Alone in the Dark Impressions

Don't you hate it when this happens? You're shown something so promising and spectacular, only to have it ruined. This is Alone in the Dark in summary, brilliance ruined by mediocrity. The game begins with your character waking up, fuzzy visioned and weak. You have to click the thumb stick to make him blink to clear your vision. Slowly you realize there's other people in the room, and another person in another bed. Then as you start paying attention you notice they're planning to kill you. You are then led, half life 2 or modern warfare style, to your own execution. Luckily all hell breaks loose literally and your would be executioner is eaten alive by some demonic tremors knock off.

After that you are introduced to some of the more innovative and frankly awesome physics mechanics. You're shown you can put out fires with fire extinguishers, or waggle the thumb stick to use them to bash open doors. The damage detection is spot on, as well is the fire fighting. But then after all this promising stuff they perform the cardinal sign of early 90's PC FPS games. They go and try to make you jump around. AND drive a car! Now I used to think that the best addition to a resident evil or silent hill game would be an awesome car scene where I can hit zombies. But that means that you have to perfect your driving physics. Ambition can kill a project as fast as a lack of it.

Then there's your inventory. You look at your inventory by opening your jacket. All the items you get are everyday things like bottles of oil, bottles of booze, health sprays, bandages, tissues, and double sided tape. But you can use those things to do ridiculous stuff. Pour a little bit of alcohol on your bullets to make them fire bullets. Wrap a plastic bottle of oil in double sided tape then stick a wick in it, light that an toss it on an enemy for a sticky bomb. Or why not just toss the bottle at an enemy and shoot it when it gets close?

There are limits to the interactions between items but the uses for them is only limited by your imagination. You could tape two bottles of alcohol together to make a doubly powerful bomb. But even this is broken. Like you get batteries to put in your flashlight but there is a situation where your flashlight can be in a state which is still equipped but not in your hand so you can't turn it off. There's a lot of good ideas but they're held down by broken and bad ideas.

It was released for Wii, PS2 (what?!), and xbox360,(the one I played) in June 2008. So there's no "We rushed this out the door for the holiday season" excuse. Also there's a DVD menu style "Skip stage" button. At any time you can skip ahead to the next section. But you don't get the cutscenes, and you can do this all you want. It would have been cool if the cutscenes were in, and you had to earn your fast forwards. In fact that shows the developers knew they messed up because in November 2008 they released it for PS3 as a new "Enhanced Edition" called "Alone in the Dark Inferno".

The most annoying part I played was a driving sequence where you had to outrun a fissure breaking the streets apart in a taxi cab. The part was terrible because you had no idea where you're supposed to go, and the fissure would catch you whenever the driving physics went retarded. And if you messed up, well all the way back to the beginning. Now read this quote from the Gamestop Page for "Alone in the Dark: Inferno".

"59th Street level tuning: one of the game’s most exciting sequences just got better. 59th Street has been tweaked for a more satisfying race against the fissure with difficulty tuning, an added checkpoint at Columbus Circle and clear voice directions given by Sarah"

Now first, yes that is hilarious. But it's also either really good or really bad. It could mean that the developer knew that scene was terminally broken and put it in anyway. Or they listened to their fans and found out it was way too hard to complete. The latter being the good one, of course.

In conclusion I'd like to tell a certain story about the game. All the humanoid walking zombie like enemies in the game are basically unkillable except with fire. Luckily you have a never runs out of fluid lighter and lots of bottles of oil and alcohol laying around to make bombs with. But once, I didn't have a bottle of anything, except a health spray, and I had to kill two enemies to clear a ramp to do a jump. I used the health spray like a blow torch with the lighter to catch one zombie on fire, who immediately died. But the other was still up, so I found a sledgehammer and knocked him over. I then spent about five minutes beating the zombie. He did not, amazingly, get back up. I like to think I broke enough things that it couldn't stand up. In the end, the game has moments of ingenious fun, but they're floating in a sewer of terrible awful broken crap.

Don't buy it, rent the PS3 version.

Two Games Enter, One Game Leaves

So at Family Video they have a rent one get one deal for older titles. I chose to take advantage of this and play two titles I've been meaning to play for awhile. These are: Alone in the Dark, and Guilty Gear 2: Overture. I'm going to write some stuff on them by Saturday and we'll see which one I have more fun with. I've heard both good and bad things about both these games, so we'll see which one wins the coveted cage match title "Game I didn't expect to be good" belt!