Metro: Last Light Message Board older than one year ago

The surface of the Earth may be a blasted wasteland, its music shops and symphony halls reduced to smoldering ruins. But as long as humans survive, so too will music. It's in that spirit that I enjoy the music of Metro 2033 and its equally post-apocalyptic sequel, Metro: Last Light. The games have a distinct musical sensibility, as the grim men and women surviving in the irradiated Moscow Metro carry on the musical traditions of… well, mostly of folk guitar and heavy metal. Cool by me. Earlier today, Chris observed how many of the everyday-life details in Metro: Last Light can make the game's cities feel uniquely lived-in. I agree, and the music plays a big part in that. In Last Light's early goings, you'll make a tour through a well-known entertainment city, sort of the last bastion of the theatre for post-apocalyptic Russia. Before you get back on the road, you'll have a chance to watch an onstage musical revue. The performances are awkward in the way video game performances usually are (tiny audiences, stilted dancing, awkward looping applause animations), but there are a few musical gems, if you stay for the whole show. My favorite performance was the one in the video above, in which a guitarist performs a famous theme by Italian violinist and composer Nicholò Paganini. It's called Caprice No. 24; here's a video of the great Jascha Heifetz performing it: I love this theme, partly because it's very nice on its own, but mostly because when I was in high school, our symphonic band played an arrangement based on it. That piece was called Symphony Fantasy Variations of a Theme by Nicholo Paganini, composed by James Barnes. Check out the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra's performance: Looking through the YouTube comments, it seems it's popular among all-state high school wind ensembles. That's at least partly because it's arranged to highlight each individual section in the band. I was always bummed that the saxophone variation was so calm, but listening to it now, it's actually quite lovely. Nothing can top the solo bass clarinet movement, though. There's a lot of great music in the world of Metro: Last Light, but that performance stood out amidst the guitar strumming and heavy metal drumming. Paganini would probably be happy to know that even in fictional post-apocalyptic Russia, his music lives on.

Mood is such an important thing in a nuclear apocalypse; a detail that is so easy to forget. That’s something that’s painfully palpable in the first hour of Metro: Last Light Yes there are telepathic, radioactive creatures. Yes, there is shooting and stabbing. But what really sticks to my ribs more than anything are those tiny, nigh invisible moments of quiet — those tiny glimpses when you see someone frittering away time and simply being a human being. Early on in Metro: Last Light, you wake up from a horrible nightmare into a subterranean military base in the bombed out metro of subterranean Moscow. Walking around, you’re greeted by your compatriots in their off-time — A man playing a mournful song on his guitar in a bunk bed for his friends, a soldier repairing his gun and someone with their headphones on, playing an air drum solo. People are unwinding, training and making due with best they have in a grim situation. There is something oddly touching about it. American games often like to pretend that the end of the world might be a fun and bombastic place. We enjoy the cavalier, gallows humor of mocking Duck and Cover and other Cold War relics. We harbor a love for the nuclear wasteland like it's some kind of neo-cowboy playground. On some level, it’s our way of coping with the depressing, horrible prospect of a nuclear war obliterating everyone and everything you love. But I’ve always found that Russia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet Bloc countries historically have had a more sober approach in their speculative fiction. Movies like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and by extension the loosely affiliated S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) and the Polish O-bi, O-ba - The End of Civilization, understand something basic about nuclear fallout: that if society is blasted back into the loam, if everything is burned to ash and we are forced to live like moles, all we will have left are our tiny, half-remembered creature comforts in a savage, dead and uncaring world. Metro seems to understand that on a profound level (for more, read Kirk's full review). The people in this game are living for their yesterdays, holding on desperately to the remnants of what made them human. "I remember so many random, unnecessary things" the protagonist, Artyom, reflects in Metro: Last Light's intro "yet I don't remember the most important one — my mother's face."

