Posts Tagged ‘alone in the dark’
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust Game Review–Well, At Least It Tried
It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere. You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all. That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market. This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.
And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.
This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate. You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and company’s dirty laundry. In some cases, quite literally.
If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity. They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra. There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.
The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense. There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good. One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday. My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this. I just know better.
You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe. Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.
But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.
Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.
Alone In The Dark–All About Control, Or A Lack Thereof
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. I had to finally dig up a lousy game on the midst of my local video store’s shelves to fill you in on, and you’ll be amazed at just what lousy game I’m talking about. It’s none other than the latest installment of Alone in the Dark, also called Alone in the Dark: Inferno.
Split into episodes like a TV show, Alone in the Dark joins us once again with perennial hero Edward Carnby, who’s had a lot of different incarnations over the years. This time around, he’s plunging through the underground tunnels beneath New York’s central park, chasing down cult activity and trying to prevent nothing less than Satan himself coming to take over the planet. Apparently there’s plenty of weird stuff going on in Central Park, if the game’s website is to be believed. Everything from mutating trees to unusual bird migration patterns is going down in Central Park, so there’s plenty to figure out.
And indeed, starting the game makes it look like it’s going to be a real party, with random things bursting out of the walls and swallowing people for no clear reason. Also for no clear reason, they seem to have a problem with fire, something that’ll come back repeatedly throughout the game. The story is deep, rich and involved, with all sorts of lunacy happening on a regular basis, and a multi-branched plotline partially determined by your own choices. Good voice acting, good sounds, decent graphics–everything that should make a good game is right here.
And then some, really–for instance, there’s even a section where you have to regularly press your right stick to blink and clear your vision. When’s the last time you had to control BLINKING in a game? I can’t remember the last time I actually got to handle my own autonomic functions. Next time maybe I can do breathing, or food digestion.
But there’s one critical flaw in Alone in the Dark: Inferno’s otherwise solid profile–control. I’m not alone on this one; I’ve read several other reviews on this one and just about everyone’s with me that the control on this game is buggier than a New Jersey tenement. Trying to get Edward Carnby to move from place to place is a slow and tedious process that involves lots of camera juggling and just a little bit of sheer blind luck. I couldn’t believe it–even the ORIGINAL Edward Carnby didn’t handle this sluggishly, and that was about twenty years ago! The game also suffers from a lack of intuitive play–at one point, a chunk of the building I was in peeled away, and I went over to investigate, figuring this was the game’s way of showing me where to go next, as is so often done in these kinds of games. Imagine my surprise when, just a minute later, a large chunk of BURNING CEILING fell on my head, killing me. At that point, after I put my jaw back where it should be, I wondered…what was next? Would I go to use the restroom and a giant jack-in-the-box would pop out? Perhaps there would be bananas in my coffee. The world no longer made sense…and that was a problem for me.
Yep, when a game starts to completely divorce itself from things like Being Possible and Making Sense, I’ve got a problem. Especially when I have a hard time moving from point A to point B as it stands–it’s bad enough Edward Carnby moves like he’s wearing concrete thigh-high boots, but it gets worse when the laws of physics suddenly decide they hate me.
All this is a shame, really, as Alone in the Darkwas a wonderfully written, tautly plotted piece that controls like someone’s taken my lovely wireless controller and replaced it with a brick with decals on it. Had they taken a bit more time with it they might well have made a masterwork. But that’s one for the “what might have been” column.
Alone in the Dark Patch "Not Promised" for Xbox 360
With the release of the PS3 version of Alone in the Dark looming, Eden Games mentioned that it would be fixing several problems, which would also be made available for the Xbox 360 version of the game as a patch. However, it appears that that might not happen.
MTV Multiplayer carries word from game designer Emile Morel who said that the studio is “trying” to do a patch, but that it is “technically complicated.” Morel added that if they do release a patch, it may fix the control and camera problems, but that the new subway chase sequence from the PS3 version won’t show up. It was also added that the patch’s size is not going too well with Microsoft.
No release date for the patch was given though.
Atari Posts Profit After Two Years of Losses
While other companies may be in trouble, Atari, who had at least two years of losses and got delisted from Nasdaq, has announced a profit of $3.5 million for the first quarter of its 2009 fiscal year, which ran from April 1, 2008 to June 30, 2008.
The company notes that games such as Alone in the Dark, The Witcher and several Xbox Live Arcade titles propelled their revenue this quarter. Atari brought in $40.3 million, with $36.7 million of that coming from the aforementioned efforts.
Atari is set to merge with parent company Infogrames, a deal that is set to close shortly.