EA revealed last year that a sequel to American McGee's Alice was on the way, but you'd be forgiven if you'd forgotten about it. The publisher has just released a new trailer for Alice: Madness Returns that just might put it back on your radar.

There's a lot to soak in, including shots of Alice battling nightmarish creatures with her knight-head staff and a glimpse of an institutionalized heroine. Check out the video now, and come back to Game Informer tomorrow for an all-new preview of the game.

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www.GameInformer.com – The Feed

Let’s imagine for a minute that Red Dead Redemption is a delicious German Chocolate cake, baked long, long ago in a quaint small town bakery, Uncle Hans’ Loafin’ Buns.

When it was released, Uncle Hans’ German Chocolate recipe became an instant sensation. It was tremendous! Cake critics from the far side of town raved about it, exclaiming between bites that it was, quite possibly, the most delicious cake in the history of baking. Cake connoisseurs demanded that Hans don his apron again and improve on his masterpiece.

Ecstatic at the positive reception to his recipe, Hans turned back to the drawing board, twirling his moustache in deep, sugary thought for months. Finally he rose from his thinking chair, snatched his finest chef’s hat and marched to his bakery. After a few months he emerged from his dessert lair, hair standing on end and face covered with a film of powdered sugar, to announce that he would indeed be re-releasing his German Chocolate recipe, this time with a Hallowe’en twist – pistachio ice-cream filling!

It would be dubbed ‘Zombie Chocolate’.

The response was mixed. Some cake critics were enraged, decrying the inclusion of pistachio ice-cream as an abominable insult to the pure, historical goodness of Hans’ original German Chocolate. Others lauded Hans. His baking skills were so great, they declared, that he would make German Chocolate and pistachio ice-cream seem as naturally compatible as cookies and milk. Still others remained neutral, stating quietly that nobody could predict the future, and the town would all have to just wait and taste for themselves whether or not Uncle Hans had gone mad.

The verdict?

Uncle Hans’ Zombie Chocolate, otherwise known as Rockstar Games’ Undead Nightmare, may be the most delicious downloadable expansion ever baked.

Music.

The game starts in symbolic grindhouse fashion, with a cutscene of a dark and quiet night in the Old West. An eerie, disembodied voice (that you wouldn’t be surprised to hear reciting the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe) narrates, as a relieved John Marston returns home after a day of chores, the trials presented to him in the last few months practically forgotten. He’s tired, and happy enough just to share in his wife’s lacklustre supper or listen as his son describes the plot of the latest book he’s reading.

Unfortunately, the rabid, cannibalistic corpse of Uncle spoils the familial tranquility, infecting John’s wife and son with the plague of undeath. Unwilling to let his loved ones wander the world as mindless cadavers, John grabs his revolver (and shotgun, and rifle, and repeater…), mounts his horse, and rides to nearby Blackwater to find a cure.

John’s journey across the original map of Red Dead Redemption is a strange exercise in nostalgia. When you find yourself saving the McFarlane Ranch from cadavers under a green-tinted moon, or hunting down and escorting survivors to their family members in a government-run Fort Mercer, you may sense a strange mixture of déjà vu and surrealism. Things are the same… except that they’re different. Rockstar picked a perfect name for this expansion, as this zombified, mystical West could easily be one of its residents’ nightmares.

Don’t get lost in the woods.

To match its nightmarish environment, Rockstar once again produced an incredible musical score – subtle, poignant, and perfectly timed. Here is one of the user comments found on the YouTube page for Blackwater, U.S.A.:

“Desolate, yet you know something happened there. Fires and damage surround you, yet strangely… where are the corpses? There are definite signs of fighting: Overturned carts, bullet holes in the wall, painting on the walls “The end is nigh!” “The dead have risen!” Risen? That can’t be right, you know that’s impossible. An old legend to keep people inside at night… But… where are the bodies? Where is everyone…..  what was that? Something’s coming. You are not alone here. Run… RUN!”
- wkunzelman1

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Or how about Dead Sled, by The Kreeps? As you play this song, imagine yourself on an American Army cargo train headed full-speed for Mexico, pinning your hat against the wind as you pick off a horde of ambling zombies under the moonlight. The image will stick.

