I remember back in the late 90's/early 00's before there was a Best Buy in my town, I used to go down to the Circuit City to look at video games. I never really bought them. I just kind of fantasized about them. I don't know, I just like window shopping. I can remember well, specifically two PC game boxes for games that I was drawn to. One was The Crystal Key and the other was American Mcgee's Alice.
I never bought either but I did eventually play both, years later. The Crystal Key is a really shitty adventure game. Alice is an OK horror platformer. I think what originally drew me to this game was their iteration of the Cheshire Cat.
Look at it. It's creepy as hell. Creepy yet alluring. I liked this cat so much that I went to the Alice website on my Win98 computer and downloaded a free screensaver of it, still having never played the game. This was how I experienced all horror games back then. I'd go to the official website or fan sites and read character bios, enemy descriptions and look at pictures and screenshots, again, never playing the games. Why? Hell if I know. Silent Hill and the first and third Resident Evil games where on the Playstation which I didn't have, for one. For another, maybe I was too scared to play them and this was a safe way to experience them. Or maybe I liked using my imagination combined with the subject matter in order to make something fun while keeping the full game a mystery that if revealed could only fall short of my expectations and thereby diminish its enjoyment for me... Kind of like The Crystal Key. One day we must all grow up and play The Crystal Key. Or maybe we grow up WHEN we play The Crystal Key after we realize it's actually shit. It's a rite of adult disillusionment. Also that shit was all M-rated. I wasn't old enough to buy them, had no adult connections to acquire them and didn't know anyone that played horror stuff like that. I already told my story about buying Alone in the Dark 4.Anyway, my point is that the first Alice game harkens back to the days where I first became obsessed with the horror/survival horror genre.
In the first game, Alice survives the house fire which killed her whole family and ends up in an asylum where she battles her inner demons in her own very twisted version of Wonderland. The second game is more of the same even though in the first one the ending implied that she made a total recovery.
A download voucher for Alice comes with Madness Returnes so I got it and played it again. The first thing about Alice on PS3 versus Alice on PC is actually the load screen. This is an important screen because on average you probably want to save every two minutes which blows. The game really needed more auto saves. In the PC version, every save file has a little timestamp and a screen shot so you basically know exactly where you were or at least which save was last. You always want to keep multiple save files in video games in case one gets corrupted. I remember when I played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the first time and they only let you keep one file per campaign. I was about 80% through the game and went to save and it fucking froze while saving. Lost everything.
The PS3 load screen has no timestamps and the associated image is just a general picture for the level. Basically you just have to guess which one you want and then go back and load another one if you're wrong. Also instead of having the load, save and return buttons as little highlightable options, it just has the commands hotkeyed directly to the face buttons of the controller which you'd think would save time but it also makes it incredibly easy to accidentally load an older file when you're trying to save over it, making you lose progress because there is also no warning.
Movement and combat seem to be much better suited to a controller than a keyboard and mouse. Some platforming segments that I remembered as gruelingly difficult were much easier like the floating leaf part and those stupid gears in the last level. But there are still parts where there is no indication where you're supposed to go so you just jump around and kill yourself a few times until you figure it out.
You know what's really annoying? Waiting for shit that moves to come back around so you can jump on it. Gears. Platforms. Whatever. There's one part near the begining where there are these little puzzle checkerboard tiles that flipflop over each other to make a a tiny isolated bridge over an abyss. They go so fucking slow. If you miss them the first time, you just have to sit there for like five minutes watching these tiles crawl away in an extremely derisive manner. Then when you finally get on them just don't fall off. DO NOT FALL OFF.
The combat has little to no indication of hit detection. It could use some more sound FX for that. The music is decent... until seven seconds elapse and it loops. It's like they started writing music but then immediately got bored or distracted and decided to just put every small clip they had on infinite repeat and call it good.
When I got to the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb fight, my mind was blown by the amount of lag produced by the two self replicating nesting dolls. This game was released in '99 and I'm playing it on a PS3 and it can't fucking handle it! It slowed to around 2 fps. If a PS3 can't play this right, how in the hell was a general Win 98/2000 PC supposed to play it right? This game must have been the Crysis of it's day.
The game really starts to take it in the ass at the second Jabberwocky fight. The Jabberwock is large, flies and breaths fire. You are small, earthbound and have shit for accurate long-range weapons. Basically if you can land a couple of hits and not be scorched to death, it's time to save and do it again about 25 more times.
