Dead Space 2

The Short


Pros
- Fast paced, visceral bloody violence like the first game
- Controls are tightened and improved from the last game
- More weapons and upgrades
- Set on a massive space station, its environments are far more varied than the first game
- Crazy story that expands on the original
- Isaac finally talks
- Same integrated UI, "strategic dismemberment," and general polish from the first game
- Great graphics, horrifying enemies, and everything else combines to make quite the thrill ride

Cons
- Despite Isaac finally taking, he doesn't really say anything meaningful
- Game is very much more "action" than "horror."
- Some of the enemies and gory events are borderline crass
- Has a multiplayer mode that nobody plays, even though it isn't particularly awful
- Gets so over the top and unrealistic at times you'll swear you are playing a Call of Duty game
- Only a handful of new enemies, with the basic staples being recycles from the first game
- Why are there so many closets for enemies to jump out of? And why would they wait in a boring closet, anyway, when they could just be running up and eating my face?

Isaac's back and ready to slice-n-dice.

Warning: Like the first review, this one contains screenshots that are both violent and disturbing

The Long

It's been often stated that if Dead Space is Ridley Scott's Alien, than Dead Space 2 is James Cameron's Aliens. It's an adept analogy, as the Aliens movies are perhaps the best horror movies set in space, and the  Dead Space games are the best horror games set in space. Like Alien, the first Dead Space was somewhat slow, put you on a single ship, and eased you into the horror elements before blowing you away. Dead Space 2 is Aliens, which was released with the tagline "This Time It's War." It is war, and Isaac is ready to blow some Necromorph scum's arms, legs, and whatever other nasty things pop out of them off on his quest to get rid of the bastards once and for all.

Dead Space 2 is much more an action game than Dead Space, and is certainly less subtle. While Dead Space started with a slow build, where you crash-land on the spaceship and walk around in the dark for a while, Dead Space 2 starts with a dude's head exploding about two inches from your face before he turns into a bloodthirsty, violent Necromorph.

I wasn't kidding with that content warning

From that point the game turns "on" and does not turn "off" again until the credits are rolling. Dead Space 2 is a good deal more an action game than the first Dead Space, and because of it a lot of the "horror" elements are gone. Dead Space was scary in the same ways the Silent Hill games are scary: during the quiet moments in the dark, as you collect your thoughts about what might be lurking out there in the dark, scared to continue forward. Dead Space 2 says "screw that, cut 'em up!" and sends you forward with a boatload of weapons to blast zombies to pieces. Which I'm totally fine with. Unlike Resident Evil 5, which tried to blend action and horror and failed (mostly on the "action" side), Dead Space 2 accepts the fact that it's action first, horror second and rolls with it. Which makes it work.

That isn't to say there aren't some tense, shocking scenes in this game. And yes, screwing this up does exactly what you think it does. 

This is evidenced by the fact that the controls are much improved over the last game. While Dead Space's gameplay was far from bad, it could be clunky at time. Isaac was wearing a heavy suit, which made him less versatile and speedy than say, Master Chief. In Dead Space 2 Isaac has a newer, lighter suit, and the gameplay changes respectively. Melee and stomping is better and faster. Isaac seems to move at a slightly better clip (though I still have to hold a button to run. Why? We have analog controls now, people.), the shooting seems tighter, and overall it just plays great. I'd say after Gears of War, Dead Space 2 is probably the best controlled third-person shooter out there. Which is good, since you still have to be shooting with the precision of a surgeon in order to blast the limbs off the numerous types of Necromorphs that want to make you lunch. The zero-g controls have also been dramatically improved, letting you float around rather than leaping like a crazy person from platform to platform. 

Most everything good has carried over from the first game. The "Hudless UI," where everything is displayed on Isaac's suit, is back in full force with a few subtle improvements that make reading his various meters easier. The graphics still look fantastic, with the enemies being horrible monstrosities, the environments being extremely detailed down to every splatter of crimson blood, and the effects being flashy and satisfying. Guns handle well (with a few newcomers like one that shoots javalins), though your original Plasma Cutter is still the best weapon in the game. 

So what's new? Well, zombie kids for starters

Visceral Games pretty much took everything about Dead Space and improved it. People complained because you spent the whole game on one ship, so they gave you a whole space station to explore. You go to various districts ranging from a residential area, a space-church, an elementary school, a biological lab, a computer mainframe, and more. You also spend a good deal of time back out in space, and these are some of the most awesome, gorgeous moments of the game. People complained because there wasn't enough enemies. So they added tons more: packs of zombie kids, a new type of zombie baby, a zombie that charges you like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park, a zombie that barfs acidic goo on you that slows you down, and more. People complained that most of the game was Isaac being bossed around, so they...actually that didn't change too much. But it does lead into another big change: Isaac actually talks in this game!

Silent protagonist no longer. 

Yep. Despite being mute in the first game, Isaac is chatty in this one (which makes it seem, in retrospect, that he was just giving everybody the silent treatment in game numero uno). This means he can decide things for himself and tell these things to other people, as well as have a deeper interaction with other characters and be more involved in the story. I think it's an improvement story-wise, but character-wise Isaac just isn't very interesting. He switches between moping about his dead girlfriend to yelling cuss words at people he doesn't get along with, and there really isn't much variance. He's also a cold-hard killer, doing some nasty things and making some tough decisions, but never really having a sort of personal reconciliation about it. Come on, dude. You can't get over your dead girlfriend, but you kill both zombies and people in this game, but you hardly bat an eye? It's like they gave you a voice just to push the story further, not develop your character...oh yeah, that's exactly why they did it. Hmm. 

That's fine, though, because I liked Dead Space 2's story. I mean, it's not going to win a pulitzer or something, but like Mass Effect, Dead Space has a relatively deep mythology that has plenty of resources for mining. Think I'm actually part of a bigger, living universe is a big step in immersing me in the game (and it's clear they want me immersed, based on the HUDless UI and the fact that it's a creepy horror game), and the story does that well enough. There's also a rather sad moment (which the screenshot above depicts) that actually made me feel some genuine emotion, so kudos to you Dead Space 2. You did alright. 

