Kuon

Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2004-03-31
Regions: USA Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★☆☆☆
Historical Japanese trappings can’t save this short-and-painful knockoff.

Official Japanese site:

http://www.ku-o-n.net/top/

Official English site:

http://kuon.agetec.com/

There’s one thing I can say for certain about Kuon: it has style. The graphics are nice, the game has chosen a non-traditional setting (Heian-era Japan), and the characters look really good. They’ve got the medieval Japanese dress going on, complete with large hats and long, flowing robes. The locations are suitably scary for the period, and some of the scenes are really well constructed.

Unfortunately, that’s about all there is good to say about Kuon. Under the nice graphics and interesting style, the game itself is a weak knock-off of the Resident Evil formula, and the content is severally limited. Now, I’m not the kind of guy who equates game length to game quality (after all, I gave Clock Tower 3 an 8.3 even though it was only about five hours long), but Kuon suffers terribly from being too short. The game took me about eight hours to finish (over an agonizing four months), but really, there’s only about four and a half hours worth of content here. Let me explain.

Kuon lets you play as two characters: Utsuki, a woman who lives a sheltered life in a shrine, and Sakuya, an exorcist. You can play through each of their missions in about four hours, after which point the game will ask you to play the other character. This sounds like a pretty cool idea because it gives gamers a way to experience both characters without the developers having to make two different full-length games. However, it turns out to suck horribly it Kuon because Sakuya and Utsuki’s missions are exactly the same. There are a few minor differences (a cutscene here, a blocked path there; Sakuya fights an extra boss), but for the most part the experiences are the same down to the smallest detail. You’ll unlock the same doors twice in the same order, fight the same enemies, and read the same diary entries. You’ll fight mostly the same bosses and solve the same puzzles. Though there is a little divergence, there is almost no difference between Sakuya and Utsuki’s sections.

In fact, there’s pretty much no difference between Sakuya and Utsuki themselves. One uses a fan while the other has a knife, and there are a few unique spells for each character, but for all intents and purposes they are the same. When you complete both of their sections a third character is unlocked (who’s section only lasts about 30 minutes), but she’s exactly the same as well. Duplicating the content might have worked a little better if the way you played the game changed dramatically between characters, but as it is, you are pretty much asked to play the same game twice.

So it should be clear by now that there isn’t enough game here. What makes the experience even more disappointing is that what little game exists is executed very poorly. Aside from the graphics, the developers of Kuon have done almost nothing right. For example, this game (like many others in this genre) requires a lot of backtracking. However, the game also punishes you for running, forcing you to walk back and forth across the map at an excruciatingly slow pace. The monster designs are pretty weak too: there are gaki, little Gollum-like monsters that seem to be all over the place, sick people, who expunge purple gas wherever they go, and ghosts, who look just like the sick people except they are transparent. Other enemies in this roster of losers include killer walruses, killer zombie apes, and giant killer silkworms. A lot of games in this genre have little brain-teaser puzzles that you must complete before you can progress, and Kuon is no exception. However, in Kuon’s case there are only two puzzles, and both of them are dumb. Even worse, you have to complete both of them twice (once for each character). Next on the list of flawed features of this game is the combat system. Though an interesting selection of spells is available to the characters, only the two fire ball spells are necessary to complete the game. These spells do not auto-aim (and there’s no swivel control to aim manually), so hitting things can be annoying. And actually, hitting enemies with the melee weapon that each character carries seems to do a whole lot more damage than the spells. In a word, the combat system blows.

These mistakes are often amateurish; the game sort of feels like the work of a team with little or no game development experience. In addition to the flaws mentioned above, the entire experience is marred by a lack of polish (the subtitles even contain misspelled words and regularly confuse homonyms).

We’ve established that the game is a mess and there isn’t enough of it. The only thing supporting Kuon is its story and its graphics. The graphics are decent (though details are extremely difficult to see because the game is so dark), but unfortunately the story is underwhelming. It’s not the worst story ever, but it’s pretty predictable and pretty short, and there is never any real build up or climax. It just sort of meanders. We don’t learn much about the characters, nor are we ever really given any details about the antagonist’s mission or motives. This story would be good enough if the game play could stand on its own, but as it is it can’t save the game from mediocrity.

In short, there’s nothing really compelling about Kuon. The graphics are enough to draw you in, but the content lacks sufficient depth and volume to really keep you interested. Though there are a few really well-done scenes (as well as a couple of environments that are quite creepy), after a while it’s just not enough to keep the game going. There’s really no reason to play this game unless you really enjoyed the scenery in Fatal Frame and don’t mind trudging through the same levels several times.

