Alice isn't nearly as weird as she wants to be, which is kind of embarrassing for everyone involved. Imagine a regular guy � say, a middle-aged tile salesman or a business school student � starts wearing eyeliner and dresses up in full Goth regalia because he wants to convince everyone he's dark and edgy and full of unresolved mysterious angst. This is what Alice is like, except not nearly as entertaining. Read more here if you want specifics and then go out and buy Rayman 2.

I agree, but several of my friends swear up and down Alice is the best third person game they've ever played. I nearly choked when they compared it to Tomb Raider.

If Alice had enjoyable combat (see Rune) I could have at least tolerated it. But I was just ANNOYED after I played it for an hour. It was completely and utterly NOT fun.

Cool music and environments though.

Alice is like an anti-Sid Meier game. Sid is well-known for spending a lot of time playing the game and trying to make sure it's fun. It looks like McGee et al spent a lot of time making sure the game looked good and had the right atmosphere and relegated gameplay to the backseat.

It's so damn linear it's almost painful. While I would love a 'dark' take on Mario 64, Alice is closer to Blasto as designed by Fields of the Nephilim. I'll stick to my console games when it comes to platform action, thank you very much.

Linearity, in and of itself, isn't actually a bad thing.

What really kills Alice is tedious combat and nothing in the way of interaction with the world, eg.. gameplay.

It's all about the gameplay. Half-life was pretty damn linear, too, but you don't see anyone complaining about that, now do you?

Linearity is actually kind of a red herring. Having designers create "completely open-ended" game worlds leads to things like Daggerfall... and that ain't good.

Well, Half Life had the illusion of non-linearity, guiding players along while giving them some semblance of freedom. On the other hand, Alice feelks like a never ending corridor of skewed angles and chia-goth pretension.

"Well, Half Life had the illusion of non-linearity, guiding players along while giving them some semblance of freedom."

You know, I don't really mind a linear path if the story is good. Half-Life was like that, and so was Starcraft. Nothing you could do would change the story. The story just adds drama to the gameplay. I agree with Wumpus that non-linearity can be a problem. It's especially a problem as far as story goes. How do you tell a story if the game is non-linear?

I just placed a winning bid on the PC version of Rayman 2. If it doesn't rock me like a hurricane, Mr. Asher, I'm coming over to your house, and I'm gonna rock *YOU* like a hurricane.

My apologies to The Scorpions.

But then again, I didn't like NOLF, so what the hell do I know?

Heh -- I need to make those quotes I use to start a thread a bit clearer. Tom wrote that about Rayman 2 and I excerpted it to start the thread.

I have played it a bit on the PC and it is really nice, though. It's a console game through and through, so I hope that's what you're looking for. I'm just not a big platform jumper fan anymore.

mark ur a dick

Well, there's a quote!

Linear games don't bother me as long as I feel like I have some control, even if it's an illusion. Naked Exposition (cool handle) had it right -- if it gives the illusion of non-linearity, that's fine by me. It's far more crucial for an adventure game, too, then an RTS, because the focus is different. The focus of an adventure is just that -- adventure. A linear game, if there's not at least the illusion of control, is just a movie that you sit at your computer for. An RTS doesn't have to worry about it as much, because the story is secondary. The focus is the building and the combat.