Now back to murderin' 

There is very little about Dead Space 2 I didn't like. The graphics, sound, and voice acting are all exceptional. The shooting is fun and provides a great mix of tension and adrenaline pumping zombie blasting. The minimal puzzles are easy and non-frustrating, and the story wasn't world-shattering but it was still worth a run-through if you liked the first game. Dead Space 2 also had a rather crazy nod back to the first game about 2/3 of the way through, which is probably my single most favorite moment in the entire game. If you played the first game and loved it, prepare yourself for a treat.

Again, there isn't much I didn't like, but there were a few things. A few parts, especially the beginning, feel a lot like the first Dead Space. Your first weapon in the Plasma Cutter, everybody won't shut up about cutting off the baddies' limbs, etc. Another problem was there never seemed to be enough stores. I kept filling up on health and ammo and wanting to dump it off, and in the first game the stores seemed well paced so that I wasn't throwing items away. In Dead Space 2, I kept having to leave presents behind, which made me sad. The infant baby enemies (a new enemy type) seemed really crass. I won't say they crossed a line or anything (I mean, come on, it's a Dead Space game), but it seemed more like they were being tasteless to try and prove how "hardcore" they were, rather than actually provide genuine scares. The last thing is kind of a silly one: enemies seem to pop out of closets from everywhere. Yeah, it's a genre staple but come on. I began to predict when enemies would pop out of walls or from the ceilings just because they use the exact same time-lull between incidents. Mix it up, guys.

Nothing bad happened here. Nope. 

The game also has a multiplayer mode that I'm certain nobody played. I booted it up for about two matches: it's essentially Left 4 Dead's multiplayer mode but with Dead Space enemies instead of Left 4 Dead enemies. Which sounds fine in theory, sure, but again...nobody is playing it. It seemed like kind of a tacked on addition, and there is certainly a large disconnect between it and the single player story. Maybe next time a co-op mode would be a better idea? Just don't, for the love of all that is good, make your main game mandatory co-op. We all saw what happened to that other action-horror franchise when they did that.

Dead Space 2 is just a really, really solid game

You really should try Dead Space 2 out if you are a fan of horror or action games in the slightest. Though you should play it after the first one; unlike many "second" games (like Gears of War 2) that make the first game look kind of pale in comparison, Dead Space was already on a platform so freaking high that Dead Space 2 just sort of stands alongside it rather than knocking it off. Both games are absolutely fantastic, and with a third one for sure on the way I really can't way to see how this all ends.

Steam sells this game frequently during sales for only $5 on computer, which also has better graphics. On a console you are looking anywhere from $20-30, which is still a very fair price. Even though this game is much more about action than horror than the first one, it's still a kick-ass game, so grab your Plasma Cutter and slice up a few more Necromorphs. 

Five out of five stars. 

Clock Tower: The First Fear

The Short


Pros
- Horrifying, genuinely scary
- Conveys a sense of helplessness rarely found on any game
- Pixelated graphics still do a great job in bringing the horror
- Multiple endings, most of which do not end well for your main character
- Good mix of genuine chills and jump scares
- Very unique experience on the SNES

Cons
- Never came out in the US; you'll have to find a fan translation ROM if you want to play it
- Uses a point and click interface but doesn't support the mouse, making controls cumbersome
- Puzzles and areas can have convoluted and difficult solutions, making a guide almost a necessity
- While playing as a frightened, helpless girl is great from a horror perspective, but from a gameplay one it can become tiresome
- Story gets really weird, especially near the end

Believe it or not, this game is pretty dang creepy

The Long

First off, it is worth nothing that Clock Tower: The First Fear was never released in the United States. I was given a fan-translated ROM by a friend back in my game-making days, when I was using an DOS-based RPG making engine to make everything but RPGs with it. Having made two horror games already, my friend thought it would be interesting material, considering the engine we used was essentially limited to 16 bit graphics. What I found was a surprisingly creepy SNES experience, that rivals even modern horror games with how downright scary it is.

Clock Tower: The First Fear follows a story of several orphan girls who are brought to a house by a mysterious old woman who wants to adopt them. After the old lady leaves for a spell, the power in the house seems to go off, and as the girls go out and explore they are murdered one by one by a little man wielding a pair of giant scissors. ...Ok, that sounds really goofy now that I typed it, but trust me: it gets creepy.

He either makes really big scrapbooks, or she should climb faster. 

Thus begins your quest as the last (?) surviving girl to rescue whomever is left, find those responsible, and get out alive. Or you can just take the car and leave, if you want the bad ending. Clock Tower offers you lots of options (and I think about 7-8 different endings), so if you want to be a jerk and run off you can. Just don't think it'll end well.

Hint: It won't. 

The story in Clock Tower is relatively basic and has a few bizarre twists, as one would expect from a Japanese horror game. Something worth noting is the deaths of the other girls: there are several for each, many depending on what order you visit certain areas, and some of them are horrific. None of them are particularly gory (the game would probably get a "T" rating today) or even violent, but the game does an excellent job using its limited hardware power to produce some shocking kills. The first time you walk into a new area and find one of the girls in trouble, and despite all you do you can't save her, you'll get why this game freaks me out.

It's a real accomplishment, to say the least. Often when you are wandering around the mansion the only sounds are your footsteps. You'll go into rooms that require you to look at things you don't want to (hint: don't look behind the shower curtain. Nightmare fuel, that) all for the sake of puzzles, and the ambiant silence combined with the fact that any moment you or your friend might die is nerve-wracking. It's a seriously intense experience, even though the game would be considered extremely slow by today's gaming standards. 

This probably won't end well. 

Another aspect that keeps the horror going is the gameplay, for both good or bad. The general gist of the game is that your character's tension rises as scary things happen, like jump scares or seeing her friends murdered without being able to help them. If she's relatively calm you can control her decently, able to run from Scissorman whenever he pops out (and he does so randomly...or sometimes not at all...talk about tension). However, if her "panic" meter caps out, she starts making mistakes. Like fumbling with doors, or tripping when she's running, or being unable to stave off a direct attack. This means you have to be extremely careful to not scare the crap out of her (and her face reacts in the corner when you see particularly horrific things, which is a nice touch). If you lose your cool, you're done.

