Alone In The Dark: Inferno

Alone in the Dark IV: The New Nightmare on PC was the first M rated game I think I ever bought in original packaging. I was too young to obtain it legally from a store. I had to try a couple of different Walmart cashiers before I found one that wouldn’t card me. This was about the time that they implemented those little alarm prompts at checkout for restricted products. You hear the little beep and hope that you picked someone who really didn’t give a shit about store policy and the law.

I remember the game as being pretty scary (experiencing it as a less desensitized 13-14 year-old.) One incredibly cheap but pants-pissing jump scare still stands out in my mind to this day. It was basically the equivalent to watching a screamer on the internet. And it’s at the VERY beginning of the game. It’s like oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t be playing this. At the end of the game it says “Edward Carnby will return.” Well, it took 7 years. I’ve wanted to play the previous games but I can never seem to get them to work on my computer so I guess my only option is…

Edward Carnby wakes up just as New York City begins to erupt in giant annoying black spires and hellspawn of four, count ‘em FOUR, different forms. There’s some kind of satisfying effect on a very primitive part of the brain while you’re watching everything fall apart. Buildings crumble. Vehicles explode and flip up into the air. It’s like HOLY SHIT! Did you see that building? It was all PKREEEEEERRRRRRR BOOOOOOM!!!

There are so many different components shoehorned into this game, (driving, puzzles, platforming, first person shooting, third person everything else,) that every button has three or four different functions depending on what you’re doing. There are quite literally five and a half pages of controls in the manual. Sketchy controls in general coupled with so many different controls sometimes makes it feel like you’re making suggestions or giving advice as opposed to controlling. It’s really easy to accidentally equip or unequip something and have no idea until you try to do something with it. You can end up stabbing a hole in the bottle you’re holding instead of aiming your gun or throwing the bottle in your left hand with the intent of shooting it only to realize that the object in your right hand is not the gun but in fact the flashlight lens.

Easily the worst part of the controls is the melee weapon combat. It’s hard to explain how bad the melee controls are unless you’re actually using them but basically there’s a huge disconnect with timing and proportional movement between the stick and Carnby’s arms. It doesn’t seem like there’s any momentum or follow-through with the swings. It can best be described as trying to wield a baseball bat with your feet. I never say this but I think the melee would be better with the motion controls of the Wiimote… or I guess the Move since I’m playing on Playstation. Or just why can’t it be like it is in Silent Hill Origins where you pick up an object then press button to swing it around or throw it. Hold it down to charge the attack. It’s not fucking rocket science. The other huge problem with melee is that when you’re in attack mode with an object, the right analogue stick is used for swinging. Previously it was the camera control. Now you can’t aim the camera anymore. You have to get the stupid camera situated BEFORE you even think about trying to attack. Then you just hope that you don’t have to REsituate it during battle. The camera’s pretty bad already without it being completely unusable.

For most of the game you’re screwing around in Central Park. The park’s really big so you need to steal cars to get around. (Don’t worry, everyone’s dead and they don’t need them anymore.) Getting around is not as easy as you’d think. There’s a bunch of those stupid black spires and pits and fault lines where the ground is raised into an impassable wall that you have to take a three mile detour to get around. Humanz, (I’m just going to call them zombies because what’s singular for humanz? Human? That’s stupid,) that you pass will often leap unto your car and start pummeling it which for some reason translates to bodily damage. AND THEY DON’T FUCKING COME OFF! You have to either run into something at a high rate of speed which is going to fuck up your car and slow you down big time or just keep driving until they decide to leave. It’s good practice that any time you pass a zombie while in a car to swerve. Just jiggling the sick back and forth as you pass is usually enough to fake them out and get them to misjudge their leap. Yeah, it’s stupid but you’re going to want to do it.

