Jumping in Slow Motion: The Sequel

Recently, I wrote a little about Max Payne, which I'd neglected to play until this winter. Now it's a week later and I've gotten through Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Again, very enjoyable, and again, occasionally hilarious. In my opinion, it wasn't quite as difficult as the first — or, at least, it seemed to require a bit less of that dreaded trial-and-error save scumming in most levels. This is because fewer of the fights are set up in such a way that you'll be blasted as soon as you enter a room and subsequently die for no good reason other than your failure to predict the future (which, of course, was perfectly fine in the first Max Payne as long as you didn't mind saving often and learning things the hard way).

Regardless, I still progressed through Max Payne 2 at a snail's pace, retrying some fights over and over again before moving on, but that was usually by choice rather than by way of humiliating failure. After getting past a particular room, I'd often decide to see if I could do it again without getting shot, or with as few bullets as possible, or just for the sake of using some grenades (which I have a tendency to hoard until I can't carry any more).

The combat itself seemed a lot more forgiving. Either that, or I've just gotten that much less terrible at third-person shooters in general, and Max Payne in particular. So maybe I'm completely wrong, but I did get the impression that the enemies' reaction times were increased, and that the protagonist is a bit more bulletproof than he was before. Bullet time, also, seems considerably more useful this time around.

Maybe I'd be able to offer a better analysis of the differences between the two games if I were to play them both in the same day, perhaps side-by-side for a careful comparison, but I'm less interested in the details than in the overall experience of playing the game. In short, it was a hell of a good time.

The story, though I'd be lying if I said it were even 10% of my motivation for finishing the game, was a lot better than in the original. Spending some time playing as Max Payne's sidekick, nemesis, and love interest Mona Sax was a nice change, too, even if it was only a superficial one. What I really didn't like about the game was the occasional escort mission, the first of which has a player-controlled Mona Sax defending a nearly-helpless computer-controlled Max Payne.

Escort and defense missions are generally pretty terrible in any game, and I failed plenty of times in this particular level — partly because it was such a drastic change of pace, and partly because I vastly overestimated the protagonist's ability to survive when I wasn't controlling him. With Mona Sax high up in a building and Max Payne down with the bad guys on the ground, this part of the game is essentially an exercise in spotting those bad guys before they can start shooting. If Max is getting shot and you don't see the shooter right away, his health is going to drop very quickly.

By contrast, whenever the player is controlling Max Payne and Mona Sax is nearby, she's invincible and doesn't need to be defended. In these particular fights, if you're feeling lazy, you can even hang back and let her wipe out every enemy in the room. I can't help but wonder if the developers sought intentionally to turn the so-called "damsel in distress" cliché on its head with this rather unusual discrepancy. I almost wonder what Anita Sarkeesian thinks of it, and perhaps we'll find out when she finally releases the long-overdue premier video in her crowd-funded series on sexism in video games, but if she does analyze this game then she'll probably be more interested in the fact that the game's heroine is seen nude or partially undressed on multiple occasions, and might be regarded as little more than an excuse for sex appeal if you can manage to ignore most of the game's plot.

Whatever her purpose in the game, I really started to enjoy Max Payne 2 during the first level in which Mona Sax is the playable character, though I can't say exactly why. Maybe it was the level design. Or maybe it's just that I had finally reached the point where practice pays off and started getting a lot of headshots with the Desert Eagle... which, by the way, might just be the most satisfying weapon in the game. Even blowing up three guys with a grenade isn't nearly as gratifying as efficiently popping each of them in the head as you jump out from cover in slow motion, and even though painting the entire room with bullet holes while wielding dual Ingram machine pistols might be more effective if you're still a beginner, it also gets dull pretty quickly. Part of making an enjoyable shooter is including a selection of weapons that feel powerful (without actually making them so powerful that they break the balance of the game), and this means good sound effects. The Ingram, unfortunately, sounds awful, but the Desert Eagle sounds very nice.

It only does the job when you can manage to hit the bad guys in the face, but that's where you should always be aiming regardless of your weapon of choice. Headshots are everything in Max Payne (which is why I find it so strange that the developer, Remedy Entertainment, went on to create Alan Wake, in which shooting a bad guy in the head is no different from shooting him in the toe... but I guess that's just because Alan Wake really isn't a shooter). Max Payne 2, like its predecessor, very often becomes a game of activating bullet time and then clicking on heads as quickly as you can. Anything else is a waste of bullets.

Now that I've gotten both of Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne games out of my backlog, I can look forward to (eventually) playing Rockstar Games' Max Payne 3. But, as I've mentioned before, I'm in need of a better computer, and I'd rather wait until after I make that purchase so that I don't have to play the game on minimum graphical settings, or at a mediocre frame rate, or both.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Game

Last night, I finished Max Payne. (The first one.) It took me a while, because my playing time has been cut drastically by that irritating thing called employment, but I finally finished it.

