Be Excellent To Each Other

I always equate 'AAA' with big budget, big marketing push, big hype. Nothing to do with quality. Although they generally are of higher quality on account of the money spent on them. Alan Wake didn't quite manage the quality bit.

Oh right, that explains it, then.

Well I quite liked Alan Wake. Despite it's often shite dialogue and its over long tedious levels at least it's a different story and setting albeit in a slightly different if Twin Peaks story. Least it copied off the best, as a single player game the story is more original than all the other man Vs aliens or war clones. And to be honest it's just a resi clone, a clone of a game that's got a worse story and just as shite dialogue.

Well I'm pressing on with it but by jiminy it's a tedious bloody slog.

I just can't feel anything other than antipathy towards Wake himself, most lethally of all in a game like this, the story simply isn't drawing me in. And the constant 'special effects' (that Remedy insist are essential to the feel of the game thus there's no option to turn them off unless you start forcing shit from the launcher command) make my eyes hurt, and the combat is incredibly one-note.

Now admittedly Max Payne 1/2 was a bit of a one-trick pony with bullet time, but at least bullet time was FUCKING COOL.

I can't believe they've replaced bullet time with 'wave a torch at the baddies and hope the battery doesn't go flat, then shoot them a few times and they'll vanish'.

Then for fuck's sake don't play American Nightmare.

I will admit I rather liked the original bit of it. I liked the creepy atmosphere, so I was kind of drawn in at the "I know what you did last summer" bit at the start where he runs over that dude.

It's unusual for me to sit and play any game for prolonged periods of time (apart from FO3 and FONV) but I was compelled to play Alan Wake. I was hoping for the happy ending that never came.

The DLC IMO was plain fucking odd. Now don't get me wrong, I'm an incredibly odd person, but I just didn't get it. Showing your torch silly words making them turn into things was about as interesting as watching paint dry. I fought on and completed the DLC, only to be horribly let down by the ending (or lack of it).

I'm not the type to go to one of those "third or half of a movie and pay £15 for a third or half of a movie" and stopped doing so after that Matrix film that was like half a film. I want an ending, I want fucking closure.

So when Alan Wake : American Nightmare came along I was kind of filled with hope, hoping they would do the right thing. Right from the word go I really liked it. It felt like I was actually getting somewhere. Then, when I had spent about four hours playing it it did the thing that I hate the most. Basically the cunts who made it were so fucking short of ideas they make you do it all again.

So, there went about another three hours of tedious ball twitching "should I just fucking turn it off and delete it?" repetitiveness and heavy tedium. After finally battling my way through the same fucking shit, TWICE I was praying for it all to end. I had seriously had enough now.

So what did they do?

MAKE YOU FUCKING DO IT ALL AGAIN FOR A THIRD GOD DAMN FUCKING TIME

I don't know if any one has seen that episode of The Young Ones titled Boring but there's a scene in that when Rick basically starts cying because he is so mind numbingly bored.

How I ever got through the monotony I will never understand. I did, though, and after being close to tears I finally finished it and the ending lasted for about twenty seconds.

I will never play another AW game as long as I live.

I gave up on this game ages ago, I'm genuinely amazed at what a clunker the guys who did Max Payne 1/2 managed to push out of the door.

NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY A WHINY FUCKING TWAT WHO DOESN'T LIKE GUNS VERY MUCH IN A FUCKING SHOOTING GAME.

And did they learn nothing from Doom 3 about how the 'torch mechanic' is the most annoying thing ever?

£5.74p in the Steam Midweek Madness sale - your opportunity to play a whining fuckrag who doesn't like guns in a third-person shooter for not very much money!

Such a ringing endorsement!

'The gun in my hand felt like a statement of impending doom, I worried about everything all the time, what had happened to Mandy, was the way her hair blew in the wind a portent of the end of the world, channelled through this dark forest. The shadows, I hated the shadows. The dim pool of light from the torch flickered in the gloom. I needed to find more batteries, I worry about batteries all the time. Perhaps somewhere in this leaden forest of despair, I would find some Duracells.'

I’ve started playing this (I say ‘started’ but I’ve done 3 episodes) and I hate it.

I hate the motion blur when I turn the camera any more than glacially but most of all I hate the camera. The character is placed either in the bottom right hand corner of the screen or the left. Except if you prefer the left because you’re not a fucking lunatic and clip the scenery it’ll revert back to the right so the entire game is just you trying to put the camera back every other minute.

And the characters and dialogue are just terrible. An FBI man turns up and immediately tries to kill you without any warning or provocation. I mean, come on, Alan’s white for gods sake.

It’s terrible. And I love Remedy games.

Ha I just re-read my posts from a few years ago. I only persevered with it as long as I did because it's a Remedy game.

Absolute pile of shite.

I’ve been killed by a wobbly gate.

Then some wobbly boxes launched themselves at me. Then I shone my torch at them for an hour and they disappeared.

Then I had a rock concert on a farm.

Then a wobbly bulldozer tried to kill me but despite its sentience it failed to establish that it couldn’t reach me if I stood 2 feet away. I dispatched it by standing completely still and shining my torch on its bucket until it fully dissipated into the ether and I walked by without a single snarky remark.

Man I was badly medicated back when this came out. But it was still cack.