Alan Wake (PC)...

It feels like I've been hearing about Alan Wake (2010 Xbox 360/2012 PC; Remedy) since the days of old DOS games. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but they were discussing it on podcasts as far back as 2006. Everyone was excited about a Stephen King-esque, horror themed open-world game set in the Pacific Northwest. As we all realized when the long development cycle finally ended, that is not what we got.

The game opens with the titular character, a famous horror novelist, arriving in a small town with his wife Alice. Alan's been having writer's block since his last best-selling novel and has taken a vacation on Alice's advice. Unfortunately, soon after arriving Alan witnesses his wife's drowning at the hands of an unknown assailant, after which he passes out. Inexplicably, he comes to one week later with no memory of the intervening time. As Alan struggles to find out what happened to his wife, he comes across pages of a mysterious manuscript that describe events before they actually happen to him in the real world. Many of these events are supernatural in nature, and the Alan soon realizes that the manuscript was written by him, though he has no memory of its creation. Shortly thereafter, a supernatural darkness takes over the town, and it becomes clear that this isn't all simply happening in his head.

In terms of everything but the terrible lip sync-ing, the game is quite gorgeous. It probably helps that the designers had so little diversity in their locales (see below).

It's an interesting and quite untested premise for a game. In addition, unlike many a review that I read, I also felt that it was satisfactorily 'wrapped up' as far as horror themes go - in the end, you do find out what is happening. But while the story and voice acting - particularly Alan's narration throughout the entire adventure - are by far the game's strongest features, this style of tale is also it's Achilles heel: How do you actually wrap a game around it?

I'm 100% certain that in the past, Alan Wake would've been an adventure game. I can think of classic titles like Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria from that genre that were in the horror mold. Point-and-click adventures catered well to aggressively linear cutscene-driven narratives of the style presented by Wake.

But this the present, and the dev team chose another route: Alan Wake is an action game. In between all of the story elements, Alan wades through endless forests fighting off people who have been 'consumed' by the supernatural darkness. Combat involves a somewhat clever concept whereby Alan must first burn-off the shadows shielding his foes by using a flashlight before he can exterminate them with firearms. I've read many praises about this system but I have to admit, I absolutely hated every second of combat in the game.

The battles just feel wrong and poorly balanced to me. From the very beginning of the game, fights are quite difficult. There are only a few different enemy types and even the basic ones require a lot of light, opening you up to attacks from their allies, followed by several bullets. Each and every battle begins in the exact same way: Enemies teleport in and surround you after which you have to scramble to some place where you can begin picking them off one by one. Your foes appear at specific 'spawn' locations that can sometimes, mercifully, be avoided, discouraging any type of exploration. It also doesn't help that your foes move faster than you do, making crowd control a huge chore. They're also able to hit you with ranged attacks from off screen, which is always fun1. It reminds me a lot of the combat in Grand Theft Auto in that it's functional, but at least in GTA's case, it was never meant to be the focus of the game. 

Yay, more trees! Honestly, the designers probably spent so much time designing trees that they should sell extras to other devs. Oh wait, nevermind. 

Sadly, the majority of Alan Wake's gameplay is this awful combat. Each of the six 'episodes' somehow contrives some way to get you back into the woods, where you fight the same three or four shadowy psychos over and over and over. There's no level design to speak of either: you just walk along mostly linear paths, struggling though waves of enemies and occasionally finding one of the game's excessive number of collectible doo-dads (yay replay value!). But aside from the occasional open-world style driving segment, every level pretty much feels exactly the same2. I just feel that if you're going to have hours and hours of combat in your game, it would do you well to add more variety to the mechanics or even enemy types.

