Our Story So Far: BAAAAAAAAAAAAD Company!!!

I don't play online shooters.  It's not that I don't like them.  I think it's that I know I suck at them.  Most of the time, I just wander around for a couple of seconds and then wind up dead.  Repeat thirty times until the round ends, then let's go do it again.  You can see why I don't find that cycle to be very much fun.  Halo and Gears of War are franchises that have helped make XBox Live the juggernaut that it is, yet I've never touched an online session in any of those games.  And I've played them all.  I missed the boat on Call of Duty 4, so when I got in there I was way outclassed.  I lasted a little while in World at War and Modern Warfare 2, but still didn't revisit those games much after a month had passed.  About the only online shooter I ever spent a whole lot of time with was Battlefield 2.  I don't know what it was about that game, but I couldn't get enough of it.  I spent a good number of months on those battlefields, claiming flags and healing my teammates (I usually played as a medic).  Something about it just clicked with me.  So I guess it's fitting that the first game to come along that has replicated that addiction for me would be Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Now I wasn't a huge fan of the original Bad Company.  Don't get me wrong; I loved the characters within Bad Company.  Sarge, Sweetwater, Marlowe, and Haggard compose what may be the greatest team in video game history.  The dialogue and chemistry between these guys was fantastic, and there were a ton of genuinely hilarious moments throughout the game.  And the story was pretty good.  A team of outcast soldiers looking to score a bunch of illicit gold in the midst of a battlefield is a story that movies have done before, but it worked just fine for this game.  But there was something about the actual gameplay that just put me off.  Maybe it was the fact that I could never see the guys who were shooting at me until my health was about 3/4ths of the way gone.  Maybe it was the fact that the mechanics were ripped straight from the multiplayer.  You would respawn after dying, with everything you had done prior still having occurred.  That didn't make sense to me in a single player campaign.  Whatever it was, I walked away from Bad Company thinking it was merely OK.  A great group of characters set in a mediocre shooter.  Needless to say, I didn't have high hopes for the sequel.

Thankfully, I was dead wrong.  I've heard a lot of reviewers complaining about the single player campaign, saying they made it too serious or something to that effect.  I can see where they're coming from, but I still argue that all the great humor of the Bad Company is still in there.  You just have to wait around sometimes to hear it.  The team will discuss their favorite scenes in Predator, why the black man calls 50 Cent "Fitty Cent", and how Sarge would fare as a mixed martial artist.  It is all fantastic.  Yet the actual story does take a more serious approach, so I see how that's not what some people were looking for.  In my opinion, though, almost every other part of the single player experience is improved in Bad Company 2.  I can see my enemies before I'm dead.  The respawning weirdness is gone.  You've got regenerating health to give you a fighting chance.  Really, the game plays a lot more like the Modern Warfare series.  And you know what?  Modern Warfare is pretty good!  And Bad Company 2 gives you more than 4 hours in its single player campaign!  I seem to be in the minority here, but I prefer Bad Company 2's single player to the original.  I just think it plays better.  Heck, I think it's better than Modern Warfare 2's single player too, which I thought was pretty darn good.

But there are a lot of people who don't want anything to do with the single player game.  To them, Battlefield is multiplayer, and that's all they care about.  Me, I never touched the mulitplayer in the first Bad Company.  I first played it on a rental copy that I got about a year after the game was released, so I figured I had missed the window on that part.  I got Bad Company 2 right at launch, and people were raving about the multiplayer, so I decided this time I would give it a go.  I got into a Conquest match, and it was Battlefield.  It was what I remembered from back in the days of Battlefield 2.  I was trying to capture control points, fighting off enemies trying to recapture them, etc.  It was a lot like the game I remembered.  I didn't like it at all.  Weird, huh?  I guess I felt Battlefield 2 was a great moment in my past, but online shooters had moved on.  Progression was in this game, but it was taking forever to get past rank one.  I wasn't unlocking anything.  After a few matches of that, I figured I was done with the online component.

