alan-wake posts

Even though we have a few more weeks before 2009 ends, events in 2010 are prepping for their new editions. The DICE Summit, the high-end game development conference, have announced the first speakers for the Las Vegas-based event. The conference will be held from February 17-19, 2010 at the Red Rock Resort.

Among the speakers announced so far is Matias Myllrinne, the president of Remedy Entertainment, and Steve Perlman, the CEO of the streaming gaming company OnLive. In addition to speeches, panels, and the annual Interactive Achievement Awards (hosted for the fifth year in a row by comedian Jay Mohr), the DICE Summit will also announce the winners of the $100,000 Indie Games Challenge.

Long before their Max Payne games and well before their current work on their Xbox 360 exclusive (maybe) game Alan Wake, developer Remedy released their first title; a car combat title called Death Rally that was published by Apogee in 1996. Now it looks like Remedy is looking to revive the game in a small fashion.

A recent trademark filing by Remedy states they want the use of the Death Rally name for "computer game software." The Escapist has posted up quotes from Remedy's Oskari Häkkinen who states, "With Death Rally we're looking at getting something neat out to the community by having a version that is playable on modern PCs out there." it sounds like that Remedy wants to get the original game, and not really a remake or a graphical revamp, out there to the public. Might we suggest GoG.com as a starting point, Remedy?

The long, long awaited action-thriller game Alan Wake from Remedy was first shown as a PC game in 2005 and was announced as coming to the PC when Microsoft came in as a publisher in 2006. However with the game's re-appearance last month at E3 Microsoft and Remedy have only talked about the game showing up on the Xbox 360 platform.

Today several fan sites, including Brightfalls.net, received an official statement from Remedy stating that Alan Wake is currently being made only for the Xbox 360 at this point. The note added, "Remedy has a deep heritage in PC gaming and would love to see a PC version available to its PC followers, ultimately however this decision lies with our publisher." It's important to note that Microsoft does have a history of releasing PC ports of many of their Xbox and Xbox 360 games including Halo, Halo 2, Gears of War, Fable and others so folks should not automatically assume that an Alan Wake PC port is dead.

When we posted up our Alan Wake impressions from E3 last month, we noted that the Remedy folks who demoed the Xbox 360 build of the game to the press were not commenting on the previously announced PC version that day. That silence is apparently continuing.

In a response to a post asking about the PC version, Remedy's Markus Maki states, "I'm a PC gamer at heart (have a Core i7, Radeon 4890, 5.1 audio setup at home) so I do appreciate your concerns. Unfortunately all I can say at this point is that we're focusing all our efforts on the 360 version and will be making comments in regards to the PC at a later in time." While that doesn't mean Alan Wake is never coming to the PC it does likely mean that the port won't be released in the Xbox 360's time frame of spriing 2010.

It's been a long wait to see what Alan Wake has been doing with himself. The writer first appeared to us in the press at E3 2005 in the game of the same name. That demo, at the ATI booth, has been the only live demonstration shown to the public . . . until this week, that is. Now four years later we got to see yet another live demo of the game (this time at publisher Microsoft's booth) and we think that the four year wait might actually be worth it.

Developer Remedy wanted to mess with the heads of gamers as Alan Wake has to deal with the fact that his supernatual-themed book is coming to life all around him in a Pacific Northwest town. He also has to deal with the kidnapping of his wife Alice by folks who want the manuscript for this new novel. The only problem? Alan doesn't even remember writing anything about it.

Microsoft's E3 2009 press event had members of Remedy on stage as they gave a live demo of Alan Wake. It was the first live public footage that was shown from the game since it was first announced at E3 2005 (yep, four years ago). It was announced that the game will be coming sometime in the spring of 2010.

The footage showed writer Alan Wake exploring the forest area of Bright Falls and dealing with a lot of supernatural threats; from invisible hands throwing objects like cars to strange people-like things that seem to look like ghostd but a lot scarier. The graphics look solid, especially in terms of lighting and the use of light and dark to create a creepy experience.

E3 2009 is getting closer and closer. And with the countdown continuing so do the rumors of what will be revealed at the show. One such rumor-filled source is a Twitter account called Game Fork who has been updating with info on what will be revealed at Microsoft's pre-E3 event on June 1

According to the page, you can expect to see Remedy's four-years-in-the-making action-adventure game Alan Wake come out of its full stealth mode at Microsoft's E3 event. Also due for a full reveal, according to Game Fork, is All Points Bulletin, the long-in-development urban action MMO from developer Real Time Worlds. Assassin's Creed 2, BioShock 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction are also planned to be shown in some form at the event. If this source happens to be on the ball, Microsoft's E3 press conference should be of interest to PC gamers as well.

[Via Gamespot]

Developer Remedy is now closing in on four years since it first revealed its plans for Alan Wake and since then little to no info or media has been released (although the developer did release a new trailer and screenshots last October). Now a new YouTube video has been released which supposedly shows off actual gameplay from the long awaited thriller-action title.

The video supposedly comes from an upcoming GDC 2009 presentation and is taken via the patent-pending "Shaky Cam" off a monitor. So the quality of the footage is, well, bleh. It doesn't help that the footage itself is on the boring side with the player character simply walking through a forest area and ending up at a lake-side shed. One interesting thing is that the viewpoint is third-person, which is something that the developers haven't talked about. Again, take this footage with a big grain of...well, you know.

Update: Looks like we and other web sites got suckered into this one (but we were also skeptical this was the real deal anyway). Videogaming247.com has posted word from Remedy that this footage is not from Alan Wake. In fact it comes from a canceled game from UK based Kuju called Redwood Falls according to this NEOGaf post.

In the last days of 2008 we posted up an extensive multi-part preview of many of the games we though might be released for the PC in 2009 (with a few that might not make it until after the year is over). However it's one thing to post up such a preview feature. It's quite another to go through that huge list of games and pick which ones we want to play the most.

That's exactly what we did, though. Out of the over 100 game titles listed in our preview we picked our top 10 titles that we are the most excited to play in 2009. This time we picked games that we are fairly sure will be out by the end of this year although, as usual, delays can and usually do happen. So what are the games we picked and which is number 1 on our list? We are giving away our number 10 pick above.

Click on the image above to continue reading our top 10 most anticipated PC games of 2009.

Yesterday we started our look at the PC games of 2009 with a ton of various upcoming action and FPS titles. But there are so many of these type of games due out in the next 12 months that we had to split that preview up into two parts. This entry not only contains a number of traditional action titles but also has some fighting games and flying action game titles as well.

Check back on Monday as we will next take a look at the various strategy-RTS based games due out in the next year.

Click on the picture above to read more on the 2009 PC Game Preview: Action-FPS Titles Part 2