Dead In My Tracks

Dear God above, has there been a more frustrating game in the past five years than Dead Rising?  I mean besides Mega Mans 9 & 10.  Those were intentionally meant to brutalize you.  Although I guess Dead Rising was too.  And they are both from Capcom.  Hmm...

Oh right, I was talking about being frustrated by Dead Rising.  I didn't own a 360 back when it first came out, so I missed it back when it was a big deal.  When all the talk about the sequel started, I thought I should go try the original.  I knew there were some quirks involving the save system, but I figured I could put up with it if the game was good.  So I bought a Greatest Hits copy last year and gave it a go.  I played it for about an hour, up till the first boss fight with Carlito.  I got murdered.  I went back to try it again.  Got murdered again.  And this wasn't a quick death, either.  I worked on that boss fight for like twenty minutes, struggling with the crappy gun controls in an attempt to hit the guy before I went down in a heap again.  I didn't play the game again for six months (rough estimate).

Now before you send me your strategies for getting past Carlito, you should know that I've now conquered that little problem.  I tried the game again last weekend, and somehow I utterly owned that jerk.  I just got up on the platform and emptied bullets into his face until he ran away (he looked remarkably unscathed, too.  I would think he'd look more like Officer Murphy before they turned him into Robocop).  And what do you know?  Things get harder.  Now while the zombies are an issue due to their ridiculous numbers, I'm willing to put up with that.  I expect that.  Having to cut a path through an overwhelming number of zombies is what this game is all about.  What I didn't expect was to keep getting gunned down by some stupid convicts with a jeep mounted machine gun.  These guys are the worst.  The literal worst.  They make it nearly impossible to rescue survivors, especially if you have to carry or support them.

And that's another thing!  If there are multiple survivors that I'm leading around, shouldn't one of them be able to carry the lame one?  I mean, I'm the guy with the broadsword that can chop the zombies into piles of goo.  I'm the one they all shriek at for help when they try to fistfight the zombie horde.  Some of them will actually have the brains to pick up a weapon, but my God are they inept even when they do that.  I had to fight off a psychotic, fire breathing clown who was dual wielding chainsaws.  Couldn't I have just played along with his psychosis in order to get him to help me thin out the horde?  No, I have to kill him so I can get two whiny and useless Japanese tourists through the food court.  I doesn't matter if I get them past the food court, though.  The jerks in the jeep will kill them no matter what.  God, I hate those guys.

Look, I know I'm late to the party.  I'm sure these complaints have been thrown around numerous times over the last three or four years.  But I'm just now encountering this nonsense, and it's really ticking me off.  And here's the worst part:  I still want to play the game.  A reasonable human being would just turn off the console and say, "Nah, son.  I don't need that kind of grief."  But apparently I have some inner masochist in me (my desire to try Demons' Souls should have alerted me to that), because I still want to jump back in at some point.  But not for a while.  I need to cool off for a couple weeks.  Maybe I'll have some revelatory breakthrough like last time that let me blaze through Carlito.  I can only hope so, for my sanity's sake.  

The Name May Have Changed, But It's All Still The Same

You may or may not notice that the name of this here blog has changed.  Well I guess you'll notice now that I've told you.  What was once The Casual Gamer is now My Life in Gaming: A Video Game Blog by JimmyJackJones.  It might change again if I can ever think of something more clever than that.  Boy I hope I can, but the last couple of hours haven't filled me with hope.

So why the name change?  I guess I should explain why I was calling this The Casual Gamer in the first place.  I believe it was on a podcast, likely The Hotspot or 1-Up Yours, when I heard someone explain what they believed to be the differences between the casual and the hardcore gamers.  They said the hardcore gamers were the ones who devoted hours to mastering games and being the best at those games.  I don't think that's how most marketing people would define it, but I could see where they were coming from.  I could also see that I didn't fit that definition.  Not that I don't play a lot of games.  I'd say most of my free time winds up devoted to video games.  But I don't usually labor over individual games, not resting until I've conquered each one.  Just take a look at my pile of shame if you want proof of that.  Instead, I like to experience a broad range of games, and check out what people consider to be the best in the industry.  I'm also not the kind to obsess over achievements, which seems to be the new measuring stick for "hardcore".  Don't get me wrong.  I love getting them.  I just can't see devoted the time and energy needed to get some of the crazy ones.  I also don't want to label myself as hardcore.  That makes me think of skateboarding out on a battlefield while chugging a Mountain Dew.  That's not me, though I do love me some Mountain Dew.  So I thought, "OK, I guess I'm a casual gamer.  I can live with that."  And so when I started this blog, that thought came back to my mind.  Hence the name.

But the more I've thought about it, the more I don't feel like that name fits.  It seems wrong, especially when the content makes me look mad obsessed about video game.  And I'm not.  I'm only mildly obsessed.  I wanted to change the name, but I decided I should think about what this blog is about.  You know, besides just being about video games.  A lot of what I've done is mostly review games that I've played.  Not to score them or anything, but rather discuss my overall impressions and experiences and describe what I thought stood out.  But I also like to post some silly humor stuff here, usually about games, and talk about some of my thoughts on the state of gaming.  I do want to get back to my "stories in games" series as well.  Basically, this blog is a showcase of how video games are kind of a big deal to me.  It's a way for me to speak my mind on this pastime, even if only a few people are around to hear it.  I wanted a name that would reflect this.  I...couldn't really come up with one.  So hey!  My Life in Gaming.  That kind of works, I guess.

