Dark Souls: PC-Style

My wait to play Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for the Personal Computer is finally over. I was waiting for the price to come down and when it did several days ago, I snatched it up instantaneously. It would have been easy to justify getting it at the $39.99 when it first came out, which of course perfectly matches my price sweet spot, because the game is quite remarkable as I have written about it before but I already have the PlayStation 3 version and that became somewhat of a roadblock. You know how much I hate redundancies. The PC version of the game comes with the additional features that also became available as a paid downloadable content on the console version so why didn't I just get that for my PS3? Well, it's because of this:

 

As soon as I got in game, the difference in image quality was immediately noticable.

 

You may have heard that the PC version was a straight port of the console version and yes, that was true which meant poor graphical optimization when things could look a million times better. But as soon as the game came out months ago, this awesome modder also released a self-made patch to make the game look incredibly gorgeous. All of a sudden, the game is no longer stuck at low native resolution and using the patch, I myself am now running it at native 1080p. Sure, the frame rate is still stuck at 30 because of the game engine - there is actually another patch that can fix that but it also ruins the game speed - but imagine playing the Dark Souls in crystal clarity with improved default effects as well as the addition of ambient occlusion with no frame rate drops... Oh what delicious fantasy! Only that it is a reality with the PC version of the game - that is as long as your computer can handle it. I can't wait to revisit the areas that slows the game to a crawl on the PS3 and experience them without that frustration. I played the PS3 version for 75+ hours and I am ready to invest at least the same amount of time with this version. The Prepare to Die tag line is extremely cheesy for me as it continues the trend of over-hyping the game's so-called "super difficulty" - you would think that such a shallow marketing strategy would only work with children but the game is rated M unless Namco Bandai Games was thinking that childish gamers are their target audience... A lot of people got stuck thinking that this game is super-duper-isn't-this-awesome hard so the publisher was indeed successful in their intent. To me, the only thing that should "prepare to die" is my PS3 Dark Souls disc.