For players with unused copies...

Microsoft is going the EA way and rewarding people buying the game new with free stuff The First of the Alan Wake episodic content in this case. New copies of the game will be shipped out with a free token which can be used to download the content which will be released sometime in the future.

Remedy has put up a video on their Youtube channel giving us a peek into the Alan Wake engine.
 

Markus Maki, Remedy's Director of development has confirmed that Alan Wake will be running at 720p throughout the game and not 520p as speculated earlier.

"Modern renderers don't work by rendering everything to a certain final on-screen resolution, but use a combination of techniques and buffers to compose the final detail-rich frames, optimizing to improve the visual experience and game performance.

Alan Wake's renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, color depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes. These are used for example for cascaded shadow maps from sun & moon, shadow maps from flashlights, flares and street lights, z-prepass, tiled color buffers, light buffers for deferred rendering, vector blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, auto-exposure, HUD, video buffers, menus and so on. In the end all are combined to form one 720p image, with all intermediate buffer sizes selected to optimize image quality and GPU performance. All together the render targets take about 80 MB of memory, equivalent in size to over twenty 720p buffers."

Alan Wake Forums

Remedy have also put up some sweet new screenshots

Alan Wake now has an official release date of May 14 (Europe) and May 18 (North America) for the Xbox 360.

Since being announced at E3 in 2005, the game's development was finished on April 7, and the release date fixed. The game has a rating of 15 (BBFC), Teen (ESRB), 16+ (PEGI), 16 (USK).

You can pre-order the game now from the official website.

Gameblog.Fr has posted pics from there trip to Remedy. They will be publishing their entire experience there and an interview with Sam Lake sometime mid February.


Head over there to check out 20+ shots of the Remedy studio and some pretty pics from Helsinki, Finland.

GameBlog.Fr: Alan Wake bientôt dévoilé sur

WARNING: Link Contains Math and Lanterns.

Yesterday's live Q&A chat with Remedy went ahead and was a great session. A log of the chat was posted online shortly after it all happened, so those of you who weren't able to join in can read it at your own leisure - here.

The Remedy team answered questions on aspects including: daylight gameplay, reasons for such a long development time, the team, and many other interesting questions posed by members of the community.

During the chat Remedy confirmed they did have a specific release date in mind, and that this would be announced in the "near future". They also said that, unfortunately for us, it is unlikely that a demo of the game will be available pre-release. You cna read about everything else in the chat log linked above.

Got a question you'd like to ask Remedy, the developers of Alan Wake? Well now you have a chance! Next Wednesday (20th January), Remedy will be holding a live Q&A session via an IRC channel (details below) where you'll also have the chance to win an Alan Wake branded t-shirt and flashlight.

Q&A Session Details
Date: Wednesday, 20th January
Time: 2PM GMT (What time is this where I am?)
Place: #brightfalls on irc.quakenet.org

Not familiar with IRC? No problem, you can always join in via Quakenet's webchat and enter your username in the nickname field and #brightfalls in the channel field. If you are more familiar and would rather use a client, we recommend mIRC for Windows, or Colloquy for Mac.

You can read more about how exactly the chat will function by reading this post on the AlanWake.com forums.

The final day of 1UP's week-long cover story of Alan Wake is now here, and finishes up with an interesting interview with lead writer on the game, Sam Lake. In it, Sam answers questions regarding the release date, DLC, Natal, and the game's development.

1UP: Can you confirm the May 2010 release date that's been floating around?

SL: I can confirm that we are really happy that people are talking about the title [smiles] but no, we haven't confirmed more than spring 2010 at this stage.

It's a pretty interesting read, head on over to 1UP to read the Sam Lake Interview and let us know your thoughts!

Apologies for the late posting of this, but if you haven't seen it already you may like to check out 1UP's article today. The article briefly explains 5 things that you don't (or perhaps do?) know about Alan Wake. Head over to 1UP to read it.

Yesterday's cover story was more based on Max Payne than it was Alan Wake, but if you're interested you can read that here.

Day 2 of 1UP's week long Alan Wake special gives us an awesome new teaser trailer, it's quite short but is indeed a real tease. Check it out below.

And in case you missed them, here are some highlight clips from E3 and TGS.

The "Alan Wake Light and Dark Preview" which is part of the 5 day Alan Wake Cover story has gone up. The article discusses the working of the light mechanics in the psychological thriller. Along with what we already knew about using lights as a weapon, new info include

• The possession regenerates in darkness, Light has to be kept on the possessed long enough without interruptions to destroy it.
• It can take over almost everything which can be used to harm Wake including doors and gates which block the players way till he finds a source of light to destroy it.
• Alan can control a bunch of vehicles of which he can use the the headlights to get rid of the possession before blowing it away.
• Bright enough light sources are needed to get rid of bigger possessed objects such as farm equipment, for which the normal flash light will not suffice.

Read the article in detail over at 1UP

Also as promised.. NEW SCREENS