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the past few days i have been playing all the ~*~artistic~*~ single-player games on Xbox Live (okay, not all: i still haven't tried Braid, for starts, and I've yet to play a Bioware game since Knights of the Old Republic, BUT that is not important). Kmart was selling Alan Wake for $35 new; my brother, the inimitable h00ray4dolphins, and i, had wanted to play it since release, but were a little wary of dropping $60 on it.
You see, Alan Wake is one of those games that went through production hell: it was first announced 5 years ago, the developers tossed out half-finished games and restarted from the ground-up twice, and as its release date approached there was a flurry of advertising and 'gaming spotlight' type articles in a desperate-feeling attempt to drum up enthusiasm for a linear, story-driven game heavily influenced by the TV show Twin Peaks.
Anyway, there was no way Alan Wake could live up to it's hype, and it didn't, but still - it's a Twin Peaks video game! It couldn't be all that bad, could it?
And, once divorced from the ridiculous standards the development team had somewhat invited - it's a decent game. Flawed, i feel - it was at one point being touted as a 'revolutionary' game insofar as story/gameplay fusion and presentation were concerned, and the end product has nothing that hasn't already been done in, say, the Silent Hill series - but it's a decently entertaining story, and the gameplay is fun enough, though it's not varied enough to support more than two or three playthroughs.
Story-wise, and without getting too detailed, Alan Wake feels like...simplified Twin Peaks. Like, if you just took the "supernatural evil entity" parts of TP, removing all of the subplots and commentary about human nature and people's private lives vs. public ones and whether or not events were caused by people being assholes, or because of the influence of a mysterious, otherworldly presence - that's what Alan Wake is. It's like a version of Twin Peaks with BOB and the Guy with the Missing Arm and the Black Lodge/White lodge stuff introduced in the pilot. In Alan Wake, there's no question that you're dealing with UNNATURAL EBIL CREATURE!!! though the game makes a half-hearted effort to convince the player that maybe this is all just an elaborate dream scenario Alan Wake's concocted in his grief-crazed head at a few points. They don't work - the events preceding these 'red herrings' just don't allow for such a development.
There is also an attempt at commenting on the nature of artistic creation, and how writers in particular can't just 'write what they want' and have a worthwhile story, they must let the story 'tell itself', etc. Which is all very well and good and suitably ~deep~ but it doesn't quite jive with the whole 'btw, SUPERNATURAL LAKE MONSTER DID IT' theme. There are a lot of different themes that the game creators wanted to explore, it seems, but they ended up putting so many in that the end result is more convoluted than rewardingly complex. The plot's interesting to think about, but the longer I do, the more...arbitrary and/or simplistic the story feels.
On the plus side, the scenery is nice and the atmosphere is one that is quite unsettling. i am actually more afraid of the dark than i was before! though i've always had a bit of an unreasonable fear of the dark since i was little, so perhaps i'm more susceptible than most to these kinds of games.
ALSO Alan Wake runs around in a Look At Me I Am a ~Writer!~ tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows which makes me lolololol a lot.
the other game i have been playing at h00ray4dolphins' suggestion is Limbo.
u guise.
this game.
is MOTHERFUCKING TERRIFYING
rather than try to explain it here are some trailers:
the things this game does using only black, white and shades of grey is astounding.
another trailer showing how macabre the game can be:
i swear, when i got to the section shown at 0:40 I DIED INSIDE. I could not believe the game was making me do this. It is easily the most horrifying thing I have ever done to solve a puzzle.
if you have XBL i would at least check the demo out. The full game is $15 in Microsoft Ripoff Funmonies which is a little steep considering that after an hour and a half of playing i am 50% finished. :(
You see, Alan Wake is one of those games that went through production hell: it was first announced 5 years ago, the developers tossed out half-finished games and restarted from the ground-up twice, and as its release date approached there was a flurry of advertising and 'gaming spotlight' type articles in a desperate-feeling attempt to drum up enthusiasm for a linear, story-driven game heavily influenced by the TV show Twin Peaks.
Anyway, there was no way Alan Wake could live up to it's hype, and it didn't, but still - it's a Twin Peaks video game! It couldn't be all that bad, could it?
And, once divorced from the ridiculous standards the development team had somewhat invited - it's a decent game. Flawed, i feel - it was at one point being touted as a 'revolutionary' game insofar as story/gameplay fusion and presentation were concerned, and the end product has nothing that hasn't already been done in, say, the Silent Hill series - but it's a decently entertaining story, and the gameplay is fun enough, though it's not varied enough to support more than two or three playthroughs.
Story-wise, and without getting too detailed, Alan Wake feels like...simplified Twin Peaks. Like, if you just took the "supernatural evil entity" parts of TP, removing all of the subplots and commentary about human nature and people's private lives vs. public ones and whether or not events were caused by people being assholes, or because of the influence of a mysterious, otherworldly presence - that's what Alan Wake is. It's like a version of Twin Peaks with BOB and the Guy with the Missing Arm and the Black Lodge/White lodge stuff introduced in the pilot. In Alan Wake, there's no question that you're dealing with UNNATURAL EBIL CREATURE!!! though the game makes a half-hearted effort to convince the player that maybe this is all just an elaborate dream scenario Alan Wake's concocted in his grief-crazed head at a few points. They don't work - the events preceding these 'red herrings' just don't allow for such a development.