Metro: Last Light doesn't sound appetizing with its "suffocating despair" and "gnarled monstrosities," but it's that kind of loveliness that made Ludwig enthuse about the Metro 2033 follow-up in his four and a half stars review. He deemed Last Light "an unusual, meticulously detailed shooter inextricable from its environment."

Of course, Ludwig wasn't the only brave soul to delve into the underground sequel. Here are some other thoughts we dug up.

• GamesRadar (90/100): "Subtlety is what makes Last Light such an exceptionally immersive game. It nails the core tenets of a shooter, then forces you to react to enemies in ways outside of simply taking cover. It plops you in a post-apocalyptic world, then fills it with tons of minor but substantial details, like the shadows of once-living people now permanently nuked into stone walls. It strips you of hope, only to dangle a tiny sliver of it ahead of you like a carrot on a stick."
• Game Informer (88/100): "This sequel plays more like a shooter than its predecessor, but doesn't sacrifice its intricate narrative or creative vision in the process. Masochistic fans will appreciate the harder difficulties that recreate the grueling experience of the original, but no matter how you approach it, exploring Last Light's absorbing world is wholly entertaining."
• Giant Bomb (80/100): "By its very nature of being a sequel, Last Light doesn't feel as fresh as Metro 2033 did, but there's still nothing else like it. Few games generate immersion through gameplay and transport you to their world the way Metro does."
• Eurogamer (70/100): "Metro: Last Light is not a bad game, but nor is it a good one in quite the same sense as its predecessor. Metro 2033 was flawed but trying to do its own thing. If anything, Last Light feels like a regression. Similarities abound, but this is a more conservative FPS, one looking at the competition rather than itself, and one with some terrible missteps. So go in with low expectations, and you might be pleasantly surprised."

Part 2 of IGN's Video Walkthrough for Metro: Last Light. Chapter 2: Ashes

Watch the ending cut scene of Metro: Last Light.

Metro: Last Light is now available on Steam in North America, Australia, and New Zealand! Please see the game page for the local release time in your territory.

It Is the Year 2034. Beneath the ruins of post-apocalyptic Moscow, in the tunnels of the Metro, the remnants of mankind are besieged by deadly threats from outside and within. Mutants stalk the catacombs beneath the desolate surface, and hunt amidst the poisoned skies above. But rather than stand united, the station-cities of the Metro are locked in a struggle for the ultimate power, a doomsday device from the military vaults of D6. A civil war is stirring that could wipe humanity from the face of the earth forever.

As Artyom, burdened by guilt but driven by hope, you hold the key to our survival the last light in our darkest hour…

