Alone in the Dark

It came free with my new graphics card, so that was the first sign that something would probably go horribly wrong.

Actually, I guess the first sign was three years ago, when Uwe Boll got involved. And the second sign was when the game came out, and Atari was being a dick about nobody liking it. So the third was the game being free, and the fourth was when it failed to start up, moments after installation, because of a bullshit SecuROM error.

The fifth sign was when the game told me to press X to blink. Yeah, as you might expect of any good cliched adventure game, the story begins with you waking up after being knocked unconscious, and since your vision is all blurry, you need to blink to clear it up. Not just once. Continually. This eventually goes away, minutes later, but I'm pretty sure a "blink" button is something that would never get past any halfway-decent QA department.

The sixth sign was at the precise moment the blink feature became obsolete, when the game's first-person perspective shifted to third. The third-person controls are somewhat like Resident Evil, e.g. you go forward/back with W/S, and turn with A and D. The mouse does nothing here. This is where the game starts screaming "BUY A GAMEPAD, FUCKHEAD!"

Thankfully, you can hit Tab to switch back to first-person. But the seventh sign that the game is absolute shit comes when you do, well, anything - this act of doing anything switches the perspective back to third-person automatically. I was basically spamming the Tab key most of the time. And, following up on the fuckhead problem, the game's eighth sign is when it told me to press Print Screen (yeah, that one!) to jump onto a ledge.

All of this happened in the first chapter. Well, actually that last one was in the first few seconds of chapter 2. So to be fair, there are only seven reasons for you to stop playing in the first chapter alone. As for reasons to continue playing, there might be one, in a part where I had to pull some rapelling maneuvers in an elevator shaft. For that brief sequence, maybe a minute or so, AITD resembled a real game.

What a load of shit.

Progress: Gave Up -- Figuring out how to uninstall SecuROM