“I would work Miyamoto any time,” said Dyack when the subject of a remaster or remake of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem came up. “Those are some of the best people we ever worked with, and I think that when you tap into a cultural zeitgeist like we did with Eternal Darkness, the culture changes.”

However, a potential remake of Eternal Darkness wouldn’t exactly be a 1:1 recreation of the original. Dyack spoke about some of the elements of the horror game that wouldn’t hold up to modern scrutiny, like how it toyed with old-school TV interfaces and visual effects, and how they would need to be changed.

“We would have to do different things, but you can do more effective things now with social media and the way things are working now, all kinda of crazy things that you can do that would be super awesome,” he explained. “We often joke about sanity effects and stuff like that, what we would do today, and so there’s a lot of potential for sure. And then that begs the question, would you want to remake it or why not just do a sequel, or another game, hate to say sequels, another game in the Eternal Darkness universe.”

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a beloved title, and was notable as being the first M-rated game published by Nintendo. The title revolves around Alexandra Roivas rushing to her grandfather’s mansion after getting a phone call about him being found decapitated in his study. While Alexandra is simply there to identify the body, she gets caught in a deeper web since the mansion shows no indication of a break-in or other likely ways that the assailant may have entered to commit the murder.

The plot kicks off in earnest when Alexandria discovers a hidden book called the Tome of Eternal Darkness, through which she learns the story of twelve people throughout history from all around the world. The wisdom she gains from these stories help power Alexandria’s own magical abilities, which she must use to explore the mansion and its mysteries. What truly set the title apart from its contemporaries like Silent Hill and Resident Evil were its tendency of showcasing the damage Alexandria takes to her sanity by breaking the fourth wall.

Nintendo might not be interested in bringing Eternal Darkness back for now. Nightdive Studios—a development team known for its work in bringing back classic games on modern systems—had discussions with the company. CEO Stephen Kick confirmed through social media posts that Nintendo wasn’t interested in a remastered release, however.

For more details, check out our thoughts on what made Eternal Darkness special.

One of the better games from sort of the middle of the budgetary range was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. This is a game that tried some interesting ideas, and ended up benefitting from the vast majority of them. With a game as incomparable as Eternal Darkness, it can be sort of difficult to quantify exactly what makes it such a great game, but we have to at least give it a shot, because a game like this deserves to be recognized for the risks it took, how well it managed them, and how ultimately successful it was in delivering it’s vision to players.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem could be described as an adventure game crossing over with classic survival horror like Resident Evil. With an elevator pitch like that it’s easy to imagine where it could have gone wrong. Action-adventure games are often associated with lots of movement, power, and freedom while survival horror games, especially from that era, are often associated with claustrophobia, limited abilities, and vulnerability. These are two philosophies that might seem like they’re at odds and destined to clash at every turn. This is why back then, and even more so today, these two types of games generally don’t have a lot of crossover in fear of turning into something like Resident Evil 6 as it ends up pleasing nobody despite trying to please everyone. Mixing action and horror is a tough road to walk if you do it that way, where the horror aesthetic is driven by essentially the gameplay of an action game.

But Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem flips the ratio on that by making an adventure game aesthetic driven with survival horror gameplay. Fixed camera angles, atmospheric lighting, somewhat stilted combat, key-oriented puzzles, you know the drill. But it is improved upon somewhat with more friendly-3D control as opposed to the classic tank controls of its ancestors. It also lets the camera flow around most areas, creating a smooth transition from one angle to the next instead of the sudden cuts that can make walking around in some survival horror games a little disorienting and jarring at times. The game is also broken up into separated levels which minimizes backtracking and your chances of getting lost. This general attitude of taking the groundwork of classic survival horror gameplay and improving on it in subtle – yet effective – ways is a big part of why Eternal Darkness works so well.