What will the world look like after the bombs fall? Can God exist in a place without hope? When man's desire to survive overrides his morality, is the empire he constructs worth saving? Those are some of the questions raised by Metro: Last Light. The (cheery!) first-person shooter is Russian studio 4A Games' follow-up to their flawed 2010 gem, Metro 2033. The Metro games are based on the works of author Dmitry Glukhovsky; the first game was based on his novel of the same name, and while the sequel isn't based on a specific work, it directly carries on the first game's storyline. The Metro series is set some years after nuclear war has ruined the surface of the Earth and put an end to civilization as we know it. In Russia, survivors have retreated to the Metro, re-forging a bleak semi-existence in the tunnels beneath the city. This is the sort of game that mentions, in its opening cinematic, the very real possibility that God is dead. Like Metro 2033, Last Light tells the story of a soldier named Artyom. The tale stands on its own, though it does assume a fair amount of knowledge of the conflict at the heart of the first game. That conflict centers around the mysterious "Dark Ones," freaky-looking humanoid beings who possess psychic powers and terrify the human denizens of the Metro. Last Light assumes that players got the "bad ending" in Metro 2033 and took the option to blast the entire population of Dark Ones into oblivion. The subsequent discovery of a single surviving Dark One sets the plot of Last Light in motion. What follows is a breathless, well-paced and, aside from a handful of moral choices that affect the story's outcome, resolutely linear single-player story that has Artyom touring the lair of the fascistic Fourth Reich, a compound staffed by a powerful Communist army, and working his way through all manner of spooky catacombs, caves, and numerous jaunts to the surface. The peaks and troughs of the narrative have been organized with a great deal of care; the story shifts between non-combat exploration, stealth, all-out firefights, and horror-tinged monster fighting with ease. One moment you'll find yourself in a factory taking on squads of well-armed soldiers, and shortly afterward you'll be alone in a swamp, facing off against horrible crab-monsters. 4A seems to have taken notes from Half-Life 2 in a number of places; while there aren't any puzzles to solve, the game's pacing often recalls Valve's 2004 masterpiece. The mostly surdy story only truly falters in the final act, where a series of revelations stack on top of one another so quickly that vital plot points go half-mentioned and it's easy to lose track of what's going on. As they did in Metro 2033, 4A regularly demonstrates an uncanny mastery of the alchemy of atmosphere. Underground cities bustle and radiate with wretched life, and each location has been crafted with a rare degree of detail. There's not much to do in most cities, aside from stopping off to refill your ammunition and maybe customize one of your weapons, but I found myself regularly sidetracked, listening to traders talk about their most recent sorties, or soldiers telling grim tales of survival. When in the field, you can carry three guns at a time, along with a varied arsenal of throwing knives, grenades, and other survival equipment. Weapons come in the usual variety of assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and pistols, with a few variations. Each weapon can be upgraded with silencers, scopes, sights and stocks, though I found little reason to deviate beyond my standard silenced pistol/shotgun/assault rifle setup. That said, the weapons in Last Light are all assembled with an uncommon attention to detail, and each one feels and sounds distinctive and memorable. I particularly liked my quick-fire shotgun, which held a revolver-like ring of shells close to the stock, which Artyom would replace one by one after he fired. And, hooray, the show-stealing "Bastard" submachine gun from Metro 2033 returns, chewing through its lateral-feed magazine in the same way my father eats corn on the cob. Two of Metro 2033's most distinctive elements make a welcome return in Last Light: The gas mask, and bullet-based currency. At many moments throughout the campaign, Artyom will have to don a gas mask, either to survive on the toxic surface or to stay alive inside a gas-filled chamber. It's a wonderfully claustrophobic thing, that gas mask—Artyom's watch displays how much time remains on his current filter, and to keep him from suffocating, you'll have to regularly change it. As his filter degrades, Artyom's breathing becomes increasingly ragged. I often found that even though I knew I had a minute or more left, I'd swap my filter just to give the poor guy a break. Instead of coins or bills, the people of the Metro use military-grade ammunition as currency. These bullets are kept separate from your "everyday use" ammo and can be spent to buy weapon upgrades. However, if you're facing off against a dangerous enemy and need more firepower, you can opt to load up a clip of money-bullets and attack for more damage. Woe is you, standing there, firing a clip of money into an enemy, praying it dies quickly. You may wind up broke, but you'll live. On Normal difficulty, I found that I almost never ran out of standard ammunition, but in my limited time with the harder difficulty setting, ammo was much rarer. Hardcore Metro fans will probably want to play this game on its hardest difficult first, saving the extra-hardcore "Ranger Mode" for a second playthrough. (I did not have Ranger Mode unlocked on my PC build of the game, so I haven't had a chance to try it out.) For all its careful pacing and wonderful atmosphere, Last Light certainly has its share of problems. The enemy artificial intelligence is a few steps shy of where it would need to be to be truly enjoyable; enemies routinely failed to notice when I'd kill their nearby friends, and more than once I'd come upon an alerted foe walking into a corner without taking any kind of understandable action. The animals and beasts you'll fight are even less nuanced, and usually just charge at you in a straight line. Nevertheless, the mutant monsters can make for some enjoyable showdowns, but they can also become tiresome. There are a few boss battles that are equally unsatisfying; you're mostly pitted against giant charging bullet-sponges with weak spots, and even one rampaging beast that must be tricked into bringing down a series of columns in a room. At those moments, the artifice of Last Light shows through the clearest. While the locations in the game have been crafted with a fine eye for detail, the characters themselves feel half-formed. You'll regularly watch waxen humans talk, slowly