So the content and tone of the blog won't be changing.  Rather, the name of the blog has changed to better reflect those things.  Honestly, a name change doesn't really need a long post to justify it.  Rather, I wanted to communicate what this blog is meant to be about.  This is a blog that shows how I feel about games, and what makes a game a meaningful experience to me.  So until I can come up with a better name to reflect that (and I won't post a huge thing to explain it again, I promise), welcome to My Life in Gaming!

Wake Me Up, Before You Go Go

Alan Wake is a game that focuses upon a novelist of the same name.  Alan has been suffering from a severe case of writer's block for a couple of years, so he and his wife travel to a small town out in the forests of the Pacific Northwest called Bright Falls.  Soon after arriving, though, something bad happens, and Alan wakes up from a car crash out in the woods.  He has no idea how he got there or where his wife is, and he has no recollection of any events from the prior week.  And to add to all that, Alan finds himself being hunted down by an army of murderous individuals who appear to be taken over by some kind of darkness.  All of these elements might make Alan Wake appear to be a horror game.  But it's not.

Alan Wake is an action game, pure and simple.  Sure, the elements of the game are built like a horror novel, but there's nothing all that scary about the gameplay.  At all.  I always felt like I could handle whatever was thrown at me.  And the story didn't scare me, even when some dark cloud drags a character away into the night.  Don't take any of this to mean that I didn't like the game.  Alan Wake is a ton of fun to play, and even if the story wasn't scary, it was still incredibly engaging, and it kept me interested in seeing just what was going to happen next.  The fact that you're playing as a writer and not some marine or hard boiled cop actually made the game more interesting, in my opinion.  This is just some dude out in the woods trying to survive a nightmare and find his wife. 

As I said before, this is an action game.  Most of the game involves you being attacked by the shadowy enemies, known as the Taken, and you fighting back with whatever you have at your disposal.  You'll usually have a revolver handy, along with a shotgun or hunting rifle, but firearms are what you rely on to finish the job.  The most important weapon in the game is light.  If you're running around the game without a flashlight, well then things actually do start to get scary.  You have to use light to burn away the darkness of the enemies in order to let your bullets do any damage.  The bigger the flashlight, the better.  Flares and flashbangs become precious commodities (the flashbangs are especially awesome), and you'll be thanking the heavens when you come across a street light that actually still works in this town.  The flare gun is the most valuable weapon you will come across, and I found myself grinning with glee when I came across ammo for that baby.  The combat is usually quick and tight, and rarely becomes too overwhelming.  There were a couple of times where I got frustrated, but now that I look back on my time with Alan Wake, it never actually took me very long to get past those moments.  For the most part, I felt like I was a bold warrior ready to take on the night.

Not that the game ever portrays Alan in that way.  He definitely reacts in the ways any rational person would react if they found themselves in that situation: confused and terrified.  He's a desperate man trying to find some way to make it out of this nightmare.  Yet his wife is in danger, so he sticks around and reluctantly faces the darkness that is slowly consuming the town.  As you move along in the game, you keep coming across pages of a manuscript that Alan apparently wrote, yet he has no memory of.  Each page of the story is about what is happening in Bright Falls, and each one seems to be coming true.  What is behind these pages and the darkness within the town is a great mystery, and there are some clever twists and developments that kept me engaged up through the very end.

While the game itself is strictly linear, there are still some diversions along the way.  There are some interesting oddball characters in the town of Bright Falls, though you gain most of the sleepy small town atmosphere from the radio show you'll stumble across every so often.  I also found myself running off the beaten path every chance I could to look for coffee thermoses and manuscript pages.  But probably the best diversion is the television show "Night Springs".  This is a Twilight Zone homage that makes you remember, "Oh yeah, Remedy does some awesome in-game TV junk!"  That stuff was everywhere in the Max Payne games, so it's nice to see they keep on with the tradition here.

I can't wrap up this review without mentioning Barry.  Barry Wheeler is Alan's agent, and when he first wanders into view, I expected to hate this character.  You know how there are characters in horror movies that you just can't wait to see get killed?  I thought Barry was going to be that guy in Alan Wake.  Yet to my surprise, Barry actually grew on me quite a bit.  He actually might be one of the best characters in the game.  I actually found myself liking the guy and hoping he would make it through to the end.  I guess credit goes to the writers for taking the snotty agent and turning him into a likeable sidekick.

Alan Wake is a great game with a pretty original premise that deserves to be checked out.  It also has a T rating, which honestly surprised me when I learned about it.  This is from the makers of the Max Payne series, after all.  And this seemed like it was veering towards the horror genre.  Yet I don't think they pulled any punches to get that rating.  They still tell a strange and suspenseful story alongside some very satisfying action gameplay.  So I have no problem recommending that anyone with an Xbox 360 go give this game a try.  I just hope you won't be afraid to turn out the lights when you're done.