Alan Wake has been spotted... in Tokyo. According to a Microsoft promotional flyer the highly anticipated psychological thriller will make an appearance at the Tokyo Games Show in September. But there's more.Microsoft held a competition last year called "WOW - Win Experiences Money Can't Buy" that gave one lucky winner the chance to be "digitally made-over and inserted (virtually of course) into a blockbuster game!" That game being Alan Wake. Whoever the lucky winner was flew to Finland where they were digitally mastered and inserted into Wake's world. Well, a year is a long time to wait to see the finished product, but the second part of the prize will come to fruition in September when the winner will be flown to the 2008 Tokyo Games Show to finally see themselves on the screen.It looks like the hype meter for Alan Wake is set to go red-line later this year....

It looks like the first trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation of Max Payne has leaked onto the interwebs today. The film, based on Remedy's third person action game series, is due for release in October and stars Mark Walhberg (currently in movie theaters in The Happening) as the title hero. From what we can tell the trailer has all of the shoot-em-up style of action that the games have and also it looks like it has some of the weird dream-like sequences that the games have had as well.So will Max Payne be the video game film adaptation we have all been waiting for or will it be a repeat of last year's mediocre Hitman (both movies were produced by Twentieth Century Fox)?...

In 2005 Remedy, the original developers of the first two Max Payne games, officially revealed and showed a live in-game demo for their next project Alan Wake. The title, which was described as a thriller type of title in the vein of The X-Files and Twin Peaks, then went into stealth mode. At E3 2006, Microsoft announced they would publish Alan Wake for both the PC and Xbox 360 and showed off a little more gameplay footage. Since then there has been little to no info on Alan Wake from either Remedy or Microsoft making the game even more mysterious. We were hoping for some more info from Microsoft this week as they were holding a big Xbox 360 press event with a number of titles revealed to the media but alas Alan Wake was not among the games shown nor given a release date. Blog site Venture Beat chatted with Microsoft Games Studios head Shane Kim and asked him flat out, "Is Alan Wake scheduled for 2008?" Kim's reply was disappointing: "We haven't announced a firm date for Alan Wake . . " adding that they would announce such a date when they are ready to do so. So we are still in a holding pattern for the game...perhaps Microsoft will reveal more at E3 in July....

A number of major film studios are flexible when it comes to having their properties adapted by fans for non-profit fan films. Twentieth Century Fox is apparently not one of them. Years ago gamers coined the term "foxed" when the same film studio got the development team that made the exceptional Alien mod for the original Quake to stop development and remove the first public release of the total conversion. Now the very same film studio has decided to shut down the fan-made movie Payne and Redemption, based on Remedy's action game Max Payne.The reason, of course, is that Fox is making its own theatrical Max Payne movie starring Mark Walhberg as the dark and violent detective (it's due out in October). Apparently having a free fan made Max Payne movie would not do and earlier this month the writer-director of Payne and Redemption, Fergie "Larry David" Gibson, posted up word on his web site that after having a chat with the VP of Fox's Intellectual Property he was forced to close shop.You can tell that Gibson is extremely bitter about the whole situation; this is something he has been working on for years. He made three trailers for his film (all now pulled of course) and now all his work is for naught. You could argue that Fox has every right to do what it did; they are spending tens of millions to make and market a Max Payne movie and they could be concerned that a fan-made non-profit film could cause confusion. On the other hand you could argue that such a fan film could serve as free publicity for Fox's Max Payne movie. We will never know.[Via Blue's News]...