turning their unmoving faces toward and away from you like animatronic figures. Last Light is a real testament to the power of good lighting and environmental design: The graphical fidelity of the world can be remarkably convincing, which stands in sharp contrast to how stilted and unconvincing the characters themselves can be. Children, in particular, are a bit freakish, and their voice acting is hollow and odd; not a new problem for a video game to have, but certainly one that Last Light doesn't solve. If I'd passed through each area without stopping, I wouldn't have noticed the seams so often. But the game encourages players to stop and listen in to conversations, which often go on for minutes on end. And so you'll stand, watching as characters stand stock still with only their lips moving, zoning out as you listen to their (usually quite interesting!) conversations. Life in the Metro isn't a holiday for the fairer sex, and neither is Metro: Last Light. This is a world filled with men and sexual violence, and almost every female character is either a prostitute, a stripper, or a potential rape victim. I don't mean to suggest that a post-apocalyptic underground society wouldn't reveal this sort of barbarism, but the game doesn't handle any of it particularly deftly. One of the only exceptions to the prostitute/stripper/victim-rule is a female sniper who eventually becomes a love interest, in a rushed storyline that culminates in a stilted first-person lovemaking scene. (Aside from the frequent loading screens, Artyom never actually talks, so any potential for warmth is immediately torpedoed by his creepy silence.) The scene felt jarring, as did an earlier lap dance from a dead-eyed stripper that had me peering through my fingers in mortification. Late in the game, a character remarks that "The Metro is a living, breathing thing, with a heartbeat, a soul, and a mind." Indeed, this place feels alive; sometimes more so than the men and women who occupy its tunnels. In fact, Last Light is often at its best when there's no one else around. The psychic powers of the Dark Ones play into a running current of mysticism that makes Last Light's Moscow a more mysterious, spiritual place than your average ruined city. The whispers of the dead will call out to you, and scenes of horror and beauty will float up from the past, almost as though the city is still crying out in agony. These moments are chilling, and were easily my favorite parts of the game. So now comes the big caveat: Technical performance. I played a PC review build of Last Light provided by the game's publisher, Deep Silver. Throughout the game, there's often an underlying feeling that Last Light hasn't been stitched together quite right. Granted, I was playing a pre-release build, but it crashed on me a number of times, usually forcing a complete reboot. In one instance, I encountered a bug where upon dying, I reloaded outside a door with no way to move or put on my gas mask. I had to either watch Artyom asphyxiate over and over or restart the entire chapter and lose twenty minutes of progress. Triggered events are often cued sloppily or out of sync, directional audio can be jumpy, and the game even hard-locked on me during the closing credits. One additional technical shortcoming that, while not a bug, remains annoying: The game appears to have only one save-slot, and when I started a new game on the higher difficulty, it erased all of my progress and left me unable to load any later chapters. A single save slot, in a PC game? What on earth? Last Light's PC performance issues are perhaps more troublesome. I was having some fairly intense issues running the game on an AMD Radeon 6870 (with 8GB of RAM and an i5 3.4Ghz processor), and found that it ran much more smoothly on my other PC, which runs an Nvidia GeForce 660Ti (with 8GB of RAM and a i5 2.8Ghz). That said, I couldn't get either machine to run the game well on my TV through HDMI; both games seemed stuck at 24-30 frames per second, no matter which settings or resolutions I chose. The only way to get them to run at a high framerate was to plug them into my PC monitor via DVI. Late last week, PR advised reviewers to turn off PhysX on AMD cards, which does help performance, but the game still feels substantially less optimized for AMD machines. (Last Light carries the endorsement and branding of Nvidia, the company who make GeForce cards, but not of AMD.) On an AMD 6870, it'd generally run at High-to-Very High settings and keep at 40-60FPS, but often it would dip into the nether regions below 20FPS. On my GeForce card, however, it ran the same settings in a 45-60FPS sweet spot for the majority of the game, and only occasionally dipped down to 30. I don't have either console copy of Last Light, but Chris in the New York office has been testing out the 360 version and reports that it works for the most part, though it has crashed on him once. And, not to freak anyone out, but Luke played the game on an AMD 6950 and it fried his card after about 15 minutes of playtime. His video card is now unusable. His card was broken all weekend, and he only just got it working again. Did the game cause that, or something else? There are too many variables to say for sure. I have yet to see anyone else report anything like that, at least. I don't feel I have enough information to say anything definitive about the game's PC performance, so I'll keep an eye on forums once the game is out and there's a larger sample-size of players. But what I can say definitively is that while Last Light mostly worked fine on my GeForce-based PC, this game has a few more technical problems than it ought to. I've been emailing with Deep Silver PR about Last Light's performance issues, though I don't yet have any official word on a patch or any planned fixes. I've also reached out to AMD to ask if they're going to issue new drivers. I'll update once I know more. For the time being, if you can bear to wait, I'd recommend holding off on Last Light if you're using an AMD graphics card, as the game will hopefully get more playable in the near future. And hey, there's already a Last Light-optimized beta driver out for GeForce cards, which I haven't tested but which Nvidia claims further improves performance. Despite those technical irritations, I very much enjoyed the majority of my time with Metro: Last Light. (Oh, the power of well-wrought atmosphere!) It's a game of stark, nightmarish beauty, and while it borrows liberally from many other games—among them S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Half-Life 2, Far Cry 2 and its own predecessor—Last Light still manages to forge a weighty, worthy identity of its own. To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton.