The combat system in Eternal Darkness contains perhaps the more interesting and engaging tweaks it introduces into the survival horror framework, and it’s certainly the element you’ll notice first, and most often. Eternal Darkness’ melee weapons as well as projectiles and firearms have a nice aiming mechanism that helps you direct your blows without breaking immersion like, say, Parasite Eve did with it’s almost turn-based JRPG approach to combat. While survival horror games of that era and before it did technically usually allow you to aim a weapon up or down, they rarely gave you much of an indication of how that shot would impact the enemy you’re aiming at without breaking the mood of the fight with complex interfaces and stopping the moment. Usually, games with this combat would just stay on the safe side and let you figure out the rules of aiming on your own. While that did protect the fragile purity of the horror, it would come at the cost of a steep and occasionally frustrating learning curve. Sometimes, you’d get the headshot of a zombie that’s right in front of you, sometimes you’d miss, it was just a crapshoot a lot of the time.

But Eternal Darkness approached that problem with an elegant solution of highlighting the exact body part you’re aiming at and letting you select the portion of the body you wanted to attack with the GameCube’s analog stick in real-time. This would result in the game highlighting the enemy’s torso, head, or other extremities for a quick and simple indication of what you are poised to hit should you choose to hit the attack button at that time. This does perhaps come at the cost of a little bit of immersion for some horror enthusiasts, but I think it’s a fair trade for how much more playable it makes the combat. Infact, I think this simple solution makes the combat in Eternal Darkness one of the best combat systems in the entire adventure/horror genre. At least from this era. It lets you have your cake and eat it too, with the atmosphere and tension that a fixed camera can provide, but minimizing the stiffness and imprecision that it can bring to the combat of so many other similar games.

Of course, this isn’t nearly as big of a deal as the sanity meter in Eternal Darkness. The sanity meter is something that can make or break you during play, as it goes down with every monster encounter and other moments. This is something you want to avoid as much as possible, as the game will absolutely start turning your experience upside down with more disorienting camera angles, strange voices, and even your items disappearing from your inventory. It messes with you the player more than with your actual character in a way that reaches near Hideo Kojima levels of wackiness. If you’ve ever played a Clock Tower game or Amnesia, you’ll probably recognize the general idea of how the sanity meter works, but Eternal Darkness turns this up to 11 and really leans into it to, I think, great effect.

This is where a lot of the game’s finer audio and visual design elements start to show themselves with cool effects and noises that you rarely saw or heard in games from this time, and even less often on the GameCube. Some of them are so fun and entertaining that you might want to play through certain sections multiple times just to see more of them. However, as these “sanity effects” are technically not regarded as a good thing by the context of the game, you do eventually need to snap out of them or avoid them to progress as intended. Your character’s grip on reality can be repaired through either executing enemies or casting one of the game’s many spells. Spells are also used for solving puzzles, revealing doors, and even buffing weapons, so there is that little dash of fantasy in the mix that makes the game all the more unique among its contemporaries.

Overall, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a game worth playing for many reasons. It’s not the scariest horror game, nor is it the most intuitive action game, but it’s ability to improve on some of the blind spots of survival horror gameplay while providing some fun action and a well-paced story do make it stand out among both genres. While the plot does bounce around the timeline a bit much for my taste and the horror isn’t particularly scary most of the time, it’s still an incredibly unique game that manages to gracefully meld many great ideas that normally wouldn’t go together at all. For all of this, it’s definitely one hell of a game.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The story of Too Human is an interesting one. The game began development way back in 1999, and bumped around to multiple different publishers and systems for almost an entire decade until finally releasing in 2008 for the Xbox 360. The game was ultimately a flop, but would also get tied up in a lawsuit that would see it delisted, and would then reappear with no announcement or fanfare years later. Now, you can also get it for free.

You can see the listing in the Microsoft store for the game here. While not a particularly great game, it’s an interesting one to revisit, because it has a Norse mythology inspiration, which is all the rage right now, and also had a big focus on loot, something that was rare for a single player title at the time but now extremely common.

Technically, Too Human is a Xbox 360 game, but it has been added to the Xbox One backwards compatibility list, so it will be playable on any 360 or One hardware. It’s unclear if this is the standard price now or just for a limited time.

Whatever this could indicate is currently unknown. When GameSpot asked a Nintendo representative about it, “We have no comment regarding this trademark matter,” was the reply.

