These are the first menus I’ve ever seen that are beautifully creepy.

Disgusting sounds permeate the air as the tentacles of The Darkness writhe in the background behind the menu text. The text — which also happen to cast shadows onto the tentacles — is otherwise plain. The combination here of the creepy tentacles, gross sounds, and the contrasting bare-bones menu system work to keep you immersed in the game. You will never confuse the paused Darkness to any other game. These are the complete opposite of the boring SNES-era styled menus of Lost Planet.

You can also pause The Darkness during cutscenes without being forced to skip them. One of the stupidest things I am always hesitant about when playing games is if I can pause and resume cutscenes. Though the ability to move your view around or otherwise interact with them may be a good indicator that the game has that feature. You can also press the O button during cutscenes to skip them, of course

It is apparent that Starbreeze learned a lot doing The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, and I heartily recommend The Darkness for anyone who enjoys a bit of cutscene and action.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m watching some Flash Gordon on a shitty TV in The Darkness…

While playing this demo I noticed a few things:

• All NBA games appear to involve rap music, most of the demos which include it appear to include no option to disable said music. I like some rap music, but this pop stuff isn’t it. I assume this is some kind of attempt to pander to the audience of 18-24 year olds who love pop rap.
• The players are lit unrealistically, and the shadows you see when players jump belie the limited shadowing available (it is a very blurry squared low-poly shadow figure) when you’re rendering an otherwise fantastic stadium and many other players.
• Along with terrible sprite trees, which speedtree only partially negates in games that use it, my other big gripe with a lot of games are a sprite based audience. I’m incredibly happy to hopefully never see that again, and although the audience doesn’t have a lot of polys, it has enough to partially fool me during motion.
• The sideline announcers are static polygon models, ugh. Please fix this in the release build.
• The cloth physics are nice, but they’re completely disconnected from “reality” when you engage the replay mode’s vcr controls, snapping around and reacting differently each time. This probably isn’t solvable, or worth solving at the moment.
• Also in replay mode you’ll notice players clipping through solid objects. This image from the gamespot review is a good example.
• Similarly, in replay mode, they’re at least smart enough to zap the player model if the camera moves anywhere near enough to clip the camera through the model, seeing the inside.
• The game is ridiculously pretty in motion, most of my graphical issues with the game aren’t noticeable when I’m playing. Which brings me to my next point:
• I don’t feel the uncanny valley whilst NBA 07 game is in motion.
• The uncanny valley ruined my experience with Madden on the 360, at various points the animations of players on the field, the most valuable and observed asset in the game, would cease animating while at the line waiting for the QB to start the play.
• I wish there were a 3D NBA Jam with this level of engine and quality.