Alan Wake.

[Coca Cola Duracell Franklin.]

People still thought this was also coming to the PC? It's been ages since the PC version was even remotely mentioned.

 

[Isildur´s Heir]

Maybe if the PC was still a big market and could cut into the console market significantly, but I don't think that's really a huge issue.

Look at this way...
If you are thinking on buying a console, what will you choose?
The PS3, which have kick ass games, all exclusive to that platform, none of them is released outside Sony´s platform; or the 360, which has kick ass games, and 80% goes to another platform, the PC?

Last generation i thought on buying a Xbox, i didn´t, i bought a PS2 (glad i did).
When i bought the 360, back in 2007, i bought the games that interested me on the original Xbox, and those were just 4: Halo 2 (which went to the PC), Ninja Gaiden Black, Conker and Brute Force.
So, in the end, there were 3 exclusive games that interested me....and the 360 will go the same way if MS doesn´t change it fast, and looks liek they are doing just that.
Halo III, ODST and Wars; Fable II and Gears II never went to the PC....so far.


I love the PC, bare that in mind, but any platform needs exclusives, that´s what sells them in the end

 

[Tron Bonne]

Look at this way...
If you are thinking on buying a console, what will you choose?
The PS3, which have kick ass games, all exclusive to that platform, none of them is released outside Sony´s platform; or the 360, which has kick ass games, and 80% goes to another platform, the PC?

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I totally get what you mean, but my point is if that question is even worth asking. Is their enough people gaming in the PC market for a 360 console exclusive title going there to make that much of a dent? Isn't the PC market pretty low right now versus the console market?

 

[Coca Cola Duracell Franklin.]

Gears of War sold around 80,000 units on PC while the Xbox version sold over 4 million units. They didn't even bother releasing Gears 2 on the PC, but Gears 2 sold 5 million.

Same went for the Halo games. Halo 1 and 2 sold great on the Xbox, but didn't even break the 200k mark on the PC. Halo 3 sold 8.1 million copies and there won't be a PC version.

I think Microsoft stopped publishing PC games outright. Fable 2's PC version was canceled and Ensemble was converted into Firebird Studios which will work on polishing Xbox 360 games.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I totally get what you mean, but my point is if that question is even worth asking. Is their enough people gaming in the PC market for a 360 console exclusive title going there to make that much of a dent? Isn't the PC market pretty low right now versus the console market?

No i think the PC market is quite big, its just the majority of them steal their games instead of actually paying for them.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

True. But I think Steam might be changing that a bit. At least I hope so. It makes buying games as easy and convenient as pirating them.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

True. But I think Steam might be changing that a bit. At least I hope so. It makes buying games as easy and convenient as pirating them.

Yea, id hope so.

 

[Superhero 101]

I am kind a little disappointed that this isn't coming out on PC b/c i am a college student and to kill time i play on my laptop when i have like a three hour break between classes and i was looking forward to play this at campus *sigh* well i guess it's just back to shooting up Russians

 

[Tron Bonne]

http://kotaku.com/5474668/alan-wake-preview-the-first-full-episode

Very long and detailed look at the first 'episode' of the game. May contain some mild spoilers, so be cautious friends