Thankfully, I gave it another shot a few weeks later.  This time, I tried out the Rush mode.  And oh my God, was it glorious.  This is how you should be playing Bad Company 2.  I was unlocking multiple things each round, racking up the kill counts, and scoring huge points from completing objectives.  I lost countless hours in that thing, and I still kinda want to jump back in sometime.  Now I said I suck at online shooters when I started this post, but somehow I always found myself near the top of the pack in Bad Company 2.  I can't tell you how much that can make me want to jump into another match.  Much like Battlefield 2, Bad Company 2 has somehow clicked with me in a way other online shooters never have.  This is my FPS of choice right now.  A new mode has recently been released, so I need to get back on and see what that has to offer.  Call of Duty: Black Ops and Medal of Honor are coming later this year, and both are vying to claim the title of the King of Online Shooters.  Personally, I think they both have a lot to accomplish if they want any hope of topping Bad Company 2.

Our Story So Far: Someone Left the Cake Out In the Rain

I already went pretty in depth into why I loved Heavy Rain.  I recommend you check out that review if you want to know specifics about how I felt.  In summary, I thought it was a fantastic evolution of the adventure game genre that excelled in the way it not only told the story, but allowed the player to determine how the story would play out.  My brother recently finished the game, and when discussing the climax of the game we realized things played out pretty differently for the two of us.  Whereas I had all my characters survive up to that point of the game, someone died in his game.  Therefore, a character who played a key part in the final struggle for me wasn't even around for that whole scene for him.  It was actually pretty cool to realize how different things can turn out due to some decisions earlier on.     

This wasn't David Cage's first attempt at "Interactive Story Telling".  His previous project was Indigo Prophecy, a game that I really liked but can admit was still flawed.  In that game, you have two central characters (you take control of other characters, but these two are definitely the focal point). One of them is a man who finds himself possessed by something that forces him to murder an innocent person in a ritualistic fashion.  The other character is a cop who is trying to solve the murder after the fact.  The early acts of the game are an interesting game of cat and mouse for the player, as they are simultaneously trying to cover their tracks and uncover leads.  Then about a third of the way in, things get crazy, and the supernatural tones that were implied up to that point blow up into the main crux of the plot.  And that stuff actually stays pretty interesting as it pursues some Mayan mythology that doesn't really get explored a lot in modern entertainment.  But once the final act kicks in, the whole thing sort of goes out of control.  New plot points and antagonists appear out of nowhere and seem to derail the story.  There are alternate endings, but they don't actually take into account any of the actions throughout the game.  They only depend on a few choices near the end and how well you can do on the final QTEs.  It was kind of a disappointment, as the early chapters seemed to hold a lot of promise on how you could change the pace and mood of the story.

And speaking of the QTEs, this was maybe the big drawback of the gameplay.  When any action would start up, two "Simon-esque" circles would pop up on the screen to indicate which buttons you should press.  It worked OK, but having big multicolored circles on the screen could also distract from some of the crazy stuff going on at the same time.  This is one of the big improvements in Heavy Rain.  QTEs are still the main gameplay element when the action heats up, but the way they are implemented are miles ahead of Indigo Prophecy.  The button prompts are put in the best contextual point, popping up where your eyes would already be focused.  This tends to flow well with the action rather than distract from it, and makes you feel more involved in what's going on onscreen.

Heavy Rain also benefits from avoiding the supernatural tones of Indigo Prophecy.  As I stated earlier, I liked most of what Indigo Prophecy tried to do with the supernatural stuff.  There were moments early on in Heavy Rain where I thought they might veer back to the supernatural for their later chapters, but I'm glad they decided not to go that route.  Staying more grounded in reality helped the story have a much deeper emotional impact.  When your protagonist gets crazy superpowers and can start flying around, it gets hard to identify with him.  When your protagonist has to decide if he should cut off his finger in the hopes of finding a clue that could help him save the life of his child, well that pain becomes much easier to sympathize with.  The emotions conveyed in the game really helped you forget you were looking at computer generated characters, and made you feel like you were watching actual people interact with one another. 

