Alan Wake on PC Review

I recently played through Alan Wake. Going into it, I didn't know what to expect. I have heard some good things in general about it as it was out on consoles for a while before its fairly recent PC release. However, I wasn't keen enough to look into just what this game is all about as it didn't really affect me at the time. I can now say that this game flew WAY under the radar. This is a game that should be a highlight of your recent gaming endeavors.

Alan Wake is awesome. What is so good about it? Well, the game itself is kind of a halfway between Dead Space and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, two games I have very much enjoyed and for very different reasons. Alan Wake is more action than Amnesia - afterall, you do get weapons and can kill the baddies. On the other hand, it's nowhere near Dead Space with your futuristic arsenal of ass-kicking. Until the later game, your main weapon is a simple pistol that pretty much takes a full clip to kill the "medium" baddies. The Shotgun and Rifle round out your gun choices, with a few other tricks like flash-bangs, flares, and a flare gun... not to mention your trusty flashlight!

 Alan Wake is based around the concept of darkness. There is a darkness in the lake; it is evil, and it wants out. Almost all the enemies are corrupted, dark versions of real people you meet in the game, which gives those encounters an extra chilling effect. The story starts with the protagonist, Alan Wake, going to some little town out in the mountainous woods with his wife. Alan, or Al as he's often referred to, is a writer suffering from writer's block, so his wife thought going out to this relaxing little town could be of help. You wind up at this cabin on a small island on the lake, where things quickly take a turn for the worse. And by "for the worse," I mean things go batshit insane.

 If you played Bastion, you probably enjoyed the narration. In Alan Wake, Al is the narrator. Quite often he will describe his thoughts as you come across various things as an internal monologue. Generally this works very well and helps enhance the story. On top of this, you collect manuscript pages of, well, a story of what's happening. You can access these in your menu and Al will read out the pages. I don't want to put any spoilers in this review, but these pages are central to the game. The point is, the game manages to keep you interested with this narration as it gives you something to focus on when maybe not a lot is actually happening in the game. It definitely adds a lot to the character of Al, making him much more believable and it helps create a bit of a bond with him.

The game is split into day time and night time. The day time is when you meet the sheriff, the doctor, the waitress... and the night is when you fight. Again, without trying to spoil anything, the short of the story is that you are trying to get Al's wife back. You're led by the nose a little bit, for a little while, but then about halfway through the game steps it up a bit and Al seems to be more driven to end his nightmarish adventures and things get very intense.

During the nights, you generally explore an area. The game is not open world, but the levels are large enough and so well designed that it does feel fairly open. I never really felt like I was "on rails" or anything, and often you can go off the beaten path to find manuscripts or additional items. At all times during the night, Al has his flashlight turned on. It acts as a cross-hair during combat, as Al always aims right down the beam. The enemies are shrouded in darkness, so you have to use your flashlight to burn off the darkness and make the enemies vulnerable to weapon fire. The flashlight can run 100% of the time normally, but you can hit a button to "focus" the beam and burn the darkness faster - however, this also consumes battery power. If you stop focusing, the batteries will recharge, but you also find many batteries and can just swap them in on the fly as needed.

 The game, sadly, doesn't have many puzzles. Off the top of my head I can only think of 1. I think that is a bit of a shame, but fortunately the tense atmosphere and often chaotic combat keeps things interesting. It's also a heavily story driven game, which is something I definitely appreciate. In fact, I have to say, the way the game ended was rather impressive. Not exactly a happy ending, but appropriate. Bittersweet would describe it best.

 There's a few levels of the game that are just outrageously fun, there's levels that are very creepy, there's a little mix up with the action gameplay here and there. Probably the worst executed aspect to the game is the driving controls... the cars handle horridly, but I don't mind. It's a pretty minor aspect of a couple levels that just switch things up.

I'm not big on number scores, so all I can say is that if you like "horror", "thriller", and "action" games then this is a must play. If you don't believe me, here's a video I shot of one level up until I was murdered. Very minor spoilers, if any (but proceed with caution).