Seriously, do not click the shower curtain. Do not do it. 

Another thing that ramps up the tension (more for bad than good) is the controls. The game uses a "point and click" interface, which also is utilized for your main character's movement. This might have worked if Clock Tower supported that goofy mouse that came with Mario Paint, but it doesn't. So you have to use the SNES controller with a pointer, which just...sucks. Especially in high intensity scenes, where you are frantically looking for hiding places or escape routes from Scissorman, all the while trying to not get cornered, the controls can really mess you up. Item selection and use is also difficult, making actually playing this game almost a chore.

Despite the simple style, I would argue this game looks really good. 

This is an adventure game, a Japanese game, and a horror game. All three of these genres are known to be  difficult not because of actual gameplay difficulty, but because of convoluted goals and just general hardness. Clock Tower is very convoluted. It'll take you several runs, inching your way along as you progress, probably finding several bad endings before finally making some headway. I'd personally say give it two or three goes just to experience it on a "naked" run, then use a guide. The game it still pretty intense and scary, even when you know what you are doing, but it is just so damned difficult to know what to do it's almost impossible to get a good ending without cheating. It doesn't ruin the experience, though, which is what matters.

The fan translation is a good one, though the story can still be convoluted. 

As stated, the sound design in this game is fantastic, and the graphics are good as well. There's something unnerving about seeing such horrific scenes playing out with retro SNES graphics, which works to the games advantage. As I've also said, there is next to no blood and gore in this game, but it still manges to be completely horrifying and unsettling. It just goes to show you don't have to pull a Saw and make your movies/games a gorefest all in the name of "horror." That is assuming you do it well, which Alan Wake tried and got really close, but unfortunately didn't quite make it. 

I really, really like Clock Tower: The First Fear. I liked it so much it inspired me in my sequel to my first horror game (Pitch Black) to incorporate a lot of Clock Tower's elements into the sequel (Pitch Black 2)

See any similarities? I drew that background in MSPaint, by the way. Be impressed. 

It has a few problems, but if you like horror games and want to see what the SNES offered, you really should check this game out. It's completely free, you'll just have to search for a ROM that's translated, so you really don't have anything to lose. 

Despite issues, I feel good giving this game four out of five stars. I could seriously argue that it is the scariest game I've ever played (though Silent Hill 2 & 3 put up an excellent fight), or at least it was scary and impactful when I played it almost ten years ago. I can see why they didn't import it over here (it isn't something the SNES audience would have boughten back in the day), but thanks to the interent you can still experience it. So go for it!

Saw

The Short


Pros
- Captures the gritty, dirty, horrifying world of the Saw movies
- A fair number of the infamous traps make an appearance
- Voice acting is decent and the game has a good atmosphere to it
- Puzzles can be very difficult and brain-teasing, which is great
- Captures the essence of the Saw movie franchise perfectly, which will please fans
- Really easy 1000/1000 G for Achievement hunters

Cons
- Combat, while not broken, is really, really poor
- While it has traps, it doesn't have nearly enough
- Puzzles are good but really repetitive
- Graphics look bland, even for an Unreal 3 engine game
- You spend 90% of the game indoors in the same gray corridors
- Endings are stupid
- While it has a strong start, it quickly burns out and runs out of ideas

"Hello, reader. I'd like to play a game..."

The Long

I have a confession to make, and one that'll probably lose me a lot of respect points from my readers: I actually really like the first Saw movie. I'm a huge horror fan, and something that is often missing from the genre is (at least an attempt at) a clever story with lots of interweaving elements. Usually it's just monsters or murderers killing lots of people, and even if they try to put a story in at the beginning it degenerates. Saw managed to keep its interesting premise (two guys are locked in an unknown room together, both chained to the wall, and one is ordered to kill the other one with whatever he can find) all the way to the end, with a shocking twist that completely caught me off guard.

The movies got awful pretty quick (I saw all the way to the fifth one for some unexplainable reason) and the franchise puttered out with the final iteration, not making much money and finally dying out (after seven movies). During it's heyday, however, Konami (yes, the guys that brought us Silent Hill) thought to produce a horror game based on the movie. Set between Saw and Saw II, you play as Danny Glover's character from the first game as Jigsaw tries to convince him to overcome his obsession with finding him by forcing Danny Glover to go through a bunch of traps and kill a lot of people. So yeah, it's like the movies. 

A lot of the areas in Saw remind me quite a bit of the Silent Hill games

What might amaze you, however, is that for a movie-tie in game based on progressively awful movies, Saw the game is actually...pretty good. It isn't going to blow you away or anything, but for those who like old-school style horror games (read: the ones that aren't secretly third person shooters like what Resident Evil has become and Dead Space) this is really worth looking into.

The game is a linear path forward, with many obstacles put in the environment to kill you. In fact, aside from the crazed enemies, the environments themselves are your biggest chance for death. Opening doors has a random chance a shotgun trap will be attached (which means you have to quickly press a button or else your head gets blown off). You have bare feet, so if you run blindly into darkness you might step on glass and lose health. Keys are often convenient placed in toilets full of dirty syringes, and so on. Again, if you are familiar with the Saw movies this is all old-hat, but even if you are the game keeps you on your toes with the constant danger that lurks around every corner.

Let's talk about the enemies and combat first, since it's easily the worst part of the game. 

Something really bad will happen to this guy if you don't solve the puzzle fast enough

The combat reminds me a good bit of old survival horror games. Unlike those games, the main character in Saw is controlled with normal third-person controls (meaning he doesn't move like a tank). Like those old games, however, combat is a horrid affair. Basically all you can do is swing whatever weapon you have and hope for the best. Enemies can easily get you stuck staggered and keep hitting you until you are dead without you having much hope for retaliation. You can often do this to them as well, but considering they like to gang up on you (and your weapons break)...it usually can end poorly. As a bonus, you have a shotgun collar on your neck (as do most enemies), so if you don't kill the person fast enough it'll go off and blow your head away. Awesome.