I wrote my review of the game the same day that I beat it, so I wondered at the time if my opinion would change later on when the emotional high died down.  Five months later, I can say I still feel the same way about Heavy Rain.  I feel like this could be an important game due to the way it approaches its storytelling.  This is just one of a few games lately that will alter the way the story plays out according to the player's choices.  A whole lot of games have tried this over the last few years, but games like Heavy Rain, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and the Mass Effect series seem to be taking that concept and realizing its true potential.  I hope developers take note of what David Cage and Quantic Dream achieved with Heavy Rain and build on it.  This was one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had all year, and I hope I get the chance to have more like it.

Our Story So Far: Maximus, Your Ignorance Of Large Carnivorous Reptiles Is Embarrassing Me!

Sam and Max continue to set the bar higher than before when it comes to comedy in games.  This duo of an anthropomorphic dog and his psychotic rabbit friend have provided some of the best laughs I've had not just in games, but from all media this year.  With the latest installment in this franchise, The Devil's Playhouse, Telltale continues to show how modern adventure games, and episodic gaming in general, should be done.

The Devil's Playhouse is the third "season" of Sam and Max that Telltale has developed, although they seem to be avoiding the word "season".  I think that's because this series of episodes stand apart from the past two installments (although there are still references that those of us who have been devoted to the series can geek out about).  While season 2 very much felt like more of the same (which wasn't a bad thing), The Devil's Playhouse has thrown in some new hooks to the gameplay to make it feel a bit different from the standard Telltale formula.  Oh sure, that standard formula is still in there.  You have an intro sequence, then you get a series of puzzles that you can tackle in any order to achieve a certain number of goals, and then you get the climax of the episode followed by a cliffhanger to get you to wait impatiently for the next episode.  That has definitely been the case in the first two episodes Telltale has released so far.

Yet Telltale has managed to throw in some new mechanics to make the gameplay feel fresh and different.  Max has psychic powers now, and those powers have an impact on the game.  Sam and Max have come across the "Toys of Power", which originate from the Devil's Toybox.  Each toy has a different power that Max can use, and these are used to solve many of the puzzles in the game.  In the first episode, Max is able to see into the future, which was invaluable in helping me to figure out what to do next.  In the second episode, you can use a ventriloquism doll to make other people say things.  Aside from being helpful in the gameplay, these toys and the powers they hold are just plain quirky, and made me use them at random to see what sort of joke would come up next.  I should also mention that when you bring up the wheel of powers, it makes the whole world seem ridiculous.  Well, more so than usual.  Phantom objects appear that make it look like some characters are wearing novelty cowboy hats, or that a saguaro is now in a previously empty corner.  I'm not sure if this is an effect of the toys or just what Max normally sees, but either way it's a nice touch.

The second episode also used another trick to change things up.  Rather than play as Sam and Max, you take control of their great-grandparents, Sammeth and Maximus.  OK, so they're basically the same characters.  The difference is in how you view the story.  You are watching their adventure on old "dangerously flammable" nitrate film reels, and you have four reels to choose from.  Each reel is a different part of the story, and it becomes necessary to switch between reels to find clues that will help you in the other reels.  It's not unlike another Lucasarts classic: Day of the Tentacle.

But while the game plays well, it's the story and characters that make any Sam and Max game great.  And boy are they great here.  I'd expect no less from a series that featured a giant talking stone head of Abraham Lincoln as a major recurring character.  There are some familiar faces, such as Secret Service Agent Superball, Stinky, and Grandpa Stinky.  There are also some new faces, such as the first episode's antagonist, General Skunkape.  But no characters can top the stars, Sam and Max.  And they're in rare form here.  My favorite line of theirs so far has come in Episode 2.  Sammeth and Maximus learn that a certain character will always fall asleep when listening to "Ride of the Valkyries".  The camera pulls out to show Sam and Max watching the film.  Max remarks, "I can only fall asleep to the Tears of a Clown."  Sam replies, "Poor Chuckles."  Max answers, "I think his shackles are too tight." The bizarre and sometimes twisted humor of these games might not appeal to everyone, but I sure can't get enough. 

Simply put, the Sam and Max series continues to be the best in the modern adventure genre.  If you've ever had any love for point and click adventure games, you owe it to yourself to play this one.  Well, you're probably already playing it, but if you're not, get in on it!

