I love both Alan Wake games. It is a shame they were so highly priced here to begin with, but they are fantastic games.
American Nightmare is well worth playing at this price.

You're absolutely right. I've been playing video games for more than 20 years, now, and I'm sure there are people in these forums that have been playing them for longer. I got a NES when I was 5, which was 25 years ago, and have been gaming ever since. I went through the SNES vs. Mega Drive/Genesis "war", then the N64 being absolutely torn apart by the PlayStation, because the latter was aimed at "mature audiences", while Nintendo was allegedly still making "games for kids". People are mean at their cores, and they need to come up with reasons to justify their superiority regarding everyone else, and it was cool to have a PlayStation just because you were no longer a kid if you had one. Games were no longer a matter of creativity and an escape from boring reality, instead, they focused on trying to convey reality as much as they could, with what the graphic prowess of the day allowed systems to. So the "mature" games are basically racing games, sports games, realistic action titles, obviously the loathed FPS genre. Platformers and side-scrollers and adventure games are for young kids, RPGs are for nerds, any game with a japanese/asian aesthetic is "strange", just because it doesn't sport a testosterone-filled, hairy, closet-sized, one-man-army macho protagonist.

I'm not saying people should stop playing those games, I'm not even saying they're bad. To each their own, people are more than entitled to play whatever they want. But there are those of us who still want our adventure games, our platformers, our side-scrollers, our RPGs. Alan Wake is an amazing game, I obviously never looked back this last GOG Summer Sale and bought the Wide A. Wake Bundle, since it was DIRT cheap (it was almost obscene, how cheap it was!), but people dislike it mostly because it's an adventure game, focused on the story aspect, with a whole lot of Twin Peaks/David Lynch/Stephen King references, fourth-wall breaking moments, the "show-within-a-show" thing straight out of Twin Peaks, a lot to read that's actually engaging and well written, and "gamers" these days are only interested in online multiplayer, "pwnage", "ownage", explosions, high-octane motors, UFC-crap and the like. Alan Wake is mature and clever, but unfortunately gets a lot of hate because of how Sony, with their PlayStation console, changed how people perceived mature games.

Hell, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker sure *looks* like a kiddie game, but I don't know a lot of six-year olds that could actually finish the game, while most "über-realistic" titles play like movies with interactive parts on them, are easier and easier as time goes by, because "we should not punish gamers that spent 60 bucks in a game by throwing high difficulty at them". I actually think a lot of kids could finish any Call of Duty, FIFA or racing game. 100%-ing Super Mario Galaxy, on the other hand? Not quite so.

Are you implying that recent games might be a tad easy to finish ? Nonsense

I agree it tends to be a good day when pricedrops aren't news :)

He's absolutely right. I agree with him when he says console gaming is to blame, but the truth is that console gaming hurt itself as well; games used to be better on consoles as well; like I said, it's PlayStation's fault, for introducing this "mature gaming" thing. It seems like all you need in order to have a mature game is a war zone setting, rugged men running around, shooting, but when it comes to the *gaming* part, there's really not much to do. "Mature" gamers don't get to play games, they get to watch interactive movies.

If you really want to play a game, your best bet are still what passes for "kiddie games". Or titles like Alan Wake, that are hated by the "mature" community, because they actually offer you something.

Hell yeah! :)
Wouldn't have said it a better way.

On my opinion The most of them battlefield saga, Killzone Saga, Resistence Saga, Cod saga (exept the first one), Halo saga, Gow Saga, are boring if you not play them on hard dificult but even so they are easy to finish. games like Half-life (Hard), Doom (Nightmare!), Descent (Insane), Duke nukem(damn I`m good) no everyone one touch the hard level. The only one really surprised me was Bioshock but in general the new generation games are easy(an hard dificult)

Is good to see people enjoy of good clasics, My first Game was Super mario Bros 1 I reamembered It came with a another game called Duck Hunt :).

At the risk of ruining the childhood of many, you knew that super mario bros 2 was actually another game, nothing more they changed the characters, in Japan was called Doki Doki Panic?

I don't think you're ruining anything... pretty much everyone here on GOG should be aware SMB2 (Western version) was a sprite/palette switch of Doki Doki Panic. Still a great game, I think. Not as good as SMB1, definitely not as good as the perfect SMB3, but still a good game.

Then again, considering the real Super Mario Bros. 2 (later known as The Lost Levels in the West) was essentially a disappointing romhack of the first game, it was arguably the Japanese that got shafted in that particular exchange.

A brilliant game. More of a spin-off than a sequel to the original, but truly great regardless. It lacks the terrifying and oppresive atmosphere of the first Alan Wake, but it makes it up with the grotesque violence of Mr. Scratch. It's nice to see the price drop. It would be even nicer to one day see a proper Alan Wake 2 on GOG.

Great, but I already have it on HB :)

The story isn't so serious this time around, but the gameplay is significantly improved. At the end of Alan Wake I was just happy cause it ended, because the gameplay wasn't that good, here you can actually have some fun. The biggest con of this expansion is the repetition of the levels, granted they have a good reason for it, but it still felt a little cheap.
I think it's still worth a buy.

I wouldn't say that the gameplay is better per se, but it suits the new direction American Nightmare takes. I actually liked the fact, that the original Alan Wake had a clunky combat system. It forced the player to be cautious and - if possible - avoid fighting. Heck, it literarly made me run for my life a couple of times. But since American Nightmare is less "lovercraftian", and more "twilight-zonian", the redisigned combat system makes sense.

Well, if Alan Wake had a clunky, unforgiving and hard combat system I could have agreed with such a view, but it actually didn't. The game was very easy on normal, I mean, just throw some light on those shadows for half a second and they get quite a long stun animation, control the crowd. Use shift a lot. At the end of each episode I had a stack of batteries, flares etc cause I often tried to save them. You know, save them for a harder battle. But those almost never came. So for me the game was mostly just clunky. The DLC eps had some harder fights, I can agree with that, but in the original they were easy.