Darkened Skye
Darkened Skye is a third-person action-adventure for the Gamecube, and if you take one look at the box art, you’ll have no idea this is a licensed game. Nothing about the story, the setting, or the gameplay sets off those usual licensing red flags. It just looks like a weirdly generic fantasy game — until you take a look at your magic abilities. Green, purple, yellow, orange, red… can you guess what the license is?
Darkened Skye is a Skittles game. Like the candy. I can’t believe this thing even exists. It was designed to market Skittles to an older audience, but nobody would even know this was a Skittles game just by looking at it! The company that got this thing made, Simon & Schuster, even considered dropping all Skittles references from the game completely because — duh — they realized this game has nothing to do with Skittles.
Well, the game still contains Skittles references because our heroine Skye uses skittles. In the universe of Dark Skye, skittles are a secret font of magic abilities. I can only imagine some kid getting this weird game for Christmas, and wondering why there are so many references to candy.
The Ring: Terror’s Realm
What do you imagine a Ring game would be like? Well, you’d need to watch a spooky cursed video, investigate a mystery involving a drowned girl in a well, and probably you’d have to run away from a ghost girl with long black hair covering her face. That’s just the basics we expect from The Ring and its sequels.
Well throw all that in the garbage. The Ring: Terror’s Realm has other plans. Creeping horror? No way. Right from the beginning, this game launches your character into an alternate world of sci-fi soldiers fighting mutant gorillas. This is a survival horror game all the way — but why are we fighting invisible monkeys? Why do you get teleported into a video game periodically? Why does this game exist?
Sadako — that ghost girl with the long hair — does eventually appear in this game. At like, the very end, after you’ve fought an entire zoo of invisible gorillas. I’ve played this game, and I still barely understand what this mess is about.
Discover more poorly thought out corporate decisions on the next page.
