I don’t have anything derogatory to say about Alan Wake. My advice to you? Spend a night in Bright Falls and soak up the eerie atmosphere. Alan Wake excels at thrilling you psychologically. Which is why it’s called a psychological thriller, I guess…
I am Ashley, and I write about the video games I play. It is therefore my responsibility to deliver you an unbiased verdict of whatever has been occupying my Xbox’ disc tray. Usually I can expect a few disagreements . After all, video games aren’t tailored to suit every individual, and personal taste undoubtedly comes into it. Never have I played a game, however, where I’ve been so certain that the answer to the question posed in the title of this very blog post will indeed be a resounding “Yes!”.
Back up… Wasn’t Alan Wake announced in 2005? Yuh-huh. I wrote a little about the effect of the many delays Alan Wake has seen, and how, having only played Alan Wake for one evening, my apprehension had quickly dissolved into confidence that it was in fact worth the 5 year wait. Now I’m on the penultimate chapter, and the game has only gotten better (and my screams louder).
What makes or breaks a survival horror game (or psychological thriller action-adventure as Alan Wake is described) is the atmosphere. If it doesn’t provoke even the tiniest pee leakage, then it’s not doing its job. Unfortunately, after the disappointing lack of scares in Resident Evil 5, I haven’t played anything since Condemned, the Xbox launch title, that has managed to terrorise me. Ask any of my friends who have spent an evening in an Xbox Live party with me as I hesitantly traipse through Bright Falls, and they’ll tell you this game makes me scream. A lot. With the lights off, surround sound on, I somehow feel that it’s entirely possible an axe-wielding dark entity will creep up behind me *shudders*.
The environment is what you’d expect, although not to an entirely predictable degree that it looses its scare factor; desolate woods, dense trees, abandoned log cabins. All of which you are forced to explore at night, more often than not alone.
I don’t mean to jump the gun here, especially as I only booted Alan Wake up this evening, but I’m pretty certain it has been worth the wait. In case you didn’t know, Alan Wake has been milling around the Xboxsphere since the launch in 2005, victim to many delays and a significant lack of updates.
Games that are in development for a long time are, in my opinion, typically underwhelming. Prey, which was in development for 11 years, was rubbish (IMO). It certainly lacked the quality you’d expect from a game that had been at the centre of such TLC for a long time, and it failed to grab my attention enough to even finish the game. Too Human, while I never played it, was released to a mixed bag of reviews after a decade in development.
It seems that games that have been in development for lengthy periods of time are naturally met with high expectations, but rarely live up to these expectations. I think Alan Wake is different.
I’ve been a naughty girl. I’ve shunned my ‘one game woman’ approach in favour of simultaneous variety. The reason being that I recently finished Splinter Cell: Conviction, and with only a week or so until Skate 3 is released, I didn’t want to start — and not be able to finish — something else entirely. This gave me the opportunity to tie up some ‘loose ends’.
My friend and I completed the co-op mode of Splinter Cell: Conviction on Realistic, which took longer than anticipated merely because of the connectivity issues we regularly experienced. I’m not sure what the issue was, but neither of us had a dodgy connection and were chatting without interruption over Xbox Live. This usually indicates it wasn’t an issue on either of our ends. I’m assuming it is, as usual, down to Ubisoft’s paltry Multiplayer programming. Bear in mind I’m a huge Rainbow Six: Vegas fan, which is also a Ubisoft (and Tom Clancy) title, but that would have never won any awards for running smoothly online, and I’m the first to admit that. As fun as the Tom Clancy games are in Multiplayer mode, they rarely seem to run fluidly.
With Conviction, you can guarantee the frame rate will drop repeatedly, and at one point you will inevitably get booted from the game. And with each co-op mode campaign being split into 4 chapters, you can rest assured that when you do get booted out, you’ll have to play through a fair bit of the game again. Considering the approach to SC:C is slow and stealthy, this gets frustrating.
With that said, there’s a lot to the Multiplayer that adds some much needed overall substance to Conviction. Even though we’ve polished off the co-op campaign, we’re now attempting the other co-op modes!
I don’t usually find myself watching The HipHopGamer Show, mainly because hip hop isn’t my scene. Now if it was called The SillySkaDancingGamer Show, I might tune in a little more often. Regardless, their latest episode caught my eye because of the title ‘Microsoft Slowing Down? Sony Stays Hardcore While Xbox Test The Casual Market‘. It’s something I’ve found occupying my mind a little recently, so much so that a friend and I had a rather interesting discussion about it the other day.
Can anyone believe it’s been a whole year since, well, last year? I remember having my doubts that 2008 would top 2007, seeing as the latter was so rich with stellar 360 releases. Truthfully, I feel I can’t even pass judgement about whether games were better this year seeing as I’ve currently missed out on a bunch of the big triple-A releases with my one-game-only-at-a-time ethic. But what I am entitled to do at this time of the year is share with you what I hope 2009 brings us in regards to gaming.
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I started playing Tales of Vesperia over the weekend. It’s exactly what I needed to pique my interest in gaming, at least for the time being. It’s as Japanese and as camp as one could hope. The opening intro is especially cringeworthy as a sequence of the game’s notable moments play out to cheesy Japanese rock music (I’ll record it and put it on my blog as it gets me every goddam time).
The characters are as cliche as you’d expect, everything is as Japanese as you’d expect, nothing has been reinvented. And you know what? That’s totally cool with me. That’s how JRPGs should be. I can’t wait to sink a bunch of hours into it. I hope it becomes my new Lost Odyssey.
I don’t have anything derogatory to say about Alan Wake. My advice to you? Spend a night in Bright Falls and soak up the eerie atmosphere. Alan Wake excels at thrilling you psychologically. Which is why it’s called a psychological thriller, I guess…
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