Combat is clunky and generally awful, regardless of difficulty. It honestly feels more like luck than actual skill. This sense of helplessness in the face of bad controls I guess ramps up the tension and makes you feel weak and vulnerable, but I don't think that was actually part of the plan. Luckily this game only has a moderate amount of combat, with most of your time spent exploring, dodging traps, and solving puzzles. 

Hope you like puzzles that involve rotating things, because there's a lot of them

Saw only has a few different puzzle types, which is my biggest complaint against the puzzles. Most involve rotating stuff to line up other stuff...actually that might be all of the puzzles. Lockpicking is also rotating stuff to line up other stuff now that I think about it...hey! Konami, you tricked me! I was going to say that the puzzles were actually pretty good, but now I don't know if I can!

Well, they are alright, then. Wait, there's a puzzle that involves sliding stuff, so they aren't all rotating. Um, wait, where was I? Oh yes, the puzzles. They are actually difficult, which is great, and since most of them will involve somebody dying if you screw up (either yourself or a person in a rather grotesque contraption) it ramps up the tension immensely. As far as puzzles go, they are basic but brain-teasy, though one of the last ones is literally just "Memory" done on tv monitors. I guess they ran out of ideas at that point (or got tired of recycling the same ones over and over).

Point: Saw has puzzles. They are good, but lack in variety. Luckily the game is short so you only get sick of them about an hour before the end.

It does a good job staying true to the creepy aesthetics set by the movies

That's about it for how Saw works. Basically your goal is often to get into a room where Jigsaw has imprisoned an innocent person on a horrible, body-shredding trap (your guy never seems to mind the fact that he's killing a bunch of people just to get in and save one, but whatever). Then you solve a puzzle to free them, get shuffled down to the next area and repeat. It's all very liner and while there is a little variety to the areas (you go to a boiler room, a crematorium, etc.) it's all still indoors in the same place so everything starts looking identical after a while. Which again pushes the fact that Saw starts strong and then putters down quickly.

One of my favorite bits, however, is you can sometimes see rooms with the aftermath of other Saw victims after they've failed their traps, with the grisly results. It's super creepy and horrifying and helps set the mood. Again (I'm saying this a lot in this review), this game is really loyal to it's creepy and often horrific source material, and I can get behind that.

The game looks good but not great

The sound design in this game is top notch, with the original voice actor for Jigsaw coming back to record the numerous television recordings that pop up to taunt you frequently. The sound design is also excellent, using lots of silence (like the Silent Hill games) to set the mood and make it so any sudden noise is jarring and startling. During specific scenes music from the movies play, and I've always felt the Saw movies had excellent, creepy soundtracks so we'll take it.

It's a pity the graphics don't match up. All the screenshots you are seeing here are from the PC version, which has better textures and higher resolution (and it still looks just "ok"). The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions look a fair amount worse, running at lower resolutions and sporting muddy textures and bad texture popin. I think the problem really lies in the art design, which succeeds when you are in an area that's been "Jigsawed" (with the green TVs, traps, etc). But during most of the game where you are running down the same bland hallways, everything just sort of meshes together. It's uninspired, and hurts the game a lot. 

It also has some really good audio logs ala Bioshock, which up the creepiness factor

As it stands, Saw is...surprisingly unoffensive. It doesn't pioneer any ground but it doesn't make any massive mistakes either. And while a lot of it is both repetitive and frustrating, I genuinely wanted to see it through til the end, and enjoyed playing it while I was at it. If you are a fan of the movies, go get some taste. But before you do that, you should probably check this game out anyway. It's short, so a weekend rent is probably your best bet, but if you can get it for under $10 you probably won't turn away unsatisfied.

So as it stands, two out of five stars. If you love the Saw movies, tack another two stars on there. If you hate them, subtract two. But if you are neutral but enjoy horror games, you might want to consider this overlooked game. At least until the next Silent Hill game comes out. 

Alan Wake

The Short


Pros
- Action/horror in the vein of Resident Evil 4 
- Stars Alan Wake, a horror writer, which is an original protagonist for a video game
- Alan Wake provides story-like narration throughout that helps set the tone and mood
- Excellent fog and lighting effects, dark forests look creepy and foreboding
- Has some genuinely interesting and weird twists in the story
- Controls are smooth and easy to pick up and play
- Voice acting is excellent
- Serious "Twin Peaks" or "Twilight Zone" vibe from this
- Breaks it up into "episodes" (like Alone in the Dark) which further pushes the "TV Show" aesthetic

Cons
- Graphics are serviceable but character models (especially faces) look pretty bad
- Insane amounts of product placements: expect to take calls on your Verizon phone and keep picking up Energizer batteries for your flashlight
- "Manuscript pages" that you find have some pretty dense, awful writing it it
- For all the gushing Alan Wake does over Stephen King, they do a poor job emulating his excellent writing style
- Meaning: the dialogue between characters is good, the narration/manuscripts/etc. is very thick. Alan needed an editor because this was obviously a rough draft
- Battles start out fun but quickly get repetitive
- Doesn't offer much in terms of varying vistas: you get mostly shadowy forests and...more shadowy forests
- Ending is a horrid cliffhanger designed to sell their DLC
- For being touted as a horror/thriller game, there is nothing scary in the entire game of Alan Wake

Welcome to Bright Falls. Alan's tweed jacket and under-hoodie aren't ready for this

The Long

Alan Wake is a compelling game with a massive development time. Like Too Human or Duke Nukem Forever, this game has been in limbo for an eternity, shifting iterations and believed to be long-dead many a time. Created by Remedy, the guys who did the first two Max Payne games, Alan Wake is (as it says on the box) a "psychological thriller." But is this love-letter to horror writers (specifically Stephen King) mixed with a weird homage to shows like Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone really worth looking into? Well...you'd better stay "A-Wake" for this review. Get it? Ha!

