Alan Wake, "The Signal" - Review - This is not just DLC ...

... it's an ingenious twisting of what you're used to.

On July 27th, Remedy released the first of at least two DLC for their very good Alan Wake, a short episode entitled "The Signal."  After finishing the full-game two months ago, I've been dying to travel back to Bright Falls and see where else the story could go.  Thankfully, the wait was (mostly) worth it.

Alan Wake - Review - Frightening, Suspenseful, a Real Page-Turner

Sitting across from Mr. Wake, with the full puzzle coming into focus and the final pieces placed, the gravity from our seventeen hour journey together keeps me to my chair, like I've been punched and punched and punched and punched and I cannot move. I breathe and instead of oxygen I imbibe the molecules of a twisted mystery. I speak and instead of words I utter what others could only describe as ravings that touch no reality. Consumed, swarmed, leashed. It won't let me move. It. It.

But I have won; heavy and weighted as I am, I have still won. The black screen, both an unknown void and comfortable signal flare communicates the end. It is over.

Or is it ...

Sorry, the above prose isn't very good and maybe only barely reminiscent of something Remedy's author/protag would write. But Alan Wake has the uncanny power to permeate my brain. And if you play it, your brain might be permeated, too, in some pretty cerebral ways.

Alan Wake is a very novel game (pun absolutely intended!) in that there is hardly anything like it out there. The closest comparisons would be Silent Hill 1 and 2 minus the grotesque horror, then add a dash of perfect location like BioShock's Rapture. Admittedly, not everything makes perfect sense, but nightmarish situations rarely do, and the nightmare we experience in this game keeps you wanting to find out what will happen next, even if it might be terrifying to see what's around the corner.

Turn the page to keep reading.  And by "turn" I mean "click."   And by "the page" I mean the link that says "Continue reading."

Final Fantasy XIII - Review - Satisfying From Beginning to (Eventual) End

A long time coming, huh?  Final Fantasy XIII came out on March 9th and here it is April 27th, 7 weeks later and I'm just now starting my review.

I think it's pretty appropriate in a way actually.  The commitment to play Final Fantasy XIII (I call it a commitment because it is much more than just playing a game) itself takes a long time to see through.  First, it took me around 64 hours to get to view the end credits, which ended up being exactly one month to finish the story. Second, I'm still playing as of today to get all the achievements and I have currently accumulated over 90 hours of total gameplay.  My prediction of how many more hours it will take to get the rest of the achievements?  Another 30.  If you're keeping tabs, any post-game leveling and achievement hunting could take upwards of another 60 hours depending on how much you play it the first time through.

Make no mistake, Final Fantasy XIII is a long game. Not only is the complete package time consuming, but the course to get there is practically a straight line that doesn't break wide open until after 20 hours (and even then it's deceptively large).  Does this construction limit the game's enjoyability?  Is it a monotonous trudge-fest that lacks depth and choice, instead funneling the player into predetermined choices making you feel like you're in an aggravatingly long QTE?

In an attempt to offer a breath of brevity:  No.

Final Fantasy XIII is a giantly fantastic game in more ways than one, and in the first four months of 2010 has captured my attention like nothing I've played since the original BioShock or Half-Life 2.  Heck, I'm still playing it and wanting to whenever I can get an just an hour to play.

Continue reading for the full review.

Review - Aliens vs. Predator - A Shallow and Bloody Bad Time

(A little late, sorry, but I take a lot of time when I write!)

"I got a bad feeling about this drop," prophesies Pvt. Frost minutes before he, Ripley, and "the Corps" thrust themselves into the xenomorph badlands of LV-426 in Aliens.

"So you cooked up a story and dropped the six of us in a meatgrinder?" expostulates "Ah-nold" Dutch to "Apollo Creed" Dillon in Predator.

Two quotes from the two films of which February 16th's Aliens vs. Predator represents are ironically perfect descriptions of my internal struggle and short play through experience with said game.  Anyone who knows me knows well that I'm an Alien fanatic.  The Predator is less of an appealing obsession, save for his completely cool design, but the Alien, to me, is the king (or Queen) of nightmarishly simple creations that are just down right, well, creative.  Plug into the xeno-realm the inseparable fate of the steadfast Lt. Ellen Ripley, each a thorn in each other's claw, and the Alien saga is thematic as well as frightful.  I love the Alien franchise.

So, perhaps I went into this game with too much excitement and hope, focusing too much on one side of the adversarial triangle that is Aliens vs. Predator.  Aliens, Predators, and the humans they encounter are tightly woven into their own universes, and though crossing over sounds fantastic in idea (and conceptually it's not really all that bad), executing that crossover in film and video game hasn't met with resounding success.  On the other hand, Rebellion's first two attempts in the franchise were very well received for both the Atari Jaguar and the PC.  I played the PC version and it scared the poo out of me!  For it's time, the graphics and gameplay were superior.  Was it wrong to hope that the team who seemed to have the AvP formula down would secure another hit?  And is it ever wrong to have hope, anyway?

No, but for this game my hope for a quality experience never came.  That's why it's a huge eye-opener when I say that six days after having my highly anticipated copy, I traded it back in.  I, the Xenophile that I am, got rid of probably the best looking Alien game to date.  But looks will only take you so far.  In the end, all I felt I had experienced were point-blank sequences of gore, three incredibly uninspired campaigns, and a lack of multiplayer replay value.

Read on for my sadly disappointing experience with Aliens vs. Predator.

Review - BioShock 2 - Rapture Needs a Bit More Polish to Shine Again

Did you ever see Jurassic Park III?

I fell in love with the first Jurassic Park.  I had seen a couple of Steven Spielberg movies before then, but JP solidified him as my favorite director (and introduced me to the tech-thrillers of Michael Crichton).  I went back five more times.  The technology, the environment and setting, the characters and dinosaurs were unmatched at the time and set the bar pretty dang high.  Then came The Lost World.  I enjoyed it, actually, maybe because I brought my rose colored glasses with me, and it was also my first date.  But I loved the first one so much that I was ready to devour any continuation of the story and to see those Velociraptors again.  I liked it, not as much as the first, but I liked it.

Then came Jurassic Park III.

The happenings of III do nothing to further the story, but serve as a flimsy reason to A.) show a couple of new dinosaurs, B.) give some usually decent actors a paycheck, and C.) I don't know, probably some other shallow reason.  Sure, Dr. Alan Grant needs money, that's what brought him to the Park in the first film, but that's really all we get from III; no deep character development and nothing new about Jurassic Park (save for the kind of awesome Spinosaurus, but who ends up being a bigger T-Rex from the first film that we don't root for.  Oh, and Velociraptors have feathers and communicate with trills.  Big deal.).  To me, III is simply a more action-oriented film with the Jurassic Park moniker.  Did we really need to go back to Isla Sorna/Nublar for this?  However, after two viewings of it (because I had to have the trilogy, of course), I enjoy it more now because it's like a "rainy day" movie:  it's pretty simple, kind of fun, and still has awesome dinosaurs.

In some ways, this is how I feel about BioShock 2.  After finally finishing the single-player campaign, I felt a little disappointed.  In retrospect, the whole package seems a bit ... off.  It has BioShock in the title, Splicers, Sisters, Daddies, and even Andrew Ryan still has a presence, sure, and it's a fun ride.  But did we really need to return to Rapture?

Read on to see if BioShock 2 should be saved ... or harvested.