n3rd

I just finished playing through American McGee's Alice as part of my continuing quest to increase my overall nerd appeal and to reduce the number of times people say What really? You never played that? Any other games that would cause you to say those very words please let me know so we can avoid future awkwardness. Overall I enjoyed the game quite a bit. I like Alice and Wonderland and I read both it and Through the Looking Glass pretty recently so inclusion of certain slightly more obscure characters (the Duchess most notably) amused me greatly. The setting was fantastic, the visual feel of all the levels was fascinating and the asylum based level was actually genuinely unnerving. Admittedly, asylums creep me right the fuck out. I think its because I'm consistently concerned that all my little neuroses may in fact add up to some actual disorder with a long hard to pronounce name that requires a padded room. I feel like however this is one of many games that was probably a lot better when it came out then it is playing now. The whole its something familiar but DARK theme has been kind of done to death at this point and I feel like Alice was probably one of the earlier examples of it being done successfully. Also the gameplay retained a number of the nagging issues that have improved through the years. The detection for jumping was a tad off throughout the game. There is one section where you ride a leaf down a stream and I think I succeeded in jumping on to the leaf approximately 2% of the times I tried. In fact I found it easier to forgo the leaf all together and risk personal harm. I admit to being a bit of a compulsive save and restarter but after hitting quick load 35 times in under 3 minutes I get pretty freaking annoyed. The largest physics issue was in its ability to detect what sort of ledges it was appropriate for me to cling to. Making a harrowing jump grabbing on the edge and pulling myself up is a tried and true jumping puzzle mechanic but it would frequently attach me to ledges with things directly above them making it impossible to actually climb up or worse attach me to ledges that belonged to moving objects such that by the time I had pulled myself up the object was not in fact underneath me and I would fall to my death. Amusing for sure but not the 15th time in a row that it happens and I have to try the series of jumps again as a result. This one jumping puzzle was the worst. Three swinging pipes to jump between. Obscenely simple in general, a lot less simple with the slightly janky controls and a random dude shooting at me. I think a full 30% of my failed attempts at that one involved me pulling myself up onto the pipe that was 10 feet to my right and falling to my immediate doom. Another thing missing that is probably more a factor of the era than anything else was much in the way of bonus material. There were numerous secret areas to find which almost exclusively contained health power ups. Now I was playing on easy difficulty so these were almost totally useless to me but even if I weren't they are quite possibly the least exciting power up possible. There is a reason I enjoy collecting coins and such, it feels like I can never get enough of them. Discovering a cleverly hidden secret area and spending time to get there only to find something that literally does nothing for you is just not fun. A few cleverly hidden creatures from the novel that were not included would have been fantastic. Or some sort of unlockables or anything really. I don't particularly feel like I have any reason at all to play the game through again.

Overall though I really enjoyed it. I think its biggest success, and potentially what ended up being its biggest contribution to future gaming, was its sensational atmosphere. The Aliceness of the game permeated its entirety. The backgrounds, the music, the weapons, all of it felt unique to this specific game and added up to a pretty cool whole. The weapons especially were fantastic. Each of them had very specific uses and methodologies and I found myself switching weapons with far more regularity than I have in any other game I can think of. They were by and large based on children's toys that were transformed into fairly sinister weapons. I mean you start with the vorpal blade and its arguably the least cool or clever of them to give you some idea how nifty the rest are. The jacks were my personal favorite though I probably used the jack in the box bomb the most. Actually let me consider just how much I really did use all the weapons. I used the croquet mallet as basically my default weapon if I wasn't sure what I would be facing. Its basic attack was solid melee damage and its secondary attack was a solid ranged attack. Versatile and useful. The jacks did a very generous amount of damage and their primary attack had a nice fire and forget feature. You toss the set of jacks at an enemy and they bounce around it dealing damage as you bounce the little jack ball thing. So you could start an attack and then run out of range as they continue to deal damage. The jack in the box explodes after a set amount of time and with some practice and timing you could annihilate even fairly difficult enemies without taking a hit if you toss one just right and run and hide until it blows up (I am so courageous and not at all cheap). The ice wand was very good for pumping out consistent damage if you can afford to be up in someone's face, I used it a lot for boss battles until I got the Jabberwock's eyestaff. The eyestaff was tremendous damage that took a bit to warm up but then let out a consistent beam for a while. Had a long range and the large damage made it my go to weapon for the later boss fights. I didn't get the blunderbuss until the very end but I used it in the final boss fight. Pretty straightforward that one. The cards were thrown as a long range attack and you could put out some really good damage really fast at the cost of burning through your mana bar. I used this mostly for guys I couldn't get a good angle on otherwise or for if someone got too up in my face and I needed them dead fast. The demon dice were incredibly clever. You throw this set of dice out and it summons a demon to fight for you. I used this mostly whenever I was against two or more enemies to distract one of them. The demons were susceptible to friendly fire so I frequently blow them up with jack in the boxes and if you summoned them with no enemies around they would turn on you. The stopwatch stopped time. Basically no combat usage but necessary for a handful of puzzles. The vorpal blade is your basic I have no mana weapon and was sort of underwhelming for being the vorpal blade but still pretty decent. Yeah come to think of it I really liked the weapons. They did a great job with that. The overall story was basically exactly what I expected it to be but it was still satisfying. It could easily have been a lot darker (and it sounds like it got tamed down during/after production) but it remains interesting in its own right.

Alice was pretty damn fun and I think the vast majority of its flaws have way more to do with inherent lacks in gameplay that were prevalent at the time. An updated version could be fantastic and I'm pretty interested in checking out what American McGee is working on now. Apparently he is doing an episodic take on the Grimm fairy tales. I'll check it out at some point but for now I'm trying to mix things up for. Next up is Portal (seriously, you never played Portal? No, no I haven't) and then after that Demigod (the box looked flashy when I was in Best Buy). After that I am open to any and all suggestions.

Totally random aside that didn't fit in anywhere else: The single most unnerving part of the game to me was almost certainly a bug rather than a feature. There is this hedge maze type area and in it the bushes were constantly shifting just slightly every time you turned. I spent the entire level thinking something was right behind me. Every time I looked at them closely though the rearranged themselves in the sprites are hard to draw so they don't always look how we want them to ok? way that I am familiar with from a decade of disappearing walls and other graphical glitches. If it was deliberate then I am really impressed. If not, then well happy accident.