A solid setting and interesting story don't completely outweigh technical shortcomings in 4A Games' fun post-apocalyptic FPS that could have been so much more.

Patrick and Brad inhabit the depths of Moscow once again, this time with freakin' SPIDERS.

Metro's enemies aren't all that tough... when they break and just stand there. Frozen on the PS3.

If "Ranger Mode" is the way Metro: Last Light is "meant to be played," why is it a preorder bonus and not in the main edition? "Offering game content as a pre-order exclusive is a requirement by retail," the game's publisher told PC Gamer. Ranger Mode is $5 to non-preorderers because that's the minimum they can charge.

Last Light isn't just a run-and-gun shooter. It's got a spooky atmosphere and a lot of monsters, too. Get a taste of what you can expect in this creepy gameplay footage.

Cam and Lucy talk post-apocalyptic survival, the joys of killing Nazis and bad Russian voice-acting.

Andrew Prokhorov, creative director on Metro: Last Light at developer 4A Games, recently had the nuance of his words lost in translation, according to publisher Deep Silver. The ITCChannel interview allegedly shook out details about a version of Metro: Last Light for PS4, the release of a software development kit (SDK) for Metro and downloadable content details.

"It is no secret that 4A Games do want to release an SDK for Metro, finish the extremely promising multiplayer component and release this in some form, and investigate a PlayStation 4 version provided it makes commercial sense," a Deep Silver representative informed Joystiq. "Although no development has started on any next-gen console versions [of Metro: Last Light]. We have confirmed these hopes and ideas plenty of times before."

The statement continues, "However, all these ideas are just ideas at the moment. It will be some time before we can officially commit to any of these projects or suggest when they might materialize. They genuinely might all happen, but equally none of them might happen. Anyone expecting Metro: Last Light as a PS4 launch game is probably going to be disappointed..."

Deep Silver plans on confirming details about Metro: Last Light DLC in the near future. Pick up Last Light on May 14.

