[Theorycraft Monday] The sequel blues

I'm feeling them alright.

I had once said that I'd be fine if all gaming franchises just disappeared and we were left with just Zelda and Castlevania. I never finished the latest Zelda game in a home console, Twilight Princess, because I felt tired of it after a while, even though it's a fantastic game. And I'm about to give up on the latest Castlevania game, Portrait of Ruin, which I picked up one year too late to begin with, exactly because I feel burnt out of this version of Castlevania. Even if I did like PoR a lot.

However, I don't want to speak about these games today, and it's common knowledge that sequels are always risky business. We complain, for example, that we never got a sequel to say, Conker's Bad Fur Day, but we always manage to find a reason to complain about the sequels we do get. And not just because they're not that different from their predecessors, like Zelda, but also when they aren't similar enough. Amusingly enough, a famous example in this category is Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link which was criticized for that exact reason. Fans. You just can't please them.

There were two games that got me thinking all this sequel stuff again. The first one was Alone in the Dark, a game that grew on me with every trailer I saw, and intrigued me with its promises of near-revolutionary game mechanics. I was never one to fall for the hype, but it truly seemed compelling. Sadly, the game itself is a real mess. The graphics are inconsistent and the animation stiff and unrealistic, the controls are horrible, the combat annoying and the camera atrocious, the story is laughable and the gameplay rather simplistic and superfluous. And don't get me started on the driving parts.

Still, I strangely enjoyed the game enough to keep my rental copy for over a week, and I have to say I loved its presentation. It doesn't matter if the things the characters said were shit, the way it was presented to us was really impressive. Plus, you can't fault the game for being ambitious, even if it doesn't quite live up to those ambitions. Not to mention, and this is an important part for me, the people behind this game seemed honest in their intentions with trying to provide a quality product, this wasn't just a cynical cash-in.

(This doesn't include the PS2 and Wii versions of the game, which are as I'm told complete and utter cynical cash-ins).

This is the part where things get complicated, though. I understand the people of Eden Entertainment wanted this to be a good, perhaps even revolutionary, game. But did they really intended it to be a good Alone in the Dark game? Many people have said it's a departure because it's not a survival horror game. I don't subscribe to the idea that the first three games of the franchise were what we call survival horror games either. They were certainly the main influence behind the first Resident Evil, which in turn spawned a zillion clones, but at their core, they were still adventure games, with action elements.

Yes, there were a lot of combat scenes in all three AitD games, but as a purely gameplay mechanic they were superficial at best. If nothing else, as the Greek reviewer Andreas Tsourinakis showed in his review of Alone in the Dark 2 way back when, the fight scenes were so poorly designed, you could find a way to glitch every enemy in the game and never get hit. Combat was more of an after thought in these games, and you never had the problem with conserving ammo, as in a real survival horror game. I would argue that the presence of enemies in these games was nothing more than a plot mechanic, to add to the tension and suspense, and not to make them into action games. After all, all three games had several difficult, and rather ingenious, puzzles in them.

Ironically enough, the fourth game which I've avoided mentioning so far, The New Nightmare, was a Resident Evil clone itself, only with deeper puzzles (which weren't on the same level as the previous games though) and pretenses at a more serious storyline. Sadly, both its gameplay and its story collapsed near the end, with one scene at the very end especially standing out as both a very dumb final puzzle and one of the most anticlimactic cut-scenes ever. On top of this, and this was a first in the series, the game had no connections to its predecessors whatsoever, and even though its main character was still a man called Edward Camby, he had apparently no connection to the man from the first three names. Not even a distand great-grandson.

Despite the lack of success for The New Nightmare, which tried to reinvent the series (notable by the lack of a "4" in the title, after all), Eden decided to um, re-re-invent the series with the latest Alone in the Dark game. The fact that it shares the same name as the game that started it all, with no numbers and no secondary titles, could imply that they were in fact trying to reboot the whole series. A fact that would explain the vast change of setting, cast and timeline, even when compared to The New Nightmare, but then they had to make the original Edward Camby from the 1920's the protagonist again. How he managed to survive all this years and still look so young is indeed explained in the game, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, which will have you looking for your tinfoil hat.

