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It just wouldn't be right if I didn't write a livejournal entry expressing my love for the game Alice Madness Returns which came out this month. So here it is. I've been playing it these past few days and in terms of content it has practically everything I could want in an alice game. Steampunk, gothic, asian, demented toy theme, card themed areas, etc. etc. The Mise en scène made me think of those stop motion movies like Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas, James and The Giant Peach, and The Corpse Bride. But I actually think Alice Madness Returns is funner than most of those particularly because it's fully interactive unlike a movie.
I don't have any screenshots here because I was playing it on my home theater PC and print screen isn't working for this game and I don't know if it has a built in screenshot function like other games do.
The visuals are great it has new cloth simulation for her dresses (which are themed to whatever part of wonderlands she's in!) and her hair which is silky and flows very nicely. Speaking of themed areas there's plenty there for me to sink my teeth into from the drab dreeriness of Alice's real world in victorian London to the more colorful areas of wonderland like the hatter's realm, queensland, the toybox, the dollhouse, the asian inspired areas, there's even an area inspired by the wonderfully bizarre russian movie version of Alice called Neco z Alenky in the dollhouse section where it's all rustic like a NIN video.... and lots more... I felt like it was just getting better and better as I played.
Some of the artwork reminded me of Tim Schafer's Psychonauts as well as tweaking memories of the original Alice and also there are times in the game where it reminds me so much of Coraline the movie... in particular the final battle. The quality of the graphics in quite a few parts is so good it almost looks like you are playing an animated movie like coraline if only you ran it on a graphics card with enough power to use tons of anti-aliasing. My graphic card can do 8x with it which looks pretty smooth but not perfect.
The combat is great especially since with her vorpal blade Alice can actually now do a combo move as opposed to the original where she could only do one swipe and then had to recover a sec or two after doing it. There's less weapons here as the rest of your arsenal
In the original you had and most of these have two modes\primary and secondary:
and the watch which stops time for a while letting you attack enemies and when time resumes they are either dead or wounded. There where also quite a few powerups in the game like the rage powerup which makes you temporarily a lot stronger and demonic looking, the invisibiliyt powerup which makes you temporarily invisible and the enemy doesn't react until you become visible and also the insect themed tea powerup which makes you look like alice crossed with an insect like a fly which makes you very fast and jump very far.
By comparison Alice Madness Returns has the following and none have any secondary functions really rather instead of that your primary attack is your melee attack and your secondary attack is your ranged:
And that's it.... there's only one powerup that I know of and that is always availble to you if your health goes below a certain point and that's the hysteria one which replaces the demon rage powerup from the original only this time it makes the whole screen go monochrome except for bright red blood\flashes of bright red here and there.... you access this via the enter key on the PC version when your health gets low.
You collect teeth as currency in the game to go along with the idea in dream analysis that losing your teeth represents worrying about losing money so in the world of wonderland teeth are currency and you use those to upgrade your weapons.
This is the part where I get to a couple of issues the game had at least on the PC. The default controls for keyboard\mouse weren't very intuitive to me and I had to redefine them. However when you do it from inside the game it doesn't work properly and some of the functions break especially her stomping ability when she grows large and during the side scrolling ship mini game the depth charge weapon doesn't work. I had to manually edit my input ini file in the documents folder on my windows 7 PC hooked up to the HDTV in my living room.
In the orignal Alice the camera was always in a chase view behind alice like most proper 3rd person shooters.. however Alice Madness Returns is a little more like DMC4 in regards to the camera although a little worse. What I mean by that is when you are standing still you can pan the camera around your character and she doesn't turn with it... when you are moving it goes back to having the camera and her rotation being one and the same. However when you go into ranged combat mode to use the peppermill or teapot cannon it zooms in and drastically slows down your camera movement. This is a little cumbersome when playing it with a mouse and I was tweaking my input.ini for this too to make it more tolerable.
There are times when the camera zooms to a fixed view like an old resident evil game and sometimes that fixed view isn't very optimal to see everything that is going on or where you need to go until the camera gets out of the fixed view when you reach a certain point. Sometimes a bit of scenery can get in your way and you have to move so that it gets out of your way apparently they didn't hear about alpha blending to make obstacles transparent. This wouldn't be an issue if they would just stick to the chase view more often.
There are times in the pinball mini game later on in the game when the camera zooms in and you can hardly tell where your ball is going making it harder than it should be.
The ending was a bit confuzzling and I feel pretty amigous although even considering all that I think it's a worthy sequel to the orignal and I enjoy the hell out of it. It almost seems like the entire last quarter of the game was a terry gilliam'esque ending like he did in Brazil. Like how can you be absolutely sure at some point she didn't relapse entirely into wonderland and never got out. The player only experiences the story from her point of view after all.
Although I have to at the moment play it on the PC because there's no mac version yet and it doesn't work in a WINE\Cider wrapper. It even includes a copy of the original for those of you who missed it due to it being a Mac\PC exclusive back in the day. More on that in the next entry as there is some interesting stuff there.
I don't have any screenshots here because I was playing it on my home theater PC and print screen isn't working for this game and I don't know if it has a built in screenshot function like other games do.
The visuals are great it has new cloth simulation for her dresses (which are themed to whatever part of wonderlands she's in!) and her hair which is silky and flows very nicely. Speaking of themed areas there's plenty there for me to sink my teeth into from the drab dreeriness of Alice's real world in victorian London to the more colorful areas of wonderland like the hatter's realm, queensland, the toybox, the dollhouse, the asian inspired areas, there's even an area inspired by the wonderfully bizarre russian movie version of Alice called Neco z Alenky in the dollhouse section where it's all rustic like a NIN video.... and lots more... I felt like it was just getting better and better as I played.
