As you know, I love my horror games and I’ll champion the worst looking stuff around if there’s some semblance of a decent plot rummaging around under all the muck and the mire. So I’ve had my eye on Rainy Woods for a long time.

A really long time.

So long in fact that I refuse to call it by its awful new name, Deadly Premonition. I have a weird feeling that I’m going to enjoy this more than the similarly themed Alan Wake when it’s released in the Spring, which is a statement of borderline madness to some. At the end of the day, I also liked Alone in The Dark 5 and hated Okami. That’s how screwed up my gaming senses are nowadays.

Who’s going to stop me anyway? Some folks from the internet? Oh, please.

So here are a few reasons why I got dibs on a game nobody wants!

It’s still Twin Peaks despite the changes!



Remember when Rainy Woods got so much stick for looking ‘exactly’ (see also: vaguely) like Twin Peaks and had to go into redevelopment to avoid being sued by David Lynch? You know, a man who really wouldn’t care about these things and never even remotely sent the developers, Access Games, a letter from his lawyers?

Me too, and it broke my heart to see that happen. For an industry built on plagiarism and simulacrums, I didn’t see the fuss. How many games do you know of that has James Cameron’s winning formula of ‘outgunned space marines vs aliens’? It’s a lot, right? Of course it is. Why do people think that David Lynch would sue anyway? He had less input in that series than co-creator Mark Frost, so by rights, it would be Frost who cared.

Oh, I forget that nobody on the internet has actually watched more than one episode of Twin Peaks. Just because you typed ‘Twin Peaks’ into Google, it does not make you Jim Garrison from JFK.



So why would anybody get their knickers in a twist about a videogame that fondly riffs on a brilliant post-modern soap opera? I’d kill for a Twin Peaks style game and when Rainy Woods was announced, my prayers were answered. But I guess when you like to think you’re artistic and underground with cinematic culture, you’re required to take offence for the directors who don’t even know you. Look, I like David Lynch too, but the man made Dune.

Have you ever watched Dune?

Ouch.

What irked me the most was that way too many people were complaining about the red velvet room, the club singers, the weird midgets, the FBI agent and the small town murder...and that was it; nothing about the game beyond the visuals have much in common with Twin Peaks’ tale of incest, murder, drug running, prostitution and black coffee. I guess the argument falls flat when you recall that nobody in Twin Peaks was strung up ‘torture porn’ style or that Special Agent Dale Cooper didn’t battle creepy ghost women and axe wielding monsters on a regular basis. But let’s not get picky, huh?





The new version of...ugh...Deadly Prem---Rainy Woods looks virtually identical, but with a remodelled FBI agent and the scene of two midgets in a red velvet room replaced with twins in the woods. Oh and the town is no longer called Rainy Woods. It’s Greenvale. So basically, Access Games spent two extra years of redevelopment pretending to change a lot to shut the critics up.

It’s still the same game I liked the look of back in 2007.

Good.

The story is going to be great!

C’mon, it’s got an FBI agent with a split personality tracking down a serial killer who’s crazier than him! What’s not to love about that? It’s the perfect set up for an interactive mystery and how many games have you played (non-DS or PC) where you’re travelling around during a day and night cycle and questioning townsfolk with dark pasts in a town that’s more crazy than the one found in the forgotten PC horror game, Harvester.

I’ve sat through a lot of rubbish games where the story has held together so well that I forgive the flaws just to see it through to the end. I don’t care much for graphics; to me, that’s an added bonus. I don’t think Access Games care much for the graphics either, since they didn’t really have the budget to care in the first place. When you’re low budget, you make sure everything else is the best it can be. If you’ve read the director’s blog on the game’s website, I think he’s got that covered. Phew!



It’s so obscure, Gamespot forum users won’t make a negative impact!

Seriously, with less people (who in their own minds are real journalists) bitching about this game, there’s going be less chance of it being unfairly remembered as a ‘piece of trash’. Then maybe we can all get on with our lives. Obviously, that’s a little naive, but when you’ve got one guy on Gamespot constantly complaining to five curious people, then it’s not going to be detrimental to Rainy Woods’ already non-existent success. It won’t suffer the humility that Alone in the Dark 5 or Kane & Lynch: Dead Men had to endure.

Seriously though, this one guy has been complaining about Rainy Woods for years. I looked up Deadly Premoniton recently and he was still there complaining about how the game ripped off Twin Peaks. You can’t miss him. He’s the only one who actually gives a toss about this game, even if he does hate it. I once asked him if he ever saw the show. Obviously, he said no.

Oh well.

The gameplay is familiar survival horror!



Nothing says safe than seeing a few familiar elements being implemented in a game that you’re unsure about. The action scenes look like Resident Evil 4 and we all loved that game (well, I liked it more than loved it). Apparently, there’s a whole investigative angle where you search crime scenes for clues, interfere with the townsfolk’s personal business, eat on a regular basis to keep your stamina up and surviving the nights fighting off hordes of J-Horror spooks. It sort of reminds me of Shadow of Memories meets Clock Tower (the PS1 version) with a hint of Silent Hill. It sounds thoroughly like a traditional survival horror game and that’s a rare thing with the next-gen consoles.

It’s got PS2/Dreamcast graphics!



If I remember rightly, we all loved the PS2 and some really loved the Dreamcast. So what is everyone’s problem with the dated graphics?!

I think far too many people are spoiled with eye candy nowadays. That said, only ‘the kids’ care about the graphics...but ‘the kids’ aren’t going to buy this game. So who cares what they think? The people in your local game shop might look at you as if you’ve bought RapeLay when you hand over Rainy Woods, but considering they’ve tried to make me pre-order Aliens: Colonial Marines several times with the insistence that it ‘will be out this year, trust me’, then I don’t think you should ever worry about what they think.

It’s coming out before Alan Wake

Hey, it’s something to whet your appetite in the meantime, right?

I know it’s easy to take the piss out of Rainy Woods, but how different is it really to Alan Wake’s premise of ‘an average Joe discovering the dark side Happy Town, USA’. Sure, Alan Wake will be the refined, more mature and polished title, but if it didn’t have that, would people take the storyline just as seriously? To me, Rainy Woods is like if the Japanese watched The X Files, emulated the show but missed the subtle points and added their own melodramatics to the proceedings. That might sound awful...but it’s not!

It’ll be cheap in the US!

There’s no sign of a UK release yet, but if it turns out to be multi-region, then I’ll import it. It’s only $20 and even if I do import it with the extra charge, that’s still about £22-£25 out of my wallet! BARGAIN! If their previous interest in the game is anything to go by, Rising Star Games might pick it up for Europe though. The most reassuring response I’ve read on their forums was:

‘Thanks for the heads up.’

Considering I don’t have any hopes for a UK release right now, that truly constitutes as reassuring. I will however go completely nuts if 505 Games gets a hold of this game. They’d butcher it with their own needless localisations, making it buggy in the process, and then spit inside the case before giving it to you.

I really hate 505 Games.

It’s not Ellis (ho ho ho...ahem)



So I’ll definitely be buying Rainy Woods/Deadly Premonition/Twin Peaks: The Game and honestly, in my head at least, I think I’m championing a dark horse here. It may be the ugly, unwashed, ‘kill-all-sons-of-a-bitches’ hick of a cousin to the likes of Alan Wake and Heavy Rain, and I know it’s not going to be groundbreaking, but I think there’s something great threatening to break through the membrane here; enough to make it worth placing next to these big hitters on my shelf come Spring 2010.

So, who’s with me?

*tumbleweed*

Well, I tried.

http://www.deadlypremonition.com