I'd previously played both games in Remedy Entertainment's newer series, Alan Wake, so I was confident in the developers' ability to create an entertaining third-person shooter. Obviously, though, the two franchises don't really have much in common aside from the presence of firearms, the fact that each game is named after its protagonist, and the amount of time you'll spend looking at the back of each protagonist's head.

Max Payne, for example, is insanely, ludicrously, hilariously violent. It was even a bit awkward, I must admit, to start playing this game less than a week after a particular mass murder which called into question (for some) the effects of violent video games on young people. Personally, I don't think games like this one are harmful at all, but the subject was still on my mind. This is exactly the type of game, I thought to myself, that would start a misinformed media frenzy if it were ever discovered in the bedroom of some kid who had gone and shot a bunch of people.

If someone told me that Max Payne, of all games, might desensitize players to violence and make them more likely to commit violent acts, I'd respond that the game is just too damn silly to have that kind of effect on people. The game doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and while some might say that's part of the problem, there's just no way that anyone could get real ideas about harming people after playing a game in which most of the shooting is done while jumping in slow motion. If a killer in the making were going to get ideas about how to commit a mass murder from a video game (which is unlikely), or if such a person actually wanted to train for such an act using video games (which is extremely unlikely), he or she would probably be found playing a more realistic shooter.

Max Payne has absolutely no respect for the concept of realism, and everything (including the violence and the motivation for violence) is consequently so tongue-in-cheek that, to me, this particular shooter almost seems like a parody of its own genre. (It some parts it even becomes a parody of itself.) Like the gameplay, the story is pretty grim, in a lot of ways — it involves drug use, corruption, government conspiracy, and a ton of murder — but there's enough humor and absurdity in the telling of that story to lighten the mood, just a little, if you're paying attention. More importantly, the ridiculous, contorted expression on Max Payne's unmoving face destroys the serious tone of the opening cinematic. I couldn't hold it in; I had to laugh. In fact, that happened a lot throughout the game, not necessarily because it was meant to be funny but because the stuff happening on my screen was so insane.

The type of carnage that occurs throughout Max Payne is only a couple of steps beyond cartoon violence. There's a bit of blood spray and some flailing when the bad guys fall down, but that's it. They even stay in one piece when they're blown up with grenades, which makes it more hilarious than tragic when a thug tries to toss a grenade at you and ends up killing himself. I should also mention that Max Payne isn't the only one with a goofy face. All of this is due in part to the outdated graphical capabilities of the game, but the developers clearly weren't aiming for realism in any case. The only hint of realism throughout the entire experience is that the protagonist is by no means invincible. If you're playing for the first time, prepare to watch Max Payne die over and over again, sometimes from a single gunshot without any warning.

Part of what made the game interesting for me is that the main character, though certainly a bad ass, is pretty fragile for an action hero. I played through the game on the easiest difficulty setting (because the others are initially locked), and the game still killed me plenty of times. Unlike some other video game protagonists, Max Payne isn't exactly a bullet sponge... and unlike some other video game villains, the ones here aren't always terrible at shooting, so you won't be feeling so great if one of them manages to shoot first. You can fill up your health bar by finding painkillers and eating them like candy — another aspect of the game which is so absurdly unrealistic that it's hard to see it as anything but lighthearted humor — but the painkillers don't work instantaneously. If you start getting hit with bullets, and the guy who fired them isn't already dead, you're in big trouble, and you'll probably be watching your own slow-motion death before you can head for cover.

The reason Max can survive to the end of the game, taking down hundreds of heavily armed bad guys along the way, isn't because he's tougher. It's because of the advantages that you, as a player, have over the game — actual intelligence, the ability to quicksave and try again when you die, and the ability to know what's coming when you do so. The game is very scripted, so it's rather predictable. If you immediately die when you walk into a room because some thug with a shotgun was waiting or you on the left, you'll know to turn left the next time you enter that room. If you get blown up by a grenade that comes flying around the corner as you walk down a hallway, you know that the same grenade will be thrown in the same spot the next time around.

Since playing the game for the first time without dying over and over again is virtually impossible, you'll have to rely heavily on quicksaving. In some places, you'll only succeed through trial and error. You can always improve your reflexes and practice your aiming, but you'll win by knowing where the bad guys are and by turning to shoot them before they appear.

The player also has the ability to jump in slow motion, shooting in mid-air, and this is the game's big gimmick. Having trouble with a particular gun fight? Try using bullet time. While it certainly isn't the end-all game-winning move, as the slow-motion feature in F.E.A.R. was, it's still pretty useful. Then again, the game was designed around it, so it's really all but necessary if you don't want to be hopelessly outgunned. Like quicksaving, it's a crutch, but it's a crutch you'll probably need to lean on in order to beat the game. If you refuse to use those crutches, you'll be putting yourself through a lot of unnecessary punishment.

