Kusoge Sunday - Dark Summit

My first two Kusoge Sunday posts featured games that were indisputably kusoge. I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to branch out from that, though, and take on games that are less universally reviled. While I’ve been known to really dislike some critical darlings like Super Mario Galaxy and Uncharted 2, I can at least get some sense of why others would have raved about them. Some games, though, are so bad that even positive critical consensus can’t save them from being labeled kusoge.

Enter Dark Summit, a 2001 snowboarding/adventure game developed by Radical Entertainment, who are responsible for a lot of relatively respectable games, as well as Mario Is Missing! Dark Summit could easily have been nothing more than a quick cash-in on the success of SSX, but to their credit, the people at Radical tried to strike out in a new direction, giving their snowboarding game a story and basing its primary missions around advancing the plot. However, every aspect of the game’s production works against its goals, from ill-advised character designs to boring level layouts.

The presence of a story is the most obvious way in which Dark Summit departs from the SSX formula. However, this is about as perfunctory as game stories get. Heroine Naya decides to trespass on a ski slope that doesn’t allow snowboarders, and gets involved in some vague black helicopter conspiracy nonsense. A shady group wants her to stop the shady plans of...some other shady group. Honestly, I’ve never been clear on exactly what’s supposed to be happening, as the game’s audio presentation is incredibly muddy, and the dialogue is pretty tough to decipher through the constant wall of techno music.

Whatever the story is actually about, it seems clear that Dark Summit wants us to buy into Naya and the other snowboarders who help her unravel the mystery as hip young rebels. That’s impossible, because there’s nothing hip about these characters. The ones who don’t look like extras from a Mountain Dew commercial circa 1998 look like they took up snowboarding as part of a midlife crisis. This is especially true of Naya, who looks like a cougar dressed up for a rave circa 1996.


Even worse than the character designs are the level designs. The supposedly exclusive ski resort at which the game takes place is littered with pools of acid, rusting cars, electric fences and even naval mines. Naya’s drive to ride on such a course might be explained away by her being totally extreme, but why would rich people pay to ski here? We already accept more bad writing in games than we should, but no amount of shouting “It’s just a game!” can excuse this sloppiness. Adding injury to insult is the game’s color palette of sickly browns, greens and yellows, which make you yearn for the crisp blue skies and sparkling white slopes of the SSX games.

Capping off the Dark Summit experience are cumbersome controls that feel designed to keep the player at arm’s length from the action. Any trick more complicated than a simple grab or spin requires a string of button inputs that have no connection to what’s actually happening on screen. Successfully entering the inputs triggers a canned animation that can’t be combined with flips or spins. The significant lag in the controls combined with the rare opportunities for big air mean that you’ll spend a lot of time watching Naya transition from the canned trick animations to the canned falling animation. Speaking of which, the developers couldn’t even be bothered to make unique falling animations for different situations. Dropping off a cliff triggers the same loop of Naya flailing around as running into a wall.

It’s hard to tell how seriously Dark Summit takes itself. It usually feels like the game really wanted to be cool and exciting, but most of the design choices work against that. Like another Radical Entertainment game, Prototype, it feels as though the team recorded a brainstorming session, then transcribed it to be used as a design document. Just as Prototype was constantly introducing new powers that rendered old ones moot (without taking the old ones out of your arsenal), Dark Summit throws out design choices that are at odds with other design choices, until the game is just a mess of contradictions.

Why Dark Summit received largely positive reviews at the time of its release is beyond me. It shouldn’t have, as even by the standards of its time, it was a bad game. But that’s just my opinion, just as the positive reviews were just the opinions of a few critics. The lesson, if there is one, is that game reviews are neither consumer advocacy nor an attempt to uncover the Truth about a game’s quality. They are, and should be, entirely subjective. And Dark Summit’s should have been far more brutal than they were.