Hidden Gems from the 6th Generation
Do you know that feeling you get when you find an onion ring in your french fries? Or how about when you wake up thinking it’s Monday but it is actually Saturday? How about popping in the latest RPG only to find out it is a very long advertisement for candy? Just a bit of an awkward turn that we may only have ever experienced in video games once in the history of the medium.
Darkened Skye is an action RPG released on the Nintendo Gamecube on November 16th 2002. The box art would be enticing to any fan of Dungeons and Dragons board games or the Lord of the Rings novels. But shortly after starting the game and getting through the opening cut-scene, players expecting a quest of orcs and dragons- will still get that experience, along with a plot centered around the Skittles’ ‘Taste the Rainbow’ campaign of the mid to late 1990s.
Never before has such a game been released where the licensed product is not in the title, the game description on the case, or on the cover art in ANY way. Show me 12 M+M games and I will give you $10 for every game I guess is a farming simulator.
I would dare ANY game developer in 2020 to release a 100 hour RPG on the PS5 for $89.99 only to one hour in have the women from Progressive Insurance tell me to go on a side quest to save her village from being decimated by an army of skeletons with the help of the Hamburger Helper glove.
Darkened Skye is not a stellar game to play. There are games that control better on the GameCube, and are nicer to look at too. But when a video game can slap us in the face with a surprise like this, I have to tip my hat to the developer and publisher. I say we Kickstart a ‘Sour Skittle’ sequel!
