Dark Souls Beaten With A Bongo Drum Controller
Some joke about beatniks I guess
Mastering a game you love can be bittersweet. You've conquered the highest peak and can see the whole world beneath you, but where from here? You could try hacking limbs off or plucking your eyes out. Or using a weird controller, I guess, if you're less prone to dramatics.
Benjamin 'bearzly' Gwin has been challenging himself with Dark Souls for a while, beating it with one single finger, with the plastic drums and guitar controllers of Rock Band, and, now, the bongo drum controller from GameCube rhythm 'em up Donkey Konga.
Look, here he is beating the legendarily frustrating Ornstein and Smough boss battle:
As you might guess, they have a complicated setup. As this diagram explains, the bongos only have four main inputs on the skins, so he wrote software which binds the controls across three configs cycled through by pressing parts of the bongos together.
"Total run time was just under 5 hours and 30 minutes, with somewhere around 57 deaths in total," he says. If you want to see more, the whole stream is archived in two parts.
His future wacky control plans include bananas through a Makey Makey, and a Dance Dance Revolution mat. I once saw a few folks using bananas in a Super Hexagon tournament. I think my flatmate placed high enough to win a prize on bananas, actually. Kids these days! What a wondrous thing the openness of PC gaming is.