What the hell is wrong with Alone in the Dark?

Mookyjooky

Mookyjooky

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I personally feel that this game is amazing. Now, now... before you get all huffy and say its garbage... let me start with another month or two in the oven and we would have a VERY good game here. I'll admit the bugs are irritating as shit... but for the most part its a 95% bug free experience. I've seen worse bugs in Halo or GTA, its just that those games are much more forgiving. It has this "Previously on; Alone in the Dark" intro each time you start it up, so it feels episodic... and each chapter plays like an episode and takes about 45 mins or so to beat.The game is very clever, and rejoins the puzzle element of survival horror.

I mean, you make you're own weapons, the story is solid, the puzzles are clever but not retard-hard, it doesnt have random japanese monster crap in it, the characters are believable and real....

The bugs and the control is fairly bad... but not worth a 30-40%, this game makes up for its mistakes a lot and I'm having a blast playing it. My girlfriend is even watching me play it through... something she never does, and she hates zombie stuff, so its REALLY RARE for her to be watching this. I personally would rate this game around 87%.... and if they spent another month on it fixing the bugs and adding forgotten effects like water splashing and what not, about a 93%.

So really? Whats the deal with the reviewers?
 
Oh, I thought you were going to tell me how it was crap, which I already knew. Unless it gets mind-blowing past the first 30 minutes that I played.
 
[quote name='zewone']Oh, I thought you were going to tell me how it was crap, which I already knew. Unless it gets mind-blowing past the first 30 minutes that I played.[/quote]

Really? I feel its pretty damn solid. How far did you get?

I'm currently roaming around central park at the moment. There's moments in the game like puncturing a car's gas tank with a knife, driving it down the street, puncturing a blood pack to get monsters attention and throwing it on the car... walking 20 feet away, watching the monsters attack the car and lighting the gas trail to the car to kill the monsters.... I felt that was pretty epic that you have that kind of freedom.

I mean, its no bioshock or call of duty... but its a very solid game.
 
I was looking forward to it. I thought that the game had a lot of great ideas and quirky engines like the fire and door breaking stuff. I didn't get very far, still on the first episode. I could just tell it had low production values and was buggy, and I have other games to play where I didn't feel like forcing myself to play this one. Maybe I'll go back to it sometime later, I still have to beat Condemned 2 which is kind of like this game, but better.
 
[quote name='zewone']I was looking forward to it. I thought that the game had a lot of great ideas and quirky engines like the fire and door breaking stuff. I didn't get very far, still on the first episode. I could just tell it had low production values and was buggy, and I have other games to play where I didn't feel like forcing myself to play this one. Maybe I'll go back to it sometime later, I still have to beat Condemned 2 which is kind of like this game, but better.[/QUOTE]

Condemned 2 gets really stupid later on. I appreciated it more when it was still nebulous about SKX and so on, but once things start coming together in the end it becomes really generic.

As for Alone in the Dark, I'm going to rent it in the next few days. I've been looking forward to it, and I'm hoping I can look past the bugs.
 
I think a lot of it is design issues, so while the bugs could be fixed, it's probably still not going to be all that fun.
 
All of the negative press I've heard about this game kind of makes me not want to play it, however I would LOVE to pick it up once it goes down in price. Maybe somewhere around 40$. I loved condemned 2 but had to trade it in because my game locked up twice and I didn't feel like going through more than half of the game yet again. I'm planning on picking that up again too though, since it's like...30$ now.
 
[quote name='Chacrana']I think a lot of it is design issues, so while the bugs could be fixed, it's probably still not going to be all that fun.[/quote]

okay... you've played it? Or is this mere speculation?

Anyways... as far as fix in an update, possible, but highly unlikely, and ATARI will probably go under for this... because the production values are through the roof, its just a shame they didnt spend more time on the game.

The fire physics is phenominal. There was this wooden bridge structure, and I took a piece of wood, lit it on fire and me and my girlfriend thought how cool it was that it slowly burnt (not in real time, fast than that though) and it started crumbling via the fire physics and gravity physics. I mean, Atari should just sell the fire physics out, cause its pretty amazing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that I've been gaming for a looong time, and I know crap when I see it... I'm not saying AitD is game of the year or anything... if I were to cheap as rate it, I would say pick it up for $30... I'm just saying that the companies giving the game a 3.5 or 40% are in my eyes uncredible. The industry has reached the point of high school, and if the cool kids are giving it a 9.5 everyone does, and people freak out when Zelda gets a 85%... but games like this one is a very good one.

