Alone-in-the-Dark posts

The DRM-free PC game download site GoG.com is done with its cryptic statements and has started revealing what games it has been teasing in previous statements this week. One of the game is actually three titles; its the first three games in the Alone in the Dark survival horror series from publisher Atari.

All three games are big sold as one bundle, letting PC gamers to have a chance to play these classic titles on modern PC operating systems. The bundle also comes with all three of the game's soundtracks. You can get the bundle now for just $5.99. GoG.com will be announcing additions to its library of classic PC games from Atari in the coming weeks.

Earlier this week the US got the official DVD release of Far Cry, the latest butchering . . . er, video game-to-movie adaptation from director Uwe Boll. However it looks like one of his first such adaptation attempts has gotten a sequel.

That would be Alone in the Dark 2, which was first released in other parts of the world in 2008. The good news is that for this latest shot at adapting the survival horror game series Boll served just as a producer of this flick (he directed the first movie in 2005). The odd news is that the movie's lead character Edward Carby, played by Christian Slater in the first movie, has changed into Korean American actor Rick Yune for the sequel (he can be seen in the just released Ninja Assassin). The Wikipedia page for the movie states that the US DVD release is sometime this winter. You have officially been warned.

Since its recent revamp, GameTap has gotten back on track adding new games to download and purchase from its library of titles and also adding new titles to its premimum monthly subscription service. Today GameTap announced a new deal with publisher Atari that will add a number of its game to GameTap's services.

Among the Atari titles that will be added into GameTap's library will include the Neverwinter Nights series, the Master of Orion series, The Witcher, King's Bounty, the new 2008 version of Alone in the Dark, Test Drive Unlimited, the first ArmA game and Indigo Prophecy. There's no word yet on when these games will debut on the service.

[Via email press release]

On Monday we began a fond look back at the 1990s, when Star Trek was well into The Next Generation and The X-Files was our favorite way to get scared. PC games also came into their own in that decade and to prove it we picked 15 titles that were released between 1992 and 1993.

It was the time period where adventure games were all over the place and an odd PC hardware add-on called the CD-ROM would make us forget floppies. Shareware was also making a huge impact on gamers, including a little game called Doom. Let's head back about 16 or 17 years and take a look at the 1990's games that we still like to play today.

Click on the image to read more of We Love the 90s (for PC Games): 1992-1993

The folks who write about games for a living can be very guilty at times for hyping a game before its release. Sometimes theymake it sound like it's a done deal that it will be the greatest game ever made when it come out.. Heck, some folks even give out awards at E3 for games that are not even completed or just shown in trailer form. So you have to expect that on occasion a game comes out that, for whatever reason, doesn't quite live up to all of its promise, previews and PR.

In the past decade there have been many such PC games like we have described. These are titles that are not bad per se (that would be Daikatana) but just didn't have what it took to live up to the expecations that gamers and especially game journalists had for it. Big Download decided to pick 10 such games from the past 10 years that, for one reason or another, had high hopes but just couldn't cut it.

Click on the image above to continue reading 10 games that didn't rise above the hype

How often have you groaned at seeing that one of your favorite movies, books, comic books, or even TV shows was going to be making the jump to video game status? How often have your fears been justified? Perhaps a better question would be: How often have you been pleasantly surprised by a video game adaptation?

It's an all-too-common scenario: based on the sales numbers of a given property, a media conglomerate will sell a license out to whomever thinks they might do a good job of spreading the brand to different markets. A movie will turn into a novelization, a comic book adaptation, a spin-off television series, a direct-to-DVD movie, a line of toys and assorted merchandise, and eventually, a video game. The wisdom of this approach seems to lie in the idea that "If they liked it once, they'll like it again". In many cases, adapting a book to a movie is relatively innocuous; many survive the transition quite well. When it comes to making a video game from a movie, or book, or any other medium, however, all bets are off. Why? It's because the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another.

Common wisdom has it that if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. What, then, should we think of the recent trend in gaming to bring back, and in some cases revamp past video games? I'm thinking here mostly of Bionic Commando's recent upgrade to be both a completely new reimagining of the franchise (yes, now it's a franchise at last) and an update of the classic arcade hit which itself includes a version of the original. Developer Grin is covering all bases, giving die-hard fans what they want while at the same time bringing in new fans who may never have played the first release.

Is it a good idea to keep mining the past for the hits of the future? How much life do these games still have in them? Is it possible to revamp an old game sufficiently to make it feel new while retaining its old-school flavor? Let's take a look.

Hell can apparently freeze over. How else do you explain how Atari, which has been bleeding money for years, finally generated a profit for its last financial quarter that ended June 30? Yet the publisher announced late on Wednesday that it indeed generated a profit of $3.5 million for the quarter, compared to a loss of $11.9 million for the same period a year ago.

Revenues for Atari were $40.3 million for the quarter, a huge improvement from revenues of just $10.4 million for the same period a year ago. It's likely that the jump was due to sales of the survival-horror title Alone in the Dark which was released in the last few days of June. Atari is scheduled to completely merge with its parent company Infogrames before the end of September.

Publisher Infogrames was apparently happy with its revenues for its last fiscal quarter; in a press release today the French publisher and parent company of US based Atari announced that revenues for the quarter that ended June 30 were 95.9 million euros, up 91.4 percent from what they were in the same period a year ago.

Revenues were up thanks in part to the release of the new revamp of the survival horror series Alone in the Dark. The company shipped 1.2 million copies of the game in its various platforms, including the PC, at launch. Actual sales figures for the game were not revealed. Infogrames also didn't reveal if the fiscal quarter was profitable or not. They did say that their merger agreement with Atari was moving foward; it's expected to be complete later this year.

Your daily wrap-up of the hottest stories in PC gaming in the last 24 hours.

	Preview: Call of Duty: World at War Not so with Call of Duty: World of War. Developer Treyarch is not at all nervous to follow in Infinity Ward's large footsteps -- after all, they've done it before, and the decision to take the series back to its WWII roots doesn't require nervousness so much as it requires guts, determination, and the hope that players who are apprehensive about leaving Call of Duty 4's phenomenal playground will give Call of Duty: World at War's jungle gym a chance.
	Big Versus: Alone in the Dark Released on the PC, Xbox 360 and Wii, Alone in the Dark is likely the final full featured title from Atari (also known as Infogrames) who have announced to focus on smaller titles. After playing through the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the title we compare our experience in our newly formatted feature, Big Versus. Shying away from our original concept of which is better than the other, Big Versus has transformed to a comparison piece regarding our overall experiences.
	Pyro Achievements Round-Up You've now hopefully finished reading our wonderful guide to pyro achievements. Will this make you a better pyro? Indubitably. You will have better weapons, better skills, and generally be a sexier pyro for all to see. Well, maybe not the last one. However, if you took our advice, you should now have three new weapons: the flare gun, axetinguisher, and backburner. If you haven't been reading our guide that we spent so much time on (tsk tsk) then we will save you the effort of digging them up. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parts are all viewable here on Big Download.
	Rise of the Argonauts gods trailers released Impudent mortal! Do you think yourself wise enough to know the will of the gods? Hey, maybe you do, and maybe you don't. Developer Liquid Entertainment and publisher Codemasters have released two new trailer for Rise of the Argonauts, each exploring the nuances of the various gods.