In any case, despite the occasional frustration, Max Payne was a pretty interesting experience. To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect to like it very much, for some of the game's most noticeable attributes are associated today with bad game design — the scripted enemy behavior, the excessive reliance on a single gameplay gimmick, and what might be called artificial difficulty (in the sense that the player will die frequently through no fault of his or her own and must rely on save scumming to progress). But the game is still fun, in its own way. Furthermore, while much of the game is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek embrace of senseless ultra-violence, Max Payne is still known for its great writing.

The plot isn't the most imaginative, but the protagonist's monologues — though a bit too heavy on the metaphors — are very well done. They affect the mood and the atmosphere of the game in a way not often seen in shooters, and the neo-noir graphic-novel style storytelling makes the game truly unique.

Obviously, the game is pretty outdated now, so I'm not sure how strongly I should recommend it to the average player. You certainly won't see the beauty in this 2001 game's ugly graphics if you can't compare them to the uglier graphics of the late '90s and beyond. But I hope new and future fans of the series will keep returning to this game despite its visual shortcomings. The franchise is still alive with the past year's release of Max Payne 3, and it's always best to play an entire series in order rather than simply skipping to the newest game.

Then again, I haven't yet played either of the Max Payne sequels, and I honestly can't say whether the latest installment bears any resemblance to the original.

Retrospective: Asphalt and Trouble

The 1995 LucasArts adventure game Full Throttle is a cherished memory from my younger years. As a result, I think it's impossible for me to discuss it without bias; if I say the game is great, it could just be the nostalgia talking. But a little bias never hurt anyone, so I'll just say it: The game is great.

Sure, it's a bit outdated; the graphics, obviously, are laughable by modern standards. Still, I'd argue that the game has aged rather well, considering how long it's been around. While the graphics (in a technical sense) are pretty awful, the artistic style can still be appreciated. Instead of attempting realism (which never looks good seventeen years later), the game's designers chose a rather cartoon-like aesthetic, which might seem at odds with the violent biker gang theme, but the game is not without its share of humor. What's important is that it still looks good... I mean, once you look past those big pixels.

It might not be good enough for children who grew up with HD everything, but it's good enough for me. In any case, whether it's pretty or ugly — especially, in fact, when it's ugly — a game has to be fun. Unfortunately, I'd be lying if I said this game is for everyone. Given that it's heavily story-driven and consists mostly of clicking on things, some might find it rather dull. I think some might even claim that it's hardly a game at all, but more of an interactive cartoon.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, such things have been said — perhaps unfairly — about several recent releases by Telltale Games, a developer of similar story-driven adventure/puzzle games. The similarity, in fact, is no coincidence; the company was founded in 2004 by former LucasArts employees, who were working on an unreleased sequel to the classic Sam & Max Hit the Road, when LucasArts suddenly pulled the plug on their entire adventure game department. Since then, Telltale Games has been making what are essentially the modern equivalents of the old LucasArts adventure titles (and even a few sequels, most notably their episodically released Sam & Max series).

Despite the common criticism regarding a lack of what some purists would consider to be "real" gameplay, however, many of these recent games have been well received, so we know there's an audience who can still appreciate what Full Throttle has to offer. Then again, perhaps it's just more nostalgic bias, since a lot of this audience probably shares my fond memories of the '90s. Certainly it's not the same desirable mainstream audience that thinks Call of Duty is the pinnacle of interactive entertainment. Full Throttle, though it's a very short game (easily finished in one sitting if you know what to do), is probably not for the player with a short attention span.

Like many of the adventure games of its era, particularly those made by LucasArts and based on the SCUMM engine, Full Throttle is essentially point-and-click puzzle game. As such, it requires a bit of patience. You walk around, talk to characters, and find items to use with other items in specific places. That's pretty much it, except for a few mandatory mini-games with frustrating controls. While it is a bit more than an interactive cartoon, you'll have a lot more fun with this game if you do like the idea of an interactive cartoon, because without the story this game would be little more than a series of items to collect and doors to kick open.

In other words, aside from a few deadly biker fights (somewhat reminiscent of a backwards-facing Road Rash) and a single demolition derby gone wrong (warning: you just read spoilers), there isn't a whole lot of action outside of the cutscenes, and winning the game means little more than doing the right things in the right order, rarely with a time limit or any sense of urgency. Surely Full Throttle is among the most action-packed of the LucasArts "point-and-click" adventure games, but it's not an "action game" by any stretch of the imagination. Like all of its brethren, it's a "casual" game if I ever saw one — at least, that's the modern terminology — and, worse, there's only any replay value if you're highly entertained by the plot. That being said, though, the plot of this one is rather good.

Not much of a back-story is explicitly revealed during the game. The presence of hovercraft technology, of course, tells us it's sometime in the future; meanwhile, the heavy security at the local gas tower and the sad shape of the surrounding town tells us that it's not a very nice future, at least not for the barren wasteland of an unnamed western state in which the game takes place. There are even some vague hints of something post-apocalyptic — see, perhaps, the lyrics of this pleasant song that plays on a radio in the game — but all we really know is what we see. Except for the occasional gameplay hint, none of the characters seem willing to explain to the player what Ben should already know.