Cars have a tendency to just fall apart while you drive regardless if you run into things or not. Dents grow on the sides as soon as you step in. Then the bumpers will spontaneously fly off. Tiny invisible inconsistencies in the road make your car spin out or nearly flip over on its back. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Also there are no breaks. You can use what is described in the manual as breaks but it doesn’t slow you nearly fast enough which is great for when you’re driving at top speed down the road and suddenly an impenetrable wall of dirt just appears in front of you.

Some of the physics in general are just screwed up. In a segment where you’re supposed to solve puzzles while driving a forklift, I got stuck. You’re supposed to raise this ramp that looks like a random pile of debris with the lift so that you can drive up to a higher level. I ended up just jumping onto the top of the forklift and then jumping onto the next level. After dicking around up there for a while it became apparent that I needed to somehow have the forklift there with me since there were a bunch of large boxes that I needed to move around. The boxes were metal and probably big enough to stuff three to five illegal immigrants in each. Still, I found that I could push a two-high stack around just by running into it with my body. When I finally got the forklift up there, I was surprised to find that trying to lift and place them somewhere I wanted was a real bitch. When you try to move two at once, they just get horribly misaligned and fall over as if the slightest breeze will send them wafting across the room. When you try to stack them one by one, well… they get horrible misaligned and fall over again. It’s like trying to stack two giant beach balls with a hockey stick. It’s actually a LOT easier to just push them around by hand… which you shouldn’t even be able to do! The game’s so broken and anal retentive about some things.

The first time you get in a car, you have to smash open the window with a bat to unlock it. I stood there for five minutes gently tapping the roof of the car and bashing in the door, (the part UNDER the window.) I started to wonder if it was even possible. How hard is it to break a fucking car window with a bat? How do they screw up such a textbook example of interactive environment?

In several places you’re supposed to shine your flashlight with a lens over it so that it projects a symbol. You have to shine it on these invisible markers that you can only see for a few moments when you close your eyes. (Yeah, there’s actually a button dedicated to blinking.) Anyway you have to line up the symbols and hold it there for a while and it has to be PERFECT. If more than three photons are off, it doesn’t work!

The first time you’re supposed to use your spirit vision to see freaky shit happens when you’re trapped in a tiny room with absolutely nothing to do and only one thing to interact with. I turned the game on, played for ten minutes wandering around the room, accomplished nothing and then turned it off again. Wow, that was real fucking fun. The next time I tuned it on, it actually told me what to do. That’s nice because I’m sure as hell not going to think: oh, maybe I should close my eyes. The second time, it happened at the castle and I had no idea what to do there either because it never told me what the hell I was supposed to be doing. (And no e-mail instructions from Sarah do not count because I can barely read that shit on my poor person’s TV.)

In some places there’s living black goo on the ground that you can’t step on or you die instantly. Sometimes you won’t even know it’s there until you jump off of something and land in it. You’re supposed to keep it away by shining the flashlight at it. (Reminds me of those stupid photosaurus’ in the previous game except a lot more fucking annoying.) The problem is that the flashlight only seems to work some of the time and it gives you almost no margin for error. Logic would dictate that if you walked while pointing the flashlight straight down you’d be completely enclosed and protected by a penumbra of light but you aren’t. Trying to get through these areas with just the flashlight will drive you crazy. Just hope that you have a bunch of glow sticks or flares to toss on the ground.

You can make fire bullets and the game encourages you to aim them at the fissures on zombies because it will kill them. But if you do aim at the fissures it never works. I’ve had basically a motionless zombie standing in front of me with the laser sight trained on the fissure while shooting and nothing happens. It’s a hell of a lot more effective to just shoot at the zombies indiscriminately and leave it to chance. Why does everything have to be so finicky?

Running over zombies would be fun if A: They didn’t jump on your car and B: They actually died. It doesn’t matter how many times you reverse and roll back over them, they always get back up. It takes like eight bullets to put the weakest zombie on the ground for any significant amount of time. Still, if you stick around for long enough, they’ll be up and at you again. The only way to kill them is with fire, that is if you can find a way to harness it at the moment.

