Alone in the Dark
Stuff of nightmares.
Then there are the things that are just awful. Driving the car involves holding the Wiimote and nunchuk up like a knife and fork and twisting them in your hands like a steering wheel (although the game's only measuring the tilt on the Wiimote, despite its instruction), and this is so awkward to use that it's a relief to find the previously frustrating New York driving sequence is now just a straight road with some explosions and falling debris flobbed into your peripheral vision as the engine descends into a low-teens frame-rate, presumably to avoid your having to use the steering almost at all. Strange, because the nunchuk analogue stick would have been available for this.
Meanwhile, the absence of visual information during the rope-climbing bits means you have to take regular leaps of faith or double back on yourself against the game's logic, too. Perhaps aware that you're hamstrung by the controls, bugs and frame-rate, the developer's also lobotomised most of the enemies, who just lurch around unthreateningly at slow speed and vanish after a couple of whacks from a heavy object. There's no longer any need to set fire to them, or even really pay attention to them if you're in a hurry.
Visuals and audio are mostly terrible. The graphics are like a bad, coffee-stained fax version of the 360 game, with dodgy character models (the gap between Edward Carnby's legs, which you spend a lot of the game staring at, begins halfway into his bowel), glued-on hair and textures that would shame a puddle of vomit. Elaborate lighting effects have been removed almost entirely. Complicated sequences are clearly beyond the engine or at least the hardware - ropes appear to be made of lengths of wood tied together, and Carnby does a sort of mad diagonal spasm as he swings left and right - and the fire, such a highlight in the full-fat version, is an apologetic orange fog of Vaseline and cotton wool.
To try and disguise some of this, it looks as though Hydravision has drained some of the colour from what you're seeing (noticeable when the game suddenly burns brightly for an instant as you enter or exit the pause menu), but this mainly just makes it look even duller. Elsewhere the audio splutters and stops all over the place.
For everything else in its amazing catalogue of flaws, errors and catastrophes, though, the biggest problem is that the game just stops whenever you can't work out what to do. During supposedly urgent scenes in the car park beneath the starting level, you get scooped up by a demonic fissure and have to escape by grabbing at something when prompted then shaking the nunchuk (not that you're told half of this, but I digress).
Once you've broken free, you're meant to get into a car at the end of the area and then climb through and get out the other side. You don't realise this though because no one's told you, so you just get into a cycle of running up to everything and hitting A, then getting scooped up by the fissure and escaping again, then running around hitting A, then getting scooped up, and so on. Without the constant threat of deadly enemies, what little suspension of disbelief there was doesn't so much snap like overstretched elastic, as we said of the 360 game, as whip you repeatedly in the face shouting, "Game! Rubbish, broken game! Idiot! Idiot who bought it!"
That's certainly how you'll feel if you pay for this, although there is an odd sense of wonderment at just how broken and unfinished it is. Alone in the Dark on Xbox 360 was a noble failure, just about clawing respectability from the jaws of disaster thanks to some interesting puzzles and mechanics, but forgetting to make the basic controls work in the process. Alone in the Dark on Wii is a broken adaptation of that borked premise, which leaps into the jaws of disaster, hauls them closed afterwards, and starts stabbing itself in the face with the nearest fang. At times you really wish it worked, because the threat of a good idea or two remains, but it doesn't.
So yes, we bought this. Fortunately we kept the receipt.