Alone In The
Dark - Darkworks'
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
certainly seems to be following a long,
hard road to completion, but what we saw
today at Infogrames' Editors' Day gives
us very high hopes for the return of the
original survival horror adventure. It
follows the same model as the first
pioneering Alone in the Dark game, with
3D characters in pre-rendered
backgrounds, but what it allows you to do
as you explore those rooms and caverns is
impressive indeed. You don't normally
expect such impressive lighting effects
in a primarily pre-rendered game, but New
Nightmare sets itself somewhat apart.
It's
strange that such an impressive effect
would be centered on a simple flashlight.
Every one of the 1,200 pre-rendered
scenes in New Nightmare has been created
in multiple versions, each lit to a
different degree. The collection of
different backgrounds is called a mesh -
in practical terms, it means the game is
able to shuffle between these in real
time. You can shine your light over any
surface in the game and see it
realistically illuminated. In particular
scenes, meanwhile, you can turn on the
lights in an area, or variably illuminate
them in other ways. It sounds
insignificant at first, but it's very
impressive to see the effect at work,
especially given how detailed the
backgrounds are. The gardens of Shadow
Island, the haunted mansion at its
center, and the caverns that honeycomb
the ground below are all recreated by an
extremely fine and painstaking hand
– even on the PlayStation, which has
the lowest resolution of the game's three
versions. As you make your way through
them, your light shows you all the dark
corners and hidden secrets (important
items reveal themselves by glinting in
the light, a helpful cue), even those
that you just might rather not see.
Those
include a wide array of things that go
bump in the night, which all react
differently in their quest to make a meal
of heroes Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac.
Light becomes a factor again when dealing
with enemies, because some fear
illumination, while others violently
attack any source of light. Also, some
monsters will attack in packs, like the
Hounds of Tindalos, while others will
take the direct approach and charge you
head-on. You can strike back with an
arsenal of 12 weapons, including some
slightly futuristic designs based on
attacking with focused light. These too
take advantage of the lighting
possibilities built into the backgrounds.
An ordinary handgun lights a small area
with a brief, sharp muzzle flash, while a
strange energy rifle casts a blue glow
with its bursts of focused light. The
weapons and other game elements also
create some very impressive fog and
particle effects, which look great in
conjunction with the colored lighting.
You'll
need unusual armament in the later
levels, when the scene moves from a
haunted earth to a bizarre environment
completely beyond it – the
Lovecraftian evil waits in other spheres
for the time when the stars are right.
There are two ways to reach the endgame,
though. Edward and Aline, the two main
characters, will each experience a
somewhat different story, depending on
who you play as. Their experiences vary
according to their personality, Edward
charging into the fray as the fated enemy
of evil while Aline hangs back, skeptical
and reticent. Their paths cross in either
game, though, during pre-rendered
cutscenes that present important story
elements. There are also short cutscenes
at particular points, like when you
encounter a significant enemy or
supporting character. The transitions
into cutscenes seem to be handled quite
well, as in one scene where you battle a
snake-like demon. You walk into a room
where a huge rug covers the floor,
decorated with the image of a coiling
serpent. Then the game switches to a
cutscene, where the demon slithers up out
of the rug and swirls into life.
Alone in
the Dark originated the survival horror
genre, but it's hardly ever mentioned in
connection with it anymore, except by
serious fans of the older games. The New
Nightmare will certainly change that.
Graphically, it's a cut above the
equivalent Resident Evil games, and it
promises a more refined sense of
storytelling as well – a more
mature, psychological sort of suspense,
rather than simple B-grade shocks.
Hopefully, it will also maintain its
predecessors' emphasis on puzzle-solving
over pure action, and intelligent
puzzle-solving at that. We're told that
backtracking will be kept to an absolute
minimum, and with luck there will be no
puzzles involving finding cranks,
handles, or valve dials. New Nightmare
won't arrive on PlayStation until the
spring of next year, but don't count it
out by any means. Darkworks has created
what looks like a top-notch artistic and
technical creation.
Tom
Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear -If there were ever two genres
that weren't meant to come to consoles,
they're PC first-person shooters and PC
strategy games. Now, we have Rogue Spear
on the PlayStation...a blend of
first-person shooting and strategy,
ported over from the PC. Hm. Rogue Spear
is a well-intentioned piece of work, and
it's better than the version of Rainbow
Six (its predecessor) that hit the
PlayStation a little while ago. However,
it's still not that good.
Having missed the
popular PC version of Rogue Spear, I
loaded it up on one of the IGNPC demo
computers and had a go through a handful
of the single-player missions. I liked
it, but throughout I was observing traits
that just couldn't be successfully
replicated on the PlayStation. The
planning system, the artificial
intelligence, and the overriding emphasis
on precision are what make the game good,
and they're also missing on the home
console.
Gameplay
Rogue Spear looks like a first-person
shooter, but it's not; anyone who says
otherwise is likely a Counter-Strike
refugee who fled that particular
battlefield on account of lousy reflexes
into the comforting arms of auto-aim.