Alan Wake's premise is actually pretty cool. Alan is an international bestseller of horror novels (though based on the box and his actual writing he's less Stephen King and more James Patterson) who has had a serious wave of writer's block for the past two years. In an attempt to get the creative juices flowing, Alan takes a trip to the town of Bright Falls, a rural, densely forested town on an island. Unfortunately for Alan, stuff is about to get weird as he awakens to find his wife gone, half the town turned into weird beasties, and pages for an apparently unpublished manuscript that he doesn't remember writing floating around town, describing exactly what is going on. When did Alan write this? Will he be able to survive his own horror story?

If this sounds like a cool premise, it is, but the downer is that it isn't executed with much care. The story itself is pretty generic for about 90% of the game (evil dark creature lived in the lake-house Alan rented from some gypsy women, its turning the townsfolk and other inanimate objects into black darkness creatures, shoot stuff until the game ends) until it gets to the end, where it goes completely bananas and tries to pull off about six plot twists at once while failing, and then tries to also leave an open-ending (which also doesn't work). Apparently the DLC (which you have to buy, of course) that takes place immediately after the ending of Alan Wake explains a little of it, but I got one of them and it just made more unanswered questions rather than tell me what the crap was going on. For a game that so heavily pushes the "Alan is a great writer, this is his story" throughout, you'd think they'd have maybe hired an actual writer or maybe some editors to fix their own, crappy story. Or maybe it was just a rough draft. 

"'About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire...' Hey! I didn't write this!"

The actual game of Alan Wake is a standard third-person shooter affair with a slight twist. See, most of the good-natured, salt-of-the-earth people of Bright Falls have turned into crazy dark zombie people, and the darkness doesn't discriminate between living creatures and, say, tractors, so those are after Alan too. In order to defeat these monstrosities you have to first focus your flashlight on them with a high powered beam (which apparently drains the batteries like crazy; you have to constantly be pumping Energizers into them in order to stay alive) until the darkness pops off them, and then you blast them with bullets. Alan, aside from being a mediocre writer, also apparently knows how to handle any firearm with excellent proficiency, meaning the shooting controls are tight and he can also walk and shoot at the same time (take that, Resident Evil 5! Your zombie-killing specialist was just outdone by John Grisham!). He also has a nifty dodge that can be used if melee enemies get too close, resulting in a rad but oddly out-of-place slow-motion duck that looks more goofy than realistic. As it stands the controls are serviceable, the shooting is tight, and enemies seem to take just the right amount of time to go down.

The problem is that there is next to no enemy variety. Aside from the few random teleporting inanimate objects (which can be killed by just using the light, no bullets required) you basically just shoot tons of similarly looking darkness dudes for the entire course of the game. It never mixes up this formula, and while it's fun and sort of intense for the first dozen, when I was gunning down darkness lumberjack #496 I started wondering why these jerks kept blocking me from the rest of the story. Alan gets a better flashlight, better guns, etc. but it all seems redundant because all that means is the game will just throw more guys at you at once. He also gets flash-bang grenades that apparently only affect zombies and not people (since Alan doesn't get stunned by them) which are good "nukes" but seem unnecessary. You are always just fighting little people-beasties, and they never get particularly difficult.

Despite the graphics not being exceptional, they do good with the little things. It's just too bad they use the same little things over and over again. 

This is probably Alan Wake's biggest flaw: it's repetitive. Which also shows in its locals: you spend about 80% of the game wandering through a dark, foggy forest path, glancing around you to make sure Taken (aka the zombies) aren't coming at you from behind some trees, shining your light all about frantically, etc. There are so many freaking foggy forests in this game. Yeah, I get that he's in forest-land USA based on the setting, but couldn't we have mixed it up a bit? You visit a sort-of trailer park at the beginning; why couldn't we go through there after it's been dark? Or more farms? (though it does have a lot of farms, too) Or...anything?

There are a few unique places, like a mental health hospital and a sort of "cabin" district, and you do get to walk through the town after it's been made "evil," but most of the game is shooting the same Taken people in the same-looking forest. Dull.

Running to safe points while being ambushed is pretty intense, and they use light well in this game

Graphically, Alan Wake does some things really well and others just ok. The aforementioned foggy forests do look quite good, and what Alan Wake lacks in technical prowess it makes up in setting and sticking to a theme. Light looks especially great, with the red/orange flares from the flare gun that billow up illuminated smoke looking damned impressive, even after the tenth one. Everything with the light looks exceptional (as would be expected, since light plays such a key role in this game), from how your beam darts across the tops of cornfields or sticks on some fog close to you. That part of the game is great.

The not so great part is when you start looking close. Textures are generally bland, with side objects such as rocks and walls looking pretty crappy if you get up close to them (though usually they are layered by both darkness and fog, so I guess it's sort of forgivable). Characters are modeled ok but their faces look horrid, with the lips hardly ever matching the voices and the whole thing looking stilted. Again, it wouldn't have been such a problem if they hadn't been banking so much on their story, but when your script isn't very great, your story's ending makes no sense, and your means of presenting it (the graphics) are choppy at best, you have a problem.

The flares still look cool, and look cooler after they've hit

The game has lots of little things that are close to being great but just barely don't make it. Alan's narration over the whole thing is a great touch and is very well voiced, but I really wish they'd actually read the ham-fisted dialogue that he's spouting off. Similarly, the manuscript pages you find blowing in the eternal forests read equally thick and bloated. It's like somebody thought a bunch of similes and over-description was all one needed to write a good book, while completely missing how to apply these tools to actually write something good. The fact you have to constantly reload your flashlight is annoying but makes sense gameplay-wise, but why the heck are all the batteries Energizer branded, and lying all over a forest? The collectables, the coffee thermoses, are also just lying in the woods. Does Alan drink those when he picks them up? No wonder he's seeing zombies; he's on some sort of weird trip. The Verizon phone placement is also obnoxious, but it anything on disc is easily trumped by one of the first lines in the DLC (where a character calls you and literally asks "Can you hear me now?"). Rampant product placement is annoying but forgivable if it makes sense. Here, it's just stupid. 

