Recently, whilst plumbing the depths of the abadonware oceans looking for treasures that had been lost to me long ago, I came across an exciting sounding horror adventure game series called Dark Seed.
Having read the review that the site gave me, it told me that it contained the artworks of one H.R Geiger. The Swedish, or was is Swiss? Born artist who designed the Xenomorph for the Alien movies. The review on the website guaranteed thrills and chills in an interesting plot in what promised to be one of the best abandonware games I'd ever play.
May I say at this point, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT REVIEWER THINKING?!
Try to imagine a game that stars American hillbilly comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who has dyed his hair black. Then put him in some kind of brown suit. Plant him in an old run down house, where he decides to write a great book, possibly one about farming and its humor or some such. Then imagine that rather than actually writing the novel at any point, he instead decides to piss fart around the local area for no apparent reason and ends up getting into a needlessly complicated alien conspiracy and you've got the basic outline of what Dark Seed is like.
You play Mike Dawson(MD) , a 70's porn star, who has just moved into an old and decrepit mansion. At this point I'd like to point out that Mike Dawson is in fact the games creator and he, out of some mind bogglingly deranged whim, has planted himself into the game as the main protagonist. MD is a writer, supposedly, the only way to actually realize this is that the game tells you before hand, as MD doesn't actually do any writing at all in the game. He's been having bad nightmares, in which some machine plants some weird ass alien fetus in his head. He then awakens with a throbbing headache. After a quick shower and visit to the good ol' medicine cabinet our brave mustached hero is ready to...... Uhhh.
Do nothing. As far as I can tell, you don't really seem to do an awful lot. After a few measly hours have ticked by, the door bell rings. A delivery man answers and gives you a package containing, a doll. After a short cinematic, showing the doll shift into some kind of alien, thing, and back the game returns to normal. But hang on lets back track, there's a few questions that itch in the back of my skull.
1. Why was a doll delivered to MDs' house? He doesn't seem to have any kids or even a wife, so unless he some kind of pervert with a doll fetish I don't really see why he ordered one up in the first place.
2. Where the hell did he put it afterwords? Its not an item, it doesn't appear in your inventory and he hasn't placed it anywhere visible, so I'm going to go with my pervert theory and just say he stuffed it down his pants.
Moving on, you soon exit the house and find that the tension making music that is found throughout the entire house is now replaced with this happy lar de dar type music. Now horror makers, a word to the wise when making a horror game, do not under any circumstance use such music, it just detracts from the atmosphere your abysmal little game has meekly attempted to conjure up.
Following a series of dull walking around, picking up useless objects for no readily apparent reason and just wasting enough time for MD to get tired enough to call it a day. You eventually end up in the alien world. Now it looks really nice, don't get me wrong. Geiger shows that he is well and truly a competent artist. But that's all it has, the music consists of screechy theramin wails that haven't been used to effect since the days of ye olde sci-fi., the animation of the aliens talking looks like a ventriloquist act and the evil and sinister plot they've constructed makes absolutely no sense.
Yawning profusely at the sheer terror of it all. I gave up trying to figure out this worthless hunk of shite and turned to a walkthrough. The puzzles are so illogical and convoluted, that completing the game without one would be a miraculous feat indeed.
Here's an example on a puzzle in this game: You need to go to the local general store to buy a bottle of bourbon(there are about 10 other red herrings worth of useless produce to purchase as well) so that you can befriend an alcoholic lawyer who shows up a minute later so that you can meet up with him in your/his backyard, the next day at 6pm. When you do go, he's playing fetch with his dog, you give him the bottle of bourbon so he'll stumble off, while you then take the stick he was throwing to his dog and use it by throwing it off a ravine in the alien world to chase a way some kind of evil dog monster.
Gee it would of been easier if Mike had just picked up any bloody stick off the ground. But clearly that Alcoholic lawyers stick was magical.
The voice acting, while not terrible still sounds really bad. This is mainly because everytime someone speaks the music stops and the dialogue is delivered in a way that sounds like someone has just switched on a stereo and then switched it off when they person has finished speaking.