Is Nintendo interested in bringing back the Eternal Darkness series, perhaps as a series downloadable games split into chapters or episodes like The Walking Dead? It would certainly make for an interesting situation, considering Precursor’s on-going work with the franchise. We’ll have to wait and see what comes of it, but for now, Eternal Darkness is a big deal. Who thought that was possible a year ago?

Canadian police have arrested co-founder Ken McCulloch on charges relating to child pornography. A press release by the Niagra police stated that, “On Thursday, June 27th, 2013, Detectives from the Internet Child Exploitation Unit/Child Abuse Unit, Technological Crimes Unit and Uniform Officers executed a search warrant at a St. Catharines residence. Subsequently, a significant number of computer systems and peripheral devices were seized as evidence.

“Kenneth McCulloch, 42 years old, of St. Catharines, Ontario, was arrested and is charged with one count each of Possession of Child Pornography, Making Child Pornography Available, and Accessing Child Pornography, contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada. This investigation is ongoing. McCulloch is being held in custody, pending a bail hearing scheduled for June 28th, 2013 at the Robert S. K. Welch Courthouse, located at 59 Church Street, in the City of St. Catharines.”

In an official company post, CEO Paul Caporicci stated that, “Having just learned of these disturbing charges today and based on the serious nature of them, Ken McCulloch is no longer affiliated in any way with Precursor Games.” The former Silicon Knights director’s name has been removed from the site and staff listings.

In a Reddit AMA, CEO Shawn Jackson defended the decision to hire Dyack. “We hired him because he’s a valuable asset to the team. We intend to show people the real Denis Dyack through his interactions on the forums and videos. Denis has made many successful games and ran independent studio for over 20 years.

“We didn’t anticipate a backlash because we actually know Denis as the person he is. We believe in Denis and with him focusing on creative, he is excelling at something that he loves.”

That being said, if the game doesn’t even get off the ground, will it really show us the man who made Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem possible, rather than the present man whose negligence made X-Men Destiny possible?

That project never got very far though. Now, however, IGN posted a teaser trailer for something called Shadow of the Eternals, developed by Precursor Games. It’s billed as being “from the creators of Eternal Darkness”, and the developers will be announcing a crowdfunding campaign for the same on Monday.

Whether the studio is related to Silicon Knights or is composed of former stalwarts is unknown. We’ll to wait till Monday for more information on just what Shadow of the Eternals really is, beyond that it could be a successor to Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

The Supernova of Kickstarter/Public Funding
The year was famous for many things, but if there’s one thing developers will fondly look back on and remember about 2012, it’s Kickstarter. Until the digital public funding medium was used for games, it was well known just what kind of horrors a developer had to go through just to get its game published. In fact, some developers have relegated themselves to designing the same game, year in and year out, under the whims of greedy publishers (hi, Activision!).

But Kickstarter allowed developers to take away control from the publisher and put into the hands of those who mattered most: the gamers. If anything, it allowed gamers to finally have a say on what games they wanted to see come to the market. No excuses, no regrets, and every dollar made a difference. Double Fine Productions was the first to break out, earning 3,336,371 with their first Kickstarter. Then Obsidian’s Project Eternity gained some ground, and went on to succeed with 3,986,929 in backing. Let’s not forget the return of The Longest Journey, with Dreamfall Chapters also in development. Even the hallowed veteran Chris Roberts came out of retirement to announce Star Citizen and seek funding through his own website and through Kickstarter (which has unsurprisingly been a wild success).

Since then, we’ve had a myriad of different developers taking to the medium, using it to finance their games, but Kickstarter didn’t just ignite a dormant market for funding – rather, it showed that crowd funding via the Internet could actually work. Heck, even Peter Molyneux is down on his knees, screaming “hallelujah!” and “I’m indie! Fund me!” in the name of crowd funding support.

It’s also helped foster some innovations like the first console to be powered by Android, the Ouya. The next year will be amazing not only because of new projects in the pipeline like Black Isle Studios’ Project V13, but also because many of the Kickstarter projects will see release. It’s an exciting year, to be sure, and we can’t wait to see what kind of reception these games generate.