The older that I've become, the more I've begun to fall into the camp that argues that linear stories don't belong in video games. The excessive number3 of action sequences in this game are completely disconnected from Alan's broader predicament. In fact, the story itself claims that the supernatural force is trying to 'capture' the writer, so why are all of its minions trying to kill him? This is a perfect example of the 'interrupted movie' style of game: You get the same effect from Alan Wake as you would by watching 15 minutes of The Exorcist, then playing 1 hour of Streets of Rage, followed by 15 more mins of the movie, and so on. Not integrating the story and game play together in any real meaningful fashion completely wastes the medium.

But hey, in my experience, many folks just love those boring, disconnected cutscenes, so I don't see them going away anytime soon.

1Wow a guy teleported in behind me and hit me in the back of the head with an axe! I didn't even know he was there!

2The game is so boringly monotonous in design that my girlfriend got tired of watching me play it. For nights on end she'd ask if I was still in the same place, or if the game was just one big forest that you fought through. The latter is more accurate.

3The game is a boring ~14 hours while it should have been a much tighter and more varied eight hours or so.

X-blades (PS3)...

The vast majority of the time, I'll only play games that garner praise and accolades from the press. There are only so many hours in the week, after all; no sense wasting time on sub-par experiences. Every once in a while though, I'll take a 'bargain-bin' mediocre title out for a spin, if it's in a genre that I enjoy, in the hopes of finding a 'diamond in the rough'.

X-blades (2009; Southpeak Games) is just such a mediocre title. Most of its reviews were middling to poor, but a few critics spoke favorably about the game, comparing it to Devil May Cry and other character action titles. While nowhere in the league of the good DMC games, it does have some cool design ideas. Unfortunately, it's also brought down by oh so many rather obvious flaws.

As stated above, XB is a 'character action game', meaning that the action revolves around a versatile character (in this case the ninja/artifact hunter Ayumi) whose moves and abilities can be upgraded as the game progresses (think Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Devil May Cry, etc.). The comparison to DMC comes from Ayumi having swords, guns, and spells at her disposal, each of which can be chained together to dispatch the hordes upon hordes of foes that come her way.

A brief digression about the main character: Ayumi is the most over-sexualized character I've seen in a game in a long time. She literally isn't wearing any pants:

Most games endow their female characters with unrealistically large breasts. In the case of X-blades, the detail with which the developers drew Ayumi's posterior is umm... impressive? To be honest, her head, hips, and bust are somewhat creepily disproportionate. Image cred here.

You (get to) stare at her thong over the course of the entire game (which doesn't feel like pandering to 14 year olds or anything). I actually think that there should be more sex in games for people who want it - both because sex is a normal part of human existence and the inability to discuss the topic in deep character relationship games tends to make intimacy feel very juvenile (see many, many JRPGs). I'm also unopposed to having attractive characters in games - there are certainly enough examples of those in both sexes. What's somewhat off-putting is when a bunch of guys decide to make a heroine who's fighting thousands of monsters in her underwear.

Anyway, the combat system is the game's best feature. It's fast and fluid and features a lot of different abilities and skills that must be used in combinations to defeat a vast number of opponents. Switching in and out abilities among the 4 quick-buttons is a bit of a chore, but worth it given the diversity. Sadly though, the first major problem with the title is that the developers throw so many foes at you at once that what starts off as a very tactical, skill-based combat system eventually turns into either a frantic button masher, or a rote checklist of using the same moves over and over (stun the crowd, take out fliers with your guns, switch to magic to kill the now unfrozen foes, repeat).

It's clear for many reasons that the devs ran out of development time and vastly increased the number and strength of foes in order to draw out what is ultimately a fairly short experience. Level design is extremely simple, featuring around a dozen arenas made up of one type of area (a ruined castle), which you will visit a couple of times each (there's little to do between arenas except find and collect upgrades). The worst aspect of lack of development time is certainly the story, which is completely nonsensical. I couldn't describe what happened other than the main character releasing a curse from which she has to free herself. One of the two other characters that you meet and interact with (in this case only once) suddenly becomes a love(?) interest towards the end of the game with no explanation. Obviously something got cut out in between. (Also incidentally, the English voice acting is so nerve-grating and terrible that I played through the entire title in French).