Long and tedious story short you eventually thwart the aliens by sending their ship off into space. The thing is the aliens are already on earth, they are hibernating in the nearby graveyard. So what exactly is letting the ship go for a joy ride exactly supposed to do? Make them so mad that they all suffer a mass aneurysm? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
This then brings us to the chilling and terrifying sequel Dark Seed 2. Oho! What sheer terror your in for! Mr Foxworthy. Having not bothered to write anything from his previous escapade, clearly got into financial strife from all that bourbon he bought and all that writing he didn't do, and has decided to go live with his mother in his Texas hometown. Turns out one of his old girl friends has been murdered and everyone in this backwater town somewhere in Texas thinks our humble porn star has done the deed.
So, with his crotch stuffed with many dolls of little girls, Mike mopes around town in search of real killer. His only friend is some twat who rides a motor cycle and wears a leather jacket and talks like a bad ass.
I think a more appropriate title for this game would be Sim Depression. As well as feeding of the success of Maxis, you basically are too depressed to do anything. You just mope from one place to the other not wanting to do anything in case you burst into tears over the sheer effort of it. More or less everything is locked and if you try and pick the lock with a coat hanger that you find while rummaging through the garbage bins no doubt looking for more dolls, you will find that he can't do it.
Anyway after a long boring series of tedious events, which basically sums up to walking around talking to people so that other events will trigger so you can talk to more people. You eventually end up in the dark world. Seems the aliens, are really mad that you let their space ship go for a joy ride and have decided to make your life all the more depressing.
Blah blah blah blah blah. Turns out you've been murdering everyone in town. Or rather, Mr rebel without a cause is. Who turns out to be the evil you! Or some shit like that.
Musics better this time round but then I've a soft spot for Mark Morgan. I can't get the damn voices to work in it so I can't comment on the quality of that. And I couldn't view any of the cut scenes and without them the games a great big series of what the hell just happened. Ah but it seems youtube, being the internets main sewage line, was able to provide. So to sum up both voice acting and cutscenes. Ha ha ha ha ugh.
That being said the critics thought this one was far worse than the original. Gee I'd say they were more or less the same in that they were both steaming piles of shit. Well that's my review of one of the most disappointing game series I've ever played. Do yourself a favor and don't bother with them. Your not missing out on much that's worth mentioning.
Having read the review that the site gave me, it told me that it contained the artworks of one H.R Geiger. The Swedish, or was is Swiss? Born artist who designed the Xenomorph for the Alien movies. The review on the website guaranteed thrills and chills in an interesting plot in what promised to be one of the best abandonware games I'd ever play.
May I say at this point, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT REVIEWER THINKING?!
Try to imagine a game that stars American hillbilly comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who has dyed his hair black. Then put him in some kind of brown suit. Plant him in an old run down house, where he decides to write a great book, possibly one about farming and its humor or some such. Then imagine that rather than actually writing the novel at any point, he instead decides to piss fart around the local area for no apparent reason and ends up getting into a needlessly complicated alien conspiracy and you've got the basic outline of what Dark Seed is like.
You play Mike Dawson(MD) , a 70's porn star, who has just moved into an old and decrepit mansion. At this point I'd like to point out that Mike Dawson is in fact the games creator and he, out of some mind bogglingly deranged whim, has planted himself into the game as the main protagonist. MD is a writer, supposedly, the only way to actually realize this is that the game tells you before hand, as MD doesn't actually do any writing at all in the game. He's been having bad nightmares, in which some machine plants some weird ass alien fetus in his head. He then awakens with a throbbing headache. After a quick shower and visit to the good ol' medicine cabinet our brave mustached hero is ready to...... Uhhh.
Do nothing. As far as I can tell, you don't really seem to do an awful lot. After a few measly hours have ticked by, the door bell rings. A delivery man answers and gives you a package containing, a doll. After a short cinematic, showing the doll shift into some kind of alien, thing, and back the game returns to normal. But hang on lets back track, there's a few questions that itch in the back of my skull.
1. Why was a doll delivered to MDs' house? He doesn't seem to have any kids or even a wife, so unless he some kind of pervert with a doll fetish I don't really see why he ordered one up in the first place.
2. Where the hell did he put it afterwords? Its not an item, it doesn't appear in your inventory and he hasn't placed it anywhere visible, so I'm going to go with my pervert theory and just say he stuffed it down his pants.
