Dark Stone Quest Log - 002

Spoomy has been questing for days.  His adventure with the ghost Riken had proven fortuitous indeed.  It was not long into Level 2 that he had become encumbered with loot, and had to use a magic door in order to return to Town town.  Once there he proceeded to sell of his wares and trade in his dagger for a much more effective weapon known as a "shurieken,"which, being that he was clearly in a western fantasy setting, was an object he was somewhat unfamiliar with, however he was assured that it was something to be thrown in the direction of bad things, and that was good enough for him.

Spoomy then spent some time chasing around Town town's only chicken (which he conveniently found was named Chicken,) before returning on his quest.  Shortly thereafter he found himself fighting a Fire Golem, an Ice Golem and finally some kind of evil Wizard.  According to Riken the wizard had stolen the horn of plenty from his home town (which was apparently not Town town).  After recovering said horn Spoomy then proceeded to Riken's unnamed town (which Spoomy dubbed "not Town town")

After returning the horn of plenty to not Town town's mayor "Mayor," Riken gave Spoomy a pretty sweet crystal, which was pretty convenient as Spoomy was immediately informed by the disembodied voice of some wizard that his ultimate task was to collect seven of these crystals to defeat the evil Draak.  Spoomy knew that Draak would be a formidable foe, one with a name equally well chosen as his own.

Continuing on his adventure Spoomy found three more crystals after assisting a fairy to rescue a unicorn, rescuing a baby for the lone survivors of a burnt out and ransacked village and retrieving "The Celestial Sword" from the cavernous depths of... some caverns.

It was at that moment that Spoomy something odd happened.  Up until that point, Spoomy had fallen into a fairly routine flow of "raid four 'levels' of a dungeon, magic door back to Town town, sell everything, profit," however upon his return to Town town with the celestial sword he noticed a giant stone obelisk rise up out of the ground.  The sky turned dark, cracks of thunder rang out through the heavens and suddenly the townspeople of Town town began to turn to stone.

Upon investigation Spoomy noticed something odd... standing right next to the giant stone obelisk, frozen in place (aparently not stone, but frozen none the less)... was... CHICKEN the chicken!  Entranced by the mysterious obelisk, or perhaps worshiping it.  It was quite obvious that Chicken was behind this entire predicament, and Spoomy's instinct to chase him was correct from the start.  Deciding not to let on that he had figured out Chicken's plot, Spoomy searched the rest of Town town.

Quite to his benefit, Spoomy found that not everyone in Town town had been turned to stone, and he would still be able to sell all of his ill gotten gains... the first of which would be that stupid Celestial Sword... because swords are for big dumb idiots who don't know how awesome shuriekens are.

His wallet now full(er), Spoomy left to continue on his adventure...

Dark Stone - The Truth

So I've been playing Dark Stone in short stints over the past few nights, and I can't lie... I'm enjoying the shit outta' it.  When I had chosen to play this game as the next entry on my list I had done so with the preconceived notion that I would pop it in my Playstation, get about ten minutes into it, and then hit the eject button on a bland gaming experience to have it sit on my shelf, never touched again.  The honest to god truth though is that this game has been the biggest surprise in my recent gaming experience.

This actually was exactly what I was looking for when I began this entire quest.  Maybe not this game in particular, and maybe not even a game of this style or mechanic, but the experience of wandering into something unknown and being pleasantly surprised by its quality.

The game itself actually feels like a natural precursor to what we now consider the modern RPG.  A fairly customizable "tabula rasa" character creation template on which the player can project themselves, a fully explorable (albiet somewhat 'boxed off' due to system limitations of the time) overworld map with dungeons and quests littered throughout for you to discover and a non linear system of storytelling that allows the player to explore at their own pace (although, once you figure our the flow of the game its pretty easy to figure what they want you to do next).  All of these elements exist and are done pretty well in this game.

Don't get me wrong, some of the things are cheesy as shit, like how your character lets out an almost sexual "Yeeeeeah" whenever you level up, or how the dungeons are called "Level X" clearly signifying the progression the designers would like for you to take, but these items are fairly ignorable in my opinion.

Now, aside from my RPG Quest, I have been playing a fair number of modern games whenever I get the chance, and have been let down almost as many times.  This is especially true for franchise games, many of which began in the PS1 era, their quality overshadowing games like Dark Stone and forever relegating it to the recesses of pop culture history.  For all the innovations those games have gone through over the years, for all the graphical updates and play mechanic tweaks they've gone through, have they gotten any better?  At this moment in particular I have one such release sitting next to my console, begging for my attention amongst the throngs of other state of the art implementations of technological wonder, yet all I can think about is playing a game that its predecessors would have scoffed at in its day.