, yeah, coming up short. Lone Survivor is a bit more Lynch than Lovecraft. Silent Hill is…sort of its own thing, I guess. Dark Souls (clink) comes close, at least the part I played, in that you’re an actor in a story you don’t fully understand working to ends unknown. But I think that might just be because I never finished it.

I’ve told this story before but here we go again:

My strongest memory of Eternal Darkness is when I got a message saying that the game had some error and could not continue, and that I would need to restart the GameCube. I waited on that message for maybe 20 minutes, and tried every button that I could. Turns out we had a faulty GameCube.

Ironically, I lost Eternal Darkness when I swapped for a friend’s copy of Call of Cthulhu on the Xbox and never swapped back. Not a good trade.

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the gamecube was the very first console that I had any ownership of - my parents had previously bought my brothers and I an N64 and a PS1 (as well as growing up with an NES and a genesis) but the Gamecube was something that was purchased specifically for me as a gift by my parents

I must have been around 10 or 11 I think - all I knew was that they made sure they got me Metroid Prime with it.

this basically started my actual love affair with videogames as anything more that a weird curiosity object. this point in time also marks the point in which I would never be one of the kids that played the “cool” videogames - I had less interest in the PS2 than the gamecube so I wasn’t abreast of what most of my friends were playing.

(there’s use of derogatory slurs in this post in reference to people using them against me, if you wanna keep scrolling and not read this part)

even now when people that aren’t from like SB or deep nerd game circles see my game collection where I live I usually get told I’m a faggot who plays bad videogames no one has heard of - I cannot play or talk about videogames with either of my roommates for this reason - I remember the first time I was kind of interested in a woman who played videogames I went to school with and she remarked that I must be, and was, a faggot for owning the games I did and owning a gamecube. the fact that i was more than slightly effiminate in highschool did not help matters much, so i tried to not let people know that i really enjoyed videogames. that’s probably the first time I really got intensely bitter about being judged for owning something or for having a particular perceived intellectual taste and it being singled out and attached to my sexuality and then used against me. it actually still happens at work

the gamecube basically affected the whole of the way I look at and play videogames. I highly doubt if not having been kind of exposed to the wacky esoteric library of the Gamecube that I would ever have even ended up on Select Button at all.

its interesting to me that the reason for that partly comes from the fact that I really had no other choice whatsoever. Metroid Prime kind of gave me an experience I wasn’t used to with first person shooters that I had played on the PC. A lot of people I knew played Max Payne and instead I got Dead to Rights (which is actually a great game on the Cube). that’s kind of how it was: friends played Wipeout and I got F-Zero GX or friends played Tactical Role Playing Game and I got that cool From Software card battler. The Gamecube had an alternative experience for everything popular at the time.

Plus, the Gamecube has the best multiplayer game of all time: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles which bizzarely enough despite having no friends to play even a co-op game of timesplitters or anything with, I somehow had the three friends and hardware required to play with a full party of four people numerous times which is a fuckin experience that I wish everybody could partake in because it’s completely awesome to get to do

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Yes, it’s super effective and a little janky

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if this is going to become a general GC thread, let me be the first to say that the game cube controller is the last, and perhaps only, video game console controller that actually feels good to hold and use

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it has my favorite feeling joysticks on any controller maybe, and my favorite triggers.

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I will argue for the GC controller every day. The only thing it’s missing is two Z buttons with different functions.

The only thing keeping my GC controller from being my go-to for every day is that games just aren’t designed around it.

Also, I genuinely dislike that “joysticks you can push in for another button” has become a standard for controllers. For me, i’m either hitting the button on accident during particularly intense moments, or I’m moving the stick slightly on accident when I try to push the damn thing down. I’m glad that the GC controller does not have this.

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The Wavebird was the best wireless controller.

:100:

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I mean damn “Wavebird” is such a great name

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Seconding this. The extra “click” at the bottom of the shoulder buttons is 100x better than joysticks as buttons and it’s insane to me that it didn’t take off.

