By: Geoffrey Yonil

It’s no surprise that EA is coming out with a sequel to American McGee’s Alice (if it’s popular, why not make a sequel, right?), the popular 2000 third person, single-player game. As the widely circulated trailer suggests, this new Alice: Return to Madness will retain that similar adult-version creepiness utilized in the previous game, with gore, insanity, and a general sense of everything dark within the world. And while it is based on the house-hold-known children’s tale by Lewis Carroll, EA’s version is anything but child-friendly.

But like the recent film remake of Carroll’s once G-rated story by the Depp-Burton duo, EA has gone the way of other mainstream currents in the entertainment industry by tapping into the oh-so-played-out asylum girl that looks like Winona Ryder from Girl, Interrupted, with a therapeutically neglected girl who essentially goes mad—kind of obvious by the title. And while many have praised the franchise’s use of originality, I’d have to disagree. Within the past fifty years plus the whole psychoanalysis theme seems to have taken a strong hold on all forms of entertainment, but not necessarily in a good way.

Like so many other games, Alice: Return to Madness plays with the theme of insanity not for any enlightened purpose—which, granted, neither did the Grand Theft Auto franchise either, and many others.  So, how and why does that make it any different? Sure, the graphic quality looks great,and the story line sounds intriguing, but so does so many other video games.  I know that Picasso was famous for stating that a “good artist cheats, while a great artist steals;” but I don’t think he meant to constantly recycle the same old story lines over and over.

Has the consumer base for video games and the like lost all sense of taste; or are they just content with killing things over and over not caring about the quality of a new, genuine plot? These are questions that I believe deserve to be answered ever before it is determined that a game can be considered good. But I don’t think many people are really going to give two shinny coins what I think so long as these vid-ja games have top-of-the-line graphics and a lot of blood—that perhaps borders along the thin line of a blood-fetishism that I’ve theorized this vid-ja-game generation has developed.

It’s self-masturbatory and maniacal; so, it should sell pretty well, right?