And that's my main problem with the game. The new Alone in the Dark fails as a survival horror game because it doesn't provide with enough tension and it just isn't scary enough, as most of its scenes that are supposed to stand out are horribly scripted in the most formulaic of manners. It also fails as an action game, or at least a hybrid action game, because the controls are unintuitive and unwieldy, and the driving sections are poorly thought out. It also fails as an adventure game, because whatever puzzles are in the game aren't exactly that clever, not to mention that they are horribly limited and fire is usually the solution to every predicament. Man, if only Prometheus could see this game, he would feel so proud.

But my main problem with this game is that it fails as an Alone in the Dark game. AitD was never about vast conspiracies (a sin commited by both recent AitD games) and obscure plots that are trying too hard. The antagonists in AitD weren't bug-looking enemies that would never scare you even if they appeared behind you while you were watching Stanley Kubric's The Shinning, all alone in an abandoned hotel. And they certainly weren't, gods forbid, "Vampirz"*. AitD was never about setting fire on everything near you, or driving around, looking for an excuse to do a jump with your car accompanied by a bullet time effect.

No, the AitD games of old, the good ones, were about clever puzzles, intense, scary atmosphere and campy, yet also simple and honest storylines. Surely, the times were different and much more simple back then, but it's a risky business when developers try to completely abandon a game's roots and reinvent it from scratch. It rarely works, and in the case of Eden Entertainment and Alone in the Dark, it really didn't.

I guess what I've been trying to say here is, why not make this a completely new IP? That way they wouldn't have to deal with problems such as explaining why the protagonist is nearly 100 years old and yet looks 40, nor would they have to deal with annoyed fanboys. I doubt the name itself was a factor that would make this game a mainstream hit, as the last Alone in the Dark game came out seven years ago, and the one before it, thirteen whole years. Now if this was truly, honestly, the direction they wanted to take the series, rather than just tying up a familiar name around an experimental game... Then they should simply stop doing drugs, as some twists only work for Dude, where's my car?

Whoa, long post. I'll mention Street Fighter 4 briefly then, and come back to it later if necessary. The question of just how much is too much comes again to my mind when looking at what we know about this game. We know for a fact that it's more of a sequel to Street Fighter 2 and not Street Fighter 3, as far as both characters and mechanics go, and that's kind of a bummer for people like me who love both games. In fact, I'm still playing both and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike. They're both good, but the evolution was already there. Why ignore SF3 completely? It just sounds... rude. And then there is this apparent rumor that Gouken, brother of Gouki/Akuma and teacher to Ryu and Ken is going to be in the game... And we're getting in "too much" territory, as I'm starting to feel that this game could be simply something to satisfy the die-hard fans of SF 2, fanservice if you will, and not a real step forward, like SF3 was.

Or, you know, I could be paranoid and should take off the tinfoil hat I've been wearing since I returned AitD. At any rate, the recent animated teaser trailer for SF4 was nothing short of fantastic, even if the artwork is a bit suspect -then again this is just a teaser, and in fact reminded me of some of the best scenes of the SF animated movie. That, and the orchestral remix of Ryu's theme is pure SEX.

I'll stop talking now, here's the trailer:



*Yes, Vampirz.

VAMPIRZ

WHO COMES UP WITH THESE THINGS?

TL;DR version:

Capcom better not fuck up Street Fighter 4, or I'll have to write an even longer post.

I enjoyed The New Nightmare for what it was, though. At least in that game the controls worked. Hell, I enjoyed the latest game too. Just not as much as I would have wanted to.

It is funny, however, Edward Camby is supposed to be the exact same person as in the first games, and presumably he should look the same as well, perhaps without the 1920's moustache. Yet most of the time he doesn't even look like the same guy from the cover of this very game. Wish I could find a good in-game shot, but google is failing me.