Twitch Plays Dark Souls is a magnificent failure

Twitch Plays Pokemon was a hilarious exercise in using Twitch's command capabilities. This allows people who are watching a Twitch stream to give commands and control the game that is being streamed. It took days for Twitch to beat Pokemon, and it was a mess, but a successful mess.

Twitch Plays Dark Souls - one of the most difficult video games on the market - has, let's just say, not been as successful. After three days, the Twitch collective hadn't even gotten to the first boss in the tutorial level. It had spent the better part of a day stuck in the menu system. I watched for a few minutes as the player character dodge rolled forward and back, and got stuck on a wall. It was painful - and hilarious - to watch.

The Powers That Be have given up and changed the game. Somehow they hacked Dark Souls to make it turn-based. After every action, the game pauses for 30 seconds, during which all the commands in the lobby are tallied up. The most popular command is issued, and then the game pauses again.

This feels like a failure, but it may simply be a necessary handicap to get this poor game off the ground. You go, Twitch! We're all rooting for you!

Image courtesy Flickr/Midhras