Ben, the protagonist, is a bit of an enigma himself. We know he's a tough-looking dude who loves his motorcycle, and that he's the leader of a biker gang called the Polecats, but his past is a mystery. His future, also, is anything but certain; he and his buddies are running low on cash. (Being an outlaw in this particular post-apocalyptic future doesn't seem to be as lucrative a career as one would hope.) Ben, however, is confident that things are about to change.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Corley, the founder and owner of the last motorcycle manufacturing company in the nation, is in poor health, with only a few months to live. This is bad news for bikers everywhere; Malcolm is somewhat of a hero to them, while Adrian Ripburger — the man who plans to take over Corley Motors in Malcolm's stead — has only his own best interests in mind... and we can only assume he's plotting something horrible.

It's not long before their paths cross; when the Polecats happen to encounter a fancy hover-limo on Highway 9, Ben pops a wheelie and drives right over the top of it, presumably unaware that Malcolm Corley himself is inside. Corley, more impressed than offended, catches up to the Polecats at a nearby bar, and Ripburger takes the opportunity to offer the Polecats employment as escorts to the Corley Motors shareholders meeting. When Ben refuses, he gets knocked out and stuffed in a dumpster, while the rest of the gang — believing that Ben changed his mind and got a head start — is tricked into driving straight into an ambush.

Things start out kind of slow — after the long opening cinematic, your first act as the player is to punch your way out of the dumpster so you can find the keys to your bike, which (spoiler alert) gets wrecked shortly thereafter, and following another long cinematic you're sent on a quest to find the necessary tools to have the bike repaired. But once you're back on the road for good, things start to get interesting... like, murder-and-conspiracy-and-explosions interesting. I don't want to spoil any of the really good parts, but things very quickly go from exciting to completely over-the-top, culminating in some truly awesome scenes part-way through the game and a ridiculous finale involving an airplane.

As far as I was concerned, back in 1995, the game was a masterpiece. Critical reception, while not quite that enthusiastic, was favorable to say the least. But I suspect it's not as timeless as I wish it could be. Today's critics and players would no doubt be more harsh. Perhaps, at the time, we were more patient. Or perhaps we were all too easily amused by the use of games as a storytelling medium, complete with full voice acting and witty dialogue.

While storytelling in games had been around for quite a long time, Full Throttle did it well, due in part to a talented cast. (Despite the developer's obvious connection to the Star Wars franchise, I was surprised to see Mark Hamill in the opening credits.) Throw in a notably enjoyable soundtrack, a ludicrously bad-ass main character, and a handful of explosions, and you've pretty much pushed the point-and-click adventure genre to its absolute limits.

Finding a working copy of the game shouldn't be too much of a challenge, despite its age; last time I checked Amazon, there were a number of them for sale. (I'm sure you could download it illegally, as well, but I never tried this; I still have my seventeen-year-old CD copy of the game, and it's a bit scratched, but it still works.) As for getting it to work on a modern computer, you can thank the makers of ScummVM for doing this for you. Their software is free, and it runs these old SCUMM-based adventure games almost perfectly on a number of operating systems and devices.

So is it worth playing? If you're a fan of old games, absolutely; if you're a fan of biker gangs and exploding bridges, most definitely; otherwise, it's hit or miss. I'd like to think anyone can enjoy this game, but it's hard for new players to get excited about old things when there are a million newer (much prettier) games to play. But if outdated graphics aren't a problem for you, then Full Throttle might just be the old-school biker-themed graphical point-and-click adventure game you've been missing all your life.

Alan Wake & Cinematic Games

A few days ago, I finished playing Alan Wake. I'd previously mentioned the game in an earlier post about movies based on video games; although I hadn't yet owned the game at the time, I had heard it was very story-driven, and perhaps, therefore, an ideal candidate for a film adaptation. Then again, as I pointed out before, such a movie serves no real purpose if the game already functions as an interactive movie by itself. Alan Wake is, in fact, what you might call a very cinematic game; while the term "cinematic" has often been used as a meaningless buzzword by the industry in recent years, it's fitting in this case. Not surprisingly, there has been some (wishful) expectation of an Alan Wake feature film. Though nothing has been announced, it almost seems bound to happen.

Much like the Assassin's Creed franchise (which spawned the short films Lineage, Ascendance, and Embers), Alan Wake has already branched out into the realm of live-action entertainment, and this is pretty easy to do when so many of the game's characters are modeled on the actors who play them. Bright Falls, the promotional web series that serves as a prequel to Alan Wake, somehow manages to be worth watching, and I have to say it's considerably more unsettling than the actual game.