Our Story So Far...

Holy cow, 2010 is half way done.  Already?!  Where did all that time go? Well, I know where a lot of my time went.  It went into playing games.  Six months in, and 2010 has already seen some incredible game releases.  I'm almost tempted to say we've seen some of the greatest games I've ever experienced.  I think we may look back on this year as a very important one, where genres finally blended in a way that felt natural instead of forced.  Ideas that seemed cool in concept have become awesome in reality.  I'll get more specific when I get down to talking about the games themselves, but if you want a teaser, let's just say that I really liked Mass Effect 2.

Typically, it's the back half of the year that sees the bulk of titles being released.  The holiday season is usually a chaotic mess where every company is trying to convince you that their game is the one most deserving of your money.  When Angry Joe called October "Broke-tober", he wasn't kidding around.  But last holiday season, a whole ton of developers pushed their releases away from the holiday season.  I think Modern Warfare 2 had a lot to do with that, but it also gave them time to polish their games.  The end result has been a steady flow of quality games all year, and with E3 now behind us, that flow doesn't seem like it will dry up any time soon.  Before we get into that craziness of the latter half of the year, I want to take some time to consider what I've seen so far.  I want to take the next couple of days and highlight some of my personal favorites and discuss what made them special to me.

Before I get into that, though, I want to use this introductory post to talk about some honorable mentions.  I've narrowed down my list of favorites down to six, but there were plenty of other great games that I've seen this year.  These games deserve to be talked about as well.  Plus, there are also some games I just haven't been able to devote enough time to to see them through to the end.  But I'm planning to get through them someday.

Perhaps the biggest game, both in size and importance, is Final Fantasy XIII.  This game has been hugely divisive, mainly because of the length of time you have to devote to it just to see the true meat of the gameplay.  Some people have claimed it basically has a thirty hour tutorial.  This is kind of harsh, but I can also understand where they're coming from.  Some people have written this off as the worst Final Fantasy and the death knell of the franchise.  How do I feel about it?  Personally, I love the game.  The graphics are beautiful, the combat system is fast paced and intuitive (not something I thought I would ever say about a Final Fantasy game), and the characters are all interesting and compelling.  Well, except for Hope.  I want that whiny little jerkbag to just fall into a lava pit or something, but I have a feeling I'll be stuck with him for the duration.  Dang it.  I'm still probably only about a quarter of the way into the game, and I haven't found time to get back into it recently.  But I definitely do want to jump back in soon and see this story out.  I don't agree with any of the complaints I've read.  This is a fantastic game.

Another game that I've really enjoyed but haven't gotten around to finishing for some reason is Darksiders.  People are calling this a dark Zelda game, and I really didn't get the comparisons when I first starting playing.  Then I got to the first dungeon, and that's when I realized, "Oh.  Yeah, this is totally Zelda."  The combat is more akin to God of War, though.  You have a combo system, you can power up your weapons, and there are Quick Time Events to finish off enemies in a brutal fashion.  Then there are moments where I turns into a Panzer Dragoon game, which is just fine by me.  But the dungeons are ripped straight out of Zelda, and you will find new items that open up new parts of the map and defeat enemies with greater ease.  And the whole "heaven vs. hell" scenario is pretty interesting, if very questionable from a theological standpoint.  But they're approaching the story from the mythology standpoint, so I don't really find it offensive.  If they went the Preacher route, now that would be offensive.  This setting is pretty cool though, and the artwork reminds me of the sketches you would find from Samwise in the old Blizzard manuals.  So yeah, it's pretty awesome.