The first two words of Alan Wake are "Stephen King." The next big Xbox 360 exclusive game is an interactive thriller played in the shadows of America's Pacific Northwest. I recently played the game's impressive first full "episode." Remedy Entertainment's May-dated game comes on a disc but is divided into episodes. These chapters are sometimes narrated in the past tense and they are designed to end in cliffhangers. To describe the first one, as I'm about to, involves spoilers, though we're talking spoilers of a pilot episode designed to set up mysteries and tone and answer just about nothing — that's what the rest of the episodes are for. So reading this will allow you to remain as much in the dark as I was at the end of the first episode or even as was Alan himself.
The first episode is called Nightmare. It opens with the "Stephen King" reference and some narration by Alan, setting himself up as "a writer." He's a King-style writer, an author of thrillers, visiting a Twin-Peaks-style town, Bright Falls in the Pacific Northwest. Nightmare begins in the middle of things. Alan Wake is driving down a dark highway. It's late. He drives smack into a hitchhiker. Alan has a flashlight, wielded in his left hand in this third-person game. Pulling the Xbox 360's left trigger focuses the beam. Seconds after he is out of his car, Alan is creeping down a path that descends near the highway's cliffs. He's being pursued by a shadowy figure, possibly the hitchhiker, who is maybe a character from one of Alan's books. As would be the prevailing gameplay theme of most of Nightmare's action sequences, Alan was being pursued, hounded, by one and then by multiple shadowy axe-men.


The gameplay was mostly panicked escape in this first section of Nightmare. I had to rush Alan down outdoor paths and into a house. A couple of times, a mysterious voice offered advice, pointing out a pistol that Alan could wield and a player could fire with a squeeze of the right trigger. When confronting a shadowy enemy in Alan Wake, the main mechanic requires using the L trigger to burn off the shadows covering the enemies and then shooting them with the R trigger. A well-timed press of the game's dodge button triggers a slow-motion effect, shades of Remedy's Max Payne games, which allows the player more time to roll Alan out of the way, turn and fire a good shot. Alan Wake is a thriller that appears to be the exception to two gaming genre rules. Games that are scary often have two deficiencies: controls and graphics.
The former can frustrate in a Silent Hill or a Resident Evil, forcing the player to deal with clunky or muddy controls. The inability to move a character with swiftness and finesse is arguably an essential element of the games' creators' intent to make the player feel overpowered and afraid. Recent, more dynamic controls, such as in Resident Evil 5, seemed to help make the game more of an action movie and less of a horror flick. Better controls produce fewer scares?
Alan Wake's scheme denies that better controls necessarily alleviate fear and tension. Alan may have controlled pleasantly, like a man and not a tank, but the need to illuminate enemies and then shoot them — and to do so while batteries swiftly drained and then needed to be recharged or be replaced in the flashlight — provided just enough enjoyable trouble to make skirmishes a fright, without being a frustration.


As for graphics, well, it's hard to say if the darkness enshrouding many of the games in the genre excused less than industry-leading graphics or if it is smaller development teams, not armed with the resources to make industry-leading graphics that turned to the horror genre. Whatever the case, it is rare to see a game in the dark-and-creepy category that could be a Best Graphics candidate, but Alan Wake, like EA's Dead Space before it, represents a pleasant exception. The Pacific Northwest is a rare and magnificent sight in video games, rendered in real and spooky detail in the episode I played. The forests were tall, dark and dense, light playing through branches. As Alan ran into a house for refuge, I noticed it was full of details, chairs and TVs and wall-hangings, meeting my newfound Uncharted 2 standard of amount of stuff I think a developer can render in a realistic indoors space. As some dark presence shook the house apart, I felt not that I was in a primitive diorama but that I was in a big-budget blockbuster. Even in the dark it felt I could see far across the valley, that this was a detailed world so well-rendered I could almost smell the sawed logs. I've barely described the events of Nightmare so far. Alan's shelter is wrecked. He is told, by that voice, to go to a lighthouse that beams in the night. Light is refuge in this game. As he runs, the shadowy figures pursue him. And just as he's getting there, this first little bit of the episode ends.
Time turns back. It's sunny. Alan and his wife, Alice, are driving to Bright Falls, ready to start a vacation. They park their product-placed car on a ferry, where Alan is immediately recognized by a local disc jockey. Alan takes a call from his agent. The ferry rides us into town, setting that Twin Peaks scene of a remote and quaint corner of American civilization full of folks who know each other maybe too well. There's some sort of festival called Deerfest starting in two weeks.
The couple goes to a diner to pick up keys to the house where they're going to stay. They want to meet a man named Carl Stuckey. Alan is recognized again in the diner by a waitress gets an earful from two old codgers, one of whom wants him to put a song on the jukebox — I don't know if it matters if the player does it — and then heads to the back where a creepy lady in a black veil hands Alan the keys she says he's looking for. Alan and Alice drive away. Carl Stuckey stumbles after them yelling that he needs to give them keys. That's the first sign of trouble for Alan and Alice.


