RayCarsilloWrites.com

Originally Published: February 11, 2010, on Examiner.com

Two of the year’s most anticipated titles have new release dates, and neither is as soon as were previously hoped.

At today’s X10, the Xbox 360 centered video game expo, being held in San Francisco, the folks from Remedy Entertainment announced that the industry wide speculated release date of April 13th for Alan Wake was false and that their anxiously awaited, episodic psychological thriller for the Xbox 360 and PC, would not see store shelves until May 18th.

Not really a surprise considering how many delays this game has seen since its original announcement, what is another month to those willing to shell out the $59.99 for it?

For those of you caught unawares, Alan Wake sees the title character, a horror writer, and his wife taking a vacation in a tranquil Pacific Northwestern city trying to help Alan overcome his writer’s block. Once in the town though, Alan starts having nightmares and wakes up one night to find his wife is missing and a story he can’t remember writing has come to life. As Alan scrounges about the wilderness collecting pages from his otherworldly novel, trying to find his wife and unravel the mystery of where the book came from, he must combat members of the community who have been consumed by a poltergeist-like darkness.

Done in a cinematic like style that sees each level of Alan’s exploration broken down into something like episodes out of the X-Files (even with a nice little narrator’s “On the last episode of…” montage between levels), Alan Wake is a story that can’t help but pull you in.

I had a chance to play a short demo of the first couple of levels where Alan must use any light source he can find to wane the darkness off of the townspeople he encounters before giving them a proper beating. From what I saw, the game could use an extra month of tweaking. It seemed as if the audio in some of the cinematic scenes was out of sync with the gameplay and the game glitches at the worst possible moments for the survival horror like action sequences. Maybe I had the displeasure of picking up an older demo, but with any luck this game will finally see the light of day come May 18th and with all the rough edges smoothed out.

In other release date news, Capcom removed the Q1 label from their next highly anticipated foray into survival horror, Dead Rising 2. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, Q1 was an optimistically unrealistic time period and so Capcom announced that Dead Rising 2 will hit North America on August 31st, 2010, with Japan getting it September 2nd and Europe September 3rd.

Not much else was revealed from Capcom besides screenshots and trailers that had already been released, but the fact that the game has a solid date now that actually lands in this calendar year is just another reason to this New Yorker that the summer months can’t get here soon enough.