Moving on, you soon exit the house and find that the tension making music that is found throughout the entire house is now replaced with this happy lar de dar type music. Now horror makers, a word to the wise when making a horror game, do not under any circumstance use such music, it just detracts from the atmosphere your abysmal little game has meekly attempted to conjure up.
Following a series of dull walking around, picking up useless objects for no readily apparent reason and just wasting enough time for MD to get tired enough to call it a day. You eventually end up in the alien world. Now it looks really nice, don't get me wrong. Geiger shows that he is well and truly a competent artist. But that's all it has, the music consists of screechy theramin wails that haven't been used to effect since the days of ye olde sci-fi., the animation of the aliens talking looks like a ventriloquist act and the evil and sinister plot they've constructed makes absolutely no sense.
Yawning profusely at the sheer terror of it all. I gave up trying to figure out this worthless hunk of shite and turned to a walkthrough. The puzzles are so illogical and convoluted, that completing the game without one would be a miraculous feat indeed.
Here's an example on a puzzle in this game: You need to go to the local general store to buy a bottle of bourbon(there are about 10 other red herrings worth of useless produce to purchase as well) so that you can befriend an alcoholic lawyer who shows up a minute later so that you can meet up with him in your/his backyard, the next day at 6pm. When you do go, he's playing fetch with his dog, you give him the bottle of bourbon so he'll stumble off, while you then take the stick he was throwing to his dog and use it by throwing it off a ravine in the alien world to chase a way some kind of evil dog monster.
Gee it would of been easier if Mike had just picked up any bloody stick off the ground. But clearly that Alcoholic lawyers stick was magical.
The voice acting, while not terrible still sounds really bad. This is mainly because everytime someone speaks the music stops and the dialogue is delivered in a way that sounds like someone has just switched on a stereo and then switched it off when they person has finished speaking.
Long and tedious story short you eventually thwart the aliens by sending their ship off into space. The thing is the aliens are already on earth, they are hibernating in the nearby graveyard. So what exactly is letting the ship go for a joy ride exactly supposed to do? Make them so mad that they all suffer a mass aneurysm? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
This then brings us to the chilling and terrifying sequel Dark Seed 2. Oho! What sheer terror your in for! Mr Foxworthy. Having not bothered to write anything from his previous escapade, clearly got into financial strife from all that bourbon he bought and all that writing he didn't do, and has decided to go live with his mother in his Texas hometown. Turns out one of his old girl friends has been murdered and everyone in this backwater town somewhere in Texas thinks our humble porn star has done the deed.
So, with his crotch stuffed with many dolls of little girls, Mike mopes around town in search of real killer. His only friend is some twat who rides a motor cycle and wears a leather jacket and talks like a bad ass.
I think a more appropriate title for this game would be Sim Depression. As well as feeding of the success of Maxis, you basically are too depressed to do anything. You just mope from one place to the other not wanting to do anything in case you burst into tears over the sheer effort of it. More or less everything is locked and if you try and pick the lock with a coat hanger that you find while rummaging through the garbage bins no doubt looking for more dolls, you will find that he can't do it.
Anyway after a long boring series of tedious events, which basically sums up to walking around talking to people so that other events will trigger so you can talk to more people. You eventually end up in the dark world. Seems the aliens, are really mad that you let their space ship go for a joy ride and have decided to make your life all the more depressing.
Blah blah blah blah blah. Turns out you've been murdering everyone in town. Or rather, Mr rebel without a cause is. Who turns out to be the evil you! Or some shit like that.
Musics better this time round but then I've a soft spot for Mark Morgan. I can't get the damn voices to work in it so I can't comment on the quality of that. And I couldn't view any of the cut scenes and without them the games a great big series of what the hell just happened. Ah but it seems youtube, being the internets main sewage line, was able to provide. So to sum up both voice acting and cutscenes. Ha ha ha ha ugh.
That being said the critics thought this one was far worse than the original. Gee I'd say they were more or less the same in that they were both steaming piles of shit. Well that's my review of one of the most disappointing game series I've ever played. Do yourself a favor and don't bother with them. Your not missing out on much that's worth mentioning.