Wake is Over

Alan Wake is a game that I have always been interested to play ever since I knew about it. Years passed and I'm constantly reminded when I see the game at the flea market or when Remedy's new game Quantum Break came out. I remember when a master race acquaintance played the PC version of Wake and told me it was nothing special but my interest never wavered.

I just didn't know how I was going to play Alan Wake eventually. While I always admire the Xbox, I didn't like the idea that the exclusive games are usually shared with the PC platform. And I didn't exactly want to get a new PC either unless I absolutely have to. Finally when the absolutely became a reality, Alan Wake was the first game I actively hunt down.

I didn't want Wake to be the first game I played as it's a few years old now so I ended up playing Dark Dreams Don't Die first. D4 is interesting precursor but it's not exactly a complete game as it only contained two episodes in season one.

Alan Wake is my first PC game in what felt like a really long time. It's not as great as I imagined it to be, but I liked it as much as I thought I would. Alan Wake isn't actually a horror game much like how The Last of Us isn't really a zombie game. It feels like it was inspired by RE4 but it reinvents the survival horror genre much more that RE5 ever did. Wake delivers on some of RE5 promises from the early trailer like the dodge mechanics and the light/dark contrast. But saying Wake is a RE copycat would be doing it a disservice though.

The game is pretty hard as you are constantly out in the open woods. Therefore you can never use the "'Back behind the wall strategy'' to fight as you are exposed from all angles. This makes the combat harder than any horror games. A lot of the game's memorable moment loses it's impact because I can never get it done without a retry. This is just Normal mode and there are another two more difficulty modes to go (Hard, Nightmare).

Getting this game and finishing it was a dream come true. I'm still getting used to playing on the PC again but this has been a good start so far.

Dead Rising Redemption

I recently got Dead Rising 2 from Play asia weekly special, what you could call a rash decision as I only found out about it on the closing day of the offer. You see I have just returned from my trip to Singapore that time though I did managed to pick up Lost Planet 2 for a mere $7.50 while there. I was on a row and this weekly special on Play-asia was simply too good to be missed as these two Capcom games were only released just recently.

The first Dead Rising on the Nintendo Wii gave me fixed feelings, I felt deprived of the true greatness the game achieved on the Xbox 360 platform but yet I was grateful that Capcom even took the chance to port this wicked game onto the Wii platform. Having endured some of Dead Rising's rougher edges on the Wii platform namely the strict time clock and frequent loading time, I was able to avoid a lot of these common frustration when playing the second game on the PS3. I just don't think that would have been possible had I not "suffered" through the first game which I'm still playing through right now actually. Playing the two games has also made me appreciated the first game even more since it has not been ported to any other system, if you don't count the IPhone edition. These two games may have restored my faith on Capcom but I honestly can't say I missed Keiji Inafune departure at all though.

Slim Second Chance

So Sony has finally gone and done it, they have relaunch their Playstation3 in dire attempt to breathe some life onto the hardware which is still lagging behind Microsoft and Nintendo in this generation's console war. It seems there's a price drop with this new revision but i rarely keep track of the console price anymore seeing i already owned the 80GB for more than a year now. As far as i'm concerned the ps3 is still a pretty expensive hardware when compared with the other two reigning console. What struck me as pretty unusual is Sony's ps3 was the last of this generation console to hit the market but was the first to introduce a new slimline version, guess lagging sales does drive a company in all sorts of funny direction.

Number Crunchers

A lot of issue has been made about the technical difficulties of porting Dead Rising to a lesser platform like the Wii, chiefly like how many zombies will appear on the screen at once? After all, the original Xbox360 was an average game made great by the mere number of zombies Capcom were able to generate on-screen at once and also the number of creative ways you could disperse the zombies. I have always been a firm supporter of playing games on their original platform and would really just contradict myself if i were to proclaim that the Wii version would be superior to the original Xbox360 version. I'm however, a lot more optimistic about how the Wii version would turn out than most, simply because i believed in the potential of the platform. I was an avid player of the Mercenaries Mode in Resident Evil 4 and was really amazed by the number of zombies on-screen at once on the Gamecube version having gotten used to the PS2 version. It made me believe that the Gamecube and PS2 version of Resident Evil 4 were indeed worlds apart and the Gamecube was a much more capable hardware than the PS2. And now the Wii is capable of so much more too, sure it will never match the PS3 and Xbox360 in the technical department but we have yet to witness just what the little white box is capable of.

I'm glad it's coming to the Wii and with the development team at Capcom Japan re-designing the game from the ground up using the RE4 engine, the end result should be promising. Of all the games coming to the PS3 and Wii, this is the one i'm most looking forward to and no, i'm not kidding.

