Dark Souls.  Yeah you heard me, Dark Souls.  I know you're supposed to learn something from every untimely death.  Get butchered by bosses as part of the process of studying their attack patterns.  Revel in the nihilism of it all.  But it's the sheer bloody-mindedness of those repeated bonfire restarts that's killing it for me.

I didn't go into it  blind.  I'd heard the stories here and elsewhere.  Forewarned and forearmed when approaching its difficulty curve.  And I can appreciate the impressive heft it delivers in the third-person combat arena.  But I figure it's not what I play RPGs for.  Exploration is squeezed along tight corridors.  Character development feels hollow when set against the slog of its relentless death-march.  And I find the lack of a musical score frightfully dull and unpleasantly jarring in equal measure.

I can understand the revered status that some hold this game in.  It's a action-RPG with no equal in terms of the punishment it dishes out to its players.  Perhaps I should've consulted that FAQ that advised newbies to start off as a Pyromancer.  My bad.    But maybe I don't want to play a game that dolls out death like it's going out of fashion   Maybe I just wanna keep on making those same mistakes, not have to learn from them, and just try to have some 'fun' along the way.  To that end, screw you DS, I'm off to play some Fable 2.