PROS:
-Plays a lot like old resident evil and AitD (Which isnt in a bad way)
-There are car and minigames to break up monotony.
-Voice overs are well done, (Script is B movie / TV show bad)
-Fire effects are second to none
-Physics are well, and arent as buggy as something like Grand Theft Auto
-The car drives like GTA controls.
-Interesting play mechanics... IE: Puncture gas tank, fill plastic bottle with gas, tape double sided tape to it, tape bullets to the bottle, put a bandage in a bottle and throw to make a "Shrapnel Grenade Cocktail".
-Music is VERY GOOD.
-Fun and realistic puzzles presented in a fresh way.
-Weapon selection excellent (love the inside jacket thing) (noted in cons too)
-Not insanely hard, but harder at times because of a bug here and there.

CONS:
-The controls are bad, very bad at times, but not shit. Not as bad as saaaay Resident evil 1,2 or 3....
-Script could be better.
-Plot is too obvious at times
-Cheap deaths
-Weapons selection annoying, creatures can still attack you, can be frustrating, easier to control with D-Pad.
-buggy at times
-bad graphical pop in sometimes at the beginning of a story. Goes away quickly, think Halo 2...

If I were to place my feelings with another game, the other game that comes to mind is Killzone... when I first played Killzone I was like "Wow, they really went all out!", then I played it and it was mearly "Above Average", though the presentation was state of the art. Killzone was less buggy, but not by much and it was less fun in my eyes. It was also missing key things like a jump button, very similar to AitD's lack of pause of items. I get its more realistic otherwise, but realistic should never take the place of fun.
 
I'm a big fan of Penny Arcade, not just for the comics, but for the frequently impressive insight that Tycho has about whatever game he's playing that week. The past week or two, he's been talking about Along in the Dark, and the summary of what he said might be of interest here, specifically to Mookyjooky.

[quote name='Tycho']I've only played a couple chapters of Alone in the Dark, and a sometimes profound directorial vision is apparent. I mean it: you'll see things in the first few hours here that you have never seen before, in any game. Big, big ideas. Then, you will take damage for apparently no reason, or you will die instantly. You won't know why. At first, I thought - ghosts? But no. The game is just broken, and it's hard to know what is happening sometimes.

I really think this explains everything we have seen in the review context. The Sevens are "true," at least as true as the Threes are. It's a matter of where you take your sample - as the experience oscillates up, or down. Even in my relatively short playtime, the qualitative sensation of play shifts hard from pure nirvana to molar-grinding rage.[/quote]

[quote name='Tycho']... I can tell you with full knowledge, yes, I know what you have read. You may even have read it here. You have heard about control oddities and weird glitches. It may be that you have come to believe you can skip the game without ill effects. And you're wrong.

We must to endure this conversation over and over as adherents of the medium, this "innovations versus gimmicks" thing. The truth of this is very straightforward, actually. Innovations are just gimmicks you happen to like. And Alone in the Dark is almost nothing but innovations, from beginning to end, gameplay innovations, cinematic innovations, inventory innovations, you name it, and I mean innovations according to Noah Webster as opposed to GameFAQS. That they took an old workhorse like Alone in the Dark and set it to this task is a nice bit of nostalgia. That they turned Survival Horror on its head is something they won't be given credit for until ten years from now, for its audacity and its vision, when all the cool kids retroactively decide that they really liked it.[/quote]
 
Maybe I'll give it a rental for ps2. I still have this gut feeling that this game isn't going to save Atari.

For a lot of gamers out there, they read reviews. If all the major reviews sites say its mediocre, such as IGN, Gamestop, and GameInformer, that's not going to help salvage a dying company.
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/aloneinthedark/index.html?tag=result;title;0
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/883/883633p1.html
http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/exeres/ACB92882-3733-4ABD-A8ED-D5D9555EE022.htm

And generally I trust GameInformer, although I would love to see what Zero Punctuation has to say.
 
havent played it, but I will check it out soon. I have a feeling this will be like Haze for me, not a great game but better than the interwebs think
 
I'm going to have to rent this to at the very least play around with some of the technology they've built for the game. The diy weapons and fire physics seem like they should be pretty cool.
 
I had zero interest in this game before it was released. You would think that all these negative reviews and impressions would keep me away from this game, but the more I hear about the game the more interested I get. The gameplay seems right up my alley. When it gets down to $20-30 (which I think will likely happen sooner than later) I will pick it up.
 
What's wrong with Alone in the Dark?

I played the Wii version, so here's what's wrong with that version:

-The Graphics. Flat bland textures, outdated graphics (there are PS2 games that look better, a lot better) too much use of the color gray.
-Collision detection
-The controls suck. Checking the inventory isn't easy since the same motion will also have the character switching items or jumping
-The script is bad, with such great lines like 'I owe you apology'.
-The voice acting
-Puzzles are extremely simple
-Occasional death due to unclear objective
-Checkpoints
-Enemy AI (they will just stand there)
-Levels feel empty of enemies
-Story makes no sense and is poorly delivered
etc.

Positives:
-It's short.

360 must use a different physics engine because it's laughable in the Wii version.
 
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