Confession time: I very frequently feel like I am neither clean nor deadly enough, which is the root cause of most of my insecurities. I sometimes think, you know, maybe if I were just slightly above-average at one or the other, everything would be all right. But goodness, I don’t even know where to begin. Fortunately, the final entry in Metro: Last Light‘s “Ranger Survival Guide” series is here to clear up a few things – including my grit-caked, horrifically pockmarked skin – for me. Apparently, my biggest mistake was failing to wipe rain, grime, and radioactive goop off my face all the time. Also, I need to buy a gun. I am, however, hopeful, because a charmingly rugged Russian man has told me I’m infinitely capable of both.

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If you're in the market for a new graphics card, Nvidia is hoping to entice you with a special promotion. Those who purchase an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or above will also get a free download of Metro: Last Light when it launches this May. The deal is available via many online retailers, though it looks like Micro Center is the only physical retailer to offer the promotion. A full list can be found here.

In other graphical news, publisher Deep Silver has revealed the PC specs required to play Metro: Last Light, and the good news is you won't need that GeForce GTX 660. Baseline specs bottom out at the Nvidia GTS 250 or AMD Radeon 4000 series. See the full specs after the break. You can also automatically test your rig for compatibility right here.

Metro: Last Light is so close. So very, painfully close. Sometimes, on cold, lonely nights and also in Russia for some reason, I can almost feel it sidling up to me, locking me in a warm irradiated embrace, telling me everything’s going to be OK. Patience, however, is not my strong suit, so I think frequently subjecting myself to these very nice promo videos constitutes some form of masochism. The latest one’s quite the ride, too, taking us on a whirlwind tour of Last Light’s various factions, human murderjerks/WWII allegories, and mutant creepy crawly stompy blaaarghies. Take a peek for yourself after the break, and then join me in a moist state of anticipatory writhing for the next month.

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Things are going to get dark in the upcoming post-nuclear survival sequel.

The world of Metro: Last Light is grim and dark, as these things tend to be, but it’s not yet clear whether it crosses the line into grimdark. Calculating such things is difficult, and requires prolonged exposure and comparative flowcharts containing pictures of fetishised death factions and tattered children playing with burnt toys in the rubble of their homes. The children are ghosts but even so a mutant dog, formerly their pet, will eat them soon. Through all the horrors of this most recent video, which provides an overview of the Metro system, factions and threats, a disconcertingly cheerful man explains the situation and provides survival tips, such as “try not to lose your head”.

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For those who missed out on Metro 2033, this trailer is a primer of the game's world and explains that Metro isn't actually a post-apocalyptic train simulator. You know, in case you were confused.

A denizen of the Moscow underground teaches us more about the Metro and the people (and things) that occupy it.

We've written about Metro several times, but now we've played it. Watch the game in action and listen to our commentary over three new segments of the game!

Gritty-looking Russian-accented choochoo-themed tunnel shooter Metro: Last Light was bought from THQ by Deep Silver, and will come out in North America on May 14th and everywhere else May 17th, which is weird because we live in an electronic age and I am an electronic girl and everything-should-come-out-at-once please. Anyway, here is a new trailer for it. It looks a bit chilly in that there Russia, and everything seems to have a rust problem.(more…)

Only darkness and things that go bump in the night lay hidden in the subway systems of Metro: Last Light. Sorry, we meant: only monsters and things that will give you bumps in the night are down there. Tickets to ride Metro: Last Light will be available this May.

April showers bring incredibly bleak May doomsday scenarios. My mother always used to tell me that, right before encouraging me to succeed with sagely tidbits like “Your generation will doom us all.” I’ll admit that a bit of it went over my head. Now, though, it’s beginning to make sense, seeing as Metro: Last Light‘s  blown back the radioactive vapors from THQ’s nuclear self-destruction to reveal a May launch date. So hooray! I finally understand my childhood. Also, videogames. Details after the break.

