Alice: Madness Returns

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I just finished Alice: Madness Returns. Hmm, it wasn't too bad. Some aspects of the game were interesting, but the story was rather thin. Dialogue was really good, and the Cheshire cat is awesome as always. It's a shame he had the same role from the first game. I like him

Comments

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I think the technical issues mostly had to do with the camera sometimes the angles made it very difficult and the way they had you lock on was a tad cumbersome compared to how the original worked. I just hope you weren't expecting an RPG like Final Fantasy with it. ;) It did feel a tad rushes at least though the Quality Assurance stage because it is pretty buggy.. they include the original but I even noticed they packed some of the files wrong so yeah.... the game though was mostly what *I* expected but I can see how you would expect different as you weren't really exposed to the original which emphasized the action even more than this one and had even less of a fleshed out plot in favor of running around the levels killing card guards\etc

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BTW some of the platforming elements where pretty tedious like when you have to use the jack bomb to hold a switch and quickly go to another area before it blows up.... and things like that and sometimes with the parts where you are on a gear tea table with the giant white rabbit\mad hatter overlooking the battle and you can earn another rose I kept on dying over and over

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BTW one last thing the American McGee was one of the guys who worked at id software originally on games like Doom and Quake.... the original Alice ran on the Quake 3 engine... so yeah the emphasis has always been to be more like Quake\Doom rather than some kind of adventure game\RPG. :) Although on the other hand I can see why a person would come at it thinking the plot and role playing aspects would be the focus thinking well "alice in wonderland is all about the story so it must be here too!"

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BTW if you want to talk about games that have thin plots games like Borderlands are WAY More guilty of that than Alice Madness Returns.. the ending there didn't even have any sort of meaningful payoff in any kind of way... less so than even Alice. The plot in Borderlands was thread bare in favor of "not interrupting the player with cut scenes or dialog trees" and they purposely went after that as a goal. When they would have a cut scene it was ONLY to introduce a character and the camera would zoom up to them they would do a pose and it would say their name and they would recite a line and that's it. Compared to games like those Alice had an in depth plot! ;) Of course not to the level of a totally narrative based game like say.... Heavy Rain or a full fledged adventure game which it is not

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Lol, yeah, I thought the ending was really abrupt too. And the part where the doll maker guy died, I dunno, that train was moving too slow hahaha

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I think I will take some of these questions out of order.... and I'll start with whether or not they are going to make a sequel

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I missed one question and that's about Alice being the most attractive in the game. I honestly don't know why that was the case. There didn't even seem to be anyone else the same age as her in her real life when I think about it apart from her sister who was dead and only seemed to show up as the red queen (Lizzie).... and in Wonderland she was the only human around. Perhaps it was mostly reflecting her state of mind. I think she was feeling isolated having lost her family and such... and she only spent brief moments in real life it seems as well. I don't know.... I remember some people at the American McGee forums where talking about that but I can't remember what they came up with as a reason.

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Uh oh, comment attack again. ;)

One more thing.... part of the story was also actually told within the game via the bottles you pick up from secret areas so if you didn't get all those you didn't get the full thing although those where small snippets taken individually. Also the game was full of symbolism and part of the story was actually only alluded to by the stuff you saw\encountered in wonderland. Such as the dollhouse... that represented what the evil psychiatrist was doing with the kids.... brainwashing them into "dolls" and selling them off to be slaves.

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yeah, i got around 80% of the bottles. wasn't the red queen like some alien/monster thing in the first game? i suppose lizzie as the red queen has something to do with guilt. and the lack of other people might suggest how horrible they are to her in real life, so she doesn't want them around in wonderland. except for the dollhouse, since that's important

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I'm not sure what other gameplay they could have incorporated while staying true to what the original was.... which is.. Alice at it's heart is again basically a platformer\third person shooter (although they made it more hack and slash\emphasized the melee combat in the sequel more

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BTW I forgot to mention the music was one of my favorite parts of the game and it was actually done by Chris Vrenna... a former member of Nine Inch Nails! He did the music for the first game too!

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my favorite tune is actually the one that plays on the ps3 menu, when im on the cd icon. it's a version of the main theme, but i like it a lot. i can't find it though.

shooting big pig snouts was amusing. i was expecting the duchess to try and eat alice eventually. i just wish the gameplay wasn't so repetitious, as that's its biggest flaw. without all the padding, the game would have been very short. i just hated realizing i was going to be doing the same thing over and over, for a long time.

*shrugs* i just wasn't the right person for the game. the game and music were lovely, but it wasn't exciting to play.