Zero Punctuation: Alan Wake

[Alstan]

Funny review but I love the game. The combat is great if you play in hard dificulty. If you use the flashlight on several enemies at the same time, you'll never end, but if you concentrate on one of them, the rest will run for you, so it's not "look at the enemy and shoot twice".
Also, I love the characters (including Barry), the soundtrack the original and the song selection (specially the last one), the TV and radio shows, and of course, the ilumination (probably the best ever).

 

[soultwister]

The game is boring as shit, but this review isn't any better. It's like you forgot to read what you wrote in the notepad before puking out the words to the microphone.

 

[Catalyst6]

I would by Alan Wake, and I might even enjoy it, if suddenly Microsoft didn't decide to do the whole "platform dedication" thing. Why couldn't they whore themselves out to every passing system like they usually do...

Some added incentive to actually own an xbox 360? What's the point in buying an xbox 360 if it'll plays all the same games as pc but has almost none of the practical day to day uses? Might as well just combine the money from getting a non-gaming pc and a console together and get a gaming pc. With 360 exclusives there's actually some reason to ever buy a 360.

Heh, it was a rhetorical question. Although if I was Microsoft I'd dump the xbox altogether and just stick to PC, seeing that their software runs almost all gaming computers. But I just don't like Xbox, so I guess I'm biased.

 

[MrDead]

Geez! Another game that looks good but plays awful.

Another solid gold piece of sh*t!

Well it's not that bad it's just not as good as everybody is jumping up and down about either.

 

[Funkbucket]

Well, thank's.. now I don't need to go out and spend $60 on getting it, If it's as bland as he said.

 

[Brannigan1]

It's a lot more fun to watch while drunk. yay

 

[mastiffchild]

Thought he'd actually REALLY hate Alan Wake myself(given his love of SH2-and make no error AW is NO SH2 whatever else it might be even if it might quite like to be put in that bracket)asand after finding he hates SK almost as much as I do I'm incredulous he didn't leave it a bloody mess in gaming's patchy memory.

Amusing stuff, though i've only played about half the game myself,I find a lot of things to agree with-especially the synching issue, Wake's ugly missus and that bloody daft recapping of the not-very-bloody-hard-to-grasp story every time the game wants a breather.

Thought it was VERY fair of Yahtzee, also, not to bring up any of the game's history. For me Remedy(or MS or whoever made the choice)the way the PC gamers were tagged along for FIVE EFFING years before seeing the game taken away from them was atrociously bad form. Christ, I bought my 360 largely to play AW(yes, at launch too!)so I guess I'm thinking how wound up I'#d be if after all that time they turned round and told me I couldn't have the game because sitting at one platform isn't as suitable as the other for survival horror style games I might be hugely wound up. Add in the fact that til this year ALL the footage of the game we'd seen had been the PC version and it gets even more annoying-although saying that most PC only gamers I talk to had long since given up on the game as it seemed to jetisson every and any good feature along it's protracted dev cycle! We lost sandbox gameplay, we lost individually designed houses(down to interiors) all open to explore and a host of other stuff as the game grew less and less ambitious.

Oh, I won't go on but suffice to say I have a lot of reasons to be sus about what we finally got from Remedy and worry about the exact reason all the original good ideas got ripped out. I just hope it really wasn't to avoid that pesky DVD9 storage issue and the costs of multiple discs, eh?

Anyway, I'm very disappointed in the game, find it's a shadow of what we were promised and sometimes think it's got a VERY OTT metascore right now. From where I'm sat ZP was very kind to it too!

 

[Mako SOLDIER]

I played a demo of the game, and from that I didn't want to buy it. Good to see that I didn't waste my money

Nice try troll. There is no demo. Jeez, do your research before you start sharting from your mouth

I played the demo at a gaming expo actually, so before you start trying to put people down, maybe you should ask how I did it instead of making your own assumptions

Ok, which one and when? Since Remedy have always maintained there will be no playable demo and they even mock up gameplay segments for demo videos, I would be very interested in the details.

 

[Mako SOLDIER]

What difficulty did you play it on? I didn't find it scary at all really on normal, but it becomes practically a different game on Nightmare. It's still balanced and fair, but the Taken actually become threatening and it not only heightens the tension but transforms the combat system into something much more strategic. I wouldn't say I'm more sensitive to it, SH2 is one of my favourite games of all time, so I ought to be desensitised to it rather than the other way around I found that when the enemies were a threat I spent a lot of time with precious little ammo, which made exploring dilapidated building etc much more of a threatening prospect.

