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Alone in the Dark 5 tech demo


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Looks like MacGuyver: The Dark Years with a sticky tape fetish.

 

I like Carnby’s use of the fluorescent lighttube, and the overcoat is an awesome inventory system, using something contextually appropriate that can believably hold the items in the gameworld.

Loose BOWELS are the first sign of THE CHOLERA MORBUS!
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Phew, that's sweet. Gametrailers.com says it's xbox and ps3 only. Will there be a pc version? But basically Alone in the dark never caught my interest that much. The only horrorgame of this type that was interesting to me was Silent Hill (part 2 especially!!).

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To play devil's advocate (just cuz I feel like it ;)):

 

-the "real time inventory" is simply eye candy, it adds nothing to the gameplay, and in fact (if they don't allow for hotkeys) it removes from gameplay. Why? Because in "real life", you'd know where your gun is, and you'd simply reach for it, without needing to stop, open your coat, and look down at your body. It's just built-in delay for "oooh ahhh" factor. "No, damn you, not the tape, I need the gun. The GUN!"

 

-they talk about being able to use as many fully dynamic lights as they want; so can many games. It'll run more poorly, the more lights used. It doesn't come for free.

 

-they're obviously showing off their lighting, but look at every object on that table in the demo room (1:26); not one of them has a shadow, and they should. As a result they look pasted into the scene, just like previous generation games.

 

-third person focus, bleh; more eye candy for its own sake. If the player doesn't have tiny shorts and a nice ass, third person focused design is pointless.

 

-their demo of what to do with objects fell rather short. A trail of flammable fluid, and a bomb (standard faire in games). All of this and much more could be done with TDM S/R. Later, a thrown light stick, and AI awareness of a corpse for diversion. Sound familiar? Welcome to gameplay from 10 years ago in a game I suspect we're all familiar with.

 

-nothing to do with the game, but: gotta love joystick/console pad controllers in first person. When will they wise up and just give consolers a mouse like they should have from the start? Can you simply buy a USB mouse and use it with any current console?

 

All of that said, Adventures With Sticky Tape does look very tasty, but despite their claims of freedom, I'm wary of a sense of "you can go everywhere we let you go!" on-rails type of gameplay.

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Well I'll check the next video. I don't buy any game's claim "It's just realistic! You can do anything!" this nearly always fails because the mess of complexity of their definition of real doesn't end up making a fun game. Just show me what you CAN do in the game and convince me it's fun, then I'll play it.

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Well, the Central Dark trailer looks cool. Looks like good use of enviromental objects. I agree with Domarius though, I'd rather have a quick easy inventory than one you have to fumble around in.

 

Who knows, this is the first I've heard of it, could be cool.

 

I guess a game that I almost liked was Manhunt. Had alot of sneaking action on the console, when I first played it I thought wow this is gonna be cool.

 

Didn't take long for me to think, wow, this is gonna be repetive. That happens to alot of games.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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The atmosphere in Manhunt was shocking in a good way. Damn, that pig with the chainsaw in the end really gave me the creeps. :D

 

Anyway, the problem about hotkeys on consoles is that consoles don't have any. In this context the inventory is a nice eyecandy innovation, compared to the old diablostyle inventories, I still hope though that the pc version will come with hotkeysupport or maybe some mousegesture style inventory.

 

Alone in the Dark is a very old game series and it has always been thirdperson, so switchting to firstperson all the sudden would be a clear design-/marketing-/consistancyfailure. An option to allow the player to do so manually would still be apreciated though, but I am sure they will implement it since most modern games have it.

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It's good that they're adding stuff like that into the gameplay, but it's not like it's enabled by any "new breakthrough tech." You could have had "sticky tape" i.e., bind on impact, flaming trails, etc, in Quake3 if you wanted to spend 5 minutes coding it. The real exciting part will be to see if they can really integrate it with the gameplay, or if it's just a gimmick you do once or twice and then beat everything to death with a wrench the rest of the time.

 

It was cool that you could pick up the light with the ragdoll cord attached, but I also noticed they didn't bother making the cord solid to the player and have it wrap around them, it just clipped right thru the player's body.

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It's good that they're adding stuff like that into the gameplay, but it's not like it's enabled by any "new breakthrough tech."
So many games use that marketing trick. The stupidest one I've ever heard was an Nintendo 64 hype article claiming one of the features to be "object pop-in removal". Even back then, I knew enough that the way this would be achieved would be the laughable idea that it has enough CPU power that you'll never see pop-in in games ever again. The only reason it was listed as a feature was to make people go "COOL - no more objects popping in!"
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Man, that's impressive. They were hyping removing a performance tweak as a brand new super-special feature. I'll typically give some leeway with gameplay "innovations," simply because the industry tends to be so risk-averse, and often it's a case of technology that hadn't made sense in gameplay terms before (like the sticky bombs). They're taking something old and making it work in a whole new way. That's almost real innovation.

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The real exciting part will be to see if they can really integrate it with the gameplay, or if it's just a gimmick you do once or twice and then beat everything to death with a wrench the rest of the time.

 

Yeah, that's a major problem with many games. On the box it says something like "2000 different weapons, 15000 types of enemies, 2 billion colours, etc."

 

And then all you have to do in the game is to find the single big weapon and play the rest of it with it.

 

The only game which was really balanced was Baldur's Gate. It was really the only game, that I remember, where you can not simply find the most powerfull weapon or spell and solve everything with it. You really had to select a mixture of spells to make it, because most characters have some weak spots and some invulnerabillities, so that you can not mindlessly blast your way through.

Gerhard

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The only game which was really balanced was Baldur's Gate. It was really the only game, that I remember, where you can not simply find the most powerfull weapon or spell and solve everything with it. You really had to select a mixture of spells to make it, because most characters have some weak spots and some invulnerabillities, so that you can not mindlessly blast your way through.

And even then, that was only because BG was based on D&D... I guess computer game designers are just crap at balance. :P

 

Seriously though, there *are* balanced games. Look at Starcraft. Ten years old and some online gamers are still obsessively playing it. If it wasn't balanced it would have fallen out of favour by now.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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