This video is somewhat spoiler-ish. It's basically a full level near the end of the game, though it's not going to spoil the interesting story bits:

The Best Way to Stream Movies to Your PS3

I've been using my PS3 as a media server/HTPC for a while now. The last game I bought for it was Dark Souls, because it's not out on PC (although apparently that is coming!). So, besides Netflix and Blu Ray, I've had to rely on streaming movies over my network.

By default on a Windows PC you can use the Windows Media Player after enabling Streaming in the options (and in your network settings). This works alright, except that .mkv files, which is a great way to encode videos, are not supported on the PS3.

I then started using the Vuze streaming function. Vuze is a torrent program as well as a media library and, as mentioned, a streaming program. The nice thing about using Vuze is that when I add a file to the PS3 sharing list, it automatically would convert it into a compatible format. The downside is that you can't really customize the encoding options besides picking "SD" or "HD". In more than one occasion I ended up losing the 5.1 audio via this method.

I spent a lot of time encoding with Handbrake, which is in fact a nice program. There are a lot of options to choose exactly how you want your video encoded, from filters to sizes, from audio to subtitles. The downside is that I still couldn't seem to get surround sound encoding to work properly.

So finally, how do you stream movies in HD with surround sound (including DTS and Dolby Digital), and in particular, how do you stream .mkv files?

The answer is the PS3 Media Server! This program is fantastic. I'm still learning all the ins and outs, but here's the gist of it: It can transcode media on the fly. This means that you don't need to wait 2 hours to transcode a .mkv HD movie before you watch it - just play it straight from the .mkv! You can select DTS and DD pass-through (options depend on if you use Optical or HDMI audio) which is great if you are using a nice home theater receiver. 

If a file does not need to be transcoded, then it will simply stream it like any other method directly from HDD to PS3.

One very neat thing about PS3 Media Server is that you can manually build plugins for it - or find plugins created by others. In particular, this one allows you to shut down your PC from a menu option on the PS3's XMB (the menu) - it's listed inside the PS3 Media Server device.

Piracy Hurts PC Gaming

Please stop pirating.

Ok, there's more to it than that. More knowledgeable people than myself have written articles and blogs on the subject, but I'd just like to add my voice to the crowd.

I'll start off by saying I think there are some reasons to pirate, though they are more than anything mere excuses. First off, pirating to use as a demo. It's an unfortunate state of affairs that video games rarely come with demos. At one time, you had a demo for almost every game and usually it was basically the first level straight out of the game. The benefit of a demo can be significant - for one, you can not really trust reviews. Mass Effect is a game praised up and down all sides of the internet, the reviews picture it as a gleaming beacon of hope in the RPG realm, and reading those love letters reviews, I get the impression that this is the kind of game I'm going to love. I did not get Mass Effect when it first came out. It wasn't really on my radar at that time, and then there was just too many other games to play. However, before ME2 was released, I purchased ME on Steam for around $15.

10 hours later, I removed it from my PC. I found it to be boring, ugly, and the combat sucked. Then again, I don't have a lot of good things to say about BioWare games since Dragon Age: Origins... but that is another matter.

The point is, I wish I didn't buy it. To really know if a game is any good, you have to experience it for yourself. Without a demo, there's only 1 way of doing that, but it is illegal (and rightly so). I'm extremely glad KoA: Reckoning had a demo because for me, it let me realize that I am not going to really enjoy that game. I know a lot of people love it - it is rated 80, 81, and 85 on the 3 platforms it was released for (Metacritic scores). Yet for me, I'd give it about a 6/10. If there wasn't a demo, I'd have been rather upset at wasting $60 on the game. Not to mention there's no returns on PC games, nor reselling. You bought it, you keep it and it's just too darn bad if you don't like it.

Secondly, demos will highlight for you whether you are even able to run the game. Some games just don't like certain hardware, or maybe it's just too demanding for your setup. Imagine finding that out the hard way (I think we've all done it before). The problem here is quite often that the listed minimum and recommended specs are barely reasonable and often vague. There's a massive difference between "minimum" driving the game at low settings and 60 fps at 720p vs the game chugging along at 20fps at 640x480... yet who knows if that's what they mean by "playable". And recommended? Please. Not once has recommended been enough for Ultra settings, maybe not even for medium at 1080p.