What Undead Nightmare does, it does well. My only complaint regarding the game would be that I wasn’t ready for its story to end when it did. I wanted more than a mere seven hours of nightmare. I’m not sure I would have been content with seventy-seven. Good zombie westerns make me greedy.

Zombies, this is Death, Felhorse of the Apocalypse. Death, zombies. What do you mean you’ve met?

Now that I’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, and inevitably find myself periodically succumbing to the siren’s call of zombies in the Old West, I sate that appetite by either:

With its terrific grindhouse style, nostalgic twist on Red Dead Redemption‘s characters and world, and new challenges, outfits, and multiplayer game modes to explore, Undead Nightmare is a must-buy for anyone who enjoyed the original game. Taken as a whole, Undead Nightmare is more complete – more feasible as a standalone product – than any other DLC I’ve played. Simply put, it’s as much a masterpiece as its predecessor.

I, for one, am glad that when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Old West.

Next Hallowe’en, Rockstar? I expect an L.A. Noire expansion in which flying saucers land in Los Angeles.

10/10 [?]

Gamer’s Guide to Life.com | we.know.games

PopCap Games has enjoyed unparalleled success in the casual market over the past few years with a string of popular games that have been released on every electronic gadget known to man. But could you someday partake in the company's profits? According to a recent interview with PopCap president David Roberts, it's a real possibility.

Speaking with CNBC, Roberts revealed that the company is currently considering an Initial Public Offering, and that it filed a Section 12 registration with the SEC. Roberts stressed that the company still hasn't made a decision one way or the other, and that it will depend largely on the market. “I do think we’ll be ready internally,” Roberts stated. “Whether the market is ready remains to be seen. …It has got to be right for us.”

Roberts was also asked whether the company will release a new IP this year, but his answer is sure to disappoint fans. "Don’t hold your breath," Roberts told CNBC, adding, "We kill a lot of products before they go out the door…If the team’s not jazzed about doing it, we don’t make them. It shows too much in the product if it’s forced labor.”

So, who wants to invest in some money into PopCap?

www.GameInformer.com – The Feed

Because it’s my blog and I can.

I’m expecting this to morph into yet another long-winded ramble that ends when I run out of words. It’s a long, winding trail, but it’s almost cohesive.

Has every one heard the term “Wrath baby?”

It refers to the generation of players (especially raiders) that came of age in the Wrath-era of WoW.

By all rights, I came to gaming age in the Wrath era. New Naxx was my first raid. I had worked on BC heroics, but more as a means to repuation gains for my own insane purposes than gear grinds for raiding Kara. I heard the stories of the raiders that came before me, walking uphill in the snow, barefoot, to wipe countless times in the presence of Illidan or Ragnaros.

However, there is a highly negative connotation to the term Wrath baby. It was in the Wrath era that concepts such as kiting, crowd control, or even more than a passing knowledge of how your class worked were set aside in favor of content being made available for all.

Whereas in vanilla and BC only a select, elite minority ever got to enter a raid, let alone conquer the content, in Wrath the focus was more story-driven and at some point almost anyone that wished to could meet Arthas at his throne.

We all know that WoW started out catering to a more… focused player base – Individuals that had the time and drive to hurl themselves against the wall or follow the appropriate grinds.

Two things happened.

First, that player base aged. Those kids in high school or college are now employed, married, taking care of kids of their own, engaging in activities outside of Azeroth. In some cases, they may have more disposable income than they did before and in some cases they are now responsible for their own monetary situation as mommy and daddy have cut the strings.

Second, the player base has expanded. Expanded in number, and expanded in diversity. People from all walks of life play WoW, not just the pimply-faced awkward teen of yesteryear’s stereotype. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, armed forces, the guy that fixes the slurpie machine, your hairdresser, your tattoo artist, your teacher, the list is endless. (OK, it ends at about 12 million active accounts, but you get the idea.)

Each of those individuals have different ideas about what is fun and what is an acceptable level of difficulty for them to encounter in their hobbies and leisure time activities; leisure time that is often restricted by real life obligations.

