It's like he said for "Darkvoid" trying something new and failing means they at the very least have some soul and not a hard drive stuffed with money.
244: The Tragedy of Alone in the Dark
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I'd really like to see him try out the PS3 version. That was basically the "We fixed most of the major fuck-ups of the 360 version" version of the game. I played the demo and found it to be quite functional and easy to get into.
oddly enough, my friend has started playing this recently. he was unperturbed by Yahtzee's warnings of the "devils willies" and purchased it.
needless to say, he's enjoying it, getting through it by guffawing whenever an awful mechanics/physics thing occurs.
I may even borrow it off him when its done. I got really annoyed with the blinking thing at the start, but i'm sure if i get past that, it will be fine.
needless to say, he's enjoying it, getting through it by guffawing whenever an awful mechanics/physics thing occurs.
I may even borrow it off him when its done. I got really annoyed with the blinking thing at the start, but i'm sure if i get past that, it will be fine.
This article interested me, because it echoed many of the thoughts I'd had on, of all things, Final Fantasy VIII. Yeah, that one. The middle child in the PSX FF brethren, doomed to never quite receive the attention of his younger, thicker sibling (VII) or his mightier, more respectable elder (IX).
VIII, like AITD is riddled with bad design decisions, yet each one redeems itself on reflection by being a good, swift kick to the face of convention. The worst issues that plague JRPGs are all swept away by a new and radically different 'Junction' system. Gone is the ability to simply grind your way to victory, mashing attack and intermittently casting some Cure spell (a la VII) - enemies don't just level alongside you, but ahead of you, gaining significantly better stat boosts. Fighting need not be about gaining experience, but there's now a more varied, more interesting incentive to go out and fight, which is to draw spells and obtain a collection of items. GFs shook up a stale and predictable battle system that had stayed virtually unchanged since the days of the very first FF.
Of course, that doesn't stop them from still being bad decisions. Giving any player equipped with more brain power than a cephalopod to junction himself to 9999 HP and max stats in the first few hours of the game was never going to turn out well. Nor was building a junction system that punished magic casting use with stat decay: in essence, players had little incentive to do anything other than junction to Str and spam attack, or, failing that, junction to Mag and spam the GF command command instead, the latter being only marginally more relentlessly uninteresting than the first. Hunting down rare enemies to obtain some obscure item vital to a weapon upgrade became tiring quickly, and the card game was either a pointless distraction or an express route to 99 hero drinks, that then made the game virtually un-losable.
At least the spirit was there, though, and perhaps with better execution and a little more thought, FF as a series could have taken a radically different direction. As happened, though, the cool reaction from fandom prompted the self-consciously conservative IX and may well have seeded the stagnation JRPGs have suffered from (and for) over the last decade.
VIII, like AITD is riddled with bad design decisions, yet each one redeems itself on reflection by being a good, swift kick to the face of convention. The worst issues that plague JRPGs are all swept away by a new and radically different 'Junction' system. Gone is the ability to simply grind your way to victory, mashing attack and intermittently casting some Cure spell (a la VII) - enemies don't just level alongside you, but ahead of you, gaining significantly better stat boosts. Fighting need not be about gaining experience, but there's now a more varied, more interesting incentive to go out and fight, which is to draw spells and obtain a collection of items. GFs shook up a stale and predictable battle system that had stayed virtually unchanged since the days of the very first FF.
Of course, that doesn't stop them from still being bad decisions. Giving any player equipped with more brain power than a cephalopod to junction himself to 9999 HP and max stats in the first few hours of the game was never going to turn out well. Nor was building a junction system that punished magic casting use with stat decay: in essence, players had little incentive to do anything other than junction to Str and spam attack, or, failing that, junction to Mag and spam the GF command command instead, the latter being only marginally more relentlessly uninteresting than the first. Hunting down rare enemies to obtain some obscure item vital to a weapon upgrade became tiring quickly, and the card game was either a pointless distraction or an express route to 99 hero drinks, that then made the game virtually un-losable.
At least the spirit was there, though, and perhaps with better execution and a little more thought, FF as a series could have taken a radically different direction. As happened, though, the cool reaction from fandom prompted the self-consciously conservative IX and may well have seeded the stagnation JRPGs have suffered from (and for) over the last decade.