If you choose to partake in this practice and you find out you really do like the game and want to finish it, then go purchase it legally! I realize this can take a lot of willpower since you already got your hands on it for free, but you know it's the right thing to do.

The second reason I can see piracy as being reasonable is if it is otherwise impossible to get a hold of the game. I mean literally, it is just not sold locally nor will anyone ship it to you. Or it's simply non existant anymore, like maybe an old SNES game. (Check out http://gog.com for a huge amount of classic PC games at cheap prices!)

Some people like to claim that they are protesting against a company, whether it's because of changes to the game that you don't like, or the inclusing of some arbitrarily "evil" Digital Rights Management scheme. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that doesn't cut the mustard. Simply by downloading the game you are clearly showing you are interested in the product. If you weren't, you would ignore it like all the Wii shovelware collecting dust. Protesting a game can only be done, really, with a boycott. Nobody playing the game means nobody is interested in it - playing the game even without paying means it has value and they should keep going, just with stricter DRM.

That's the problem. You pirate to "protest" something like DRM, and they ramp up the DRM. To put it in a strawman argument, it's like shooting cops to protest that there are some asshole cops. Guess what, that is not going to work, all it will do is bring in more authority. If you don't like DRM, then do not consume the product. Otherwise, deal with it. (See article linked below for more on why DRM is nearly a non-issue blown way out of proportion)

If a game is engaging in practices you find intolerable - like day 1 DLC (See Mass Effect 3 and Sim City 5), pirating it will not send the message that you want. What you want is to say "I disagree with what you're doing so there! Give me everything I want!" like you think it's a hostage situation. The company does not see it that way. They see people stealing their product. They have every right to sell a game how they see fit with whatever features they see fit for whatever price they see fit. If nobody bothers playing their game, then they know they need to change. If millions of people play it without paying... they'll just go to somewhere they can get paid from those playing it (read: consoles).

In the end, the only thing piracy hurts is us gamers. The days of PC dominance are fading into distant memory; PC gaming is now an after thought. If we're lucky we get a game ported, at release, with some customization options for graphics and controls. Often, though, we have to wait for our version and aren't even able to set a custom control scheme.

I've heard arguments about how it's because developing for PC is hard, there's so many variables in hardware, PC gamers are more picky, etc. No, the reason PC games aren't very popular with developers is because PC gamers pirate everything that isn't "nailed to the floor".

As a collective, PC gamers need to really step up to the plate. We have systems vastly superior to consoles, and often a fair bit more expensive too. On top of that we can purchase and install games without leaving our chairs, and usually at around $10 less than console games. And while we wait, we can browse sites like Reddit and YouTube to keep ourselves entertained... yet, apparently, we can't be arsed to lay down some money on a quality product. We get the best deal out there, and we throw it in their (the developers/publishers) faces!

I realize that a lot of this sounds like conjecture and opinion. Well, it is... however, I also felt the need to write this after reading this extremely awesome article on the subject matter:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
(Bear in mind it is now a little over a year old data, but it's good nonetheless)

I think the article pretty accurately describes my stance with the following quote. This, my PC gamer friends, is why we must pay for our games. This is why developers don't care about us. This is our own doing.

In summary, looking at the data we wind up with what appear to be roughly equal proportions of machines capable of gaming in the console market vs. the PC gaming market: there are approximately 76 million or more 'next-gen' consoles currently in use around the world; and of the 1 billion PCs globally, we can state with a reasonable degree of confidence that at least 80 million, possibly as many as almost 200 million of them are capable of gaming with the latest titles. If we want to refine the figures down to which machines are capable of 'hardcore' gaming, then we can exclude the Wii from the console stats, bringing us down to 40 million consoles (XBox 360 and PS3); and even if we halve the number of PCs with add-in graphics cards to 40-100 million to account only for medium and high-end graphics cards, we still wind up with at least a 1:1 ratio in terms of the number of gaming consoles vs. the number of gaming PCs. What we can say with a high degree of certainty is that at no point does it look like gaming PCs are being outgunned in terms of sheer volume of console hardware by a 4:1, 5:1 or higher ratio as game sales ratios would suggest.

As in, consoles have at best the same install base as game-worthy PCs, but they outsell more than 5x the amount of games. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.