Chinese cosplay photographer Mengjie Luan is back with another set of spectacular pics.
In the above gallery, there are Alice: Madness Returns photos with cosplayer Jill. "There were some problems and headaches during the Alice shoot—but in the end it worked out great," Meng told Kotaku. "I also finally learned the meaning of '苦逼造就牛片' or 'hardship brings great pictures.'"
Besides Alice: Madness Returns, Meng recently completely some photo shots of popular online game League of Legends with cosplayers Xiao Luojun and Ying Tao.
"I personally prefer to cosplay games, mostly because most of my spare time is already taken up by playing League of Legends," said Xiao. "I spent a lot of time working on this cosplay and when I saw the results, I was stunned."
That's the thing about Meng's photos: you always end up stunned.
Read more about Meng in Kotaku's feature on him and his work.
Since running a big, enjoyable feature on Duncan Harris, the "video game photographer" behind the website DeadEndThrills. Harris takes some of the most evocative, compelling video game screenshots I've ever seen, and so I thought it would be fun to share some of his work each week here.
Awesomely, he has also released a new collection of shots formatted expressly for the iPad. Which means: Baller iPad backgrounds for everyone!
Anyhow, let's go through some new entires, largely focusing on Alice: Madness Returns.
Epic shot from Alice here, one of those great long-angle shots. It took me a moment to realize that London is not, in fact, burning.
Tools and tricks: 2160p rendering, antialiasing (FXAA injection w/ texture pre-sharpening), restored UE3 developer commands, noclip, fixed camera, custom FOV.
Very cool one of Alice here, and she does indeed look quite a bit like Wynona.
Tools and tricks: 2160p rendering, antialiasing (FXAA injection w/ texture pre-sharpening), restored UE3 developer commands, noclip, fixed camera, custom FOV.
This is interesting, so I'll just quote Harris directly:
I'm trying something a little different with some of these, in response to what strikes me as either an odd feature or technical flaw in this game's use of fog. You see it quite a bit in Unreal games, this featureless miasma that sucks contrast and colour from the entire scene where you'd expect it to be more precise. The solution, as much as there is one, is to freeze the game, take a shot, then disable the fog and take another, using a custom keyboard bind to toggle the effect. Then you layer one atop the other in Photoshop and simply lower the fog to about 40 per cent opacity. Tools and tricks: 2160p rendering, antialiasing (FXAA injection w/ texture pre-sharpening), restored UE3 developer commands, noclip, fixed camera, custom FOV.
This one makes me really want to play Alice: Madness Returns. Everything I've heard about the game suggests something I won't really like… but I love the fantasy implied by these screenshots.
Tools and tricks: 2160p rendering, antialiasing (FXAA injection w/ texture pre-sharpening), restored UE3 developer commands, noclip, fixed camera, custom FOV.
Let's end on something different—another of the amazing upres'd Mario Galaxy screenshots Harris was posting a few weeks back. Remarkable.
Dolphin emulator (OpenGL), 2160p rendering, antialiasing (4xMSAA), textures patched (HUD, pause screen), free camera, bilinear downsampling.
Coming to comic shops and specialty retailers near you, these Gentle Giant sculpted action figures give Alice: Madness Returns a chance to play with the darker side of Lewis Carroll's creations.
Seen above is Diamond Select Toys' Alice: Madness Returns Select Figure assortment, based on American McGee's dark video game return to Wonderland.
The $22 assortment of 7-inch-scale figures includes Alice, the Cheshire Cat and a Card Guard. Each figure is fully articulated and comes in over-sized collector packaging. Alice comes with her Vorpal blade, Hobby Horse and Pepper Grinder weapons as accessories.
Below we see the Alice: Madness Returns Hysteria Alice Select Figure PX. This bloody variant of Alice shows her in eye-bleeding Hysteria mode and comes with uniquely painted Vorpal blade, Hobby Horse and Pepper Grinder weapons. Only available to Previews customers, this 7-inch-scale figure is fully articulated and comes in oversized collector packaging for $22.
This week on the PlayStation store, the pickings are slimmer for new games than they've been, but there is still some fun stuff to be found. Alice: Madness Returns arrives as a downloadable game, with a full-game trial for PlayStation Plus users. Rocksmith owners will have a chance to download some killer Megadeth tracks, which is never a bad thing, and there are a whole grip of game videos (yay!) to tide you over through the holidays, including the trailer for Naughty Dog's just-announced The Last of Us, which beats trying to watch it on YouTube.