Echo Night: Beyond

Also known as: Nebula – Echo Night
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2004-01-22
Regions: USA Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
A space-horror adventure game that succeeds in creating an extremely convincing–not to mention creepy–environment, Echo Night: Beyond’s only major flaw is that it is really slow.

Echo Night: Beyond is the third Echo Night game in the series. The first two were rather obscure Playstation 1 games (the second never left the shores of its native Japan), and Echo Night: Beyond for the PS2 came and went without much notice. In fact, I’ve had my copy for more than a year, and I only decided to take the plastic wrap off earlier this month. I was looking for something slower paced than the beat-em-ups and shooters I’ve been playing lately, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect Echo Night: Beyond to really be all that great. After all, I haven’t completed the earlier games in the series and they’ve all been panned by reviewers.

However, after the first few minutes I found myself completely hooked. Echo Night: Beyond is not a fast-paced or action-filled game, but I found it so enthralling that I played it almost non-stop for four days straight. It’s rare that I have this much interest in a game that I’m not already intimately familiar with. Despite the fairly negative reviews, I found Echo Night: Beyond to be a fun, scary, and extremely entertaining game.

The deal with the Echo Night series is that all of them are non-violent, first person Adventure games. All center around ghosts that require help to move on from this world into the next. All include malicious ghosts that can hurt you unless you protect yourself somehow, and all focus heavily on item puzzles. There’s no continuity between each game in the series other than the mechanics. Echo Night: Beyond takes place on a moon base in the future. The base is devoid of people, and as you move around in your bulky space suit, you’ll find that it’s quite old and in disrepair. As the only apparent survivor of a space ship crash, you must search the base for your missing love, Claudia. But even though there are no people here, something continues to inhabit the decrepit space station.

As with its predecessors, Echo Night: Beyond is a first-person Adventure game. Most of the game play involves exploring new areas of the space station, finding items, solving puzzles with those items, and learning more and more about the story through computer terminals and letters. The central game mechanic is the appeasement of the ghosts who haunt the base. Ghosts tend to stay in a single area, and if that area is covered in the mysterious fog that permeates the base, the ghosts may turn violent. Appeasement involves calming the ghost down by removing the fog and then talking to the ghost to find out what is keeping it from moving on. Most ghosts have a specific worry or memory that keeps them on the base, and it becomes your job to resolve these concerns for each ghost you encounter. The stories of each ghost help communicate not only the work that must be done to set them free, but what life on the station was like before everybody died. In return for helping them, the ghosts will often give you valuable information or items needed to progress. If you encounter a violent ghost, your only hope is to run for the nearest door (though sometimes that won’t be enough) before your heart stops. There’s no combat (how can you fight a ghost, anyhow?) and no violence of any kind. Your only goal is to continue deeper and deeper into the base in order to find out what’s happened to Claudia.

The game designers were obviously influenced by works like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (specifically, the Magnetic Rose segment) and films like Outland. The idea of a haunted moon base isn’t entirely new, but the theme is extremely well executed. As you explore the deserted halls of the station, you’ll notice the care and detail that has gone into the design of each room. The designers have obviously tried to make the experience as realistic as possible, and this focus has produced an extremely cohesive and convincing environment. Air locks must pressurize before they can open, computer terminals from foreign ships display in the appropriate foreign language, and moving walkways terminate in small gates to keep passengers from accidentally going the wrong way. Unlike many adventure games, Echo Night: Beyond tries to keep the experience it presents absolutely realistic at almost all times.

In keeping with this strive towards realism, the graphics in Echo Night: Beyond are phenomenal. 98% of what you see in the game is the space station environment, and the developers have really gone the extra mile to make sure that it looks really, really good. Effects seen in few PS2 games, such as reflection mapping on walls and floors, are used to excellent effect and help sell the art really well. Though the game occasionally slows down under the strain of the graphics engine, the slowdown never negatively affects game play, as there’s almost never a need to move quickly or with precision. The art style is really nice as well, and the design of the cabins keeps you on your toes. Many of the halls and rooms in the space station are dimly lit, requiring you to use your helmet light to progress. The colors and textures used are interesting and non-repetitive, and overall the visual quality of this game is top-notch. The environment is also quite creepy, and I found it quite unsettling to explore new areas of the base for the first time.

The quality of the graphics is complemented by excellent sound design. There is very little music in the game, but the sounds that you make as you walk around the station are extremely well realized. Your heavy space suit boots clunk differently on each surface, chairs will creak and turn when you accidentally bump into them, you can hear the protagonists breathing in his helmet, and every elevator, escalator, and moving walkway has its own set of sounds. Like the graphics, the sounds go a long way to selling the realism so desired by the designers of this game.