After a very aggravating dragout boss battle, it's time to enter the Queen of Hearts' castle. How do you do this? With an aggravating dragout platforming segment. The most appropriate analogy I can come up with is for you to imagine trying to walk a tightrope while thirty assholes with RPGs try to take you down. Kind of like in the end of Psychonauts... You know, it's funny that I made that connection just now because I actually found Raz from Psychonauts' skeleton hidden in Madness Returns. What's with that? There's a large variety of different and interesting weapons to use in this game. Actually there's kind of a problem with that. There are TOO many. When you get in a sudden fight, you need the appropriate weapon but it may take a while to scroll through all of the weapons you DON'T want. In the sequel you only have 4 weapons. (5 I guess if you count the clockwork bomb which is about as lethal as a pillow fight.) Two of them are ranged and comprise about 70% of the control clunkyness of the game. They constantly get stuck in aim mode. The aim reticule will only lock on whichever enemy you don't want to aim at and even if you switch targets a dozen times will still only lock onto another enemy you don't want to aim at. Often times you'll be shooting at a large and/or far away enemy with one until it overheats and needs time to cool down so you try to switch to the other one but it won't. It takes it a couple of really tedious seconds or taps to register. Then if you're switching to the teapot cannon it takes another couple of seconds for the weapon itself to respond. Once you see it switch you'll naturally hold down the fire button to charge up a shot but when you release it you realize that it wasn't charging at all and you have to start over again, doubling the time you're left vulnerable and the chance that your attack will be interrupted. The weapons in the first game were far better.
The way you upgrade weapons in the first Alice is kind of strange. You basically find duplicates of weapons lying around and the more you find of a weapon, the stronger it is but there's really no way to tell outside of combat that it is stronger. The exception is the dice weapon which the game literally gives you another throwable die for every diabolical die you find. In the second game you have to purchase upgrades with teeth that you get from smashing or killing things or find laying around. That's fine until you max out everything or start a new game+. Suddenly you're accumulating tons of teeth with nothing to do with them. I don't know why but that really bugs the hell out of me. I hate that it doesn't do anything anymore. Something I thought was really cool about Red Faction: Armageddon was the fact that even when you maxed out everything, you could still use your scrap to buy cheats and weird visual filters. Sadly that's the only instance I can come up with where they do that. Now Madness Returns does have unlockable concept art but you can't buy it. You have to collect bottles scattered throughout the levels. But what's stupid is that the bottles don't unlock anything until you find all of them on a level which you're probably not going to do unless you're specifically hunting them down with a walkthrough as you play and that is really shitty.
Alice has an overdrive mode where she does more damage to enemies. You can only use this mode when you find a specific item which activates it right then and there. The item is only ever placed where there are just a couple of enemies and/or in a precarious platforming segment where you can't really do anything, so what the fuck is the point? In the second game you have hysteria which can only be activated when on your last tiny fraction of health but sometimes you just go right over the threshold straight to dead without ever being able to use it. Still more useful than the one in the first game.The first game had a better Cheshire Cat who I think is a contender for best video game guide character of all time. He appears and usually has something useful or interesting to say in a sort of evil Jeremy Irons voice (or Katz from Courage the Cowardly Dog if you prefer.) "Here's a riddle: When is a croquet mallet like a billy club? I'll tell you: whenever you want it to be." You know how in most iterations of the Cheshire Cat when he vanishes you can still see his teeth and eyes go last? Well it looks like they tried to do that effect for the game but got is backwards. The teeth and eyes vanish first, leaving disturbingly horrid voids in the cat's skull.
As for Madness Returns all by its self, all the characters are back but the good ones are evil and the evil ones that you killed already are alive again and... not evil. I don't really think there's any significance. It's just strange.
The level designs start out okay. I like the underwater part that looks like the underwater part in Disney's James and the Giant Peach. But the majority of the levels seem like they're composed of random floating shit over an abyss. There's no reason or continuity between anything. It's just really lazy and empty design. The levels also get really repetitive. They reuse the same puzzles over and over. On every level you can count on 2-3 slider puzzles, 1-2 rhythm games and 2-3 slides. Why? The slides are exactly like the slides in Super Mario 64. The more of them I did, the more I found myself jumping over the sides to land on lower parts of the slide, skipping large segments to get it over with quicker... like I'm trying to beat that stupid fatass penguin.There aren't any bosses except for the final one. That sucks but it's not just that there aren't any boss fights. The game heavily implies several times that there will be a boss fight and there isn't.
There's no physical manual for the game. Instead you get a little card in the box telling you that the manual is on the game. You load the game and where is the manual? On the main menu. So if you're playing the game and you need help with something, you have to quit the game to load the manual. Then reload your autosave file and continue from wherever that was. How hard is it to just make it accessible on the pause menu? Or just fucking PRINT it with all the money you saved on not designing the levels.