Though the joystick click is conceptually a good solution to the apparent need to put ducking and/or dashing in your game, it is always hard for me to do on purpose or to avoid doing accidentally.

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There was a point at which I realized that might never again have the patience to play a JRPG. But then, Skies of Arcadia was released for GameCube. A Dreamcast-enthusiast neighbor had mentioned to me several times how much he liked that game, so I decided to try it. And it was excellent. (I think Final Fantasy 12 is the only game of that type that I’ve played since.)

The ship battles were a lot of fun, and the only thing that I remember disliking about the game is that one impossible boss that you are supposed to lose to for story reasons. It’s not all that difficult, so you can pretty much fight forever with no obvious clue that you are supposed to lose.

Entering the Dark Rift is one of my favorite video game moments. It was very late at night and not at all what I was expecting, and I still listen to the music from that area.

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Two words: Gotcha Force

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I probably have the odd answer here, as my most played and favorite Gamecube game is Ikaruga. Never played a Treasure game beforehand and hadn’t really played much in the way of shoot 'em ups for a good number of years beforehand, but I knew someone who kept talking up the game as something special that was almost never going to be released here (previously stuck as a Japan-only Dreamcast release) so I bought it sight unseen.

Infogrames/faux-Atari had a contest upon release where you you could play in a one credit only challenge mode and use the code you got there to post your score on an online high score board, the top five scores getting a trophy. I was no where near good enough for that so I chose a different set of personal challenges: to make the top fifty so that I would be on the front page of the high score board, to crack a score 20 million (there were smaller targets along the way), and to beat it on this challenge mode. The contest was only for the first two or three months of release, so this was basically the game of my spring/summer.

I basically lived in the practice mode for much of that time, playing each section of a stage over and over trying to figure out how to best chain everything together. After that was time to practice entire stages, then trying full runs. Then I’d get better, revisit these individual section for more ambitious approaches and repeat the whole thing. By the time the contest was done I managed to just edge past 20 million and finish in the top fifty, but god I could not beat the game. The final stage is half of a boss rush and given that it was less deterministic than the rest of the game due to this (remember, hadn’t played many shooters in several years) I just hit a hard wall there I could not get past. I had to just accept it and take a L on it.

~several years later~

Someone else I knew had gotten into Ikaruga after the fact and was playing through it. I decided to pick it up to just revisit it for a bit and I was so bad at it because I had forgotten how to chain anything (it is in many ways as much of a puzzle game as a shooter). It got under my skin though and once more I began plugging away at it and after a bit I had a revelation. There were certain sections where I was most likely to lose a life as getting the maximum number of chains was just plain vicious. I realized that if I simply refused to fire and concentrated on dodging I could avoid breaking my chain while saving the life.

Suddenly with practice I was able to make it to the final stage with more than one or two lives in reserve. A single mistake was no longer crippling. I ended up with an absurdly clean run and made it to that last stage with four or five lives and got past the first boss without dropping a life, I dropped one to the second and the third but gained an extra life before getting to the final challenge: a sixty second wave of bullets you have to dodge and survive. I swear to good I actually paused the game at this point and had to take a walk outside to get my hands to stop shaking. Once years ago I had made it to this challenge with no lives to spare and had died with only ten seconds left, literally within sight of victory. I calmed myself down, went inside, unpaused and did it almost flawlessly, shocking myself so much that I flew right into a bullet with a few seconds left as I realized I had done it. I respawned, flew past the last bullet and for the first time, after having put well over a hundred hours into the thing, finally watched the ending.

I still have that final score written down: 25,256,860. I still consider it to be my greatest gaming achievement. So yeah, that’s why Ikaruga is the Gamecube game that means the most to me.

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yeah gotcha force

did u kno that a us copy costs 100+ usd ;_;

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damn im glad i got mine for 12 bux when i had the chance