Digital Life

Since Darksiders is free on the PSN store, I decided to grab it and finish off the final few trophies I had left to get the platinum. I know, no one cares about trophies, it's the completionist in me. You can tell how much I like a game by how far out of my way I go to collect those little virtual cups.

Battle Hardened was one I'd been working on so I got that first. Tedious as hell, but not difficult in the least. And I found some amusement in punching ravens to death with the Tremor Gauntlet, so there's that.

Then on to the two I would need to start a new file for. Open Air Parking, which was basically recreating the Live Free or Die Hard scene, only with demons and no yippee ki-yaying. Took a couple tries because aiming cars at helicopters is harder than it looks. Gotta lead that target, man.

And now we come to the one True Bastard of a trophy. Every game has one. It's that one trophy that's hard as hell, almost invariably bronze, and makes you want to punch the developer who thought of it in the face. Seriously, why does every game have one of these? And why is it never a silver or a gold trophy? Always bronze, as though to mock your achievement when you finally actually get the damn thing.

In Darksiders, it's killing 160 enemies while riding the Angelic Beast, known in pre-apocalypse lands as a gryphon. It sounds easy right, I mean, I'm a veteran of Star Fox and it's basically a shoot everything that moves (and some things that don't) level. Not so much. 160 isn't an arbitrary number; it is literally designed to drive you mad. 120 kills? Piece of cake. 140? Challenging but manageable. That 160 though...they picked a number that will deliberately taunt you from just out of reach. You can look at your kill stats before and after this mission to figure out how many kills you got. Chances are, if you didn't get the trophy you missed it by less than ten kills. Sometimes you missed it by just one. Talk about maddening.

I've played this one mission half a dozen times with the sole purpose of getting this trophy. On my best run, I missed it by 6 kills. 6! And that was before I upped the sensitivity on the controls to make targeting easier. Ugh. Poor gameplay mechanic or deliberate malice? I'm leaning toward the latter, personally. Because it's in every damn game.