The development team, Gaijin Games of Russia, is obviously quite talented as the character designs are great (sexual innuendo aside) as are the graphics. The lighting effects in particular are quite impressive, and get shown off a lot in the dark, shadowed environments. Image cred here. 

It's often more disappointing to play a title that's got highs and lows as compared to something that's just plain bad. The combat and upgrade mechanics of X-blades are pretty good and were enough to keep me playing. On the other hand, the lack of environment variety and anythin to do other other than fight in the game are a major drag. 

I need to end by pointing out one other heinous flaw that I've seen a few times in games and have never understood. In order to get the 'proper' ending to XB (the 'bad' ending is only a few seconds long and is awful), you must refrain from putting ANY points into a particular set of abilities from the very beginning of the game. Nothing warns you of this - you just have to somehow 'know' not to touch one part of the skill tree. If you do, getting the good ending will require a complete restart. Who thought that this was a good idea? Why do developers do things like this? I don't feel the urge to play their game again - in fact, the only thing I feel is being cheated out of a complete experience.

Diablo III (PC)...

The original Diablo (1996; Blizzard) was quite an important PC game. At the time it was credited with ending a few years of RPG stagnation that had occurred on the platform as many developers jumped on the twin crazes started by Doom (First-Person Shooters) and Myst (multimedia content). It was nevertheless, quite controversial as many die-hard PC RPG fans felt that the action-based clicking was a huge step down from classic titles that emphasized strategy and tactics. Regardless, it was a huge success that really launched the idea of online, co-operative multiplayer1. I bought the original Diablo on day one and put many hours into it, but D2 (2000) kind of missed me until I played through it with a friend a few years ago. I remember that the game was heavily delayed, and by the time it came out, it looked terribly archaic compared to some of its own clones.

These 'clones' have always been the series' curse. A lot of companies have had vague notions about what aspects of Diablo lead to its success: The constant gaining of 'loot', the randomized dungeons, the customizable characters, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the real 'secret' to Blizzard's success came from the very delicate balance of all of these factors - plus high production values, a great atmosphere, and awesomely unique music. Too much or too little loot makes the game tedious or boring, too many skills and customizable abilities leads to choice paralysis, low production values create a less-than-compelling play experience, etc. These complaints could be levelled at any number of genres, but the somewhat simplified (click, click, click) gameplay of Diablo and its clones seem to expose such faults in a glaring fashion - and there have been oh so many clones2.

After a dozen years of absence, Blizzard finally decided to release the third installment, and playing it has coalesced my feelings about the franchise such that I understand why I can enjoy this company's efforts while being mind-numbingly bored when playing so many others.

Yes the gameplay remains a click-fest and yes the primary drive behind playing is watching better and more powerful equipment drop from slain foes. But Blizzard appears to have tested and refined the formula such that the frequency of the upgrades makes continued play incredibly addictive. Furthermore, at least as compared to D2, individual areas are smaller and more varied, so you constantly feel as though you're making progress. The game is also gorgeous and cinematic, so each weapon, piece of armor, or ability that you use looks cool and incentivizes you to further develop your character(s).

The different classes, Monk, Barbarian, Wizard, etc. all look really cool and unique (although the Barbarian female may be a bit... huge). Compared to the previous titles, much more of your equipment is uniquely represented on your character, so there's a constant aesthetic drive to seek out new sweet looking loot.

While the base gameplay may be quite conserved from previous entries, character development has been simplified considerably: you no longer distribute stat points and have access to all abilities given to your class. You simply swap them in and out as needed. While this reduces the degree of differentiation among players, it fixes one  of the major issues underlying D2: there were too many useless abilities while others were 'obvious' bests. It also prevents you from creating a 'gimped' character - you can't mess up. I'd personally prefer having a few meaningful choices rather than many useless ones.

