Alone in the Dark With Alone in the Dark
In the late night hours, you find yourself doing things that you normally wouldn’t when it comes to entertainment. Whether you all of a sudden realize you’ve just sat through 4 hours of a Bob Newhart marathon, or you’ve mindlessly ambled through a viewing of Bewitched (the movie), it has happened to all of us. The later it gets, the more your standards go out the door, and it gets to the point to where you will take just about anything…whether you like it or not. I guess it’s sorta like being an ugly girl in that respect.
To be completely honest, I’m typing this to try to get that whole thing going where you all agree and then think to yourself about what horrors you subjected yourself to for the sake of late night entertainment. It’s supposed to help you relate to me, and more than anything is supposed to make me not look completely insane when I tell you that it is 3:30AM on a Friday morning, and I just spent the last hour burning down every fucking evil root on Alone in the Dark for the 360.
Yes, THAT game. The worst of the worst, the shittiest of the shit. The first game since Predator for the NES that I actually regret purchasing. There is not one redeemable quality about this game. I spent more time questioning why this bastard exists more than I did playing it. Was this the biggest rush-job ever, or just the greatest case of laziness in quite a long time? Whatever the reason may be, it is a putrid excuse for a game, and it deserves to be right next to the possibly-disintegrating-by-now remains of ET in whatever landfill it calls home. I have seriously tried to sit down and write a review for this game since it first came out… and I just can not do it. I can’t even put together the words without getting furious about the whole experience. If you’ve played it, then you know what I mean.
Consider yourself "special" if you picked up this edition.
So anyway, back to the evil roots. Like I said, if you’ve played it, then I’m sure this section of the game holds a special place in your heart. For those lucky enough not to have played it, there is a point toward the later portion of the game where there are “Evil Roots” sprouting up all over Central Park. What are Evil Roots? Who knows. Just know that killing them is tedious and not fun at all (actually I guess they do end up living up to their namesake). With each root you burn down, you gain some spectral vision bullshit that you have to have up to a certain level to progress. Once you hit this level after killing enough roots you can go on and finish the game, sparing any extra roots in the process. I was more than happy to do this when I was playing through. It had gotten to the point where I said out loud that if this game wasn’t over in an hour, I was turning it off. So I ended up leaving behind a few roots with no intention of ever caring that I never killed the rest.
A good 6 or 7 months go by and it is a very late night and I find myself running a fever. In my feverish and half-asleep state, I flip through games and pause when I come across the Alone in the Dark box. I pause, and because of my recent addiction to getting any leftover achievements I missed in my first playthrough of games I beat, end up popping it in. Mostly because I am curious as to how many roots there are total that I needed to take out to earn those fleeting 50 gamerscore. I realize that the game has saved my progress, even though I am skipping chapters, and that a total of six roots still remain. I continue to stare blankly, knowing full well that what I’m about to do will probably make me hate myself for the better part of next week. Is six roots really worth it?
The start button is pressed.
What followed was an hour of gunshots, cursing, flaming bottles being tossed around like footballs, more cursing, and discovering that if you tape bullets to a flammable liquid, it will cause an explosion roughly equal to an atomic bomb. It took an hour mainly because I didn’t realize until about 45 minutes in that I wasn’t wearing my glasses… which sort of explained why I was missing every single thing I aimed at. After tossing on my apparently very necessary eye-wear, I went on a tear. The six roots went down fairly easy, with the exception of the last. It was too far away to shoot or throw a bottle, and I couldn’t reach it by foot or car. It wasn’t until I furiously put my foot down as hard as I could on the gas and took off up a ramp that looked nothing like a ramp that I finished the last one off. Of course I had originally planned on just running straight into it with the car in anger, so imagine my surprise when apparently I was supposed to use the car to land on the edge of a piece of road, and that when I hit it would cause a teeter-totter action that would send another flaming car directly into the root.
That sadly ended up being one of the more thought out parts of the game, and it still barely worked.
With all the roots now sent off to wherever roots go to die, I now am the owner of a few things:
- 100% Spectral Vision
- 50 Achievement Points
- Regret
I then tried to trump that by going through that fucking Level 3 car scene without dying. I don’t know how my neighbors feel about hearing a grown man yell out, “Fuck you, goddamn fuck-car,” at 3:30 in the morning. I would probably meet it with either a small laugh or a shake of the head.
This is roughly how I looked after finishing.
Goddamn achievements. I’m already hating myself.
