Go Buy Alan Wake!

Last summer I bought Alan Wake on sale for a whopping $4 and it was awesome. I posted about it and tried to get people to get it, but no one seemed to really want to pay the full price for a game with a fantastic story. Well, it just went on sale for the winter holiday sale for only $3.

There is no excuse. Alan Wake has Steam cards and an awesome story. You need to play this game and $3 is a steal. DO IT NOW!

Alan Wake's American Nightmare

Yesterday after posting about Alan Wake I decided to install the sequel and see what was happening to poor Alan. Well, four hours later I finished that game so I hesitate to really call it a full game. On the plus side it does have an 'arcade' mode where you can fight a horde of monsters for 10 minutes with no plot involved at all if you like the combat and don't want more story. I wouldn't be surprised if the arcade modes with their online score leaderboards actually gave a lot of extra game time to people who like the combat, so I guess it's a bit harsh to deny that this is a full game. It's just not a full game for me.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare actually had more enjoyable combat for me than the original did. They added a ton of new weapons and changed the way ammo boxes work in a very good way. Now instead of needing to find lots of little piles of ammo and being worried about running out you get full ammo for both of your weapons and your flashlight any time you hit an ammo box. On top of that ammo boxes are marked on the mini-map and recharge over time, so there was never any worry about running out of bullets. The special weapons like grenades were more limited so I hoarded those like there was no tomorrow, though! It also ot rid of most of the trash mob fights. I think that may be an atmosphere thing though... It's hard to paint a good horror picture of despair when you're stuck in the woods if you escape after two minutes and a boss fight. Things feel more real when you have to run 20 minutes through a forest getting ambushed along the way. More real, but less fun.

On the downside the story was significantly worse. Ok, maybe worse is the wrong word there. It was significantly different. The original game was all about crazy stuff going on and a desperate search to figure out what was happening and why. It was horror all the way, and it was very good at it. In the sequel I never really felt like I didn't know what was going on. I don't want to go into details without spoiling the first game, but what you learn over the course of that game is used in this one, but nothing interesting is really added to it. It felt more like a fantasy story where the crazy stuff was already spelled out for us and we just needed to see where it would lead. And it lead exactly where I thought it would go. I didn't feel like I needed to keep playing in order to see what was going to happen like I did in the first one. But at less than a third of the playtime I never really reached a point where I felt I should stop but couldn't because I HAD to keep playing.

It does make use of what may be my favourite story device, though: Groundhog Day! I need to play more games with this device. I remember playing a PS2 game my brother owned when I was visiting from University once that made great use of it. What was that game called? A search on Google for 'PS2 groundhog day guitar' brought up Ephemeral Fantasia and the cover looks right.

At any rate, I'm still happy I played Alan Wake's American Nightmare. It was worth playing, but I think it really pales in comparison to Alan Wake. Which may be saying more about how awesome that game is, actually...

Alan Wake

Last month during the Steam summer sale lots of games were on sale and I bought a fair number of games that I may well never get around to playing. Stupid sales! One game, Alan Wake, I bought because it was on sale, and because it has Steam cards, and because I saw a Facebook post where my sister told my brother it was awesome and that he should buy it on sale. On the weekend (after noticing I could add categories to my Steam games and therefore tagged it as something with cards) I decided to give it a spin.

14 hours played later I've beaten the game and both of the extra DLC missions that came with it. It's a first third person shooter, and that's a genre I don't really like in general. The core of the genre is two mechanics I don't like very much: consumable items and aiming. So if I don't like the gameplay why did I keep playing after picking up my Steam cards? Well, the story is absolutely fantastic. I had to keep playing because I had to know what was going to happen next and how stuff that had already happened would be explained. It's got a horror theme and the atmosphere was perfect. The first boss fight actually had me shivering in panic. And not just because I had to aim at something that was moving faster than anything in the game had moved to that point! I think the sound effects of the thing moving so quickly helped, and they fit in perfectly as well.

The game actually dealt with both of my concerns in decent ways, too. It would constantly remove my entire inventory which meant saving up items 'just in case' wasn't something I needed to do. I still did for most of the game, but eventually I decided to just use my super weapons on trash mobs because if I didn't use them they'd just go away. (Added bonus: an achievement for killing 50 things with each weapon!) Also if I died and respawned at the last checkpoint it would either give me my inventory when I hit the checkpoint or 12 bullets for my revolver whichever was more. So if I reached a point where I didn't have enough ammo I could just die and probably get enough back. Only once did this not work out for me, and I eventually made it through that section by running for my life instead of shooting everything in sight. Aiming was a general problem, but not as bad as in most games because there is no concept (that I could tell, anyway) of a headshot. Either you hit the enemy or you didn't, and that's that. It also did a good job of auto-aiming for me, so as long as I shot in the general area of an enemy it was good enough. I still had to worry about rotating to shoot in the general area and sometimes when I wanted to snipe an explosive barrel or something the auto-aiming was annoying, but it was still better than a generic FPS.

There were all sorts of collecting achievements that I didn't get. Coffee thermoses that are your standard 'just find all the junk' fare and pages of a book that explain some of the plot. Some of these pages could only be found on the hardest difficulty, which I didn't play, and I missed a bunch of the normal ones too. That makes me sad, because I want to read them all. I want to see all the TV shows you can find, and listen to the radio shows. But the trash fights in the game were plentiful and I really didn't like the combat enough to want to do them again. Maybe at some point, but more likely I should just look them up on the internets.

I was a little annoyed at the ending because it didn't really tie things up. But I guess since they were likely planning DLC and such that's to be expected? The DLC was hidden pretty well and most of the annoyance went away when I found how to access it and was able to see a little more of the story. They also ended on a cliffhanger, no surprise there, but it felt more closed off at least. And since I bought the sequel at the same time I guess I can find out what happens next anytime I get around to installing it!

I remember seeing the logo for this game somewhere, maybe in a tv commercial? I really like it. The way the main character is the dead space in the A in Wake is pretty sweet.

It is animated in game, too! The flashlight and gun are great!

I only have one Steam friend who has this game, and I think that's a mistake that needs to be fixed. Anyone who likes horror stories or unique FPSers needs to get this game. It's a shame it's not still on sale for $4!