For the moment, however, I'd like to forget about the predictable attempts to push the franchise into other media, such as movies and books, and focus instead on the game itself. Don't wait for a score at the end, though, since it's not my intention to write a proper review. I don't really see the point, since the game is already old enough that I'd surely be the millionth guy reviewing it. While it's still relevant enough to have its place in a more general discussion cinematic games (and I'll get to that shortly), it's not unfair to say that Alan Wake is yesterday's news. This is usually what happens by the time I get around to playing a game, since I'm strongly opposed to paying full price for anything.

Despite the game's age, however, I'm not as far behind the times as you might assume. While the Xbox 360 version, released in May 2010, is already more than two years old, the PC version (which I recently purchased) wasn't released until February of this year. Although a PC version was originally planned at the time of the game's announcement, the game was published by Microsoft, and selfish Microsoft wanted the game to be exclusive to its own Xbox 360 console. Apparently, this changed only after lots of nagging by Alan Wake's developers at Remedy Entertainment, who still wanted to release a PC version of the game despite the juicy exclusivity deal. It took a while, but Microsoft finally agreed, and the PC version sold well even though the console version had already been around for nearly two years.

Since the personal computer is my game platform of choice — and, more importantly, since I don't even have my own Xbox 360 — I had to wait for the port. Fortunately, once the PC version was released, it didn't take long for the price to drop low enough to get my attention. During the recent "summer sale" on Steam, I picked up Alan Wake (including DLC), along with the sequel/spin-off Alan Wake's American Nightmare, for a combined $9.99. I haven't played the latter, but the first game alone was, in this writer's opinion, worth at least one crisp Alexander Hamilton, give or take a penny.

In short, the game is pretty fun. After hearing so much about its plot-driven nature and so little about its gameplay, I feared it would be disappointing as a game, and notable only as some kind of casually interactive storytelling machine. I've heard as much about several recent titles, most notably Jurassic Park: The Game and The Walking Dead, both by the (appropriately named) developer Telltale Games. To my surprise, my fears about Alan Wake were unfounded.

The combat is seemingly very simple — dodge attacks, weaken bad guys with flashlight, shoot bad guys with gun, repeat — but there is some unexpected complexity in the subtleties of managing multiple enemies at once, and in using the environment to your advantage. More importantly, there is some real challenge involved; you'll occasionally find yourself getting cornered and chopped to pieces after the simplest mistake on the easiest difficulty setting. (The gameplay isn't actually difficult, per se, once you figure out what you're doing, but you will have to learn things the hard way if you don't learn them quickly.) Additionally, whether you think this matters or not, the combat just looks so freakin' cool. It's entertaining enough, at the very least, to stave off boredom for the duration of a single play-through.

But I fear that Alan Wake's great balance of enjoyable story and exciting gameplay is an exception to the rule, and beyond that first run through the game, things can still get tedious. (I should mention, by the way, that when I say I finished Alan Wake, I mean to say I finished it completely. I beat the game on every difficulty level, found every hidden item, and unlocked every achievement. Don't ask me why I do this with every game I play; I guess I'm a masochist.) But in Alan Wake, the lack of replay value doesn't stem from repetitive combat, or even from spoiled plot twists. Playing a second time is tedious because, in its attempt to be "cinematic," Alan Wake includes a lot of dialogue and other brief but mandatory breaks in normal gameplay.

While the cutscenes can be skipped, a lot the dialogue falls outside of these cutscenes. Characters will talk (and talk and talk) to you, as you walk around and explore your surroundings during the non-combat sequences, and you're not always able to ignore them. Occasionally you'll even be instructed to follow a character, as he or she slowly plods around, revealing bits of the plot via typically one-sided conversation — which, on your second or third play-through, you won't really care to hear. The story is fantastic, but hey, it's the same story every time.

I'm using Alan Wake as an example, but these are issues that plague a lot of story-driven games, to varying degrees — even first-person shooters like Half-Life 2 and more action-oriented games like Assassin's Creed. In each case, many players will praise the plot, the characters, the acting, the soundtrack, and the aesthetics, while the rest will see these things as harmful distractions from what really matters: the challenge and the complexity of the game.

Perhaps Alan Wake in particular has some immunity to this common criticism, since it's no secret that the game aims to be as much like a TV show as possible. Divided into episodes, each ending with a theme song and beginning with a recap of prior events ("previously on Alan Wake..."), the game might as well have been a television miniseries. Take out the episodic interludes and it still might as well have been a movie. If you don't want like your games to be cinematic and movie-like, you probably wouldn't play a game like Alan Wake on purpose. The game is rather transparent about what it is, and players know what to expect, so you don't hear a lot of complaints that gameplay has, arguably, taken a back seat to plot and style and other cinematic silliness.

Ironically, one of the major problems with Alan Wake, and other similarly plot-driven games, is actually the result of misguided attempts to retain as much "game" in these shameless interactive movies as possible. All of the major plot and character development could have been confined to skippable cutscenes, but instead, we play through a lot of it. In Alan Wake, this accounts for a lot of lost replay value. Outside of the scary monster-shooting parts (i.e., during the day), you're left with little to do but walk from point A to point B, admire the scenery, listen to characters talk at you, and position the virtual "camera" at different angles while you wait for things to happen. It might make you feel more like a director than a player, and, unfortunately, this is fun exactly once.