I think the reason I haven't gotten around to finishing these games really speaks to the quality of the other games that have been released so far.  I love both of these games, but I've found games that I wanted to devote my time to even more.  You'll see six examples in the days ahead, but then you have a game like Splinter Cell: Conviction.  This game brought Sam Fisher back in a big way, and made him a force to be reckoned with.  In the prior games, you always felt like Fisher could take care of business, but the stealth gameplay always demanded a more methodical approach.  This time, Sam's not messing around.  He will straight up destroy anyone who gets in his way, and his enemies haven't got a prayer.  The Mark and Execute maneuver allows you to clear out a room of enemies within seconds, and creates a faster and more fluid style of play.  It also meant I wasn't reloading the last save every five minutes (I tend to get anal about the older Splinter Cell games).  The single player is short and sweet, and is basically comparable to a quality action film.  The multiplayer is also solid, allowing for some truly awesome co-operative takedowns and suspenseful moments.  Though things can get pretty rough in co-op, too, so be prepared for some frustrations when the AI pours on the heat.  While I just can't bring myself to put Conviction up there with my top six so far, it still is a great experience that I would highly recommend to anyone who hasn't checked it out yet.

Of course, there are also portable games.  Sadly, I haven't devoted the time to portable games that they deserve.  I guess I feel I should be getting my money's worth out of my HDTV or something.  But that doesn't mean there haven't been any good portable games!  On the DS, I feel I need to mention Picross 3D.  I love the prior game, Picross DS, and actually haven't finished all the puzzles that game had to offer.  If you don't know, the Picross games have traditionally been square or rectangular grids.  Along the edges would be numbers that would tell you how many squares were actually in the puzzle, and an idea of how many groupings you can expect.  You have to use logic to figure out what squares to remove, and the end result is that you've revealed a picture in the grid.  It's actually way more fun then I'm probably making it sound.  But Picross 3D takes the Picross formula, makes it three dimensional, and actually makes it work. Now you are basically sculpting out blocky images, and you really won't be able to figure out most of the images until you've cleared out all the unnecessary squares.  At my current pace of knocking out one or two puzzles every other day or so, I'll probably be hanging around with this one for a while.

On the mobile side of things, I want to mention Chaos Rings.  This is a mobile game developed by Square Enix.  I have it on the iPhone, but I don't know if it's available on other mobile phones.  They've basically made a full sized RPG for your phone, and made it look comparable to some of the higher quality graphics on the PS2.  The battle system is fast and fun, the story is intriguing, and the artwork is beautiful for a mobile game.  I'm still really early on in the game, but the ability to quit out at any point and pick it right back up when you're free again is a key feature for me.  Oh, and you can turn off random encounters if you want.  That's pretty cool.  It cost me $12, which is pricey for an iPhone game, but I think it was worth every dollar.  If you have any love for JRPGs and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I highly suggest you give it a try.

Ah, but then there are those games that we try not to talk about with other people.  We don't want them know what we've actually been up to in our private time.  No, I'm not talking about adult games.  Those are just creepy.  No, I'm talking about the guilty pleasures.  And for me, no game has been more of a guilty pleasure than Deadly Premonition.  Holy cow, has this game gotten way more coverage this year than it deserves.  It is not a well made game.  That much needs to be said up front.  The combat is tolerable most of the time, and the driving is just awful.  There are ideas in the game that I feel had promise, but I don't think SWERY had the money he needed to really pull them off.  Yet it's the characters that make this game dear to my heart.  The oddball inhabitants of Greenvale are just the right kind of quirky to make it worth pushing through the zombie infested portions of the game.  And then there's the hero: FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan.  Just call him York.  That's what everyone calls him.  This character is cut right from the Twin Peaks mold, and it is hard not to love the guy.  I'll admit, I've found myself talking to Zach every now and then.  Thanks to Giant Bomb's dueling Endurance Runs, I know how the game ends, so that's slowed me down on completing it myself.  Yet I have a feeling that someday, I may return to Greenvale to finally solve the case once and for all.  Isn't that right, Zach?

So those are my honorable mentions for the year so far.  Oh, yeah, there was Alan Wake, but I've talked about that recently, so I won't be redundant here.  I don't really have a "worst of" category yet, as I have tried to avoid any games I've heard negative things about.  Really, everything I've picked up has been great so far.  The only bad thing is that I don't have nearly enough time to play it all.  Yet somehow I'm finding the time to play the original Deus Ex.  Hmm...ANYWAYS, check in tomorrow when I'll be discussing episodic gaming at its finest.

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.