"Where's my damn coffee?!"

I just beat Alan Wake, Remedy and Microsoft’s psychological horror thriller, and while it’s a great game one thing baffled me – well, beside the entire plot. Throughout the game are scattered 100 coffee thermoses; their inclusion (I’m inferring) is that they keep A. Wake awake (har har). But acquiring them is completely optional. The haunted writer doesn’t have a ‘stamina’ or ‘sleep’ gauge that needs to be maintained, which makes the coffee collection one of the oldest (and most tired) gameplay mechanics: the pointless collectible.

Continue Reading

Ubisoft just filed a trademark application for “Horse Gaga,” suggesting that the game publisher ran out of ideas and is now taking to the Video Game Name Generator for its future titles. The application only says this for details:

Entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game for others over global and local area computer networks and providing information on-line relating to computer games, video games and computer and video games related products.

Continue Reading

Here’s an interesting patent from Sony describing a video game demo whose features degrade over time. The illustration above spells it out: You download the entire game, and at first all its features are available to you. But after several hours, your character becomes less powerful. In another scenario, Sony describes a racing game that depletes the number of available tracks with each race. Eventually, you’re left with very little, unless you choose to unlock all features you once had. The patent even allows for subtler changes in a game’s sound effects, lighting and color. Sony says it could distribute these demos on physical media — it’d have to, given that Blu-ray-based games would be inconvenient to download.

Continue Reading

While some games are content to pillage and defile classic literature, I’ve got faith that designer Goichi Suda can pull of a game inspired by the writings of Franz Kafka. The Playstation 3-exclusive project, dubbed Kurayami, is Japanese for “darkness,” and will feature a character fending off foes with a torch while exploring a strange, eerily-lit town. No word yet on the link to existentialism, but this is from a guy who’s track record includes a game about an assassination squad comprised of one man’s split personalities and another about an anime fan who becomes an assassin after winning a lightsaber-like sword on the Internet. So while all we’ve got now are some concept shots on no release date in sight, Kurayami’s got my interest piqued. [GameKyo via Destructoid]

Continue Reading