Game Life's Chris Kohler interviews President of Infogrames Phil Harrison on their upcoming title Alone in the Dark.
Chris writes:
"It's just the tiniest bit weird to hear Phil Harrison talk about Achievements and Wiimotes.
At a media event here last week, the former president of Sony's game development studios made one of his first appearances as the president of Infogrames, parent company of Atari. He was here to help promote the biggest game in the publisher's lineup: Alone in the Dark, which will ship next month on Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 2, and PC.
Harrison says that his job at Atari is to "reset the publishing part of the business and to help to grow the future of the company."
Alone in the Dark developer Pieces Interactive has been hit with layoffs a month after its release, as per the latest information.
That genuinely, genuinely sucks. The reboot has clear flaws, but it really felt like a solid first step for this team to receive *greater* investment.
That's standard. Teams are together for a Project, after its done some..and sometimes most devs are fired until the next Project is in the works and people are needed again. Only the core members stay in the time between the hot phase of the game development.
VGChartz's Lee Mehr: "In one sense, it feels strange to even think Pieces Interactive had big shoes to fill with this series' legacy. Given what's come before, did it really? And yet, even when considering the last two flops over a two-decade span, there's still something about Alone in the Dark emblazoned on a title screen that carries a sense of revered history. In that respect, perhaps this reboot's best accomplishment is in honoring that spirit through its inventive world. It's also fair to emphasize knocks against its survival-horror design, some puzzle-solving, and so on; it certainly won't be considered a trendsetter like the 1992 classic. Still, the amount of goodwill wedded to its brighter qualities makes for something that dawdles the line between unfortunately-flawed and impressively-enticing."
The new Alone in the Dark remake doesn't do anything especially noteworthy, but that doesn't mean it's bad. It's just... cromulent.