There's something to be said for storytelling in games, but unless you're the type of person who can watch the same movie ten times in a row and love it every time, you probably won't find yourself playing Alan Wake repeatedly. When I just want to shoot things, I always go back to Killing Floor or something else with minimal character development and maximal carnage. That way, I won't have to sit through mushy romance stuff in between fights.

It's not that I have anything against story-driven games. As I said, Alan Wake was enjoyable to say the least. However, the best story-driven games are those which tell a story in a non-intrusive way. Sometimes this means condensing the heavy plot development into cutscenes which the player can opt out of watching, but this tends to cause a sharp separation between the game we play and the story we hear. An often better solution, if the developer wants the game and the story to meet seamlessly, is to have dialogue occur during normal gameplay without stopping the gameplay, or to show the player what's going on through subtle cues without having the protagonist's sidekick stop and explain everything. It's a classic case of "show versus tell" (or perhaps "let-the-player-find-it versus shove-it-in-the-player's-face").

The player shouldn't be forced to sit and listen to dialogue, or watch a ten-minute cutscene, or follow a character around at a snail's pace for the sake of plot development, because if a game is riddled with these kinds of tedious, non-gameplay moments, the best gameplay in the world can hardly make multiple replays worthwhile. I'm sure, however, that Alan Wake's developers were aware of this, for at least they gave us the ability to skip past cutscenes and rudely walk away from some of the less important conversations.

It would even seem that someone on the development team isn't too fond of excessive dialogue in games... that is, unless this in-game encounter between Alan Wake and a more-than-slightly crazy video game designer named Emerson is just an attempt at self-deprecating humor:

Emerson makes a good point, even if he's too insane to know it.

But characters (and toasters) who talk, talk, talk, all the time, aren't the only problem with games that attempt to provide some kind of cinematic experience. Bad camera angles, sluggish controls, and frequent breaks in gameplay are all symptoms, and Alan Wake suffers a little from all of them in its attempt to look cool. As far as the controls are concerned, I am grateful that the developers patched the game with a "Direct Aiming" option to make the game more suitable for mouse and keyboard controls, but there's still some delay when jumping and performing other actions, and I'm fairly sure it's not just a performance issue on my computer. It's just a consequence of the game's smooth character animations.

More natural character movements often necessitate less natural gameplay, and while Alan Wake was never meant to be a platformer, this does make the game somewhat frustrating. Once the novelty of playing such a realistic-looking game wears off, you'll wish Mr. Wake could just turn on a dime and jump at a moment's notice like your other video game heroes.

Eventually, you will get used to the controls, and even the awkward camera angle, but those frequent breaks in gameplay — which usually involve the camera moving to focus on some far-off object or event, often to show the player where to go — still make replaying familiar sections a snore-fest for impatient players such as myself.

There will come a time when video game developers will need to realize that video games are not movies. I hope they also realize that trying to imitate movies is not the only way to tell a good story. For decades, stories have been an integral part of video games. We've come to expect some kind of story, especially in horror/mystery games like Alan Wake. But the video game industry has long been unable to drop the habit of turning to movies as the inspiration for their storytelling techniques, and as developers strive to make games even more "cinematic" (and otherwise more visually impressive) with every passing year, they seem to be losing sight of what actually makes them fun.

Retrospective: Ten Years of Insanity

There's a general consensus that Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was, in some way, underrated. So many people say it, however, that I'm not sure if it could possibly be true. On top of that, the game's Metacritic score is fantastic. It seems to me that this Lovecraft-inspired GameCube-exclusive title was good enough to attract considerable praise, but wasn't quite popular enough to provoke a significant backlash of the hipster variety, the type that causes people to claim a record-breaking commercial success like Halo: Combat Evolved is the worst game ever made. In any case, the ratings themselves are above average, to say the least. If Eternal Darkness hasn't gotten what it deserves, it's not that it was underrated, but rather, I think, that it was underplayed. Maybe the game, though loved by critics, went underappreciated by the average player because it was too different. Or perhaps there was simply insufficient hype at the game's release. Indeed, when I found the game, some time later, it was by chance. Prior to playing it, I had never actually heard of it.

One night, I borrowed the game from a local movie rental outlet. Remember those? It seems they've long since become a relic of the past, replaced almost entirely by digital distribution and existing now only in the form of automated kiosks at supermarkets. My future children will never believe me when I tell them that entire buildings dedicated to renting out movies on physical media were once commonplace, and that the decent ones even had a section for video games. (On discs! With no DRM or DLC! Amazing!) Could Eternal Darkness really be so old?