There is also an attempt at commenting on the nature of artistic creation, and how writers in particular can't just 'write what they want' and have a worthwhile story, they must let the story 'tell itself', etc. Which is all very well and good and suitably ~deep~ but it doesn't quite jive with the whole 'btw, SUPERNATURAL LAKE MONSTER DID IT' theme. There are a lot of different themes that the game creators wanted to explore, it seems, but they ended up putting so many in that the end result is more convoluted than rewardingly complex. The plot's interesting to think about, but the longer I do, the more...arbitrary and/or simplistic the story feels.
On the plus side, the scenery is nice and the atmosphere is one that is quite unsettling. i am actually more afraid of the dark than i was before! though i've always had a bit of an unreasonable fear of the dark since i was little, so perhaps i'm more susceptible than most to these kinds of games.
ALSO Alan Wake runs around in a Look At Me I Am a ~Writer!~ tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows which makes me lolololol a lot.
the other game i have been playing at h00ray4dolphins' suggestion is Limbo.
u guise.
this game.
is MOTHERFUCKING TERRIFYING
rather than try to explain it here are some trailers:
the things this game does using only black, white and shades of grey is astounding.
another trailer showing how macabre the game can be:
i swear, when i got to the section shown at 0:40 I DIED INSIDE. I could not believe the game was making me do this. It is easily the most horrifying thing I have ever done to solve a puzzle.
if you have XBL i would at least check the demo out. The full game is $15 in Microsoft Ripoff Funmonies which is a little steep considering that after an hour and a half of playing i am 50% finished. :(
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 05:46 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 12:12 am (UTC)From:The Limbo demo is def. worth trying if you don't want to spend the $15 that is really $20+ because of MS' carnival ticket economy. >:[
no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 08:23 pm (UTC)From:I don't know that Bioware's work could be called ~*~artistic~*~ like ever.
Braid is as beautiful as it looks, but it's so up its own ass that I burst with lulz every time I get to the little book-opening bits in between levels. I haven't played it in a while, though. I don't FailTube the puzzles on principle and ragequit the last one I got stuck on.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 12:06 am (UTC)From:The demo lets you play a pretty sizable portion of the game, including one of the more memorable puzzles, so you can get a pretty good taste of what the game has to offer without paying the steep entry fee.
I'm not sure I'd call Bioware's games artistic in the way the word's generally used, but they do come up a lot when discussing storytelling methods in games. I personally don't think they (Bioware's) done anything different from ye olde Choose Your Own Adventure books. (This isn't a knock against their games either, KotOR was pretty rockin' - but they probably shouldn't be in the discussion about artistry in games, though articles on the subject usually mention them.)
I poked around the gamefaqs Limbo board and there was a 'Braid vs. Limbo' topic. The general consensus seems to be: Braid has harder puzzles, Limbo is less pretentious. XD I don't youtube/google puzzles either, if something stumps me i just go to bed and try to forget about it for awhile before going back to it which seems to work alright. I've only had to do that once in Limbo, though. My first playthrough of Portal had like....4 or 5 of those moments.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-26 08:05 am (UTC)From:The Bioware games that I've played -- which comes to three, if I remember correctly, haha -- are definitely Choose Your Own Adventure: The Next Generation, which really is an awkward fit for a discussion on ~artistry in storytelling. Obviously, I'm in big gay sparkling love with them, but still. That said, credit where credit is due and all that: Dragon Age and the Mass Effect games provide the most authentic role-playing experiences I've had this side of a console. If you're talking about the Games As Art Ok chestnut, I don't see much room for anything but crafted, prefab, linear storylines and effectively evocative, atmospheric games. ... Shit, I'm going to end up writing some tldr bullshit in my eljay about Rothko vs Braid and my enduring, burning desire to play a De Chirico video game. Goddamnit. ... Anyway, what Bioware work I've played certainly earns a tiara and sceptre for interactive storytelling. They're stuck in the same old Baby-Eater vs. Jesus moral choice rut in a lot of ways, but the writing ranges from competent to fanfuckingtastic rah rah rah and the variables merge together with very few visible seams. All smoke and mirrors that comes down to "who's gonna die and who u gonna bang", of course, but really nice smoke and mirrors. The illusion of a fully player-crafted story is more finely tuned in ME2 than the other two, but in a world of sandboxes, they still stand up well. Bioware belongs in there somewhere, just not in the same vein.
Ahahaha yeah, Braid jerks off in front of a mirror like whoa. XD But it's so fucking beautiful when it shuts the fuck up. D: Which is most of the time, since you can run right past the moronic little books. Maaaaaaan, Portal 2 is going to rape my brain, I can already tell. I'm generally too dull-witted for puzzles of any sort, but something about Portal made my brain click along in ways it usually doesn't. But all that newfangled shit is going to totally wreck my Portal breeziness, I know it. DX