In your tiny-ass inventory you can create improv weapons, (most of which are useless in one way or another,) out of stuff you find around the park. Nine times out of ten your problem can be solved by throwing a bottle of flammable liquid and shooting it in mid air to make an explosion. You can do stuff like tape a glow stick to a flammable bottle but what the hell’s the point? The glow stick is just going to explode. You can’t even activate the glow stick while it’s on the bottle or beforehand so it won‘t even be glowing when it explodes. Another interesting thing is that you can toss a full bottle of Smirnoff and shoot it to make a John Woo sized explosion but the second you make it into a Molotov cocktail it becomes the biggest waste of flammable liquid in the game. One of the most useful combos is spray can with lighter. It’s ironically more effective than bullets since everything’s so susceptible to fire. You can just go around spraying fire at enemies. This was very interesting to me since it was exactly how I used to kill black widows in my garage as a kid. That is until I almost burned down the damn garage. True story.

The inventory screen is the interior of your jacket. I like how you pull it open like you’re announcing to everyone in the room, “I have a bomb!” The space for items is ridiculously small. On the left you have five slots and on the right you have four. Yeah that may sound like plenty but let me explain. On the left side resides your lighter and that stupid lens. You CAN NOT get rid of them at any time. So you only really have three slots. Your bullets go in one. Well, you need those. Your pointy implement sits in another. You don’t want to get rid of that because knives are hard to find. Okay so there’s really only one space to work with on the left. There are three different objects you can fit there, (rags, tape or bandages.) Forget about rags because bandages keep you from bleeding out when you’re critically injured and can double as a fuse. Tape is crucial for making things but you have to keep those damn bandages. Never drop them or you WILL bleed to death. It’s Murphy’s Law.

On the right it would be wise to always have a medical spray can to heal yourself. You should also have either a second medical spray can or some other flammable spray so that you can light various things on fire. Also it would be really good to have flares or glow sticks for the occasional black goo because if you don’t have them, you’re up shit creek. So that leaves us with…. Oh, one slot. Fantastic! Basically, find the most explosive bottle you can and put it in that slot. Every time you use it, go get another one. And that’s the inventory. It’s so aggravating to be trying to build things like this or just have to go find another bottle of something as soon as you use it because you can only carry one. Okay, drop the bandages and pick up the tape. Drop the Jack Daniels and get the plastic bottle. Oh, the bottle shattered on the ground when I dropped it. Great. Throw the tape away and get the bandages again. Where did they go? I dropped them right here, damn it! Oh and you know what else? The inventory is REAL TIME just like in Fear Effect! It’s not nearly as shitty but it certainly isn’t conducive to spending time to make anything!

One thing I can say I’m grateful for is the ability to hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time which is more than I can say for Doom Guy in Doom 3. In that game you either got to see the enemies OR you got attack them. Edward can even hold two things in his hand AND use the light by putting it on his shoulder.

All and all the game tries to do too much. It just seems like there are hundreds of little unresolved issues everywhere. They should have either dropped one ore two major components to smooth over everything else or just spent more time on it as a whole. It was better than the shitty movie anyway…

Fear Effect

So, Fear Effect for the Playstation ,(at least disk 1), is set in a futuristic CEL shaded Hong Kong. Visually it looks like Bladerunner meets Killer 7. Sounds awesome. So how can they screw this up? When I first played I thought the backgrounds were prerendered with fixed camera angles but when I looked it up I found that it’s actually short clips of looped animation. I had noticed this but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before so I didn’t know what to call it. No wonder this game has to be on four disks. The animated backgrounds look great except that the animations are only like three seconds long. Once you see them loop, (or even freeze), it breaks the immersion. So which is better: stagnant prerendered backgrounds or full motion backgrounds that keep showing the same thing every couple of seconds? Another weird thing about the game is that it’s in letterbox aspect ratio.