Actually, yes. In fact, it came out in North America ten years ago this month. A full decade has passed since the release of what many would consider to be a masterpiece... and still no sequel. (The developer, Silicon Knights, instead spent too many years working on Too Human, a planned trilogy that ended up being a single game with mediocre reception.) There are currently some rumors of a sequel being developed for Wii U (along with some more rumors that the sequel, though never officially announced, has already been cancelled), but sequel-related rumors have been floating around at least since 2006, when Silicon Knights president Dennis Dyack claimed that a sequel to Eternal Darkness was a sure thing. That was six years ago, and none of the "news" since then has been concrete enough to get my hopes up. Nintendo did renew the trademark back in 2010, but U.S. trademarks need to be renewed every ten years anyway, so this might have been routine procedure. Until an official source hands out some official information, any speculation is misinformation and I refuse to participate.

In any case, I'm glad those rental stores were still around at the time, because otherwise I would have missed out on some neat games. I had no idea what to expect from Eternal Darkness, in particular, and I guess that was part of the fun. I only hoped it would be worth my time, and if it wasn't, wasting a few dollars on a bad rental would be worth the money I saved by not buying the damn thing. It was kind of a win-win situation, so I went with it.

As usual, I read through the instruction booklet before playing. I was a bit overwhelmed when I saw profiles for half a dozen characters, all from different historical eras, in the first few pages. (For some reason, only half of the playable characters were actually listed here, as if to let the player know the story is going to span two millennia while still withholding some nice surprises.) When I got to the page about sanity, I was intrigued, and cautiously optimistic; already, the whole concept of a sanity meter, alongside the ubiquitous health meter and the familiar (though oddly spelled) "magick" meter, seemed like a very original gimmick, but still a gimmick. I guess I still feel that way, to a certain extent.

The sanity meter is the game's defining feature, and you can't really describe the game without bringing it up. It hadn't been done before, and it hasn't been done the same way since, probably because Nintendo has a patent on it. The basic idea, as implemented in the game (though the patent makes it sound slightly cooler), was that a character's sanity would decrease when he or she encountered a monster — or, more specifically (and counter-intuitively), when the monster saw the character. (Shouldn't it be the other way around?) The character could then regain sanity by performing a finishing attack on a defeated monster. The most amusing aspect of the sanity system, in my opinion, is that your character would suffer a catastrophic loss of sanity if you went and killed an innocent bystander; in this case, delivering a finishing blow simply wouldn't do you any good.

When a character's sanity was low enough, things got weird. The camera would tilt, the walls would bleed, and you would start to hear crazy voices. Occasionally, full-blown hallucinations occurred, and while most of them involved the protagonists unexpectedly dying in hilarious ways, some of these hallucinations were an attempt to break the fourth wall, or to trick the player into thinking the game had malfunctioned. It was a clever way of making the player feel how the character felt — that he or she was going a bit mad. Throughout my first play-through, even when the game wasn't pretending that my television had just turned itself off, I had to wonder what was "real" and what was simply the result of the protagonist's deteriorating mental health. Few of these effects were likely to actually scare the player, but I'd never seen a more ambitious attempt at player immersion.

But the full-blown hallucinations usually ended with the character screaming, "this can't be happening!" — after which everything went back to normal, often returning the player to the previous room. (The game just isn't cruel enough to have these hallucinations actually affect your ability to win.) Strictly as a gameplay mechanic, the sanity meter was only a minor annoyance. You wouldn't lose for running out of "sanity," per se, but if the character would lose sanity while the sanity meter was empty, health was subtracted instead. Of course, this would rarely happen to a careful player. Impatient players, on the other hand, might tire of finishing off every defeated monster. This was, actually, a rather tedious task, since each finishing move would take a couple of seconds. And if you weren't quick enough, dead monsters would disintegrate on their own before you reached them, and you'd get none of that precious sanity back. At some point in the game, I did get tired of hitting the "Finish Him!" button; I was tempted to ignore it entirely, and instead rely exclusively on a spell which restored sanity in exchange for magick.

The game's magick system was almost as innovative as the sanity feature. At the very least, the potential was there, even though the execution was questionable. Different combinations of magickal runes, collected throughout the game, were combined to create different spells. With five "target" runes, five "effect" runes, four "alignment" runes, and an optional "power" rune to beef up any type of magick, the developers could have provided us with a fairly extensive list of spells. To be precise, assuming each target/effect combination were used, there could have been 25 distinct spell types. Instead, only 10 combinations were used, and while you could technically count 117 different spells if you were to separately consider each alignment rune and each acceptable number of power runes per spell, the complete spell list was still, in retrospect, a bit underwhelming. The player was even encouraged to try new rune combinations to discover spells, rather waiting for the game to reveal the correct recipes, but with only 10 acceptable target/effect combinations — and with many of the spells being revealed to the player as soon as the necessary runes were available — this wasn't quite as exciting as it sounds. The new spell feature was used mostly to create more powerful versions of spells you had already learned. [Spoilers in the video below.]

