Wakey Wakey Alan

The first game should be a memorable one, so for some reason I chose Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is really the sort of game that I should either love or hate with little leeway in between.

I love media that leans on the fourth wall and messes with the metaphysical, and also the idea of reality being twisted according to some artsy fartsy type or even just a bland everyday Jane type. I like deconstruction of individual interpretation becoming everyone's interpretation, with the mind screw chicken/egg looping of fate and choice (you know, the kind that Steven Moffat utterly fails to achieve) and the examination of why plotholes will cause a horrible shadow darkness to come from the depths of a lake to invade your small cozy town. It's also, according to the box, a "psychological horror game", and horror is far my favorite genre of video game, as it was the genre that shifted my understanding from games being smashy smashy to intricate forms of media capable of telling its own story with an unprecedented level of immersion. It's mildly Lovecraftian (though that's not quite as obvious as the references to another author in this game), which means it takes place in New England, horror homeland of misanthropic ugly jerks who all want to accessorize their axe with your face - and admittedly I find this the most enjoyable thing known about my area. So it's everything I should love.

It's also everything that I should hate. The story covering the metaphysical premise is held together by a main character who is about as charming as a whiny sack of potatoes with a face drawn on and you're completely unable to get into this mindset that the game desperately wants to push of Alan being a competent writer. Just handfuls of minutes into the game, trying to believe that Alan is considered some literary genius goes from being hard to impossible because you are basically forced to read his writing, and it is in a word: terrible, and in several words: the exact sort of terrible that graces bestseller lists for weeks for no understandable reason. The horror element is also rather poorly done, which doesn't stick in my side by just being bad, but of me seeing the potential of it being good and never quite achieving the perfection that I know it's capable of, deep inside.

That said, I love Alan Wake. I love Alan Wake in the sort of "I wouldn't trust this man to make pb&j without burning an entire neighbourhood down" way. The Merlin way, the G.I. Joe way. Charming in its complete idiocy.

The Beginning of the Beginning of a Journey

I've known video games as long as I've known books, films, and television shows (in the cases of television shows, I've actually known video games quite a bit longer). I've shared their experience with my brothers, once played Pokemon using my brother's GameBoy under a table so no one would know for months, collapsed on the floor from that one time with the headcrab I just didn't see coming inside that vent, and yelled in rage as I clicked the single wrong space on my Diablo map that ran me straight into the spear of a very angry zombie Amazon. To sum up: I've been a gamer my entire life and games have always meant a lot to me.

Unfortunately, with the price of games, getting games at all has become a war of attrition between me and game publishers, with me lurking around the shelves of GameStop hoping to glimpse the shining corner of a game that I thought I might have wanted to play two years ago but couldn't afford to, like Indiana Jones hitting stone in the desert in Raiders. I bought Bioshock: Infinite for forty bucks the other day and devoured the game in less than a week and felt real smug afterwards, like I'd just duped Ken Levine into giving me his credit card number.

So this is my journey as a late gamer, examining the games people forgot about three years ago and I picked up, weeping in bittersweet joy at the price tag, the accomplishment of months of spoiler avoiding. I have to confess that I did preorder Remember Me for about five dollars when my wallet and checking account were housing a terrifying moth army, but I did desperately want to support a game that apparently needed to dare to have a leading female person of color. And that is the sort of anecdote that also explains a lot about what you'll find in this blog.

But join me, if you feel like it, on this belated quest, the life of the one-step-behind. It's a hard life, but some of us live it still.