The cabin they drive to is nice. It's set on a small island at the end of a dock, nestled into a cove at the foot of wooded hills. This house also is highly-detailed, with rugs and a radio (the disc jockey is blabbing that Alan is in town), paintings and furniture and an odd framed photo of what looks like someone in a diving suit. I had control of Alan on the island. I walked him around to explore and picked up the details about Alan and Alice's struggles. Their marriage isn't perfect. His writer's block is a struggle. He wanted the trip to be a vacation from the stress and is not pleased when he sees the surprise Alice has set up for him: A typewriter in a room of his own. She's even found a local doctor who she thinks can help him surmount any mental blocks. Alan's angry. The next events happened fast. Alan is back outside. It's getting dark. Alice is suddenly calling for help, as if she's drowning. Alan dives into the water for her. And then a scene change. Alan wakes up in a crashed car. He's outside of town. What follows are some dark and lovely scenes of chase and combat. Putting them in words wouldn't do them justice. Alan winds up chased by shadowy figures in a logging camp. The big trucks that haul and cut tall evergreens create their own frightful shadows and set up new dangers: rolling logs, falling logs, blind corners hiding another enemy. Alan sees a service station in the distance. Its bright lights are his his goal.
The first half of the episode, which would last about an hour, was easy. The second half was tough. Enemies are numerous and relentless. On some walls my flashlight revealed arrows which pointed to hidden caches of weapons or batteries (also product-placed, Energizer brand). There are pages of a novel seemingly written by Alan scattered in the level. Collecting them tells a story. Everything, including the arrows, has a narrative explanation, if players dig for it, the developers told me. But I was busy trying to survive. I fared better with a shotgun and then with a flare gun which can flash-shock a cluster of enemies. I made it to the service station after a few more tough fights and called for the police. A sheriff showed up. She drove Alan to where he said his wife had fallen into the water, outside that house on that island in that cove. The sheriff drove him there and made him look. There was no house there. Just a dock leading to nowhere. Just a cove.
End of episode.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

Sounds awesome. Really, really looking forward to this one. I love the idea of it being episode based and ending in the fashion of a show like LOST(which i just got into by the way)

 

[Dark_Lord]

Some new videos (found them at another forum):
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/alan-wake-welcome-to-bright-falls?size=hd
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/alan-wake-follow-my-light?size=hd
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/alan-wake-darkness-rising?size=hd

 

[Tron Bonne]

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/18/alan-wake-rated-teen-five-minutes-of-footage-illuminated/

A video of the footage is in the link

New footage of Remedy's upcoming mystery thriller Alan Wake has found its way online, showcasing some of the demonic thoughts scrawled on paper by the game's title character. Five minutes of footage found at French site GameBlog.fr (posted after the break) showcases some gorgeous environments and some of the action we experienced at Microsoft's X10.

Considering half of the Joystiq staff wasn't even born yet when the game was first announced*, we're just happy to helpAlan Wake figure out what's happening in the small mid-western town of Bright Falls.

But we're not expecting a gruesome adventure, as the ESRB has rated Alan Wake T for Teen. We can't blame Alan: when you're fighting for your life you need as many gamers as you can get on your side.

*Okay, not really.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

http://www.vg247.com/2010/02/19/remedy-explains-decision-to-release-alan-wake-on-xbox-360-only/

Don't know if anyone posted that yet, but basically someone from within Remedy said that the PC version was axed because Alan Wake had a relatively small team working on it and they chose to focus on just one version.