While the changes to character creation were a minor controversy, a very controversial aspect to D3 is its requirement that you have a constant internet connection to play - even in the single-player mode. Admitedly, the title is so multiplayer-focused that I can understand this choice: There's no distinction between offline and online characters, and there's an ever-present online auction house where players can buy and sell sweet loot. However, the arrangement does pose some odd peculiarities. For one, you can experience server lag in single-player. It doesn't happen often, but it's odd. In addition, whenever the servers go down for maintenance, you can't play the game at all. This has already happened to me once in the couple of weeks that I've had with the title, which isn't fun. 

Everything about D3 oozes with that typical Blizzard gorgeousness. The company's also got a reputation for making games that are highly scalable - I can play it on my MacBook (with settings turned low) or my 2 year old Windows PC (at 1080p with settings on max).

As I've alluded to above (as somewhat in previous posts), the loot-based Diablo-style of game hasn't always been my thing. I felt that even Diablo 2 relied too much on exploiting player's OCD tendencies to make a compelling game rather than actually putting any substance into the experience (I feel quite strongly that this is one of the major failings of Torchlight, a game that many people evangelize. Take away the OCD hunt for loot, and you're left with a very boring game). But in D3, Blizzard's really crafted a much richer experience - there's a lot of narative for people who want that, visual flair for those who like graphics, loot for the OCD in all of us, and co-op multiplayer for teaming up with friends. It has some failings, such as having to beat the game once to unlock a reasonable challenge in single player, but they didn't detract from my enjoyment.

If nothing else, Diablo 3 reveals how sub-par many of the genre's titles have been, which, if we're really lucky, will push other companies to improve their own mediocre efforts.   

1Yes, yes, previous games had done this - Neverwinter Nights (1991), among others - but they tended to be very niche and buried behind pay-to-play systems.

2I highly reccomend Dungeons & Desktops to anyone who's interested in PC RPGs. The author has a great chronicle of the many, many Diablo clones to grace the PC. This doesn't begin to cover the number of such games that graced consoles.

Soundtracks...

During the past couple of years I've become a really big fan of listening to instrumental soundtracks of movies and games while working on my computer (voices tend to be distracting while I'm writing). To this end, I've started buying soundtracks when they come on sale on sites like Amazon.com.

On the game soundtrack tip, I just wanted to point interested folks to a blog, http://gamemusic.wordpress.com/. The maintainer of said blog both discusses good commercially available game soundtracks, and also curates a list of freely available sountracks - mostly to classic PC games.

There are some real gems from a bygone era here: Homeworld, Daggerfall, System Shock 2, etc. Interestingly, it seems that many of these tracks were either made freely available by now defunct companies, or the composers retained the rights to the music and released it later themselves (some of the albums are actually enhanced or scored beyond the original say MIDI format). Check it out!

Record of Lodoss War (Dreamcast)...

I've begun picking up a few titles to play around with on my new Dreamcast. The one that I've played around with the most is an action-RPG called Record of Lodoss War (2001; developed by Neverland). RoLW is (loosely) based on a 90s Japanese cartoon series of the same name that was itself heavily derived from the tropes of Dungeons & Dragons1. It's partially for this reason that I wanted to play it - I used to be a big D&D fan - but also because the action RPG is one of my favorite genres, and I'm always looking to try out new entries.

RoLW is quite fascinating if for no other reason than historical interest. It's very similar to a later, much more popular game called Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on PS2 (2001; Snowblind Studios) though it incorporates some gameplay elements that are superior in many ways than its spiritual successors. (Note that while both games came out in the same year in North America, I believe that Lodoss War came out two years earlier in Japan).   

One way in which RoLW is substantially inferior to later, similar action RPGs is in its graphics, which really are quite abysmal. I've heard from retro podcasts that many Japanese developers were taken by surprise in the move to 3D graphics - some studios stubbornly refused to switch, producing 2D games for many years while others attempted rather poor forays into 3D and ended up closing their doors.