While playing, you alternate between controlling three different mercenaries on a team as they try to recover a kidnapped individual. The controls are, to put it mildly, a fucking abysmal pile of horse shit. For starters, the X button is fire. Yes that’s right, the X button; the button that has been ingrained in you as the action button. In third person shooting games there is traditionally an aiming mode that might make X switch to being the fire button for that moment but here it’s just fire plain and simple. So every time you go up to an object you want to investigate, you’re going to end up shooting at it instead. The real action button is triangle which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The square and circle buttons are, get this, your inventory. Yeah… Circle goes forward through your items. Square goes back. What the hell were they thinking? Those four buttons are supposed to be reserved for functions that are important/often used as in actual gameplay and they dedicated half of them to inventory? Lets see, what are we going to need to do a lot of quickly in the heat of battle? Dodging and running? No. Sifting through the various keys that you picked up. That’s going to be the most useful. The shoulder buttons are running, dodging, turning 180 degrees and sneaking. Which ones are which doesn’t matter because you’ll never remember anyway. That’s how intuitive the controls are. You have to actually mentally recall which button did what or just try them until you find it instead of just playing the game.

The controls for movement should be simple and self explanatory but they actually suck too. I don’t know why Sony didn't put analogue sticks on their Playstation controlers until three years after launch. So it’s the new 3D era of games. How do we move in them? Oh I know! A D-pad! That way the player has to zig-zag their character around retardedly and even the simple act of walking through a door takes countless minute adjustments to accomplish. Complain all you want about the fugly three-handed N64 controller but at least Nintendo knew it was time to use sticks. The game actually has support for the analogue stick controller but when you use it... I don't know but somehow the control becomes even worse which is just divide-by-zero mindblowing.

Luckily I'm playing on an emulator so I have free reign of the control assignment. I remapped EVERY SINGLE BUTTON save for the sneak button and the movement controls. And the only reason I didn't change the movement controls is because there's no other option than to have them shitty. Immediately after doing the game designers' job for them, the game is suddenly a significant degree better. That's not to say it doesn't suck in many other ways.

Going back to the so important inventory with two buttons dedicated to it, you have to scroll through it one item at a time in real time. This it really great for when you run out of bullets in the middle of a firefight and need to switch to a different gun with more ammo. You just have to stand there like a dumbass, taking hits until you either find something useable or die. I guess you could roll around if you’re good as multitasking but that presents its own problems.

The dodge or roll move is important because you can quickly distance yourself from an enemy and also become unhittable while rolling. What sucks about this is that you have almost no control over which direction you’re rolling. If you’re really careful you can roll straight forward or straight back. Everything else is completely random, from the direction you roll to the direction you’re facing when you stand up.

Whenever you come across a locked door that you happen to have the key to, you have to dig the key out of your inventory to use it and usually every subsequent time you want to go through that door. It's such a small thing but come on. I have the key. You know I have the key. The key's not good anywhere else. Just USE the damn key. I don't have to tell you to keep breathing or to tie your shoes periodically. It's just a tedious waste of time.

The other thing about the inventory is that it pops up on screen when you press the buttons for it. If you don't do anything quick, like in two seconds, it disappears and resets at the first item, making you have to find whatever item you were looking for AGAIN. There's no reason why it has to be like this. It could pause the game when I'm using the inventory. It could have its own screen. It could let me see all of the items at once. It could stay on the screen until I tell it to go away. This is what the screen looks like during gameplay.

Notice anywhere where they might be able to squeeze in an inventory? Like maybe half the fucking screen?

The health bar in the game (and the thing that the game is pretty much named after) is basically a fear meter kind of like in Clock Tower. It starts out green and when it reaches solid red and you get hit, you die. Several things affect your fear differently for better or worse, or so it's alleged. I’ve read a lot of explanations on the internet regarding how the fear meter works and they all say different things, most of which I think are bullshit. I know one thing we can all agree on though is that getting shot increases your fear. The only way you can get healed significantly as far as I’ve experienced is when you reach an unknown prescribed spot in the game like when you switch characters or finish a large segment/puzzle.

