Dang, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this post 2 months ago… I’m sorry about that.

I just stumbled upon this game myself and was thinking it might fit here. The main characters are robots and the trailer shows a satellite dish at one point but it otherwise looks like the wild west and you fight skeletons. That’s close enough for me.

Also, this game is made by the guy who made Pumpkin Jack, which was a fantastic spooky game inspired by the PS1 game MediEvil. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on Far Far West.

Thank you for doing this. It’s been a wild ride and I never realized how much time passes over the course of the novel. Thanks for keeping up with it for months!

Thanks for posting here when the movies are about vampires! I don’t think the posts usually gets many comments but it is appreciated.

Interesting! This is a great find!

First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.

Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.

And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.

The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.

See, this is crazy to me. I can’t believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent “weird pirates” genre wasn’t created until 2003 by Disney! But I can’t think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn’t a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for !weirdwest@lemmy.zip . It’s so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can’t find them. This isn’t like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn’t really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??

Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn’t.

Exactly, One Piece and Peter Pan are perfect examples of “pirate fantasy” but are missing that lawless aspect which (in my opinion) drives the romantic view of pirates (and the Wild West). Or maybe not “lawlessness” but the “living by their own code” aspect of it.

It’s strange how dark/light fantasy shouldn’t have any impact on whether the lawlessness of pirates is glorified, yet it seems to work out that way.

Well now that’s interesting… I never really considered how well point & click adventure games would work on mobile devices. That’s a good idea.

For example, there’s a book series called Liveship Traders which I guess has pirates and magical living ships but it’s all “high fantasy”. At least, that’s my understanding (I haven’t read them). I’m also not looking for steampunk/airship pirates, which you could consider fantasy.

I guess I’m broadly looking for more “horror themed” fantasy elements, if that makes sense. I agree that most pirate settings would lean more towards horror elements, but it isn’t a guarantee. I mean, there’s a Tinkerbell movie called The Pirate Fairy. Not interested.

I guess I really missed out on the Monkey Island games, they seem to be getting mentioned here a lot.

Is it OK to start with Return or do I need to play the older games first?

Awesome, thank you! You’re right, that description sounds perfect!

Perfect, thank you! You’re right, “undead pirate” or “ghost pirate” is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for.

I’ve been aware of the Monkey Island games for awhile but I guess I never knew there were supernatural elements to it. And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!

Wow, that is impressive! I can’t believe you actually remembered a random enemy from Super Mario Land! I watched that video clip and you’re totally right, those have to be Jiangshi. Crazy!

True, no matter how often they’re required to feed, you really can’t have vampires living for centuries eating that consistently. And with each new vampire also eating that often, you’re burning through humans exponentially.

Oh that’s a good one! How fast does the water need to move to be considered “running”? How wide does it need to be for it to be considered “crossing”? This is like the Gremlins thing about not feeding “after midnight”.

But the real question is… does virgin blood taste any different? There are way too many horror movies that require virgin blood.

Very cool, thanks!

Can you give any more details? What’s the story about? How many issues is it? Have you read it? It looks interesting, you’ve got me curious.

It’s weird how many times I proofread this post and still missed these typos. Also in the SotN section, I called it “Dracula III” rather than Castlevania Iii (Dracula’s Curse). Oops.

I don’t want to say it’s a bad game or shame you for liking it, but it’s just a bit too far of an outlier for me to really embrace in a meaningful way

It’s funny, after beating Lords of Shadow, I didn’t have an overly negative reaction to it. I thought it was a decent enough game, just a tad long for my liking. But then a couple years later I had an itch to replay it. So I tried watching a youtube video with all of the cutscenes strung together (a “Lords of Shadow movie”). And with each boss cutscene I thought to myself “oh man, that’s right, I hated that boss”. After that happened with basically every boss in the game I realized “hold on, I don’t think I liked this game at all…” and decided not to replay it. 😄

OP, you did not mention Vampire Survivors

That’s true, I stuck with the “official” Castlevania-named games. I didn’t mention any of the collabs. Because there’s a Vampire Survivors expansion, a Dead Cells expansion, and a V Rising expansion. While I love those games all got homages to the Castlevania franchise, they aren’t really “Castlevania” games to me and I don’t feel compelled to play them. Although I have actually played Vampire Survivors and Dead Cells…