Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Can a man called Alan really be an iconic action hero? Divining rods point to yes after watching this actual-proper-footage demo of Alan Wake on stage at last night’s Microsoft presentation. The light-as-weapon really does look like an interesting system, and the general visuals seem to be an enormously high quality. Hard to really know if it’s going to have the frights we’d expect from a supernatural thriller, but you can bet Alan is regretting marrying a woman with such as spooky voice. Go watch.
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[Wot - Ed]

Gamershyde are the first to put up a load (if six counts of a load) of images of the mysterious Alan Wake, so they get linked. Which is pretty good – but then 1UP actually got an embedded version up, which means they get linked too and the petty little video thrown beneath the cut, plus some frame-by-frame analysis of a bloke running around in the dark with a torch.
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The mighty Shacknews points out that Remedy have murmured on their official forums, assuring fans that psychological-thriller Alan Wake is still in development.

We feel we owe you all a small heads up, and our apologies for lack of updates. This is just part of our psychological thriller, is it all real or imagined… Seriously, yes, we’re still here and working hard on getting Alan Wake for you to enjoy. Sure, we’ve been in development for a long time and if everything had gone perfectly smoothly there probably would be a game out for you guys to play already. But designing a completely new game can be hard, and sometimes you need to take a detour to find the best route forward.

Sounds like some developmental trickiness going on at the studio which produced the Max Payne games. We’re still looking forward to it…

Boo – probably no Alan Wake this year, apparently. Well, I say ‘boo’, but in all honesty we still know very, very little about this game, even though it was announced some three years ago. So I have almost no idea what it is I’m missing out on. I only know I want it.
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Well, it’s probably coming out in 2008. Rumours report it looking finished this time a year ago, so hopefully all those additional months are polishing the game up to a glowy sheen. Alan Wake is one of those projects that has rumbled along beneath the gaming radar, without ever revealing much in the way of content or planned release schedules. Nevertheless it’s a significant release: the game that the Max Payne team, Remedy, did next, and a title that Microsoft has pegged as “Vista Only” in an unsubtle attempt to nudge more gamers out of XP and into the latest operating system.

Not only that, but what we have seen of Alan Wake so far suggests it could be a genuinely interesting survival horror, mixing up the action of Max Payne with a freeform world and Resident Evil-style frighteners.

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