I played it on normal. I play everything on normal then again on hard. See.. that idea doesn't really gel with me so well. I played Fatal Frame on normal and it was tense as all hell (not to mention terrifying). If the game is scary, or has tension, it simply has it. Silent Hill simply has tension. Difficulty has nothing to do with it.

Normally I would completely agree. I usually find harder difficulty modes to be contrived and unbalanced. In fact this is the only game where I've found the hardest difficulty to genuinely add to the experience. Sure, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame do tension without any real contributing gameplay factors, but that's because they are horror and the setting and story itself are pretty nasty. Heck, the Wii Ju-On game is scary as hell, just through jump-out shocks, despite consistently score around 50% etc due to having no real gameplay other than 'try not to jump when a shock moment comes up'. Alan Wake isn't really a horror, so the tension really tends to be proportional to the percieved threat imo.

Sorry if I was a bit bullish earlier, I've been championing this game since release and genuinely believe it does something pretty darned special, enough to be my Game of the Year so far, even over Mass Effect 2. Sadly it's not doing anywhere near as well as the fans would like sales-wise and there are already people spreading actual misinformation about it over at Gamefaqs and 4chan, which people are actually believing. Sadly, some people take Yahtzee's opinion far too seriously and I just really don't want to see this game fail when it easily deserves way more success than a heck of a lot of games that get sequel after sequel. So, yeah, I flew off into fanboy rage, which really isn't like me. Lol, THAT's how much I love this game

 

[cooperace27]

Is the video not working for anyone else? Every time I try to play the video it says

"200 Stream not found"

And 3 more lines of something I don't understand ):

 

[Shamgarr]

why won't it work for me? it says something about not being able to stream in a black box

 

[killakcin]

is it just me or is the video broken

 

[MrDead]

Sorry if I was a bit bullish earlier, I've been championing this game since release and genuinely believe it does something pretty darned special, enough to be my Game of the Year so far, even over Mass Effect 2. Sadly it's not doing anywhere near as well as the fans would like sales-wise and there are already people spreading actual misinformation about it over at Gamefaqs and 4chan, which people are actually believing. Sadly, some people take Yahtzee's opinion far too seriously and I just really don't want to see this game fail when it easily deserves way more success than a heck of a lot of games that get sequel after sequel. So, yeah, I flew off into fanboy rage, which really isn't like me. Lol, THAT's how much I love this game

I have to say without giving anything away the last bit you play through right before the final FMV had me go, ok, THIS is REALLY neat. But for me that was 2 minutes vs however long I played the rest of the game.

Edit: Oh and frequently turning around and seeing the sun or moon through the trees and hills.. as an outdoors simulator it REALLY excels.. no sarcasm intended.

 

[Citrus]

Episode Ein? Episode Funf? That isn't proper German, Yahtzee.

But I do agree with the point about how the game seems to constantly find ways to get you into the woods somehow. Even though the forests are done better than any other environment, you spend so much time in them that by the end they just seemed like the blandest and most tedious parts of the game.

One thing I'll add is that the voice acting is very good. Every character I remember from the game had a great and suitable actor, even for the more annoying characters with the more annoying voices (Barry).

Spoiler

Am I the only one who thought Agent Nightingale was going to turn out to be some embodiment or servant of the darkness? The moment I heard his name, I just thought, "Wow, what blatant foreshadowing." I was surprised when it turned out he was just some random agent after all.

 

[ineedscissors]

hilarious. loved the resident evil 4 reference; "madre de dios!"

 

[Verex]

Using botox on her face tumors..

Best thing ever. LOL.

 

[Keepitclean]

It was OK. That's all I have to say, it wasn't horrible but not a stand out either.

 

[ultrachicken]

Best video in a while, good job Yahtzee

 

[FloodOne]

I knew I didn't need this game when I read some critic on the internet complaining that games with groundbreaking story telling like Alan Wake were probably not going to sell. Gee mister, I didn't know shooting people followed by pre rendered cut scenes had never been done before. What a work of uncommon genius.

Here's yet another game that causes me to reconsider buying RE4 again for the Wii. That was a good game, wasn't it? Pretty much nailed this formula the first time.

Pretty much. That's why RE4 is better than RE5. You can't make that style of game any better than they already did. Every improvement feels like a step back.

 

[The Youth Counselor]

I see Heavy Rain, Alan Wake, and the Robert Zemeckis Animated movies get a lot of criticism on their uncanny valley moments and creepy faces. But I don't think it's fair criticism considering they're all playing up horror. I think they're supposed to be creepy.