That?s a cop out if you ask me. Essentially re-releasing the game doesn't excuse the original product. This is why I refused to buy MGS3 subsistence, why should I pay more money to a company to correct a badly designed game. In MGS3 case it was the fixed camera angle which they removed in subsistence.yourbeliefs said:
Yahtzee,
You may have heard about it, but I think you would get a kick out of Deadly Premonition. It falls in the "so bad, it's hilarious" plot, music, pacing and otherwise, but there are some gameplay innovations that blew me away, like the fact that the player interacts with the character from being a split personality in his head. The main character's insanity gave us any number of hours of laughing about everything else.
You may have heard about it, but I think you would get a kick out of Deadly Premonition. It falls in the "so bad, it's hilarious" plot, music, pacing and otherwise, but there are some gameplay innovations that blew me away, like the fact that the player interacts with the character from being a split personality in his head. The main character's insanity gave us any number of hours of laughing about everything else.
- Apr 1, 2009
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hes totaly right, I mean the plot was crap and every cool thing was hampered by shoddy implimentation but dammit the game was innovative as hell. And even when you had to take out all the satan trees it still wasnt horrible since they tended to make each one its own little puzzle kinda thing, like one that really comes to mind is stuck on a piece of map you cant get too but you can drive a car to jump the cliff and blow up the car to get it
Hey, I remember buying this game. Funny thing is, I did because of Yahtzee's review. I looked at the game in its pretty (broken) steel box and tried to recall what he said about it. What I remembered was "*white noise* ...best pyrotechnics I have ever seen... *static*" and since I had a coupon I bought it.
After reading this, I'm not sure if I should still play it or not.
After reading this, I'm not sure if I should still play it or not.
I greatly enjoyed AITD, once I realized that the Spray+Lighter combo made me invicible, making combat bearable. Bullets? Who needs bullets?
This game will go down as the greatest dissapointing game in my entire life.
Granted I mae many mistakes with this game: I bought it on day 1 for the Wii; but they promised up and down that they were developing it specifially for the Wii from the ground up! I'm not a stupid man, when I see a game for the Wii simultaneously released for the PS2 and the Wii, I know not to get my hopes up, but I believed that this game was different, that the PS2 would be a port of the Wii, not the other way around.
So needless to say I too was wowed by the beginning, but the then the driving happened. And then the problem with accessing the inventory happened with the broken Wii controls. And after only an hour of playing I was freaking done with this game,
Just like Yahzee says it had so much potential but it was broken like hell!
Luckily I didn't let this scare me out of getting Shattered Memories day 1, and soon I will get Fragile!
Granted I mae many mistakes with this game: I bought it on day 1 for the Wii; but they promised up and down that they were developing it specifially for the Wii from the ground up! I'm not a stupid man, when I see a game for the Wii simultaneously released for the PS2 and the Wii, I know not to get my hopes up, but I believed that this game was different, that the PS2 would be a port of the Wii, not the other way around.
So needless to say I too was wowed by the beginning, but the then the driving happened. And then the problem with accessing the inventory happened with the broken Wii controls. And after only an hour of playing I was freaking done with this game,
Just like Yahzee says it had so much potential but it was broken like hell!
Luckily I didn't let this scare me out of getting Shattered Memories day 1, and soon I will get Fragile!
I haven't played the game, but after reading Yahtzee's description, I thought AITD might actually be good if it were a movie, you know in the just awful enough to be good sense.
But hey, at least the game lets you burn stuff, and isn't that all we really want to do in the end?
But hey, at least the game lets you burn stuff, and isn't that all we really want to do in the end?
I am not certain but the Alone in the Dark movie sequel may be based on this particular Alone in the Dark game. As soon as I saw the reviews and heard so much negative comments from friends I just couldn't try it.
Frankly I'd be happy if they did what they were hinting at and released a patch that updated the 360 version to the PS3 one.
The differences really do make all the difference.
The differences really do make all the difference.
I remember playing the demo and playing with fire in it, but since then I've completely forgotten about the game until this article!
