Sargun: You're tagged in orange with "MAXIMUM TROLLING" and I've only ever seen you break character a handful of times.

mike doesn't troll serious video game threads. he's actually really into design theory and the industry. you'e thinking of the politics hread where he is captain troll 'o the troll brigade

I remember buying darksiders for 14.99 and was glad i did. totally worth my 15 bucks.

'enslaved : odyssey to the west' is another cheep-o that's totally worth the week or so of playtime it gives you.

Looking forward to WWE 2K14. Hopefully 2K can breathe new life into the franchise.

Dumb-Ass-Monkey: Darksiders is f*cking awesome! How could it not get picked up?

Because games need to make a profit.

I played Darksiders and found it to be a goofy mess. The story line was dumb, the "YOU MUST DEFEAT 3 CHALLENGE ROOMS TO GO ON!" shadow worlds were annoying, the environments were plain and completely uninteresting.

For me, the game felt like it had no direction, like they never knew during development what it was going to be. The kicker was the controls. 3rd person beat-em-ups have to have solid controls. They felt awful and the button mapping was worse.

Of course I seem to be in a minority here, but after playing Darksiders, I had no desire to play the sequel.

scottydoesntknow: Free Radical: Dumb-Ass-Monkey: Darksiders is f*cking awesome! How could it not get picked up?

Because games need to make a profit.

To be fair, they should also be advertised correctly. The game got rave reviews, but I think I saw maybe one actual commercial for it on TV.

They should also be budgeted correctly. Setting 2 million sold as a break even point when the first game barely broke 1 million in sales is farking dumb.

I have Darksiders sitting on Steam as a result of the Humble Indie Bundle THQ put out about two months ago. Looking forward to playing it when I buy a desktop that can actually run it.

I'm just glad that Volition is still alive. I really love my sandboxes, and Saints Row is the most excessive, goofy, straight up fun series in that genre. I'm playing through RF: Guerilla, and that's a fun game too.

SEGA has done well with the Total War series. I enjoy the RTS genre, though I'm turned off by Warhammer as a property, but they seem to buy these dev houses and let them be, at least when it comes to the PC market. Plus they figured out how to make Sonic the best platformer around again, so I think we're okay with this weirdly-competent SEGA buying Relic.

I'm wondering why Vinnie Mac doesn't just create WWE games, bring Yukes over to design the WWE series, and then publish those games themselves. Seems like they'd get a bigger cut than selling the licensing to Take-Two. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

Free Radical: Dumb-Ass-Monkey: Darksiders is f*cking awesome! How could it not get picked up?

Because games need to make a profit.

I thought the game sold around 2 mil.
The follow ups on the story mention 2 things.

1. Virgil is the farthest away from releasing another game. DS2 was their 2012 release.
2. Their next title was going to be a new IP. It's an added risk that any publisher would have to take on and spend marketing dollars.

Basically, the ROI on the acquisition was not potentially high enough.

The Bestest: Why even stick with Yukes? If you're gonna do that, may as well try to get AKI back.

I was just assuming that Vince would stick with Yuke's and play it safe rather than be creative about what studio he got to develop his games.

I would love to see synSophia/AKI make another WWF/E game. I still think Def Jam: Fight For New York is the most perfect game they have ever done, even if it's only a wrestling game hybrid. Still, can you imagine a No Mercy sequel on that engine? My word. And that engine is almost a decade old!