Game:Dark Vengeance

Reviewed by: Kirk Hiner

I never played too much Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger. I got into Star Frontiers for a while, but the whole spell casting thing never really appealed to me. I can remember staying up late at Church Camp a few nights to get through a game of D&D, but I had more fun trying to kill myself and my friends than I did at attempting to accomplish anything. I'm older and wiser now, though, and the carefree days of youth have given way to the...well...the carefree days of adulthood. I mean, I'm a game reviewer, for cryin-out-loud. I haven't done too much growing up over the past fifteen years.

Good thing,too, as it gives me an excuse to spend far too much time playing games such as MacSoft's Dark Vengeance.

Despite its unfortunate name ("Dark Vengeance" would serve better as the title of a USA Network original movie starring Joan Severence and Anthony Perkins), this is an entertaining game. A great combination of adventure and plot compensate for some shaky interface elements, making Dark Vengeance worth the money and time.

The premise is nothing new; an evil hoard arises to rein destruction on all mankind. Rather than organize an army to fight off this menace, the onus of saving the Earth falls on one person--either Nanoc the Gladiator, Kite the Trickster or the Jetrel the Warlock, depending on how you prefer to fight. Me? I went with Nanoc for two reasons. One, as I've mentioned, I'm not much for magic spells, and Nanoc is the type of guy who'd rather swing an axe at someone than throw a fireball. And two, his name spelled backwards is Conan, which was a movie produced by Dino DeLaurentiis, who also produced my favorite movie of all time,"Flash Gordon." Kite spelled backwards is Etik, and Jetrel is Lertej, neither of which recall any movies of note.

Excuse my tangent.

Now, learning to control even the brutish Nanoc proved a bit tricky, as Dark Vengeance utilizes a control scheme called chording. For those who don't know, chording involves using modifier keys to control different actions your character can take. For instance, if you use 8 to move forward, you'd use Control + 8 to attack forward, Z + 8 to jump forward, and Control + Z + 8 to dodge forward. It's actually pretty handy once you get used to it, but be prepared to either save your game a lot or use the cheats until you do.

And explain this to me. I mean, I know that cheating is big in today's society. I saw the N.Y. Jets cheat to beat the Seattle Seahawks in this past football season, I cheated on my multiplication tables in third grade so that I could go the A&W Root Beer Stand with Mrs. Wollesson, and lets not even bring up our wonderful President. But why did Reality Bytes find it necessary to make cheating an option in the game? Invincibility is a feature you can select, not a code you have to dig up on the Internet. Perhaps they anticipated the difficulty people would have trying to fight in the narrow hallways of this game.

That, actually, is my only major complaint about this game. Most of the quarters in which the action takes place were more cramped than a subway car in Tokyo at rush hour. Having little room to move greatly hindered my ability to fight; I can't imagine how difficult it would've been with Jetrel or Kite who need room to cast their spells. On top of this is the gamma problem. I'm used to sacrificing brightness when playing 3Dfx accelerated games, but...well, they don't call it DARK Vengeance for nothing. In some areas, I had to shut off every light in the room just to be able to see my Nanoc, let alone whoever was currently attacking him. To be fair, the gamma toggle option was disabled on my computer, for reasons unbeknownst to me. I'll be curious to learn if others had this same problem.

Having said that, I should also point out that--when you can actually see the graphics--they are pretty sweet with RAVE acceleraction (no Glide support here, but see below for the trick to get hardware acceleration with the GameWizard Voodoo2 card). Even better than the surroundings are the battles. Most of the spells are wicked to watch, some of the nasties die in really cool ways, and the melee weapons leave a wild ghost-trail after you swing them, green if you missed, red if you connected.

The story in Dark Vengeance just gets better as the game progresses, which is rare in action-based titles. Like a good book, the further you get into Dark Vengeance, the more interesting it becomes. It's this feature that sets it apart from comparable games such as Unreal.

Dark Vengeance does have a network option, but I wasn't able to give that a go. Well, more like I wasn't willing to give it a go. Call me crazy, but I'm not into getting my butt whooped online by some eight-year-old in Redmond named "PC_Rewls."

Besides, I do have to save some time for watching all those USA Network original movies. I hear they're working on one right now in which a character played by Joan Severence gets entangled in a web of sex and murder. How's that for cutting edge?

Genre: Action/Adventure

Platform: MacOS

Format: CD

Developer: Reality Bytes

Publisher: MacSoft

Requirements: PowerPC (180MHz 603e or 132 MHz 604), System 7.6.1, 32MB RAM, 50MB hard disk space, 256 color monitor, CD-ROM drive

3Dfx Support: Rave

Retail price: $39.95

Network Feature: Yes

Availability: Out now

Now, for those of you with Voodoo2 cards. You'll have to create a different startup set using the RAVE driver included on the DV disk. Keep the Game Wizard Glide extension enabled, but disable the Game Wizard RAVE driver. When playing other 3D accelerated games, however, it's probably best to switch back to the Game Wizard RAVE.

Thanks to Jennifer Ho at MacAddict for giving me this information.

Raised on Intellivision and "Tron," Kirk Hiner has been an avid gamer ever since he was tall enough to look through the viewfinder on the Battlezone upright. Although he makes a living using a PC (not by choice) to design websites for Dynamics Online, Inc., Kirk never strays from his 9600/200 or 3400c for computer gaming. When he's not playing the latest Logicware release, he can either be found working on his next "never to be published" novel, rereading anything by Kurt Vonnegut or watching RAW is WAR.

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February 09, 2010