In Which I Ask a Lot of Questions About the Alan Wake Sequel

I'm pretty excited about the Feb 22nd XBox release of Alan Wake's American Nightmare (sidenote: why is everything in the horror genre "American" now? Is it necessary for horror to have a country? Or can we just send horror out on a boat in international waters and let it learn its lesson?) but I'm not so sure how I feel about it being a downloadable.

On the one hand, it's only 1200 Microsoft points which is about $15 (I HAVE FINALLY FIGURED THE POINTS SYSTEM OUT). On the other hand, downloadables are always shorter than a boxed game by necessity—only so much space on the old hard drive amirite?

The original Wake took me about 10 hours to play straight through which is short to begin with and looking at the list of achievements for Muddy River Nightmare Band the sequel will be short even by downloadable standards. I mean, it looks to have about a quarter of the amount of game play which is disappointing if true. Not surprising, of course, but disappointing.

I'll admit to getting frustrated by Alan Wake's repetitive killing style (although murder-burning evil lumberjacks was pretty goddamn satisfying) but it was also super addictive and mimicked the slow building terror of an actual nightmare really well and I'm actually surprised at how much I've found myself looking forward to this game.

I also just now realized I never played the original DLC so I'm going to go do that right now. Or maybe I should save it and play it back to back with National Lampoon's National Nightmare? To stretch the horror out? Excuse me. To stretch the American Horror out? You saw what I did there, I'm sure.