Blizzard can’t do anything about the first change to their player base. If they held the secret to eternal youth they wouldn’t be making WoW.

Blizzard actively pursued the expansion to their player base. For better or for worse, it is a staple of a successful business to keep expanding and reaching in to new audiences. Stagnation leads to death.

But you can’t rope 12 million people into a game and expect them to all be at the same level of skill, attention level, interests, etc. It’s also not terribly nice to have a HUGE portion of the game, where developers spend the most time in perfecting the encounters, and dangle that completely out of reach of a sizable portion of the paying player base.

So the pendulum swung from higher-end content being available to only the elite few to virtually everybody being able to at least attempt all content. (I say virtually because my mom still hasn’t seen Lich King. Maybe someday she’ll actually level something past 60.)

In concept, I love the idea. There is a lot of story to be told and all the really cool parts have to have the epic feel that can only be done through complicated cut scenes that risk removing the MMO feel (looking at you, Wrathgate) or through group-oriented content that we band together to beat our heads against.

Blizzard even took what they learned from achievements and variable difficulty settings and continuously refine the structure. Get the story out there for everyone on normal mode. Let everyone see Arthas and partake in his slaughter on a weekly basis. Everyone gets to be a PART of the story.

But what Blizzard couldn’t control is human nature. WoW is an MMO. Meaning other people see you. They see what gear you have. See your achievements. See your titles. And then they judge.

People that would have been content to complete content on normal mode in a single-player game, forgoing Nightmare or Hell modes, are suddenly faced with the pressure to compete on the highest level, even if they have no desire or ability to perform at that level.

It’s not enough that you were there to kill Arthas on 10 normal, it doesn’t mean anything until you’ve killed him on 25-man heroic, blindfolded, with one hand tied behind your back.

And in Wrath, it was almost that easy. Heroics became laughable when everyone was sporting raid gear. Matter of fact, people were complaining about “underperformers” in heroics when in all reality, they were just people working on their first 80 and were gearing up to be able to enter raids. (Yes, there were some real scrubs out there, but a lot of people were genuinely trying to follow the progression path Blizzard laid out. They weren’t maliciously holding up your heroic by virtue of being new and lesser-geared.)

Another new term was born, wrath. Yeah it already had meaning, but now it’s a verb! As in, “I’m in a hurry, let’s wrath this bitch.” At which point, the tank pulls like his ass is on fire and you brutally rampage through the encounter, paying no heed to mechanics. In short, you outgear something to the point where you could walk away from the keyboard and let your cat play for you.

I remember as a new player, BC heroics were HARD. Wrath heroics were hard until I got better tanks, after that they were much more enjoyable and were never on par with the difficulties faced in the BC encounters. Cataclysm heroics were HARD. Of course they were meant to be hard in our quest greens and highly coveted crafted pieces. Add a PUG that didn’t know what a skull on a mob meant and you were in for a rough night.

Now that I’m in raid gear, Cataclysm heroics are no longer HARD. More aggravating than anything else. They are pretty, the encounters have some flavor to them, but I’m not currently in a mental space that appreciates 5-man content. I would much rather be raiding or farming to prep for raiding. (And that’s a whole ‘nother topic.)

Tomorrow, let’s talk about people.

clearcasting

David Anson explains how improving Windows Phone 7 application performance is even easier after udating the LowProfileImageLoader and DeferredLoadListBox classes.

Source: Delay’s Blog

I’ve continued to hear from people who are benefitting from LowProfileImageLoader and DeferredLoadListBox – and the code has even been incorporated into the WP7Contrib project! Along the way, I’ve also collected some great feedback, so I recently dedicated time to make a few improvements.

SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

In this podcast, Jesse Liberty talks to Paul Betts – the author and inventor of Reactive UI.

Source: Jesse’s Blog

Paul Betts works in Office Labs at Microsoft and is the creator of Reactive UI – an MVVM framework based on Reactive Extensions.

SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

New developments in concrete technology could mean that roads last twice as long as they do now.

