Alone in the Dark developer Eden Studio went all out with the mea culpas at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Eurogamer reports on some changes being made to the upcoming Playstation 3 version. It's mostly a matter of tidying up the interface, making combat more forgiving, and making it easier to get through that infamous driving scene in which New York collapses around you, under you, and on top of you, forcing you to replay the sequence over and over again. If you played Alone in the Dark you know it well. Probably too well.

They're also making the flashlight work without batteries. I would normally assume this was a game balance thing. Obviously, the designers want me to use my flashlight sparingly. They want me to fret about battery power. It must be a matter of balance or immersion or however I'm supposed to experience the game. Even Doom 3 not letting me equip a gun and a flashlight at the same time seemed to be a sort of trade-off. I could choose security or situational awareness, but not both.

So when a developer throws up their hands and goes, 'Oops, we didn't mean the thing about the batteries', I'm less inclined to say, 'Phew, glad that's being fixed' than I am to say, 'Well what the heck were you thinking in the first place? I trusted you!'

Unfortunately, the problems with Alone in the Dark run deeper than any of the proposed changes, some of which will be patched into the Xbox 360 and PC versions. Let me know when Eden Studios addresses the uneven pacing, the ludicrous non-story, and way there was exactly one scary moment and it took six hours to get to it, followed by a bunch of padding in which you run around Central Park to level up some meaningless skill.