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Metro: Last Light is coming to North and Latin America on May 14, and Europe three days later on May 17, publisher Deep Silver announced this morning. The PS3, Xbox 360, and PC sequel to Metro 2033 was, last we heard, expected to release this month, but that was always uncertain following original publisher THQ's troubles and the horror/shooter's acquirement by Deep Silver.

Vote with your wallet. We constantly preach it as an approach that actually Makes Important Things Happen, but does it? Does it really? It’s such an easy be-all, end-all argument to toss out, but things are rarely that simple. The recent death of THQ and potential failure of Gas Powered Games’ Wildman represent very tangible examples of how “vote with your wallet” can screech and shatter like so many piggy banks being hurled into a craggy abyss. But there’s hope, too, if you know where to look for it. The industry’s changing. Here’s why that makes us – its most vocal, diehard fans – equal parts more and less powerful than ever.

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Pre-orders of the PC download version of Metro: Last Light have been removed from Impulse, GameStop's PC download service. In addition, no other upcoming THQ games are available from the service, though released games can still be purchased.

"Essentially, due to THQ's current financial situation and uncertainty of delivery, in order to protect our consumers we removed the ability to pre-purchase that specific game," GameStop vice president of public and investor relations Matt Hodges told GameSpot, referring to Metro.

Bids for the now bankrupt THQ's assets are due January 22. Either the company will be purchased outright, or its assets will be auctioned starting January 23.

Pre-orders of physical versions of Metro and other THQ games, for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, remain active on GameStop.com. The removal currently only applies to PC downloads.

OK, hold onto the floppier parts of your brain, because this is about to get a bit complicated. So remember how THQ went bankrupt and fell into bed with “stalking horse bidder” Clearlake Capital? Well, the primary intent of all that was to keep THQ in one piece while dealing with that nasty little “having basically no money” thing, but – at the 11th hour – there was a twist. Creditors decided THQ’s all-or-nothing sales approach wasn’t fair to them (it’d probably pull in less money, after all), and a US bankruptcy court judge agreed. So now THQ’s gone from monolithic one-gulp meal to easily chopped up buffet, and rumor has it that a number of major players are interested in various series, games, and franchises.

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For a brief bit of levity, here is the first image that popped up when I Google image searched "stalking horse."

THQ is bankrupt, and has a new owner. Yes, all at the same time.

Clearlake Capital Group LLP has acquired the financially beleaguered publisher as a "stalking horse bidder," offering up a total consideration of $60 million for the company, including a new $10 million note for its creditors.

The bankruptcy petition by THQ is simply a byproduct of this larger deal, allowing the company to shed some of its debt obligations in the wake of the sale.

According to a press release put out by THQ today announcing the deal, the company made it clear that it has every intention of continuing development on its upcoming suite of games, including the likes of Metro: Last Light and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

"The sale and filing are necessary next steps to complete THQ's transformation and position the company for the future, as we remain confident in our existing pipeline of games, the strength of our studios and THQ's deep bench of talent," said Brian Farrell, Chairman and CEO of THQ. "We are grateful to our outstanding team of employees, partners and suppliers who have worked with us through this transition. We are pleased to have attracted a strong financial partner for our business, and we hope to complete the sale swiftly to make the process as seamless as possible."

In case you're anything like I was prior to writing this story and don't really understand what a "stalking horse bidder" even is, it turns out it's simply a method of auctioning assets that ensures THQ wouldn't be low-balled by potential bidders. By filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, THQ was able to use the stalking horse method to select Clearlake as an opening bidder for the publisher. Any other company could have entered the fray and bid up over Clearlake, but it sounds like nobody did. In effect, THQ chose its eventual owner, while leaving the door open for other bidders who never appeared.

Kind of an interesting story to just float out there right at the end of the year, when all the media is beginning to disappear for vacation, ain't it?