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Alan Wake Reconfirmed As PC/360 Exclusive
Alan Wake (the game with the really great tornado from last year's E3) has been reconfirmed as an exclusive title for Microsoft platforms. Via Wired's Game|Life blog, the news comes from the awesomely named Helsingin Sanomat website. Remedy (makers of the Max Payne titles) had this game slated as a 360/PC exclusive back in their E3 2006 trailers, but news of Microsoft's new 'mentoring' role for the company appears to have renewed interest in the game. It's unclear why Microsoft isn't following their general pattern of purchasing the company outright, but the 30-employee strong company is staying independent. Microsoft's resources still back the company, though: "Microsoft has huge machinery for games production. If a team of 80 voice actors are needed from the States, they can provide it. Their test laboratory is also fantastic."
Was there really any doubt about the 360/PC exclusive?
If it wasn't for the videos and the apparent "Demo" I'd call vapourware.
I've been waiting for this game for more than a year now, given it was supposed to be a 360 launch title as I understand it.
Gonna be passing on this one.
No, this is NOT a PC/360 exclusive title. This is a VISTA/360 exclusive title.
From TFA (emphasis mine): Alan Wake will require either the Windows Vista operating system or Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console as its platform.
Go f**k yourselves, Remedy! I'm not switching to Vista just to play one of your damned games! You want me to play your game? I expect a copy of Vista to come with it, and we all know that that's NOT going to happen. Otherwise, I'll be sticking with XP and going back to your gaming pinnacles, Max Payne and Max Payne 2!
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I wonder how many of all these announced games, including alan wake, which will end up using DirectX 10.1.
Possibly they are more than anyone cares to admit, today only few days after Vista's launch into the land of no DirectX 10.0 games in sight...
What does the summary mean by saying "the awesomely named Helsingin Sanomat website"? Is it perhaps the typo "Helsingen Sanomat" in the actual article? Something else? I really don't know what's so awesome about it. "Sanomat" is just a word meaning newspaper in finnish. Just like in "The New York Times" or "The Sydney Morning Herald". City name and newspaper suffix. Nothing else.
If it's really going to require DX10 then it's not going to be due out for a long long time. ATI just very recently released DX10 cards and Nvidia hasn't had them out very long either. All of them are extremely expensive and it'll take a great deal of time for DX10 to build the market mass to support any kind of reasonably succesful game limited to DX10 only.
"Microsoft has huge machinery for games production. If a team of 80 voice actors are needed from the States, they can provide it. Their test laboratory is also fantastic."
What?! If they are so fantastic, where is the DX10 patch for Flight Simulator X?
Microsoft has huge machinery for games production. If a team of 80 voice actors are needed from the States, they can provide it. Their test laboratory is also fantastic.
If those voice actors are the same as Microsoft must have hired for the english version of 99 Nights, a game made by Q Entertainment but mostly funded by Microsoft and published exclusively for the 360, then I'll suddenly become a lot less interested in Alan Wake. As for testing...
I was waiting for someone to state that exact response. Thank you for not making me wait too long. No, it absolutely does not sound silly. Your attempt to equate the two is what sounds silly, or actually closer to ignorant.
As people like you always tend to forget, upgrading a PC vs. a console it a totally different experience. When you upgrade a console, it's with the expectation of newer and better games. The console is expected to be engineered with a narrow scope and hardware platform with one specific function -- to play games, although admittedly many are marching towards becoming media centers. The hardware is a specific chipset; the coding is for a specific set of circuitry. You can have a reasonable expectation that everything will work just fine and if something goes wrong, you lose your ability to play games.
With Remedy's expectations that you must upgrade to Vista, there are a ton of other issues that might be affected. We're already getting reports of hardware and software incompatibilities across the board. If you have iTunes, don't go to Vista - the blue screen will follow. I've been reading that old games run slower on Vista than on XP. I've not heard good things about NVidia's drivers for Vista. There are lots of reports of application incompatibility.
So, upgrading to Vista just because Remedy doesn't want to use DX9 will likely have more ramifications than just the cost of upgrading to a new operating system. In this case, if something goes wrong you could lose a lot more than just your ability to play games, not the least of which is who-know-how-many hours possibly rebuilding your PC, loss of data, inability to use software that you've been using for years, and lots of other headaches that have been reported for just about every new Windows version since 3.1 -> 95.
In fairness, some have reported no problems at all with Vista, and I say "Good for them". And, yes, yes, we know all about backups or using a test PC instead, blah, blah, blah. We're geeks. We know all about that. Some ignoramus parent who buys Vista (A) because it's programmed into them by Microsoft marketing, (B) because they want to have the newest status symbol, or (C) because their kid is screaming to play Crysis or Alan Wake isn't going to take the same precaution and therefore risks encountering a lot of upgrade problems. "Gee, dad. Did you back up all of your data before you tried to upgrade?" "No." "How far back does your data go?" "Since XP was released." You don't run into that with a console upgrade because your old console is still there!
Upgrading to Vista just to play one game has far more risks involved for things that have nothing to do with that game than buying a new console just to play one game. Forcing customers to a whole new operating system is a much more arrogant statement on the company than forcing them to buy a new console.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
This is exactly the argument that I'm sick of getting into with die-hard console fans with respect to upgrading. Most of us at least know that when upgrading to a new Micosoft operating system to install it on a test box, install it on our main box after all of our pertinent data is backed up, or install it on a box where we don't really care if the data is lost. The average Joe who doesn't know nearly as much about computers as we do and whose kids want to play any DX10-only game is NOT going to take any kinds of precaution and will just throw himself into the trusting arms of Microsoft's developers. If anything happens, there are going to be a lot of curse words thrown around and possibly some memories lost that otherwise might not have been lost. I know, I know, a bitched Vista upgrade doesn't mean that data will be suddenly lost, but I know a lot of people who equate "Windows problem" with "must format the hard drive".
With a console, you don't have a choice -- you MUST buy a new box, so the old one is still around to fall back on. Most people who upgrade to Vista aren't going to have that luxury. A console "upgrade" cannot possibly be compared to a Vista "upgrade" unless people are forced to buy a new PC in order to run Vista, which would be disastrous for Microsoft. Anyone who intentionally tries to make the two the same thing clearly doesn't know what he's talking about or is just looking for an argument.
Not really an exclusive when you buy the company.
Showing my age, I saw the title and flashed on a port to the really *big* iron. Consoles, eh? You kids don't even know you're alive! Games should be printed out in EBCDIC after showing in green screen. And get off my damn lawn!
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson