By Adam Smith on October 3rd, 2011 at 5:15 pm.
What mad form of ultraviolence will I be introduced to next, I often wonder. This time it’s quad wielding in The Darkness 2, making me realise it wasn’t long ago that dual wielding was an exciting prospect thought to be possible only in John Woo films, but then Rise of the Triad came along with its guns akimbo and ludicrous gibs. Judging by this new video, The Darkness 2 won’t disappoint on either the gore or the preposterous death-dealing fronts. With a gun in each hand and murderous tentacles sprouting from his flesh, Jackie Estacado can rip the door off a car and cut a goon’s face off with it while firing two automatic weapons, or ensnare an unruly gangsster, casually lob him into the air, and then fill him with bullets before he hits the floor. If you don’t believe these things are possible, watch and learn.
It seems like gunstacking was only yesterday and now this? It can’t be long before someone makes a game where the player is a gun made out of other guns that shoot guns. The trailer doesn’t actually tell us much beyond the fact that people will die horribly at Jackie’s hands and other appendages. It does occasionally look like the city has been converted into a zero gravity chamber, causing men to drift slowly in the ether rather than slamming into walls with bone-crunching force.
And is it just me or are the logos at the beginning of the trailer louder and more active than most actual trailers? I felt like I’d been to a particularly raucous rock concert.
03/10/2011 at 17:18 Shooop says:
It can’t be long before someone makes a game where the player is a gun made out of other guns that shoot guns.
Someone make this a reality. It must be made so.
03/10/2011 at 17:22 Jesse L says:
What’s that little indie game where the player character is a torso with machineguns for arms and legs, and you move by firing the guns in the opposite direction?
03/10/2011 at 17:28 Teddy Leach says:
That’s the one I was thinking of.
03/10/2011 at 17:28 Adam Smith says:
I believe it may be Gunlimb.
03/10/2011 at 17:32 toomian says:
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/08/browser_game_pick_metagun_mark.html
Notch made one too, called “Metagun”.
03/10/2011 at 17:39 Ross Angus says:
@toomian: was that before, or after Shamas Young’s cartoon? (I know it’s later in terms of date, but perhaps Notch started working on it earlier).
03/10/2011 at 18:07 westyfield says:
IIRC there was a BF2 mod that, among other things*, replaced the helicopters’ rockets with F-35s, which were themselves firing missiles.
*It also made the pistol call down artillery strikes, attached tanks to J-10s, and made jeeps fly.
04/10/2011 at 00:24 MadTinkerer says:
In the Worms 2 weapon editor, you could make a minigun that fires bullets that split into smaller projectiles (like a fragmentation grenade), each one of which had a payload that could destroy half a screen. So it was basically a bunker-buster with the firing rate of a minigun.
Every time it was used, there was a 50/50 chance of wiping out your own team.
04/10/2011 at 00:30 LionsPhil says:
Worms 2′s weapon editor was basically the best thing ever.
04/10/2011 at 03:30 Adam says:
Sure why not….More hands for more weapons…why not.
03/10/2011 at 17:29 felisc says:
well, swinging tentacles is cool, but they take an awful lot of space on the screen.
03/10/2011 at 17:30 Teddy Leach says:
It wasn’t a problem in the first game.
03/10/2011 at 17:30 Lord Custard Smingleigh says:
Rise of the Triad: 2x wield: 1995.
The Darkness 2: 4x wield: 2011.
Doubling in wieldiness every 16 years. It doesn’t sound like much, but by 2171 we will be wielding four thousand and ninety-six weapons at once.
03/10/2011 at 17:52 sneetch says:
Knowing that my great grandchildren will enjoy this makes it all feel worthwhile.
03/10/2011 at 17:54 John Richardson says:
Sounds like a future Borderlands game
03/10/2011 at 19:39 DeathCarrot says:
MDK2 had quad-wielding in 2000. We should be up to 8 or 16 way wielding by now!
04/10/2011 at 00:10 Navagon says:
So by then we’ll have a game based on this film?
03/10/2011 at 17:48 ResonanceCascade says:
I read ‘wielding’ as ‘welding’ and thought for a moment that the gun in the image was a blowtorch.
Which makes me wonder, why don’t more games let you kill people with a blowtorch?
03/10/2011 at 18:59 Balhazer says:
There’s Killing Floor, the “pyro” perk let you incinerate everything at your heart content!
It even prize you with more damage and fuel to keep doing it.
