Weekly Alice : A Console Game for the Lolita

(Weekly Alice should be termed As and When Alice by now!)

I didn't really start playing video games until I got a PC that was capable of supporting all the necessary requirements around 2002. And even so, the games I like to play were rather selective. I've got a taste for survival horror and back then, excellent survival horror games on a PC format were few and rare in-between.

So in 2002, passing by a bookshop a few months after I got my nifty new PC, I noticed on the bargain rack, a title that caught my eye. After picking it up to check out the blurb, I had no hesitation whatsoever in plonking down S$19.90 for it.

American Mcgee's Alice is a third-person shooter PC game that came out way back in 2000. While not true survival horror, perhaps more geared towards action and gothic orientated, I LOVED this game to bits and still do! Everything about it reaches an almost perfect 10/10 in my gaming scores. The characters and game design is absolute genius. The backgrounds as you move through the game are unforgettably beautiful. Gameplay too is fun and exciting with an arsenal of unusual and different weapons. And of course, the story itself, of an Alice gone insane and committed to an asylum after her parents died tragically in a fire.

Blaming herself for her parents' horrific deaths, the Alice in the game is not someone Lewis Carroll would have imagined, 10 years later. After repeated suicide attempts, Alice is now confined, under restraints, at Rutledge Asylum and practically catatonic. This is the beginning of American McGee's game for the Alicephiles who might like things a lot darker.

After her stuffed bunny comes alive (or is it just a figment of Alice's badly fractured mind?) and implores her to save 'us', Alice is once more sucked into Wonderland but a twisted, malicious Wonderland that bleeds pools of blood, fire and brimstone, and where the Red Queen's card guards kills anything on sight.

Even after 11 years since it came out, the graphics of the game is still stunning to behold.



And a lovely bit of update is that American McGee has finally come out with a sequel to the game! And the sequel, entitled 'Alice: Madness Returns', looks even more gorgeously rendered and macabre than the first. The sequel will be out on PC, Xbox and PS3 format on 14 June 2011 which is...next month! And I confess I decided to buy a PS3 last December, partly because of the sequel, lol.

Alice's new outfit for the sequel? The kick-ass boots still remains though, yey!

I'm really excited for the new game and will be reserving my copy, no chances will be taken! You don't have to play the first Alice game to play the sequel but it would help to know some of the backstory first. Visit EA's official Alice: Madness Returns website if you like, it's fun, prettily designed with loads of Alice artwork to enjoy!