Of course, not everything about Echo Night: Beyond is perfect. This game is extremely slow moving, and requires more patience than most console games. Moving through the environments takes time, and since there is no combat, the pacing is significantly slower than what many are used to. There are no bosses or mini-bosses, no explosions, and no guns. The goal here is exploration and puzzles, and the absolute lack of action will turn some gamers off. One of the chief complaints from other reviewers about this title is that there’s really not all that much to do other than explore and find items. As a result, you will probably only enjoy this game if you enjoy the environments and the story. If exploring the space station and understanding what happened to it is not your cup of tea, there’s not much else here to keep you interested.

Echo Night: Beyond also suffers from one of the classic problems with item puzzle-based Adventure games. It requires you to exhaustively search each and every room. Should you miss an item, you may not become stuck for hours, at which point your only recourse is to go back and search everything again. This only happened once or twice to me while playing this game, but it’s frustrating and boring to go back through areas you’ve already explored looking for that one missing piece that will allow you to progress.

Finally, the game isn’t very scary. The environment does an excellent job of making you feel claustrophobic and helpless, but eventually the effect wares off. Once you realize that ghosts can only hurt you in certain situations, moving through the station becomes a considerably less stressful ordeal. And ultimately, there’s really nothing other than the environment and the occasional malicious ghost to really scare you at all; it seems like the attempt at horror is half-hearted.

All that said, I really enjoyed Echo Night: Beyond. I was totally taken by surprise by the games competent atmosphere, measured pace, and old-school mechanics. Though it’s not the scariest or the most innovative game under the sun, the developers really deserve credit for creating such a convincing experience. If you like adventure games and enjoy exploration, Echo Night: Beyond deserves a look.

Official Japanese Site Official American Site.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Platforms: Xbox
Release Date: 2005-10-24
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★☆☆☆
Innovative on many levels, but somewhere along the way they forgot to also make it fun.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a first person Lovecraftian horror game set in the 1920s. It includes a range of interesting features including insanity effects, a realistic approach to healing wounds, stealth game play, and of course, loads of Cthulhu. On paper, this game seems like a highly innovative approach to horror games–conventions of the genre are tossed out the window to make way for new, fascinating game play ideas. The final product totally delivers on graphics, sound, and story line. It’s just that the damn thing is no fun to play.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: Call of Cthulhu’s game play is seriously broken in several fundamental ways. The content of the game itself–the levels, weapons, enemies, flashbacks, insanity effects, voice acting, etc–is pretty universally high quality, but you can’t enjoy it because the game is extraordinarily frustrating to play. I tried hard to like this game because it’s clear that the designers put a lot of effort into breaking the mold for not just horror games, but for first person shooters in general. And indeed there are a number of very interesting design decisions to be found in Call of Cthulhu. But it seems like the core game play, the part you spend most of your time, you know, doing, got lost along the way.

I’m only going to touch on a couple of the most egregious problems in this review because frankly, there are too many to individually enumerate. First and foremost, aiming is really, really hard. This is a first person game, and so interacting with things and shooting them is a function of your ability to “select” them correctly in the world with your view point. In Call of Cthulhu, even simple actions like picking up items sitting on the ground are unnecessarily difficult. You need to be in exactly the right spot, and often I found that I couldn’t collect an item unless I crouched and looked at it straight on. It’s also hard to interact with items when there is more than one object in the vicinity. Early in the game, for example, there is a pretty cool section where you must run from some attackers in a hotel. The way to beat this section is to lock the doors behind you, but it’s quite difficult to actually manipulate the lock on the door. Half the time you’ll open the door instead of closing the lock, which is the exact opposite of what you want. Even in low-pressure situations where you have time to look around and line up the lock perfectly, it’s often difficult to lock and unlock doors. There’s a bit much later where you must move along a stormy reef, holding on to hand-holds as you go to avoid getting washed out to sea. This is a really cool idea but it is totally ruined because actually grabbing the handholds is neigh impossible.

The aiming problem extends to shooting as well, and it is here that it is most damaging to the game. Your player holds his weapon at a strange angle, and there is no targeting reticule on the screen, so understanding where the shot will go is very hard. There is an aim button that brings the weapon right up to your nose, and while it does make aiming easier, it’s still quite easy to miss at point-blank range, even with wide range weapons like the shotgun. I often forgot that the aim button was there, as the gun position in un-aimed mode looks pretty much exactly like every other first person shooter ever. And to make matters worse, not all weapons can be aimed; there is a weapon that you receive at the very end of the game that is pretty much impossible to aim with any accuracy. Shooting people in Call of Cthulhu is harder than any other FPS I’ve ever played, hands down.