Some of the artwork reminded me of Tim Schafer's Psychonauts as well as tweaking memories of the original Alice and also there are times in the game where it reminds me so much of Coraline the movie... in particular the final battle. The quality of the graphics in quite a few parts is so good it almost looks like you are playing an animated movie like coraline if only you ran it on a graphics card with enough power to use tons of anti-aliasing. My graphic card can do 8x with it which looks pretty smooth but not perfect.
The combat is great especially since with her vorpal blade Alice can actually now do a combo move as opposed to the original where she could only do one swipe and then had to recover a sec or two after doing it. There's less weapons here as the rest of your arsenal
In the original you had and most of these have two modes\primary and secondary:
- Vorpal Blade: (but slower\more limited of course as I mentioned), secondary fire throws it at the enemy with pretty good damage
- Throwing Cards: (a deck of cards that you can throw rapid fire and also shoot like a shotgun if you press secondary fire)
- Croquete Mallet: A club type weapon which also can be used to launch croquette balls at enemies
- Jack Bomb: A jack in the box that explodes when jack pops out
- Ice Wand: a wand that freezes stuff with a freeze ray kind of like in duke nukem
- Jacks: (ball and jacks) that old toy except you throw the jacks at the enemy and they attack them and when the ball stops bouncing they return to you... a very powerful weapon and works well against bosses
- Demon Dice: a set of dice that spawns a mini demon that attacks whoever is nearest to it
- Jabberwock's Eye staff: In one mode: Fires a powerful laser. (Drains Alice's willpower, while firing)
Secondary: Fires very powerful magic artillery with large damage radius. The more energy you use the more shots come down in target area. - Blunderbuss: A very powerful shotgun type weapon that looks like an old fashioned shotgun with the horn shaped barrel on the front
and the watch which stops time for a while letting you attack enemies and when time resumes they are either dead or wounded. There where also quite a few powerups in the game like the rage powerup which makes you temporarily a lot stronger and demonic looking, the invisibiliyt powerup which makes you temporarily invisible and the enemy doesn't react until you become visible and also the insect themed tea powerup which makes you look like alice crossed with an insect like a fly which makes you very fast and jump very far.
By comparison Alice Madness Returns has the following and none have any secondary functions really rather instead of that your primary attack is your melee attack and your secondary attack is your ranged:
- Vorpal Blade: same knife as before only with a proper combo move but you can't throw it this time
- Peppermill: a rapid fire machine gun type weapon that you pepper the enemy with
- Hobby Horse: A club type weapon that can break shields as it gets upgraded
- Teapot Cannon: a grenade launcher type weapon that launches globs of scalding hot green tea
- Clockwork Bomb: (almost forgot about this one): It's a small clockwork filled plushie of the white rabbit that is attached to a pocket watch that you can remotely detonate it with. Useful to distract enemies and solve certain puzzles.
And that's it.... there's only one powerup that I know of and that is always availble to you if your health goes below a certain point and that's the hysteria one which replaces the demon rage powerup from the original only this time it makes the whole screen go monochrome except for bright red blood\flashes of bright red here and there.... you access this via the enter key on the PC version when your health gets low.
You collect teeth as currency in the game to go along with the idea in dream analysis that losing your teeth represents worrying about losing money so in the world of wonderland teeth are currency and you use those to upgrade your weapons.
This is the part where I get to a couple of issues the game had at least on the PC. The default controls for keyboard\mouse weren't very intuitive to me and I had to redefine them. However when you do it from inside the game it doesn't work properly and some of the functions break especially her stomping ability when she grows large and during the side scrolling ship mini game the depth charge weapon doesn't work. I had to manually edit my input ini file in the documents folder on my windows 7 PC hooked up to the HDTV in my living room.
In the orignal Alice the camera was always in a chase view behind alice like most proper 3rd person shooters.. however Alice Madness Returns is a little more like DMC4 in regards to the camera although a little worse. What I mean by that is when you are standing still you can pan the camera around your character and she doesn't turn with it... when you are moving it goes back to having the camera and her rotation being one and the same. However when you go into ranged combat mode to use the peppermill or teapot cannon it zooms in and drastically slows down your camera movement. This is a little cumbersome when playing it with a mouse and I was tweaking my input.ini for this too to make it more tolerable.
There are times when the camera zooms to a fixed view like an old resident evil game and sometimes that fixed view isn't very optimal to see everything that is going on or where you need to go until the camera gets out of the fixed view when you reach a certain point. Sometimes a bit of scenery can get in your way and you have to move so that it gets out of your way apparently they didn't hear about alpha blending to make obstacles transparent. This wouldn't be an issue if they would just stick to the chase view more often.
There are times in the pinball mini game later on in the game when the camera zooms in and you can hardly tell where your ball is going making it harder than it should be.
The ending was a bit confuzzling and I feel pretty amigous although even considering all that I think it's a worthy sequel to the orignal and I enjoy the hell out of it. It almost seems like the entire last quarter of the game was a terry gilliam'esque ending like he did in Brazil. Like how can you be absolutely sure at some point she didn't relapse entirely into wonderland and never got out. The player only experiences the story from her point of view after all.
Although I have to at the moment play it on the PC because there's no mac version yet and it doesn't work in a WINE\Cider wrapper. It even includes a copy of the original for those of you who missed it due to it being a Mac\PC exclusive back in the day. More on that in the next entry as there is some interesting stuff there.