Knightfall: The End of Silicon Knights
It didn’t grab gamers by the wrist, urging them to listen to tales of madness and depravity. But admittedly, the story of Silicon Knights and their slow but steady decline into obscurity was an explosive one.

For the first time, via a former employee ousted from the studio, we got to learn of the cancelled projects the developer never got around to – including Eternal Darkness 2 – and the dealings of Denis Dyack as he personally drove his studio to the ground.

In between, there were annoyances with Activision, who wanted to see some kind of return on X-Men: Destiny, news about the development of a survival horror game known as The Box (which was somehow meant to be a Silent Hill title, and yet was taken to Sega for consideration), the revelation that Silicon Knights had continued using Unreal Engine 3 even after their monumental court case with Epic Games, a look inside the mind of Dyack, who wanted those who left the studio to have their names stricken off the credits list and awarded only “Special Thanks” (until Activision stepped in and called bullshit) and most importantly, how a single ego can systematically infect and annihilate even the most promising of developers.

BaZynga: Something Clever to Say How Farmville Dev is Dying
There was a time when I came across this article and was utterly disgusted. Simply put, when your CEO says stuff like, “I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs*”, you know there’s a problem.

At that point, it didn’t bother me to see what happened to this company who was making money off of people with their shabbily designed “Ville” clones. So even when they went their own way from Facebook – which was hilariously some time before Facebook went into public trading – it only struck me as inconsequential.

Then there were the falling profits, resignations and absurd threats of legality. Sooner rather than later, Zynga had lost its way, with the once vaunted social games no longer offering the same modicum of returns. The developer tried and is still in the process of branching out into mobile development, along with developing board games with Hasbro for its titles, but it’s still in a free fall.

Such is the state of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that even industry veteran Bill Campbell, currently director at Apple who’s helped many visionaries like Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt in their times of need, reported that he was in tears regarding the state of his company. Will 2013 be the year that Zynga finally folds?

The Next Wave of Consoles
The Wii U might have gotten a head start but quite frankly, rumours of Sony and Microsoft’s next consoles have been doing the rounds for a good couple of years now. You can read more about it here, but long story short, Microsoft’s newest iteration of the Xbox has been called everything from Xbox Next to Xbox 720 and more. Oddly enough, the Playstation 4 has remained pretty much that.

Both consoles are rumoured to be more geared towards the living room experience, with Kinect branching out into Glasses tech to allow for enhanced augmented reality functions. Sony for its part is looking into finger sensing, depth perceived technology, most likely for it’s Playstation Eye to give it Kinect-like functionality. The newest consoles, following leaked specs from hardware running Square Enix’s next gen title Agni’s Philosophy, might contain as much as 32 GB of RAM.

We can’t really say where it will go or which one will be a success, but the console war is about to heat up again. It may be a different generation with different expectations but come E3 2013, if both consoles are really going to be announced, the gaming industry will show once again that war never changes.

Former Silicon Knights staff member Stefan Jewinski revealed in his LinkedIn profile that The Box was an “open world survival horror” for the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360. It was also being developed around the same time as Too Human. Why didn’t we hear any rumblings from Konami? Because they were never approached. Instead, Silicon Knights took the game to Sega. Eventually they ditched it, and THQ took it up, calling it “The Ritualyst” before finally canning it in 2009.

Was Konami ever approached? This is still unknown but a bevy of screenshots from the cancelled title show what could have been.

Source: NeoGAF

1. Rare

Once upon a time, there was a company called Rare that made some very nice Nintendo games. You’ve probably heard of them: Banjo Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing and even some little game called Goldeneye 007. However, after being purchased by Microsoft and releasing a few ho-hum titles, the developer was relegated to developing Kinect games. Games which have been very successful, don’t get us wrong, but still paint a very strange picture of Rare’s legacy. Most famously, a composer from Rare talked about how Microsoft had killed the company.