 

[Tron Bonne]

Basically what I guessed if that ends up being the full truth. With as long as it's taken to get the game this far they're probably better off focusing on one version

 

[TheCorpulent1]

I have a 360, so I don't really mind. It would've been nice to get a PC version, but you're right, anything to cut down on the obscene delay the game's already experienced couldn't hurt.

 

[Tron Bonne]

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/15/alan-wake-several-dlc-episodes-this-year-second-season-depen/

As revealed during this year's Consumer Electronics Show, tormented writer Alan Wake will continue his dimly lit journey in the form of post-launch downloadable episodes. After the internally episodic thriller hits shelves on May 18, Remedy Entertainment will extend it with at least two episodes in 2010. The scope of subsequent episodes and the duration of DLC support will hinge on the audience, of course, but Remedy managing director Matias Myllyrinne envisions a substantial engagement.

"I think it'll depend a lot on the audience, but certainly we want to -- if we're successful -- we want to do a large "Season 2," if you will, at some point," he said in an interview with Joystiq. "Right now, I'm not allowed to say what we're doing exactly this year. But we're going to have more than one episode come out this year."

Once the full game is complete and the team has a chance to gauge acceptance and feedback, Remedy Entertainment will shed some more light on its plans. We'll share ours with you right now: Expect to see the full Matias Myllyrinne interview on Joystiq later this week.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

Sounds cool. I hope they dont pull a GTA IV tho. Everyone had moved on from GTA IV by the time even the first DLC hit. Really excited to play this one tho.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

I thought the point of DLC was to extend the life of the game. It's not Rockstar's fault if people decided to trade GTA IV in the minute they finished it.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

I thought the point of DLC was to extend the life of the game. It's not Rockstar's fault if people decided to trade GTA IV in the minute they finished it.

Yes it is. Rockstar waited 10 months before adding the DLC. Thats way too long. I think ppl did wait, they sat around for 3 or 4 months and nothing happened. Rockstar really blew it with the DLC for GTA IV.

 

[KALEL114]

FYI. This fanboy crap just keeps getting lower and lower. Be aware that some d-bags are posting spoilers to AW in random forums. Watch out for N4G especially. Halo 3, Gears 2, Mgs4, Heavy Rain, ME 2, and now this. Just be carefull where you post.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

FYI. This fanboy crap just keeps getting lower and lower. Be aware that some d-bags are posting spoilers to AW in random forums. Watch out for N4G especially. Halo 3, Gears 2, Mgs4, Heavy Rain, ME 2, and now this. Just be carefull where you post.

Haha, i wonder if it'll spill over to Metacritic. It was pretty funny seeing Gears of War 2 and Little Big Planet with sub 60 fan reviews, pathetic, but funny.

 

[Tron Bonne]

Well Alan Wake is going to be almost 100% same game just like game: LOST
Only differents is Alan Wake is horror action and LOST puzzle action.
But its same.

I have not clue what this means

 

[ProjectPat2280]

Well Alan Wake is going to be almost 100% same game just like game: LOST
Only differents is Alan Wake is horror action and LOST puzzle action.
But its same.

Im assuming english isn't your first language, but even then, i think you are horribly mistaken.

Alan Wake is going to be set up similarly to the show LOST, in that each 'episode' will begin with a "Previously On" segment and each 'episode' will end with a cliff hanger, thats about it tho. I don't think you know what you are talking about.

 

[Tron Bonne]

I think he's talking about the game they made from Lost, not the show.

I think...

 

[ProjectPat2280]

If you think Alan Wake is open world game then you wrong. Its linear game.

Well they said Alan Wake will be Alone in The Dark 2.
You have episodes and linear game.

Haha, no s**t. The game started out as an open world title but they scrapped that because it wasn't conducive to the nature of the title. Because the title is linear doesn't mean anything. The game doesn't have to be open world to be good.

Im still pretty sure you just don't know what you are talking about.