Which sort of brings me to my last point: Alan Wake is a "thriller" game that isn't particularly thrilling, scary, horrific, or otherwise. You might have guessed that with it's "T for Teen" rating they couldn't exactly get away with gore-based horror, but plenty of games and movies have been classified in the "teen" rating and still pulled off some pretty serious scares (The Ring comes to mind). Because Alan is such an excellent shot and everything is layered with that corny narration, the game comes off more as silly rather than scary. And yeah, there are lots of dudes coming at you at times, but I never had that white-knuckle, nail-biting mixture of dread and tension that was so persistent in games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, which Alan Wake clearly is trying to emulate. You come for the story, wade through the quagmire-ific gameplay to the next plot point, and then the game ends. There is no horror here. 

I've also never seen an author have cardboard cutouts made of himself to push his books. Vain much, Alan?

As it stands, Alan Wake does well on its aesthetic, even if it misses the mark of being a "psychological thriller." The story is compelling despite it's stupid, obnoxious ending, and while the shooting is good there is just far too much of it. It's hard to take a polarizing stance in either direction with Alan Wake: I can't hate it because it still is a very solid game at its core, and I can't love it because it does so many little things wrong. If you are into third-person shooters and love foggy woods and want to see a rather unique take on familiar genre trappings, you could do a lot worse than Alan Wake. But if you were expecting a "psychological thriller" several years in the making, you might want to wait for the paperback. I mean the sequel. Or something. That joke didn't work.

You can grab the game pretty easily for $10-15, which if you are interested is a decent enough price to jump right in. Just know what you are and aren't getting, lower your expectations a bit, and you'll probably do fine. This game also recently came out on PC, which includes all the DLC, and considering the graphics are a bit better (and it supports 3D cards) I'd consider that the optimum way to play, if you can get a controller hooked up.

Three out of five stars, Alan. You didn't write a bestseller, but at least you pulled out of the midlist. 

Week in Review for 2/19/2012 - Horror Week

It's time for another week in review! This last week I burned through 10 terrible games, shoving the total up to 67. I didn't get through all my terrible games, though (I still have 9 up for grabs on the Xbox 360 alone) but I think I covered most of them. I have enough left for another terrible games week should I feel so inclined, but for now it's back to business as usual.

And business as usual is that this week will (probably) be Horror Games Week! Yes, I'm going to burn through all the horror (not horrible) games I can think of, including every Silent Hill game (except Origins, which I never played), the Saw game, Clock Tower, The Suffering, and more. I love horror games, so I have plenty to choose from, including ones that are just sort of horror (Left 4 Dead, Dead Island) but still could technically count.

I'm currently playing Saint's Row The Third pretty seriously on the modern gaming side, and I'm deciding what game I want to play through on the retro side. I'm considering doing yet another Super Mario RPG playthrough, but it's also been a very long time since I've beaten Final Fantasy II/IV, so maybe that will be worth some time. I also need to finish Final Fantasy XIII, where on the Xbox I got to the exact same spot I gave up on the PS3 version and then gave up again. I'm going to really try to push forward, though. It's starting to turn into a game, finally.

Anyway, here's this week's horrible games with their respective reviews.

Fable III - 1 / 5 Stars
CastleQuest - 1 / 5 Stars
Too Human - 1 / 5 Stars
Bad Dudes - 1 / 5 Stars
Crackdown 2 - 1 / 5 Stars
TMNT: Turtles in Time Reshelled - 0 / 5 Stars
Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley - 2 / 5 Stars
Dead Space Ignition - 0 / 5 Stars
Ninety-Nine Nights - 1 / 5 Stars
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - 2 / 5 Stars

That's it from me this week! Have a killer week!

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

The Short


Pros
- Fantastic voice acting and script
- Game is a hybrid of third person shooting and Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider platforming
- For a 2007 game, it looks pretty decent
- Swashbuckling adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones
- Vistas and landscapes are impressive and have a tremendous amount of scope

Cons
- Shooting is tedious, with bullet-sponge enemies and weird controls killing the pacing
- Forced Six-Axis controller moments (tipping controller to stay balanced) are awful
- While I like Drake, the fact that he kills so many people in cold-blood kind of...disturbs me
- Story takes a stupid supernatural twist at the end
- Platforming is decent but far from difficult or even slightly challenging
- "Puzzles" are extremely easy

The game looks great in stills, but in action plants look really "plasticy"

The Long

The Uncharted games, made by blockbuster developer Naughty Dog (who also made the fantastic Jak series on the PS2) are easily Sony's biggest franchise. The only game series I can even think that comes close to moving similar numbers is the God of War games, a series that gained momentum by being one of the last great PS2 games. The first Uncharted: Drake's Fortune came out back in 2007, when the PS3 was struggling to gain a foothold against the momentum-hogging Xbox 360. Advertised as a sort of "Tomb Raider" meets "Indiana Jones" meets "Gears of War," Uncharted was one of the games that pushed the PS3's popularity, providing a "killer-app" for many who wanted to embark on Nathan Drake's first adventure into the jungle to find Sir. Francis Drake's hidden stash of treasure.

I didn't play this game until 2010, and it was one of the first games I got on my PS3. I also had already played a bit of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves first, but I abandoned it because I wanted to play through this (the first game) just in case I missed some story elements or something of the sort. Note this was also after the absolutely killer third-person cover-based shooter Gears of War 2 had curb-stomped its way onto the market, a game I'd spent hours upon hours of time with. I also absolutely love the modern Prince of Persia games, so I figured this would be a match made in heaven.

Was it? Well...no. Not this first iteration of the Uncharted series, anyway. 

Despite having that "early HD" look with its textures, the shadows and backdrops were top notch, if a bit repetitive 

First off, let me cover what Uncharted does right. It would be safe to say that Naughty Dog probably has some of the best script writers in the business (even if their stories aren't that great to back them up), paired up with some absolutely incredible voice talent. Nolan North (now video game famous for providing his voice in every game ever made) voices our star Nathan Drake, a literal descendent of Sir Francis Drake, who find out his great-great-whatever-grandfather left a stash of buried treasure way off on some hidden island. After crash landing the plane and getting separated from the reporter slash love interest he brought along, Nathan embarks on a quest to outrace the bad guys in order to make sweet, sweet cash.

