Alice: Madness Returns

I meant to post about Gallery Nineteen Eighty-Eight's "Alice: Madness Returns" exhibit long ago, and although the exhibit itself (June 8th to 12th) has come and gone, there were a few standout pieces that really caught my eye.

I will say this: EA and Spicy Horse know how to market the hell out of a videogame. Pairing up with a handful of talented artists and the renowned Gallery Nineteen Eighty-Eight for a show themed around "Alice: Madness Returns" brings the game to the attention of all sorts of people, gamers and otherwise, who might have been tempted to dismiss it as a cheap sequel. It's a brilliant move.

Also brilliant is the fact that the official "Alice" store is selling prints of all of the pieces shown at the G1988 exhibit, alongside prints of some absolutely stunning concept art from the game.

As for the game itself? I've played through the first few levels, and while it's not the greatest videogaming experience of all time, it's pretty solid. Gameplay, style and tone are the same as the original, so if you enjoyed that, there's no reason why you wouldn't enjoy this. At the same time, thus far at least it doesn't have anything all that new to offer, as far as third-person action-adventure games go.

Which is beside the point, really, since "Alice: Madness Returns" is aimed at people who appreciate style over substance. That sounds harsh, but it's meant as a compliment: the game is shiny, slick and clever, and if it doesn't have much in the way of profundity, who cares? It's a freaking videogame. It's job is to look nice, sound nice, and play nice. All of which "Alice: Madness Returns" manages with aplomb.


"Alice's Phantasmagoria" by Ken Wong


"Adventures First...Explanations Take Such a Dreadful Time" by Kevin Tong


"Alice: Madness Returns" by Phantom City Creative


"The Little Magician" by Brian Colin

Alice: Madness Returns

The original American McGee's Alice was, in my opinion, an underrated cult classic, a dark revisionist take on Lewis Carroll's Wonderland novels with phenomenal character design and a grim and clever sense of humour. Although it received a fair amount of criticism for its poor controls, the outdated (though striking) graphics, and the fairly straightforward game structure, it had a kind of indie dark-horse charm to it, featured an absolutely haunting soundtrack by Chris Vrenna (of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson), a well-thought-out world map, and one of the best weapons rosters of all time, including a Blunderbuss, a Croquet Mallet, and Jacks. I played the hell out of it, and loved every second of it.

It looks like American McGee is at it again with the forthcoming sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, slated for a June 14th, 2011 release, and based on the below gameplay trailer, it looks like a return to form. I couldn't be more excited about this game if I tried. Previously, I'd been a bit wary, as everything McGee's done in the interim has been - to put it kindly - underdeveloped at best, but the video highlights what looks to be a definite improvement in both visuals and controls, and I'm now counting down the days until June 14th.

Of course, I got this unreasonably excited about Epic Mickey too, and look how that turned out.  Oh well.  Fingers crossed!

Miscellany.

The biggest problem with blogging about videogames is that, well, you have the built-in distraction of playing videogames when you should be blogging. I tried to bring the two worlds together earlier today by writing a review of my latest pixellated fixation, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, but instead I just ended up playing the game itself for five hours. FIVE HOURS. And it's not even that great a game (Kotaku says pretty much everything I was going to say anyway, in slightly different terms, in their own review. Yeah, I'm not a lazy blogger; I'm efficient).

But I should probably stop shirking my duties already and draw attention to a few interesting developments in Videogame World - developments which numerous other far-more-responsible and on the ball blogs have gotten to first. What are you gonna do?

First off, American McGee's back at the Alice mill, and while there hasn't been a whole lot of media, there is this intriguing trailer making the rounds. The first Alice was, for all of its superficial Hot-Topic\Tim-Burton-ripoff qualities, a solid third-person actioner with some very clever design elements, and I'm curious to see where McGee ends up going with this.

The MMO thing has been getting stale in recent years, but The Secret World (which may or may not be the official title) looks like it may inject some new life into the genre. Or not; it's hard to tell given the similarly-limited material available thus far. Either way, the contemporary urban setting and secret-society theme is a welcome new approach to the tired, hack-and-slash fantasy conceit of 90% of the current crop of MMOs. My brother (who both plays a lot more MMORPGs than I do and reads a lot more comics than I do) describes it as "a bad-ass Hellblazer MMO", and I have no choice but to defer to his expertise in such matters.

Finally, via Threadless offers up this little retro gem:

So they weren't aliens after all. I mean, the ships are probably being flown by aliens. Possibly aliens that look exactly like said ships. There are so many meta-layers here I can't even begin to comment.

You can get it here for the very reasonable price of $18.