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Infogrames |
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MacPlay |
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Jeremy Hartwood has committed suicide in his Louisiana mansion, Derceto. You take the role of either Edward Carnby, a private investigator, or Emily Hartwood, Jeremy's niece, and investigate the suspicious death. The three-floor mansion is reputed to be haunted by its eccentric past owner. Very quickly, you realise that it is. Warped rats, zombies and giant worms are among the foes who are after you, and you must somehow escape.
Alone in the Dark is an action-adventure survival horror game. The action is displayed from a number of fixed viewpoints. The backgrounds are 2D painted images, while the player character, all items and monsters are rendered as 3D models.
To escape the mansion, you'll have to solve a number of puzzles. They usually involve finding an item and using it in a proper place. Apart from items necessary for the puzzles, you can also find books and documents that can be read, healing items which can be consumed to restore hit points, and weapons.
Weapons come in handy, since Derceto is full of various monsters. Some monsters can be killed with weapons, but others are either impossible to kill or require a bit of thinking to take down. Note also that you have limited amounts of ammunition, so you have to use firearms carefully. MobyGames
The difference between this and the CD-ROM version is that it lacks voiceovers when reading things like notes, parches and books, and the font used to display text in those documents is bigger and more spaced. Everything else is exactly the same.
See also Alone in the Dark (CD version), Alone in the Dark 2 and Alone in the Dark 3. This game is also available for DOS.
CompatibilityMinimum Requirements:
68040
4 MB RAM
8-bit Color
System 6.0.7
* The "stair bug" only occurs on systems 8.6 and 9.x (G3Throttle, which solves the "stair bug," is included for convenience).
Comments
This might be useful to anyone playing it without lowering the cycles (or not, this is what we did back then, but I played this on a DOS pc, not a mac, but bugs seem to be carbon copied between versions).
When your character is descending the stairs and is about to finish (by the third before last step), smash that walk forward key and let it go before the character finishes. It done correctly, it -most of the time- will stop the character at the foot of the stairs.
Oh those camera angles!
... first game I remember that massively used those to scare the player. Runs really fine on my PowerMac 6100/66 and 7.6.1.
I tried this game in Mac OS 9.22 and I suffered from the stair bug. I must say that back In the day I also suffered it in DOS with my old PC. Never saw it again under DosBox. I remember that under DOS It seemed that you'll avoid the stair bug by pressing the down arrow before finishing climbing down the stairs, but that didn't work under Mac. There is, however an included "patch" which is a power strip application which lowers the CPU speed. That fixes it, so I assume that older and slower MACS won't suffer this bug. The fix works perfectly, and I completed the game with no further problems.
The low rating comes from the music which is just plain bad for my taste, and breaks the immersion as much as the English voice acting under the DOS CD version. Nothing that can't be solved by muting the music tho: Sounds are good, and graphics a bit better than the DOS version.
I have this a game on floppy disk.
I tried this game on 2 different computers.
Power Computing Pro 225 with G3 400 upgrade card with 768 mb of ram. It was running the game in mac os 8.6 with no stairs bug problems but put in mac os 9.1 in same computer and stairs bug happens in mac os 9.1.
I tried game in power mac G4 1.25 G 2003 mirror door running mac os 9.2.2 and mac os x 10.4.11 and classic. The stairs bug happens in mac os 9.2.2. I have not tried in mac os 9 or mac os 9.0.4. Does any body know the stairs bug happens in mac os 9 or mac os 9.0.4?
Is there any difference between the Floppy and CD version of these? The screenshots appear to be the same.
Nah. I tried this exact same version, you can run straight down stairs. There was no bug for me on 8.1, using an original performa mac.
The Stair bug happens on OS 8.1 as well
It happened to me once, I didn't know it was a bug,
I thought I had to do something first upstairs, until I read THAT was a bug.
nice game, a true classic.