Sounds a lost like an Indian Jones movie, doesn't it? Well, it's close.

Nathan Drake is a very charismatic character, as is Elena, the girl he brought along. Drake's old mentor, Sully, is also an extremely interesting and well-realized character. Drake has a nasty habit of talking to himself constantly (as well as as saying "oh crap" every single time something goes wrong, which is often), but the dialogue is so well written I'm willing to forgive it. I'm reminded of the Prince's narration in The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is what I consider to be one of the best written scripts in any video game ever, so that's a lofty comparison. When the characters are together and playing off each other the banter is entertaining and realistic, making their witty exchanges an absolute joy to listen to. While it's true the story is a bit...weak (get money before other guy does) I'm willing to forgive because the ride it took me on (at least with the dialogue) was so great.

The architecture in this game is astounding. Bonus points since you can climb it. 

Another big perk is the fact that the game looks incredible. If you put it alongside most modern games you would notice that some things look a little...off. The whole thing has that "shiny plastic" element going about it that you saw in a lot of first and second generation games this round of consoles, and they tend to like to overlight everything in an attempt to show everything off. The areas also get really repetitive, with 90% of the game you switching between being outside in a jungle, climbing across ruins, or exploring ruins in the jungle. You do get some bits where you are underground at the end, which is a decent change of pace (though not as pretty). All these complants are really minor, though, especially considering this game came out in 2007. They wanted something that showed the power of the PS3, and boy did they get it. This pedigree of incredible-looking-ness carried over to both Uncharted 2 & 3, which are easily some of the prettiest games I've ever played.

So far this review has been very positive, which is good. The aesthetics of Uncharted (both this game and the whole series) have always been their biggest selling point, with Naughty Dog and Sony sparing no expense with production values. The problem with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, however, comes when you start playing the game.

Drake is mad because it takes a full clip from an AK-47 just to kill one dude

As stated, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a hybrid between the cover-based shooting of Gears of War and the platforming puzzles of Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia. The problem is that Uncharted (like it's main character) is a jack-of-all-trades it is a master of few. Shooting in Uncharted feels really clunky, with aiming never clicking with me and cover controls annoying. Simple commands like swapping weapons or picking up ammo also seemed weirdly disconnected, like I'd be standing over a gun a certain way and the prompt wouldn't appear, or I'd press the Triangle button to swap guns and nothing would happen. These poor controls are only exacerbated by the fact that Uncharted apparently really wanted to be a third person shooter: there are tons of enemies in this game. Normally I'd be fine with this, but another massive issue is all enemies are bullet-sponges. It can take literally minutes to take down just one or two guys, waiting for them to come out of cover and then taking a few daring pot-shots as they relocate. Skirmishes drag on and on, with the game rarely giving you a break between them. This tedium made me put the game down several times out of sheer frustration and bordom, because whenever I saw another fight coming up I really, really didn't want to do it. Perhaps one of these two things (bad controls and immortal/hordes of enemies) broken on its own wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the pairing of them make Uncharted: Drake's Fortune unbearably frustrating.

Your adventure takes some weird, swashbuckling turns throughout

The other issue is the climbing and puzzles. While interesting, Uncharted is very clear on where you need to go, mostly. Let me backtrack a second and explain why I think this is. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time they introduce a ton of really difficult platforming puzzles that challenge your response time and button dexterity. In any other game, these feats of platforming would be infuriating: you'd die constantly and have to start over. But PoP introduced a new mechanic: time reversal. Basically a "rewind" that you can activate and deactivate at your leisure (though you have a limited number of charges), this meant the developers could make their insanely difficult platforming segments, because it was less of "dying a lot" and more of "learning it through easily-fixed mistakes." It was brilliant and I wish more games stole it.

Skip forward to Uncharted. There is no time-reversal mechanic; it relies on normal checkpointing systems. This means every platforming segment is one of two things: really easy because Naughty Dog didn't want you pulling your hair out in frustration all the time, or designed to make you pull your hair out in frustration every time. Granted, there's lots more of the former than the latter (thankfully) but if I knew I was just getting vanilla "easy" platforming I'd have gone back to Prince of Persia. Again, it's that whole "jack of all trades but master of none" problem: Uncharted wanted to marry two genres together, but didn't do it particularly well. Which would have been fine if I hadn't already played both Gears of War 2 and Prince of Persia before. Because I had, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune felt clunky, cheap, unfun, and boring in comparison.

The animations are great, but the melee attack is total garbage

It's worth noting that the sequels to Uncharted do a much better job at being both a shooter and a platformer. While still not on par with the previously-mentioned greats, they also bumped up the formula by increasing the number of places you visit, the set-pieces you encounter, and just knocking the "crazy" out of the park. You don't care if climbing is boring or simple if you are climbing up a train that's dangling off the edge of a cliff in a blizzard and slowly falling apart as you try to get to the top (Uncharted 2 starts with a bang, we'll just leave it at that). But if it's just around some ruines that looked exactly like the last batch...might start to notice that the game really isn't doing much for you.

I also have to get this off my chest: as much as I think Nathan Drake is a charming, witty, roguish protagonist, I can't also help but think he's a huge psychopath. You kill hundreds of guys in this game, probably more in the first couple hours than every person Indian Jones killed across all four of his movies. And at least in Indiana Jones he was killing Nazies (or at least people we knew were totally evil); in Uncharted Drake offs guys that were just hired by another guy to recover the treasure before Drake. I see no reason to believe the antagonists in these games are particularly evil, or if they are they certainly don't deserve to die for it, and their poor, underpaid henchmen with no health insurance really don't deserve to have their heads popped just because Drake wanted some gold before them. Which reminds me of another thing: he's making snarky remarks constantly, even when killing dudes. How sadistic is that? He's killing just some regular guys, and joking about it? This guy should have post-traumatic stress disorder in spades! He's killed more people across these games than probably the total death count in Operation: Desert Storm!