Lodoss War looks only slightly better than a PS1 game because of the noticeably crisper polygons. The devs would have been so much better off by stylizing the characters rather than going for 'realistic' proportions. Notice the complete lack of shadows on anything; something I'm finding quite common on Dreamcast games. I can't take my own screens, so this one's from Gamespot (here).

Neverland was clearly unprepared for the transition to 3D: character models are flat, simple barely shaded polygons. While all equipment is technically represented on the character, it doesn't really matter as this essentially translates into some smudge becoming a different colored smudge. Animations are also laughably bad: characters run as though they're skating around, with nary a bob or swagger. It's easy to chalk this up to RoLW being an old game, but there are many N64 titles that looked a lot better than this.

If one can overcome the horrible eyesore there's quite a bit to like about Lodoss. For starters, the game features a neat weapon/armor upgrade system that takes the place of the 'loot' so common in other Diablo-esque clones. On top of allowing quite a bit of variety in terms of play style and customization, the key breakthrough in the system is that you can easily transfer any upgrades placed onto an item to any other item of the same type. Furthermore, all upgrades 'stack' without a limit on the number of upgrades other than their rising cost. A common problem in Diablo-type games is the fear of 'wasting' upgrades on equipment that may quickly become obsolete.

In RoLW's case, you're actually just carrying stats and skills forward onto each new piece of equipment such that by a few hours in, your stuff is pretty crazy 'epic'. This also has the benefit of allowing players to experiment with different upgrade paths (eg., boosting critical hit chances, damage, weapon speed, etc.) with very little consequence. (I should also note that a recent rather under-appreciated title, Two Worlds II, also implemented a somewhat similar consequence-free upgrade system that made experimenting pretty awesome - why don't more games do this?).

Note the 'quick' item bar on the right side of the screen. It's pretty useful and easy to cycle through, even if it's typically only filled with green healing potions. Screenshot from here.

Also, it's somewhat mind-blowing to me that Lodoss War lets you save almost anywhere (the only exceptions are boss battles). At any time you can town portal home, save, and when you load, the portal is still there waiting to take you back into the fray. This comes at the price that savegames chew up just under 1/3 of a memory card, but it's rather shocking that a very early game in what became a rather popular genre2 offered an awesome feature that none of its successors, even on hardware with HDDs, did.

Among its other neat features are an excellent automap, and a host of optional dungeons and content that seem interesting even if they're only there to pad out the experience somewhat. I guess I should mention that in typical Diablo fashion, the story is near non-existent - basically you've been revived from the dead to halt the ressurection of a dark Goddess. It's a bit of a departure from the theme of the original cartoon (which a friend loaned me when I was 16), but you do meet and team up with some of its main characters. These NPC sections are actually quite fun, as your helpers are powerful, and generally allow you to be more reckless than you can be solo.

While it's clear that RoLW is a product of its era, the number forward-thinking elements it incoporated into its design made it quite easy for me to overlook its general ugliness. The appeal of such a title, being tied to a classic cartoon, would have made it niche no matter what, yet it's unfortunate that more games of the genre weren't influenced by its efforts. It certainly deserves a look from anyoen who's into loot games or classic RPGs in general.

1For all I know, the game could be based on the novel/comic book series, but I'm not up on that sort of stuff.

2'Rather popular' was sarcastic. After Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance was a smash success, we got such titles as: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II (2003), Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes (2003), Champions of Norrath (2004), Xmen Legends (2004), Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004), The Bard's Tale (2004), Champions: Return to Arms (2005), Xmen Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse (2005), Marvel Ultimate Alliance (2006), Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009), Deathspank (2010) and sequels, and Bastion (2011). On top of that, we have many games that are only slight variants of the above model including Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone (2004), and Too Human (2008) among what I'm sure are many others. The point I'm trying to make here is that I don't hear enough people talk about what an INCREDIBLY PLAYED OUT GENRE these boring hack-and-slash, loot-based RPGs have been. Please come out with something with the semblence of originality!!!