The Week According to Foo

The start of the week was quite bad in a way. Not 'bad' bad, but sort of 'disappointing' bad, if you know what I mean (chances are that you do not). My Rock Band kick-drum pedal broke, you see and everything in the world seemed to fade into irrelevance at this tragic event. Not for long, though, as EA sent me a new one! Yay! Suddenly the world seemed a better place and a little nicer smelling at that. Thank you, EA, very muchly.

You see, I feel that the drums are the core of that game, and it's certainly its main selling point. It's because we've all played the bygone Guitar Heroes and some of us have played SingStar, so it was obvious the main attraction Rock Band has to fans of the Rock-Bemani sub-genre is the drum-kit. I'm pretty sure that most of the people who bought Rock Band spent the first few hours getting to grips with that rather marvellous piece of gaming kit rather than repeating something they'd done on Guitar Hero and SingStar before it. I'd also wager a fair amount who bought Rock Band bought the game and the standalone drum-kit and chose to either ignore the 'Band in a Box' or wait until a later date before picking up the remaining peripherals.

But that's old news now. What's new news is that I've bought Alone in the Dark for my Xbox 360. I've played a good 2 hours of it and frankly, despite being disappointed at just how bad it is to actually play, it seems to get better the more I play it. This might be down to me becoming honed to the nuances of the game; for instance the control system and the way your character moves. It might be that I'm getting dragged in by the story and that no amount of clunky gameplay can make me deviate from it. But it might just be that the game is simply getting better - no more, no less - as if the developers started the game from the first level (or, as they're called in Alone in the Dark, episode) and worked it's way to the end of the game, slowly becoming more accomplished at making the game they wanted to make.

I very much doubt it'll end up being The Best Game I've Ever Played in The World Ever™, but it could very well become one of those games that isn't praised by absolutely everyone in the world, but finds its own loyal devoted fans that love the game despite its shortcomings and such, and that I might find that, come completion, I can call myself a member of this small club. At the moment, it's hard to say whether I will or won't, but I will definitely tell you if I do and if I don't. 

There is a game that I have happened across in the past and I truly believe it is one of the most criminally underrated games in the history of man… that's for another time, but the same place.