Read the full list below:
Family Feud Decades ($9.99)
Red Faction: Armageddon ($39.99)
Alice: Madness Returns ($39.99)
Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood ($19.99)
Winter Stars Demo
The King Of Fighters XIII Demo
EyePet & Friends Pack (x2) (free – $2.99)
EyePet & Friends Add-Ons (x4) ($0.69 – $1.49)
LittleBigPlanet 2 Muppets Costume Pack 2 ($5.95)
LittleBigPlanet 2 Costumes (x4) ($1.99 each)
Everybody Dance Pack 4-5 ($8.99 each)
SingStar Song Packs ($6.99)
Battlefield 3 – Physical Warfare Pack (free)
Duke Nukem Forever – The Doctor Who Cloned Me ($9.99)
Disney Universe – Nightmare Before Christmas Level Pack ($4.99)
Need For Speed: The Run – Heroes And Villains & Le Upgrade ($4.99)
Ace Combat Assault Horizon various add ons (x11) (free – $11.99 each)
Champion Jockey – Music Pack 3 ($1.49)
Assassin's Creed Revelations Ancestors Character Pack ($3.99)
Motionsports: Adrenaline – Urban Jungle ($4.99)
Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 10-Character Pack ($2.99)
Marvel Pinball: Vengeance And Virtue ($9.99)
Zen Pinball: Epic Quest Table ($2.49)
Rocksmith – Hangar 18 By Megadeth ($2.99)
Rocksmith – Public Enemy No. 1 By Megadeth ($2.99)
Rocksmith – Smoke On The Water By Deep Purple ($2.99)
Rocksmith – Symphony Of Destruction By Megadeth ($2.99)
Rocksmith – Megadeth 3-Song Pack ($7.99)
Under Siege Original Soundtrack – PSN Exclusive ($3.99)
The Last Of Us Announce Trailer
Carnival Island
The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim Live Action TV Commercial Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Launch Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Uranus Zone Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record – Frank's Lost Years Trailer
Dragon's Dogma Pawn Trailer
Battlefield 3: Back To Karkand Gameplay Premiere Trailer
Need For Speed The Run: Golden Gate To The Empire State
Need For Speed The Run: Multiplayer Trailer
Inversion – Inversion 101 Part 1 – Intro Video
Inversion – Inversion 101 Part 2 – Offensive Strategies Video
Inversion: 101 Part 3 – Defensive Strategies Video
Inversion: "Gamescom 2011 – Co-Op" Trailer
Inversion: "The 3 G'S Of Battle" Trailer
Inversion: "The Invasion" Trailer
Max Payne 3 – Design And Tech Series Video #1
Sonic CD Announcement Trailer
Family Feud Decades Trailer
Assassins's Creed: Revelations Avatars (x10) ($0.49 each)
The Last of Us Avatars (x2) ($0.49 each)
The Last Of Us Announce Trailer
Carnival Island
The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim Live Action TV Commercial Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Launch Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Uranus Zone Trailer
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record – Frank's Lost Years Trailer
Dragon's Dogma Pawn Trailer
Battlefield 3: Back To Karkand Gameplay Premiere Trailer
Need For Speed The Run: Golden Gate To The Empire State
Need For Speed The Run: Multiplayer Trailer
Inversion – Inversion 101 Part 1 – Intro Video
Inversion – Inversion 101 Part 2 – Offensive Strategies Video
Inversion: 101 Part 3 – Defensive Strategies Video
Inversion: "Gamescom 2011 – Co-Op" Trailer
Inversion: "The 3 G'S Of Battle" Trailer
Inversion: "The Invasion" Trailer
Max Payne 3 – Design And Tech Series Video #1
Sonic CD Announcement Trailer
Family Feud Decades Trailer
The Last Of Us Static Theme (free)
Sonic CD: Stardust Speedway Static Theme (free)
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
Assassin's Creed: Revelations – Constantinople Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
Destinations: LA Rush Hour Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
Digital Blasphemy: Sky Song Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
DP Season's Greeting's 2011 Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
Bane of Yoto Comic Ch1 Dynamic Theme ($2.99)
Dynamic Christmas Theme 1 ($2.99)
Dynamic Christmas Theme 2 ($2.99)
Dynamic Christmas Theme 3 ($2.99)
Turtle Beach DPX21 Theme (Free)
Turtle Beach PX3 Theme (Free)
Turtle Beach PX5 Theme (Free)
Turtle Beach Screaming Head Theme (Free)
FINAL FANTASY VI ($9.99)
Super Street Fighter IV – Arcade Challengers Pack (Sale) (PS3) (now $1.99, original price $3.99)
Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition – 10 Ssfiv 8-Bit Avatars (Sale) (PS3) (now $2.99, original price $9.99)
Super Street Fighter IV Ultra Complete Alternate Costumes Pack (Sale) (PS3) (now $4.99, original price $17.99)
Super Street Fighter IV: Super Complete Alternate Costume Pack (Sale) (PS3) (now $4.99, original price $17.99)