Inventor Spot – Inventions, Innovations, and Interesting Ideas for the Inventor in All of Us

Want to see a digital version of yourself in Resistance 3? If so, you'll be interested in a new contest Sony has announced that ends with a trip to San Diego and a cameo in Insomniac's newest sequel. Those interested should head over to the "Resistance 3 Get in the Game" site and submit a picture of themselves.

Winners will receive the all expenses-paid trip to Insomniac's studio for the face scan and the chance to be among the first to play the game. I hope whoever wins has fun running around the apocalypse getting shot at by bug aliens, as my video game character will be just fine relaxing in Los Angeles.

www.GameInformer.com – The Feed

Fatshark's upcoming downloadable game Hamilton's Great Adventure features collapsing bridges, loads of treasure, and a hero who wouldn't be caught dead without his trademark fedora. Sound familiar?

Judging from the trailer below, the gameplay may be as familiar to gamers as the setting. The game has a decidedly old-school flavor, with players controlling Hamilton as he runs down paths collecting keys and treasure. Take a look at it below. The game is set for an April release on consoles and PC.

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www.GameInformer.com – The Feed

So yeah, we just might finally get around to finishing this up. Maybe.

Anyway… I’ve recapped what healing was like in Wrath, glanced at some of the new abilities available to priests in Cata, and looked at the monumental increase in the mana cost of providing even the most basic of support utilities: dispels and buffs. I’ll not kill you all with the math, but rest assured that the heals, especially AoE heals, suffered a similar inflation.

But truly, the most important part of healing is the mindset.

Healing is a beast unto itself, just like tanking and DPS require different schools of thought.

In the days of yore, disc healing had its ups and downs.

Those that played disc understood the value of a disc spec, those that did not play disc simply looked at the meters and called us scrubs.

Disc has always been an unusual creature in that it specialized in the mitigation of damage, not the correction of damage.

Tank or raid, I could heal it all. By design, disc excelled at HEALING a single target very well, but also at PREVENTING damage to 10-15 targets at the same time.

Playstyle through Wrath pretty much boiled down to keeping a PW: Shield on as many people as possible (or at least the targets likely to take damage), toss out a Prayer of Mending and Penance as they came off cooldown, read a magazine, and wait to start the whole process over. When the shit hit the fan, we still had a large selection of tools to choose from to heal single or multiple targets, but with enough gear, something had to actually bust through the bubbles first.

Unfortunately for the disc priest, the effect PW: Shield and Divine Aegis bubbles were captured horribly, if at all by the game. A few add ons made an effort to hazard a guess as to what was actually happening with that thin sphere of light that stood between the tank and his future as a pixelated smear on the floor, but without the support of Blizzard supplying hard data in an easily-accessibly format, it was nothing more than educated guesses.

So on meters, we generally were bottom of the pack.

We were also bottom of the pack for overheals. But no one looked at overheals anymore. In Wrath, mana was such a non-issue that you weren’t perceived to be doing your job unless everyone was topped off at all times. ZOMG! The rogue stubbed his toe! He’s down 1 HP! CAST GREATER HEAL, MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!! Efficiency meant nothing.

The mana issues was even less of an issue (how can a non-issue be less of an issue? I don’t know, but it was) thanks to the mechanic of Rapture. Rapture is a spiffy little talent in the disc tree that returns a portion of your mana whenever a bubble is popped. Pre-Cata, we were seeing 2.5% of total mana returned with every popped bubble. Hmmmmm Lich King Infest…. 10 bubbles, 25% of my mana… /drool. Even if your bubbles weren’t all being popped, the mana return from that and the dozen other sources of mana regen available in the raid was more than enough to keep the blue bar near full.

Health pools were a lot smaller. Getting tanks with 70k health was pretty cool. I remember my mage being ecstatic about hitting 20k life. A Renew that ticked for 10k over the course of its life could keep most clothies in the green. At least the smart ones.

And then Deathwing fucked up the world.

Come back tomorrow for what may or may not be the exciting conclusion to the “even as disc” post!

Well, I hope it’s exciting, I just can’t promise it will be the conclusion.

And of course, as I’m writing this, the next patch notes are out with changes to all of this. But that’s just too bad, it’s my rant and I’ll finish it because I want to, so there.

clearcasting