Also, was anyone else creeped out when they played the original "OMG THE MONSTER IS SHAMBLING OVER SLOWLY FIND THE SWITCH! FIND THE SWI-*DEAD*" Poly-rific AITD?
yes, kids, there was a time when this was creepy to folks
Also, was anyone else creeped out when they played the original "OMG THE MONSTER IS SHAMBLING OVER SLOWLY FIND THE SWITCH! FIND THE SWI-*DEAD*" Poly-rific AITD?
yes, kids, there was a time when this was creepy to folks
Great article as usual. I like the idea of the developers allowing you to do all those extra things in the car, the glove-box opening and such.
Also, if Lucifer came up to check his stoct portfolio and found that the Economic Crisis had fucked it over, wouldn't he just destroy the world in anger and frustration that he had wasted his inheritance?
Also, if Lucifer came up to check his stoct portfolio and found that the Economic Crisis had fucked it over, wouldn't he just destroy the world in anger and frustration that he had wasted his inheritance?
I was SO close to getting this game on release due to it promising so much that seemed new. Thank God I listened to the reviews, otherwise that would have been 40 quid down the drain. I agree with Yahtzee on this one, though. It did look good but failed to deliver. Reminds me of The Conduit a bit, as that promised a lot. But that promised good graphics for the Wii, which it succeeded in making, unlike a lot fo 3rd party content.
If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing right. If a game is worth playing, what makes it worth playing? You'd want to play it right, since your idea of right will be my variant of left.
Perfection is quite a fickle thing. We can never quite get to that point where we say ''This is perfect, it cannot be improved any more than it has been.'' due to the fact that someone may not like it thus making the whole thing, well, imperfect. When someone has brilliant ideas but is unable to shovel them in to a product correctly they're usually shunned, but it doesn't make the idea any less of a good idea if you believe it to be so.
Even if Alone in the dark was a monolithic goose-chase in several areas, it has still made an advance of some kind and I believe that's what matters.
Also an off topic, Many great ideas were spawned in sheds.
Perfection is quite a fickle thing. We can never quite get to that point where we say ''This is perfect, it cannot be improved any more than it has been.'' due to the fact that someone may not like it thus making the whole thing, well, imperfect. When someone has brilliant ideas but is unable to shovel them in to a product correctly they're usually shunned, but it doesn't make the idea any less of a good idea if you believe it to be so.
Even if Alone in the dark was a monolithic goose-chase in several areas, it has still made an advance of some kind and I believe that's what matters.
Also an off topic, Many great ideas were spawned in sheds.
It's curious that Yahtzee is the one behind that article, because the AITD ZP is one of the few that made me think, 'I agree with him, but I still would like to play this game'. The only other is, God forgive me, the MW2 one.
Overall, I can forgive anything if a game provides an interesting enough thread for me to hold on to. I can forgive sloppy storytelling if there's fun gameplay, I can forgive frustrating gameplay if there's an interesting setting, I can forgive a drab setting if there's a unique way of acquiring items. One of my favourite games ever is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which was quite drab and quite easy for what was supposed to be a horror game that you need to play three times, but I still loved it, because what it did well, it did perfectly. Another one is Body Harvest, which managed to have bad graphics even compared to other first-year N64 titles, but I still consider to be the best GTA style game ever made, simply because no other GTA style games let you destroy giant alien scorpions with either WWII tanks or 60's sedans.
Unfortunately, my rental doesn't carry AITD for any console I own, I have swapped my modded 360 for a legit one in a series of strange but unnoteworthy events, and I'm not about to actually pay money for it, so I'll never know if I'd actually like it.
Overall, I can forgive anything if a game provides an interesting enough thread for me to hold on to. I can forgive sloppy storytelling if there's fun gameplay, I can forgive frustrating gameplay if there's an interesting setting, I can forgive a drab setting if there's a unique way of acquiring items. One of my favourite games ever is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which was quite drab and quite easy for what was supposed to be a horror game that you need to play three times, but I still loved it, because what it did well, it did perfectly. Another one is Body Harvest, which managed to have bad graphics even compared to other first-year N64 titles, but I still consider to be the best GTA style game ever made, simply because no other GTA style games let you destroy giant alien scorpions with either WWII tanks or 60's sedans.
Unfortunately, my rental doesn't carry AITD for any console I own, I have swapped my modded 360 for a legit one in a series of strange but unnoteworthy events, and I'm not about to actually pay money for it, so I'll never know if I'd actually like it.
I don't think it really needs defending as it's a perfectly valid point. In an ocean of mediocrity, an island of shit is still an island.