Beat Hazard Ultra (Sale) (PS3) (now $7.99, original price $9.99)
Back To The Future: The Game – Full Series (Sale) (PS3) (now $14.99, original price $19.99)
Jurassic Park: The Game – Full Season (Episode 1-4 Bundle) (Sale) (PS3) (now $22.49, original price $29.99)
Polar Panic (Sale) (PS3) (now $3.99, original price $4.99)
Aquattack – Minis (Sale) (PS3/PSP) (now $1.99, original price $2.99)
Hannspree Ten Kate Honda Sbk Superbike World Championship Umd Legacy (Price Change) (PSP) (now $6.99, original price $7.99)
Ultimate Board Game Collection Umd Legacy (Price Change) (PSP) (now $6.99, original price $7.99)
Split Second Bundle ($34.99)
Red Faction: Armageddon Bundle ($32.99)
Assassins Creed: Brotherhood Bundle ($34.99)
Assassins Creed 2 Bundle ($18.99)
Warhawk Bundle ($31.99)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Bundle ($29.99)
| Free PSN Game: | Marvel Pinball (PSN Game) |
| Full Game Trials: | Alice: Madness Returns Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood Red Faction: Armageddon |
| Discounted PSN Games: | Beat Hazard Ultra – 50% off |
| Discounted PS3 Full Games: | Assassins Creed 2 Bundle – 30% off Assassins Creed Brotherhood Bundle – 30% off Borderlands Bundle– 25% off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Bundle – 25% off Homefront Bundle – 30% off Red Faction Armageddon Bundle – 30% off Split Second Bundle – 30% off Warhawk Bundle – 25% off |
| Discounted minis: | Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road – 20% off Psycho Soldier – 20% off |
| Discounted Add-Ons: | Marvel Pinball: Captain America (Add-on) – 50% off Marvel Pinball: Fantastic Four (Add-on) – 50% off </td |
| Exclusive Themes: | Robots Dynamic Theme – Free </td |
There’s probably some irony in the latest title from a man whose name appeared in big huge letters on the front of so many game boxes involving the word ‘BigHead’, but I’ll be damned if I can tell what it is.
BigHead BASH is the latest move from American McGee and his Spicy Horse studio, and it’s a forthcoming social network game. I don’t know whether this means Alice: Madness Returns wasn’t the hoped-for success or just that McGee fancies a go at the Facebook goldrush before it dries up, but I do know that it’s a side-scrolling 3D shooter with tons of shooty-jumpy activity. (more…)
The semi-sequel to American McGee's Alice arrived last week. A timely return to a gothic wonderland, or is too late, too late for a very important date with our hard drives? Come on, down the rabbit hole with you and let's find out…
Alice 2 is, I think, pretty much what an only casual observer of videogames believes almost all videogames are like. Mad monsters, lurid colours, cartoonish characters, slightly unconvincing voicework, a steady diet of jumping and thumping… Alice could be The Videogame incarnate, evoking so many of the tried and tested values and mechanics that have come, gone and repeatedly come back again over the last couple of decades, and in theory polishing them into a fantastical sheen you could see your own distorted face in. If someone showed me this game out of context, I'd have a very hard time guessing when it was released. 2011? Maybe. 2007? Quite possibly. 2001? Turn those visuals down low and yeah, this could have been a launch title for the original Xbox or Dreamcast or something. This is not necessarily a criticism.
Given mainstream gaming is so resolutely charging towards grim, painfully po-faced military shooters, there's a whole lot of room for a determinedly colourful throwback like Alice: Madness Returns. This action adventure is nominally a sequel to 90s PC game American McGee's Alice, a Tim Burtony reimagining of Alice In Wonderland (but one that predates Burton's actual, rather more sugary take) but there is absolutely zero requirement to have played the first game. You know what Alice in Wonderland is about, right? There you go.
This Alice is grown-up and half-mad following her adventures in Wonderland and a childhood accident that killed her parents. From there, the game's a series of encounters with Wonderland's most famed denizens, redesigned as deformed, leering and sinister. Some familiar characters have turned to active evil, but even the helpful ones are menacing and obsessed with their own self-serving agendas, as well as getting their creepy faces all up in yours. The weapons, too, blend the familiar with the outlandish: a pepper-grinding cannon, a rocking horse head performing the warhammer role… You know what they do perfectly well, but it all adds to the sense of being somewhere appropriately unhinged.
It's a wonderful world to look at, rich in visual imagination and unsettling strangeness. The artists are clearly steering Alice's dark ship, switching between different styles and palettes every few hours, and able to make even the feyest of technicolour fairylands palpably unnerving. Oddly, richest of all is the ‘real' world, a grimy Victorian London which a down'n'out Alice roams between her mental downward spirals into Wonderland. Washed out and grey, it might only be occupied by humans, but they're the game's most fearsome-looking creatures. Bloated and monstrous, they first draw and then repel the eye with equal strength. These London scenes are an absolute treat to look at – but almost entirely devoid of interaction, instead being essentially cutscenes you can run through. Despite being so devoutly different to the game proper, this speaks to the same downfall: the world seems to have been designed first, then a game squeezed often inelegantly into it.
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For its first couple of hours, Alice successfully hides its major faults. It's like visiting a house you're thinking of buying – every time you start to notice a suspicious stain on the ceiling or get a whiff of something rotting behind a cupboard door, it distracts you with something new and wonderful. "And look at these delightful bathroom fittings! No, no, there's nothing behind the skirting board – but aren't these designer radiators just darling?"
Early Alice is a carnival of imagination. Arachnid, cyclopean teapots; doll-faced tar-hulks with beefy porcelain arms; winged pig-snouts which reveal secrets when peppered with, well, your giant pepper-grinder cannon; invisible roads and keyhole doors only discovered by shrinking Alice grasshopper-high. It aims to surprise and delight, and surprise and delight it does.
And then it goes on. And on. And on. New sights appear alongside the recycled, but after around three hours the dread realisation creeps in: they are only sights. Behind them, there's just the same handful of actions repeated. The jumping challenge, the side-on jumping challenge, the thumping'n'shooting challenge, the remote controlled bomb challenge, the find all the secret areas challenge. Drawn out and spun out over far too many hours, what's actually on offer behind the theme park scenery is too sparse to sustain the bizarre, 15-20 hour length of the game. It's a platformer first and foremost, but a pretty humdrum one: neither easy or difficult, but simply a forgettable, repeating, sometimes irritating middleground. It does seem to realise this to some extent, as it largely has you instantly respawn just before a failed jump rather than making retread long minutes' worth of bouncy mushrooms and floating rocks.
It's a different matter if you die in a fight. Following Alice's pretty dissolution into a cloud of butterflies, it's back to wherever the last checkpoint was. Generally speaking it's not too imbecilic about this, but once in a while it'll ping you back far too far, forcing you to repeat some long, irksome jumping puzzle, leaving you with the cold, sweaty fear of failing the fight a second time and having to go through all of this again. This kind of cruel design is admittedly relatively rare (and a couple of times, dying even saw me respawn past whatever foe had been giving me a hard time) but it highlights just how much filler is in the game.
That's the big problem, the fracture at the heart of Alice's appealing infrastructure that spreads and spreads and eventually collapses as more weight is heaped upon it. It has more visual variety than about a dozen of its peers, but underneath that it's a formulaic, flair-free jumping and fighting game, stretched out so far that Alice's won't be the only sanity under threat. A few more weapons and weapon upgrades come along eventually, but their efficacy and thrill doesn't justify the wearying journey to them.
My motivation to keep going was only to see what it might paint upon my monitor next, not because I craved any more jumpy-stabby. I prayed for jumpy-stabby to stop, in fact. "Just show me the next zone! Unlock Alice's next dress! I just want to see, I don't want to play anymore!" That's what I'd have cried at my PC, were there not someone in the room at the time. What I actually cried was "oh you bast… oh for fuuu… oh not again" and unrepeatable variations upon a theme, as I strove just to get through it. In a great many ways, it's doing what Psychonauts did, and that's what drew me to it so much in those early hours, but sadly its spirit just isn't the wild equal of its superficial madness.
What began as a delight ended as a chore. Tightened down to 6 or 8 hours Alice would have stayed a convincing wonderland, but it's hard not to suspect that someone just wanted to make the best or even just get their money's worth out of all that remarkable art. Less curiouser and curiouser, more like averager and averager.
Republished with permission.
The semi-sequel to American McGee’s Alice arrived last week. A timely return to a gothic wonderland, or is too late, too late for a very important date with our hard drives? Come on, down the rabbit hole with you and let’s find out…>
Alice 2 is, I think, pretty much what an only casual observer of videogames believes almost all videogames are like. Mad monsters, lurid colours, cartoonish characters, slightly unconvincing voicework, a steady diet of jumping and thumping… Alice could be The Videogame incarnate, evoking so many of the tried and tested values and mechanics that have come, gone and repeatedly come back again over the last couple of decades, and in theory polishing them into a fantastical sheen you could see your own distorted face in. If someone showed me this game out of context, I’d have a very hard time guessing when it was released. 2011? Maybe. 2007? Quite possibly. 2001? Turn those visuals down low and yeah, this could have been a launch title for the original Xbox or Dreamcast or something. This is not necessarily a criticism.