Heads or Tails

No, i wasn't talking about the new Dark Knight movie, though i did enjoy Aaron Eckhart performance as Two-Face the most out of the entire film. I'm talking about the Dead Rising book that i ordered during the Play asia summer sales which arrived promptly yesterday. I was initially very worried that this might turn out to be a strategy guide since the website gave no description whatsoever on and there was no review by anyone who bought the book posted on the net. So i did my own research by studying the release date of the Xbox original and the past game guides that were done, all released within the first two months of the game release, came to a conclusion that this could not have been a japanese game guide as it was released more than a year after the game was out.

True enough, it wasn't a game guide as i expected but sadly, it's not much of an art book either. It would have made a nice compliment to the game if you read japanese as it's packed with so much trivia and diaries on the game. I can't really make heads or tails of it but it's sort of designed as a program to what's available in the mall as well as delve into the characters and people behind the game. There are occasional production sketches such as storyboard for the cutscenes but it's all drown in a sea of unfamiliar japanese text. Oh well since i only paid half of the full price after discount i guess i can live with it. Boy i sure feel as dumb as frank does here, taking a leak in his boxers.

The Big Reveal

The big reveal as i promised, this is what i ordered at play-asia today. If there is one thing i noticed about Play is that they rarely ever re-stock their items during sales period like this. Why would they, when they can hold back for a couple more days and revert back to their original store price. The sale is still a win-win situation for everyone, play gets to clear off their old stock of games from gathering dust and us gamers get to pick up a nice bargain.

Now i know every Nintendo fans are sulking for the most part after their recent E3 show because they fail to unveil any titles for their core audience. I for one, am less bothered by this because as i said many times before, i don't play many Nintendo first-party games anymore and i'm very pleased that they are still on the top of the current console race thereby ensuring a healthy supply of third-party games to come.

One such title is Capcom's Dead Rising, heading to the Wii very soon as reported in the pages of Famitsu. Now this is certainly a nice surprise seeing that most would probably expect it to be ported to the Playstation3 instead but when you think about it, the decision is pretty obvious. The game has had little success in Japan, partly due to it originally being an Xbox exclusive and the fact that it's a sandbox-style game, not a very popular genre in the japanese market. Secondly, the original Xbox release was not optimised for play for standard definition TV, drawing heavy criticism from gamers shortly after release.

To address all these issue, Capcom would have to seriously overhaul the entire look and gameplay of the game and knowing how lazy the folks at capcom are, they would surely go for broke and thus, the decision to make a Wii port instead of an obvious PLaystation3 port was conceived. Honestly i was pretty happy with the decision, after all i already got Lost Planet for my Playstaion 3 and the general impression was that it was a pretty unimpressive port. It remains to see how this port will fare but knowing some effort is being put to completely overhaul the mechanics of the gameplay and look, it should at least be on par with the Playstation 2 port of Resident Evil 4.

Oh and before i keep you waiting any longer on what i finally order from play asia today, here it is.

Nero minded

I finished DMC4 last weekend and since i didn't have any game scores that i would normally would post, i didn't bother to blog about it. I was pretty determined to finish the game before 8th of July, the official release date of the PC version as i would have the satisfaction of knowing that i have at least beaten a certain legion of gamers to completing the game.

Yes, i was pretty sore about DMC4 coming to the PC platform, perhaps even more so than the XBOX360 because i have never regarded the platform as a viable gaming platform. In my mind, PC gamers are just a bunch of cheap skate gamers would can't be bother to purchase a game console and instead turn to their multi-tasking PC to get their gaming fix. I would know because i happened to be one in the past !

This DMC4 release is a little different because Capcom happened to be handling the development themselves instead of outsourcing it and they have also taken the effort to throw in some extra modes as incentives for console gamers.

Nice move Capcom but you are not getting my money this time....

Devil May Care

To called myself Devil May Cry fan is a bit of an understatement as i absolutely loved everything about the original Devil May Cry game, it's still my favourite Playstation2 game of all time. Devil May Cry was probably Capcom best spin-off from the Resident Evil franchise back then when they were still experimenting with the formula to see how far they can deviate from it. The game made a big impression with it's gothic atmosphere and character design, but more importantly how fluid controlling the main protagonist Dante was. A testament to how good an action game should be is when any enemies, even the ordinary ones are able to kill you if you are not careful, something which the original Devil May Cry possess and no other action games, even it's sequel is able to replicate.It firmly cemented Hideki Kamiya as my favourite game developer as he would go on to craved up more hits like Viewtiful Joe and Okami. Anyways going back to Devil May Cry, i lost interested with the series through the years and sequels though the prequel Devil May Cry 3 managed to win me over again, the fact that the series may never being the hands of Hideki or even surpass the original remains a concern for me.

The final straw was when Capcom decided it's high time to replace Dante as the main protagonist of the series and later announced that the fourth installment will be going cross-platform to Microsoft XBOX360.With the release of Devil May Cry 4, the development team for DMC2 and DMC3 attempts once again to take the series further to new heights but this jaded fan will not be able to learn first-hand how good this installment will be since i don't have a Playstation3 as of yet. Then again, would i want to subject my brand new sixaxis/dualshock3 controller to the mercy of Devil May Cry 4 infamous difficulty?