03/10/2011 at 19:40 Strange_guy says:
Except even in the firebugs hands the blow torch does no damage. I guess you could argue the flamethrower is a very specialist type of blow torch though.
03/10/2011 at 18:26 flexm says:
Or why doesn’t more games just feature welding in general, some really good games have had welding while it’s almost always absent from shitty games. (ie alien swarm vs alien breed)
edit: replyness to resonance cascade lost by logging in
03/10/2011 at 19:01 Kollega says:
The headline makes me think of that other game – “Dudebro: My S**t is F***ed Up So I’ve Got To Shoot/Slice You 2: It’s Straight-Up Dawg Time.”
03/10/2011 at 19:04 Battlehenkie says:
It’s a shame the first installment is not available for PC. Atmosphere, music and Mike Patton made it one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in the past decade.
03/10/2011 at 19:19 Colonel J says:
Indeed. I really enjoyed the first game back in the day when I still had a console. Surprised that Starbreeze never ported it to PC.
04/10/2011 at 02:01 Shortwave says:
Mike Patton you say?!
I wonder if he’ll be in this one? Hmm.
That would be enough for me to buy it. Ha!
04/10/2011 at 10:01 Battlehenkie says:
Aye, he’s confirmed to have reprised his role as The Darkness. He’s the reason that got me interested in the first game in the first place. Anything that man touches is quality, so I feel TD2 must be a safe buy.
03/10/2011 at 20:38 Danny252 says:
Is it just me or do the guns just seem rather superfluous?
“You could shoot him, or you could throw that lampost at him”
“You could hold him up with a tentacle and shoot him, or you could just have the other tentacle punch through his neck”
“You could knock them down with a tentacle whack and shoot them, or you could slice them in half”
“You could hide behind a car door whilst advancing and shooting, or you could throw it at them”
03/10/2011 at 21:07 Xenon_MD says:
I’ve got a box full of the comics and iirc Jackie never used guns when he was able to use the Darkness.
Guns during his daylight hours when he was at his most vulnerable and couldn’t use his powers – at all other times it was full on Darkness tentacles, minions and ripping into things using the claws on his armour.
03/10/2011 at 20:50 Grinnbarr says:
I can see how this would work with a controller (triggers and bumpers) but how the hell do you control something like this with M+K?
05/10/2011 at 10:56 RegisteredUser says:
4 button mouse = voila.
Although I kind of prefer akimbo guns that fire on a single click rather than having to hold 2 buttons, so a 3 button mouse should already do.
Or simply ESDF keyboard and A and G are the tentacles. Or W and R. etc pp.
Nothing is impossible, you DO have 100+ buttons available with a PC, unlike with a console..
03/10/2011 at 21:21 Scandalon says:
Pointless nitpicking: According to Wikipedia, Marathon was released several months before RoTT, and it featured dual-wielded shotguns…or did that not come until Marathon 2?
03/10/2011 at 23:04 Creeping Death says:
You could have found this out while on Wikipedia
“Naturally, action films have been a major influence on action gaming. Rise of the Triad and Marathon, both released on December 21, 1994, were the earliest first-person shooters to integrate akimbo pistols.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_wield
It would seem by wikipedia skills outmatch yours, sir!
04/10/2011 at 05:05 Scandalon says:
Au Contraire!
I got my release dates from the main wikipedia entries forRoTT and Marathon which clearly are more canonical than a stub entry such as that put forth by yourself.
Clearly my wikipediosity is greater than thine own. Do you yield?!?
However, I am humble and gracious enough to admit I was slightly wrong, in that Marathon 1 only let you dual-wield the pistols, the shotguns were in M2. (From TV Tropes entry on Dual Wielding AKA Guns Akimbo:
03/10/2011 at 22:01 nrvsNRG says:
really looking forward to this. played the first one on the shitbox360 and very much enjoyed the feeling of power it gave you.
04/10/2011 at 01:17 YanDaik says:
crazy camera movement
04/10/2011 at 13:02 KenTWOu says:
Jackie Estacado can rip the door off a car…
Reminds me about Crysis 2, cause Alcatraz already did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wMCpDgDEqI
05/10/2011 at 10:16 MonkeyMonster says:
Ludicrous gibs… oh the memories. A small tear of teenage joy just dribbled from my eye as I fondly remember the very very early serial cabled based multiplayerings of ROTT and doom2…
Made my wednesday, thank you Adam.