This is a strategy game -- a strategy
game with action elements, certainly, but
a strategy game nonetheless. More
important than the actual moment of
execution is all the planning you have to
do beforehand: absorbing intelligence,
setting up your route and tactics,
picking your team, and equipping the
troops for battle.
Here's where Rogue
Spear first runs into trouble. The PC
version uses a navigation system built
around waypoints. Before the mission, you
plan your route through the area and what
you're going to do from moment to moment
by placing waypoints throughout the map
-- you connect up those dots to define
where your teams move, and attach actions
to particular waypoints to define what
they're going to do there. If you want a
team to toss a grenade into a room, for
example, you stick a waypoint just
outside the door and tag that point with
the grenade action. To coordinate team
actions, you use "go-codes,"
waypoints where a team will hold and not
progress to the next action until you
deliver a signal.
This works well enough
in the PC version, because you can define
very complex routes and actions. You
could have a team zig-zag or do
loop-the-loops through a room if you
want, tossing flashbangs in every
direction as they go. The PlayStation
version, however, has to simplify things,
and that's a problem, because even the PC
navigation system isn't quite versatile
enough to deal with some threats. On
PlayStation, you can only navigate room
by room, not point by point, and the AI
follows a set path through every given
room. It becomes immediately obvious that
this isn't quite adequate, because your
teammates die with unusual frequency,
seemingly due to poor navigation and
insufficient adaptability.
For example, the
Pandora Trigger mission (the first one,
in the art museum), breaks your squad
into two teams. One clears the ground
floor, the other clears the second, and
the two meet up for the climactic assault
on the room where the hostages are kept.
On the PC, at the default difficulty, the
upstairs team generally has no problem
clearing the upstairs on its own (you
default to controlling the downstairs
team). On the PlayStation, also at
default difficulty, the buggers die like
flies. All-too-frequently, I heard
"Man down! Man down!" over the
tac net and found myself with no backup
once it came time to rescue the hostages.
That is, if I got that
far at all. The AI tends to die through
its own foolishness; you yourself usually
die due to the poor control. Rogue Spear
demands precision in movement and aiming,
precision which is not afforded by the
Dual Shock. This is a game that very much
wants a mouse and a keyboard, the latter
especially when it comes time to manage
complex inventory and command options
(have fun managing four teams with the
command subscreens), but more immediately
just for getting around and whacking the
bad guys. The dual-analog controls are
slow, not very exact (even with a heaping
helping of auto-aim), and include no
option that I can find for adjusting the
analog sensitivity (which is ridiculous,
because the default sensitivity is much
too low).
A few other
peculiarities of the console-PC
transition rear their ugly head -- for
example, the menu screens are often
nigh-unreadable due to the small, blurry
font. Even on my sharp WEGA TV, I
couldn't tell whether I was supposed to
hold down L1 or L2 to rotate the map. The
same problem makes the map hard to read,
and decreases the usefulness of the
in-mission radar. Finally, you lose the
little map in the HUD that showed you
around your waypoints in the PC version.
Now you just have the weak radar and an
arrow leading you by the nose.
Two-player multiplayer
is available, but not really worth
mentioning, considering that there are
four-player deathmatch games available on
PlayStation with far better looks and
control. Rogue Spear multiplayer isn't
any fun with just two players, anyway --
all the excitement of LAN cooperation is
gone.
Graphics
The framerate is up in comparison to the
original PS Rainbow Six, but it's still
pretty slow, and the game in general
still doesn't look too good. The texture
quality, for one, is very low, with the
same flat colors of the PC version and
additional blurring and pixelly bits. The
models are shaky, with plenty of breakup
and the joints and strangely shaped
limbs, and the quality of the
environments leaves a lot to be desired
at times. The Arctic Flare mission, for
example, which takes place on a hijacked
tanker, includes no sea or sky or coast.
On the other side of the rail is nothing
but inky blackness, not even stars, and
the rest of the tanker takes some time to
be drawn in as you move along the deck.
I'm willing to forgive
the poor animation, because it's more or
less the same as in the PC version. I've
often wondered why PC FPS developers
generally produce such stiff character
motions -- any opinions? Perhaps a
problem of sychronizing realistic
animations to unrealistic movement speeds
and maneuverability, I don't know.
Anyway, Rogue Spear includes the usual
curious tendency of characters to seem as
if they're running on an invisible
treadmill and being superimposed over the
environment as they move about.
Sound
Rogue Spear still sounds about as good as
it did on the PC, which is pretty good.
The cool Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral
score is intact -- sitting still on the
intro and menu screens is fun just so you
can listen to the soundtrack. The voice
acting is all there in both menus and
missions, sounding very cool at all times
(the intelligence reports are generally
useless, but well-spoken nonetheless),
and the effects do the same fine job of
creating the atmosphere and hinting at
what you ought to be doing. The tac net
chatter is fun (it's always very
satisfying to hear "Tango
down!" from your teammates), and
being able to hear the bad guys just
around the corner, before you
silenced-MP5 them to death, is great fun
in an admittedly evil sort of way.
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