But they brought us…

Perfect Dark, a first person shooter that succeeded Goldeneye 007 and cemented Rare’s legacy as a company not to be trifled with. The game introduced quite a few new mechanics such as the ability to take control of the opposing side in campaign mode to fight against the players and the “Simulants”, individual AI bots for multiplayer that can be heavily customized to provide a challenging and fun experience. Even today, we see remnants of these two factors such as in Gears of War 3’s Beast Mode and Resident Evil 6’s Agent Hunt mode.

2. Sega

If there’s ever been a bigger fall from grace in gaming like Sega’s, it’s unheard of. The company went from being part of the Big Two, competing with Nintendo at every turn, and eventually standing alongside Sony and Nintendo as the generations Big Three before cancelling the Dreamcast and retiring from the hardware business altogether. This would’ve helped the company’s focus but they succeeded in ruining many of their key franchises like Sonic the Hedgehog and outright ignoring others like Crazy Taxi, Virtual On, Skies of Arcadia and more. Sega does see some success these days with Phantasy Star Online but it’s best titles are from other developers like Platinum Games’ Bayonetta and Creative Assembly’s Total War series.

But they brought us…

Shenmue. This is not only the game that introduced Quick Time Events but also brought forth a more cinematic and simpler presentation to the gameplay and character. As a saga and adventure game, it was somewhat hit and miss, but this is the title that arguably ushered in the era of David Cage’s titles like Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit and Beyond: Two Souls, besides giving every single developer nowadays a cool way to do something with just a button press. In a way, it’s also the basis for the combat system in games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.

3. Silicon Knights

Oh, Silicon Knights. This is the story of a developer who’s one key figure – Denis Dyack – went from the hottest thing to a megalomaniacal, despotic douche who actually made us feel bad for Activision and the money they wasted. After moving away from Nintendo and developing the Too Human trilogy, which ended in a single game, and then releasing X-Men: Destiny, the working conditions in the company eventually came out. And if Dyack had his way under his now-three person regime, there would be no one credited for developing X-Men: Destiny in the first place.

But they brought us…

Eternal Darkness. Besides being a very compelling action-adventure and horror game, it introduced the Sanity Meter. Essentially, as horrifying things began to happen, the player would lose his grip on reality. This would manifest in different ways such as warped painting and surroundings to the Start button being randomly pressed and controllers being disconnected. While not featuring anything as extreme, Call of Cthulhu and Amnesia: The Dark Descent featured protagonists who’s mental health had a bearing on their overall performance and perception of the world around them.

4. Konami

Now this may raise some ire: How is it that a company responsible for Metal Gear Solid has fallen out of favour in the past few years? Very simple: that was Kojima Productions. The main company hasn’t had a great new IP in a while, and it’s key franchises like Silent Hill have been faltering for a while. The company must be commended for re-releasing Zone of the Enders for the new generation – thought there have been complaints of the games not carrying a steady 60 FPS frame rate – but they’re definitely not the same behemoth without Hideo Kojima backing them.

But they brought us…

Suikoden. Now why of all the games would Suikoden, a Japanese RPG, be highlighted? Because, it brought forth one of the first defining moments of player choice in RPGs ever. So much so, that it actually inspired Warren Spector to create Deus Ex. By that extension, it’s something that the entire Western RPG industry is built on, without which games like Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Alpha Protocol and many others just wouldn’t be the same. Arguably, this mechanic of choosing and reflecting your inner nature was also seen in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, an old-school PC adventure game, but for inspiring Spector and one of the “choicest” games of all time, Suikoden gets the nod.

5. id Software

Long story short: RAGE was a disappointment that took too long and didn’t look half as good as the company promised while Doom 3 BFG Edition is a waste of time.

But they brought us…

Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein – for that matter, the entire first person shooter framework that we know today. Companies like ION Storm, Valve and Epic Games wouldn’t be as big as they are today if they hadn’t started out in some form or the other by id’s influence, be it through personnel (John Romero staring ION Storm), technology (Half-Life used the Quake II engine) and competition (Unreal Tournament was made specifically to combat Quake 3: Arena, and thus began the engine wars between the two companies). Let’s not forget the mouse-look, capture the flag, rocket jumps, respawning enemies and so many other famous tropes that no FPS game would be complete without.