But perhaps, as a guy who has already beaten this game a dozen times, I'm being too demanding. Most of the spells that did exist in the game were pretty bad-ass, and they offered better ways to handle situations which might otherwise, to the unimaginative player, seem difficult. Playing the ninth chapter, arguably the scariest level in the game, I found myself facing a bunch of bonethieves — freakish, agile monsters that hide inside of human hosts and, if left without a host, try to crawl right down your throat. To defend myself, I had only guns (which are terrible for fighting bonethieves) and a photographer's flash pan (meant to temporarily blind enemies). Instead of fighting them myself, with my limited ammunition, I got rid of them by repeatedly summoning trappers — little crawly dudes that can teleport enemies to another dimension. It was the easy way out, but it was more fun stunning them with the flash pan and running like a coward until I found a proper weapon, which is probably what the developers intended.

The best you could ask for, in a linear game, is the ability to handle a given situation in a few different ways. That's why the plasmids in BioShock were so nice, and why the gravity gun in Half-Life 2 added some extra mileage to what otherwise would have been a straight-forward sci-fi shooter. Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that Eternal Darkness provided more than a couple of opportunities to diverge from its linear chain of puzzles, or that the combat — relatively open-ended though it might have been — was very good. But Eternal Darkness was, first and foremost, a psychological horror-themed puzzle game, not the type of game in which the combat itself was very important. Fortunately, it wasn't a big obstacle, either. In fact, most of the combat was so easy that brute force worked just fine — enchant your sword and start swinging, and you'd rarely go wrong — and if you ever did run into trouble, you just had to come up with another strategy, try different spells, and be more careful. The fighting itself was a bit clunky, and the ability to selectively target the limbs and heads of your enemies wasn't entirely as cool as it sounds, but it worked.

The way I see it, Eternal Darkness could have been a good supernatural horror even without the sanity features, since the magick system alone would have been enough to set it apart from the Resident Evil titles to which Eternal Darkness was so frequently and so unfairly compared. Perhaps it even could have been a decent puzzle-based survival horror without the magick, as well. Playing as a dozen different characters, with a variety of different weapons (from swords to fully automatic firearms), in a 2000-year struggle against the minions of ancient and all-powerful beings that transcend the physical realm and could squash the entire planet without breaking a sweat... well, that's a pretty good foundation for a psychological horror already. Add the spell creation system and sanity effects, and you have something truly special. The fact that the game is innovative in multiple ways makes it worth remembering, and worth replaying.

I ended up buying the game, twice — once because I loved it, and again because my first disc was scratched, which caused some skipping during the cutscenes. But that's what I get for buying a used copy. (Used games! Another soon-to-be relic of days gone by. The industry has almost succeeded in killing the used game market and I expect them to finish the job in the next couple of years. Apparently a used-game-buyer like me is just as bad as pirates or shoplifters in terms of "taking money away" from the developers. I doubt the poor condition of the disc was due to bad karma, though, since my second copy was also pre-owned, but in much better condition.)

Eternal Darkness is a very immersion- and story-driven game, and nothing more rudely breaks this immersion than dialogue that skips and stutters like a broken record, so having a scratched disc just drove me crazy. If you plan on getting your hands on a copy of this game, try to find one that's undamaged. It seems the game is already prone to occasional skipping in good condition, as it tends to drive the console somewhat bonkers, with the little motor in the disc drive pushing the laser back and forth rapidly during cutscenes and loading screens. At least, this is the case with both of my discs, and I've tried them on more than one GameCube as well as a Wii. I've heard similar complaints from other people, all of whom claim that Eternal Darkness is the only game that does this. Perhaps the game itself is possessed by some angry spirits.

None of this will matter to you if you plan on skipping all the cutscenes, but if you're playing a game like Eternal Darkness without paying any attention to the story, you're probably not enjoying it. Gameplay is always the most important aspect of a game, but the plot here is really a crucial part of what makes the game enjoyable. Even some of the vocal performances are pretty well done. [Spoilers in the video below.]

But there are also some rough spots, usually with the characters who don't have many lines. A particular conversation, between primary protagonist Alexandra Roivas and an unimportant supporting character, Inspector Legrasse of the Rhode Island State Police, is so far from believable that it's hard not to laugh, or cringe, or both. It's really a shame that this dialogue occurs right in the opening cinematic.

The fact that I wrote this much probably makes it a bit too obvious that Eternal Darkness is one of my favorite games despite its few shortcomings. I'm even a bit disappointed when people tell me they've never heard of it, but I wouldn't call it underrated. Underappreciated, maybe. But "underrated" is a worthless term, either way, since it conveys nothing but the fact that whoever uses the word is in disagreement with the critics; to say a game can actually be underrated (or overrated) implies that each game has an objective amount of goodness, some sort of inherent rating, that must be compared to the critical reception it receives. In other words, it's a way of saying that everyone else is wrong. And in this case, considering all the positive reviews, I think it's simply untrue that the game was underrated in the slightest. Although it might have deserved a bit more popularity in its own time, it's remembered as one of the best GameCube titles a decade later, and that's something.