At least I'm not the only one who thought this; Penny Arcade knows. 

As it stands, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is just...not fun. I didn't enjoy it. Yeah I loved looking at it and hearing it, but anything that involved ducking into cover or shooting (and a good 80% of the game seemed to be that) was just a tedious, obnoxious drag. As I've said: the later games fix a lot of this one's problems, and this was the first in a series and the first attempt to merge these genres by Naughty Dog. But just because a game is pretty or tries hard doesn't mean it's worth playing, and I only really suggest playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune if you really don't mind some awful shooting.

Then again, everybody else gave this game insane amounts of praise (as evidenced by its metacritic) so I'm pretty sure I'm the minority here. I finished it mostly to see if there was anything I needed to know before playing Uncharted 2. There wasn't really, so you could probably just start on the second game and it would work out just fine.

If you still want to attempt it, I'd say it's worth $5-10. It's pretty and well-written (minus a weird supernatural thing at the end that is mega-lame) and tries really hard. But know you might throw your controller against the wall in frustration at times. 

Two out of five stars. 

Ninety-Nine Nights

The Short


Pros
- Lots of hacking and also slashing to be had
- Tons of different characters with unique abilities
- Shows a pretty insane number of units on-screen at once
- You feel kind of badass when you are killing 20 people at once with a massive weapon
- Has a story. I think.

Cons
- Gets boring after about the first five minutes
- Characters are poorly balanced; some are extremely powerful, others are just horrible
- Tons of cheap deaths
- Boss units/fights aren't fun
- Incredible lack of depth
- They attempt to interweave a story between characters. They don't pull it off.

Get ready to kill boatloads of dudes by yourself. 

The Long

Ninety-Nine Nights has drawn comparisons with the Dynasty Warriors series, and for good reason. Both games involve essentially two massive armies clashing into each other, with you playing as a super-powered hero tasked to push the front forward until you win. Apparently there are people who actually like these games, because there's almost as many Dynasty Warriors games as there are Final Fantasy games, with new ones coming out on every platform at a pretty regular clip. Seeing as I hadn't played any Dynasty Warriors games before busting out Ninety-Nine Nights (hereto referred to as N3), I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

What I found was a game that looked cool from the offset, but quickly coasts its way into monotony. 

Armored, winged anime character with gratuitous cleavage? Must be a Japanese game. 

The basic premise of N3 is simple: many armies are clashing, you are a hero/leader/captain/whatever, and you have to make it so they win. So a jillion dudes will go running at each other, and its your job to run out and murder as many of them as possible. The more you murder, the further your troops can advance. You'll capture points and kill some bosses on the maps, and then you'll win. Later, rise, repeat for a dozen or so levels and then you switch characters. Play through every characters' dozen levels and you beat the game. Done.

The repetitiveness in terms of overarching structure is nothing compared to the repetitiveness in actual combat. 

Pre-teen witch showing enough leg to make a hooker blush? Japan. 

It's your regular hack-n-slash, meaning you hit "x" and "y" a lot and people die. There is literally no depth to this combat whatsoever. There is the ability to gather "souls" or something of that sort from enemies that lets you go into a powered-up state, but that's pretty much the only additional ability you have. There are a few combos but none are particularly interesting or necessary (since the hordes of enemies tend to just stand there and die unless they are the bosses), and though each character does have unique attacks and abilities (and upgrades, which are all small and do next to nothing) the monotony of the whole thing is just overwhelming. How do you fail at a hack n' slash games? These games are boring by design, so their target audience is usually more forgiving. This game is just...tedium incarnate. 

The effects aren't particularly flashy, and the only good thing graphically is the massive number of foes on-screen

That was really short, but that's essentially N3. That's the whole game. I know, now you are chomping at the bit to run out and buy it, but hold on, savvy consumer! I forgot to mention the best part: the balance issues!

So as you play through the levels with each specific character they level up and grow more powerful, and it's an extremely slow burn with regard to difficulty: each specific character scenario starts off slightly harder than the one before it, but you still have to burn through a dozen levels before it becomes a challenge. The issue is that two of the last characters are the extremely slow brute character and the fragile, bad-combo pre-teen witch (as seen above). By this point the game is starting each mission with a higher difficultly level, but they aren't giving you better characters to cope with these (the fast, twin-daggered goblin is probably the most powerful character in terms of raw damage). This was about the time I really started hating N3: it went from being a dull, boring, easy grind to a rather difficult grind. Sure, the previous characters had tons of cheap deaths, but at least I could get to the end levels before it started getting ridiculousness. With jailbait witch I was dying constantly from the start. Maybe I just suck, but it really got old fast and seemed like some really poor pacing and balancing.

The characters couldn't be more cookie-cutter anime cliches

The graphics also look blurry and muddy, with poor textures throughout. Your main characters look decent (it's an early release Xbox 360 game, so I'm willing to cut it some slack) but all the generic enemies look like something off the PS2. They probably had to do this because they put a trillion of them on screen at once, which I'll admit is pretty impressive, but since they all look like garbage the magic is sort of dead. Effects like fire and magic all putter out without much flare or excitement, and the backdrops for this action are blurry, boring, and uninteresting. It's about as bland as it comes. 

Hiding your bad graphics under motion blur doesn't work, N3. 

As it stands, it's hard for me to recommend Ninety-Nine Nights, even for those who enjoy these types of games. I will admit I managed to have at least a little bit of fun with the game during the first few characters, with the idea of murdering tons of people constantly driving the game forward...sort of. But in retrospect it was a long, dull experience that I'd probably not want to ever replay. It wasted my Saturday, I can say that much, but it shouldn't waste yours, because you read this review and now know better. 

I don't suggest buying it, but if you are really insistent I suppose under $5 isn't too horrible. It just does so many things wrong, even in its own genre that makes a name for doing things wrong, that Ninety-Nine Nights is just...it's bad, ok? No more joking: this game sucks. Just....it's bad. Don't play it. I'm done.

One out of five stars.