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 Alone in the Dark, first released in 1992, is a Lovecraft-inspired adventure game often credited with inventing the survival horror genre. It was followed by annual sequels until the third game, which was about cowboys and no one wanted to talk about it, so the series came to an abrupt end. But that is not dead which can eternal lie, and seven years later, it was deemed time to awaken the Alone in the Dark franchise with a new game. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare was first released throughout Europe in May of 2001 and worldwide a month later, and to bury any risk that they might remind people of cowboy Carnby, it serves to reboot the franchise into a new continuity. In The New Nightmare, series staple Edward Carnby and newcomer Aline Cedrac are tasked with exploring the mysterious Shadow Island, each seeking to uncover the truth behind something in their personal lives while getting embroiled in the twisted machinations of the billionaires who own the island. The developers came up with clever tricks to do things rarely seen on PS1 hardware, but the release of the PS2 the previous year spelled doom for their efforts. An improved Dreamcast version was released soon after the PS1 version, but no one owned a Dreamcast, and ports of that version to the PC and PS2 introduced serious technical issues, with the PS2 version never seeing release outside of the PAL region. For this LP, I'll be going through both characters' campaigns on the PS1 version with my friend Bec, who suggested I check out this game in the first place. Throughout the adventure, parts of the story will be told via extremely long documents, which I'll endeavor to summarize in the videos but if you want to read their full text for whatever reason, I'll be posting links to all new documents with each update. Please do not post spoilers tagged or otherwise, and since this is a seventeen year old game based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, take particular note of the following:  Content Warnings: this game features jumpscares, sexism, and a very insensitive portrayal of Native Americans throughout. Individual episodes will have additional warnings tagged, including graphic animal abuse and body horror.Updates: Carnby 1: Beware of dogs [CW: graphic animal abuse]/Documents: 1 Documents:  Fiske's notebook
Fiendly fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Nov 5, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 17:14
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 09:26 |
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Fiendly posted:
this is only scratching the surface. this game does not give a gently caress about anything you hold dear and you should expect it to screw with you at every turn. it's irreverent and inappropriate but it's drat honest about how stupid it is. i love it for that.
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Oct 31, 2018 18:40
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God, I was looking for this forever. I remember me and my cousins playing this on a demo disk way back during a sleepover one night. Scared the poo poo out of us at our ages. I could not for the life of me pin down the name, I could only recall the demo segment. Every Alone in the Dark game I saw didn't look like what I remembered, so I figured it must have been a different game series.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:13
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Coolguye posted:this is only scratching the surface. this game does not give a gently caress about anything you hold dear and you should expect it to screw with you at every turn. it's irreverent and inappropriate but it's drat honest about how stupid it is. Guess I'm gonna have to update the content warnings as things get worse. The game overall is pretty immature, and I assume poor localization is what made the majority of the writing a mess, but it'll surprise ya from time to time. Psycho Knight posted:God, I was looking for this forever. I remember me and my cousins playing this on a demo disk way back during a sleepover one night. Scared the poo poo out of us at our ages. I could not for the life of me pin down the name, I could only recall the demo segment. Every Alone in the Dark game I saw didn't look like what I remembered, so I figured it must have been a different game series. It's a real outlier of an AitD game. I like to think it's just an unrelated horror game titled The New Nightmare, particularly because it's really funny to think an original IP would put "new" in the title for no reason.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:30
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I remember playing this back in the day but could never get very far with Carnby and only a little bit further with Aline. I never went back to finish it either despite playing all of the other games... even the 2008 game. Watching you guys play the game, it looks like could have been a really cool game if it were released a bit earlier, not rushed and didn't have problematic writing though. I am digging the setting and atmosphere and the lighting tricks are quite impressive for PS1. Also there was an Alone in the Dark game released in 2015 called Alone in the Dark Illumination. It was terrible.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:02
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Well for a start, no the abkani are not a real tribe. There is a tribe called the Abenaki though. Also some fun facts about the movie, Uwe Boll really was the one who sabotaged the movie, the first treatment written for the movie was more based off of the first three games with more of a Lovecraft vibe to it. But Boll demanded a script with two things in it, first that it be based off of The New Nightmare and that it open with a car chase. I think the results speak for themselves.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:29
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David D. Davidson posted:Also some fun facts about the movie, Uwe Boll really was the one who sabotaged the movie, the first treatment written for the movie was more based off of the first three games with more of a Lovecraft vibe to it. But Boll demanded a script with two things in it, first that it be based off of The New Nightmare and that it open with a car chase. I think the results speak for themselves. I'll gladly give Boll credit for making the movie terrible, but it probably had more to do with his apparent contempt for the art of filmmaking and whatever tax tricks he was trying to pull than anything in the script. It is quite possible that including any of the silly stuff the original trilogy is loaded with could've accidentally made the movie legitimately good, though.
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Nov 2, 2018 03:15
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What does Carnby have against White Wolf RPGs, anyway? :P
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Nov 4, 2018 23:03
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Good god, this is a PS1 game!? I was wondering why you weren't using the PS2 release, but if the PS1 looks this good, I can't fault you for it.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:48
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malkav11 posted:What does Carnby have against White Wolf RPGs, anyway? :P carnby has everything against everything in this game dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed
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Nov 6, 2018 20:27
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The Watercrown posted:Good god, this is a PS1 game!? I was wondering why you weren't using the PS2 release, but if the PS1 looks this good, I can't fault you for it. The PS2 version also has longer load times and the music pauses during every screen transition, constantly breaking the flow of the game. The Dreamcast port seems to be the best one from what I've seen by comparing YouTube videos, but like you say, the original release is more than good enough. malkav11 posted:What does Carnby have against White Wolf RPGs, anyway? :P There's a lot going against White Wolf now, so I'm inclined to agree with him on this one.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:41
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 09:26 |
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The most I can remember this game for is Carnby's absolutely ridiculous gun and one of Aline's puzzles stopping my progress even though I knew how to solve it.
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Nov 7, 2018 04:43
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