It’s hard for me to be legitimately upset at the health system when I don’t know exactly what the official game manual says about it so I went to replacement docs and downloaded a PDF of it. What it said is that in order to lessen your fear, (heal yourself), you can sneak kill enemies, do well in gunfights, solve puzzles and discover important items.

Sneak kill enemies: Bullshit. I sneak killed two enemies in a row with a red fear meter and guess what color it was afterwards… It was fucking red.

Do well in gunfights: True. I saw it happen. But you know what? I didn’t need it. Know why? BECAUSE I DID WELL IN THE GUNFIGHT.

Solve puzzles: True, but that’s basically the established healing checkpoints that I mentioned.

Discover important items: True but essentially you discover important items by solving puzzles so…

Things that increase your fear besides bullets in your head are running out of ammo and being detected by enemies.

Running out of ammo: As if running out of ammo wasn’t bad enough in and of itself, they have to punish you for it?

Being detected by enemies: Yes, sometimes it’s possible to pull off a sneak kill but most of the time it’s not. And yes, the enemies are probably going to “detect” me when I shoot several bullets right in their fucking face!

All and all, I hate the lifebar. It’s deceptive, unreliable and needlessly complicated. But what’s worse is that the way it punishes or rewards you basically equates to strapping weights on a drowning person because they’re failing to stay afloat or strapping life vests to someone in the desert for doing a good job not drowning.

The ever-present drawback of fixed cameras in an action game is that you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Every time you’re about to transition to the next screen, you could literally be instantaneously catapulted into a gunfight with half a dozen enemies with absolutely no warning and then just die. That’s not entirely true. Usually your fear meter pops up when you’re about to get ambushed. But still, sometimes you’ll find yourself having to mow down wave after wave after wave of enemies that are presumably piling out of some clown car just off screen. You have no idea where they’re coming from or how many there are. If you want to sneak up on someone, you basically have to go around every corner sneaking in the assumption that someone’s going to be there.

There’s a ton of ways to die instantly in Fear Effect. Getting electrocuted, falling off of something, getting burned. A lot of these things are so petty and aren’t even identifiable as deathtraps until you kill yourself with them. This game is a real dick. It just loves to sucker punch you with endless instakill scenarios, a lot of them coming out of fucking nowhere with no warning or explanation so you’d have to be precognizant just to not die. Diffuse the bomb! Run from the explosion! Jump quick! Now! Now! Now! Escape the guards! Look out! Faster! Switching characters! Everyone’s shooting at you! Watch out for the water! Don’t shoot that! Boom! Oh, look at that! Ha ha! You died! Try again, asshole! I'm suddenly reminded of this.

There are parts in the game that slow to a snail’s pace just because you’re constantly having to reload the game, play to the shitty death part and try again by killing yourself there enough times until you can figure out what the hell it wants you to do there. (If you watched that first video, that wasn’t even all of them.

The same step here/don’t step here puzzle keeps reappearing I don’t even know how many times. They work so great too with the terrible depth perception and finicky controls.

Yeah, this is about what that looks like to me.

At the end, you descend into hell to defeat the King of Hell. (Honestly I didn’t see it coming.) Out of the three characters, one is already dead and now you have to choose who to play as and who dies since they’re having a disagreement about how to proceed. I chose to play as the girl, not because I supported her ideals but because I knew she had more guns and ammo at the time… Also two arms.

Not so good for dual-wielding. I was also mystified as to how he even reloaded his guns. I didn’t know at the time that there was a different boss depending on who you chose. The guy’s boss is actually a lot easier. Hana’s boss however is a combat nightmare. The only way you can hurt him is by burning paper money that randomly appears. (I have no idea.) As I’ve already explained, having to use the inventory in battle is like trying to trim your toenails by kicking a big rock repeatedly. So basically survive long enough to grab the money, maneuver yourself into the always tiny interaction zone next to a torch, quickly find the money in your inventory while being raped and select it before the inventory disappears. Even after I could accomplish all of that, it would most of the time fail for reasons I’ll never understand. The only thing I could conjecture is that it was because I got hit right before using it but it’s not like I have any control over that!