The other big issue I have with this game is the damage model. The developers tried to implement a system in which you need to apply bandages to individual wounds on different parts of your body. You are actually open to attack during the time you spend patching yourself up, which serves to make your character seem more vulnerable. If you sustain damage and don’t treat it, you experience some visual anomalies and eventually can die of blood loss. I understand what the designers of this system were going for: it’s an attempt to remove the feeling of being an invincible super-hero and make the protagonist an everyman, thereby increasing the tension invoked by sneaking and the other aspects of the game. In my mind, however, the damage and health system in Call of Cthulhu is a complete failure.

I thought about this for a while and decided that there are three main problems. FIrst, you die almost immediately from just about everything. Fall more than about 10 feet? Death. Get hit by any enemy more than twice? Death. Fail to grab onto the railing on the boat? Death. I must have died 500 times in Call of Cthulhu because it’s so easy to die. A complex damage and health system seems sort of moot if most enemies can kill you in less than three seconds. Second, the system is based around using specific health items (sutures, splints, etc) to heal your wounds; if you run out of these items, there are certain wound types you can’t heal. Well, I had a never-ending supply of splits and never enough sutures because I got shot a lot but didn’t fall very much. Nothing sucks more than collecting a health pack and still not being able to heal yourself because you ran out of some sub-item, then slowly dying over a period of 30 seconds. Please don’t delay failure, game designers! If I am going to die, just kill me now and save me the 30 seconds! This is resource management overkill, similar (but less deadly) to the awful system in Illbleed. It is also a level of interactivity that I don’t want–I don’t want to have to worry about what health items I have and which I am missing; as in 99% of other games, it’s sufficient to let me collect items that heal me. My final beef with the health system is that patching your character up is boring. It means you have to stop in the middle of play, go into the menu screen, apply bandages and splints and stuff, come out of the menu screen, watch the little animation as your character applies the items, and then finally get back into the game. The developers must have realized that this was a problem, so they included a quick-heal button, which avoids the menu but still requires the application animation. This doesn’t really alleviate the issue because I have to stop playing for a while while I heal. And of course, during this time that I am not playing, the game is still running and I could be shot by some malicious passer-by. Though I understand what the developers were going for with this mechanic, I found it to be overcomplicated and a recurring source of frustration.

The last major problem I’ll mention is the general gun play. Call of Cthulhu’s first two hours or so were pretty fantastic because, well, they haven’t given you a gun yet. I really enjoyed those early bits, and then the whole thing went south as soon as a weapon was placed in my hand. In addition to the aiming issues I mentioned above, there are a plethora of other problems: reloading takes way too long (you can be killed by most enemies in less time than it takes to reload the shotgun, for example), there’s no way to tell how much ammo remains in the chamber (and there’s no auto-reload), every cut scene and healing animation unequips your weapon, and as I mentioned before, point-blank dead-to-rights shots often mysteriously miss. These issues might have been less damaging if the game hadn’t been focused on shooting, but after the first two hours most problems the game throws at you involve shooting people. The gun play is so bad that I think the game would probably have been improved if they just omitted firearms from the entire experience.

These three fundamental problems, aiming, healing, and gun mechanics, form a deadly combination that results in repetitive and frustrating game play. There are many other issues as well (the save points are too far apart, the subtitles don’t update reliably, the enemies are really amazingly dumb, the story lacks cohesion, the insanity effects kick in at seemingly random times, there are lots of bugs, etc), but these three are the problems that kick the teeth out of the game and leave it for dead in a ditch. This should have been an outstanding game, but because the core mechanics are so broken, I can barely even call it mediocre.

Ok, so I’ve spent this entire review so far ripping into Call of Cthulhu. This is because I am frustrated that all the effort the development team must have put into the game was wasted by broken core mechanics. But it wouldn’t be fair to rag on Cthulhu without also touching on some of the excellent parts of the game. As I mentioned earlier, the graphics are all quite nice. The level designs are pretty good as well, and there is a huge variety in the places that the protagonist visits over the course of his journey. FPS games live and die by the variety they offer to the player, and in terms of locale and level design, Call of Cthulhu does an excellent job of keeping each area fresh. There are several stages that I found quite inspired, almost all of which occur in the first two hours of game play. The writing for the story is good, the voice acting is well delivered, and the game does a good job with presenting the period that it is set in. I really, really liked the flashback sequences. These are playable, highly filtered sequences that occur every once and a while. They are short and sweet, and work really well at increasing the tension level while simultaneously filling us in a little more about the protagonist’s background. There’s also a very high quality interrogation scene, and I throughly enjoyed the repeated appearance of one slightly mauled dead girl.

But despite the solid content design, Call of Cthulhu’s game play problems pretty much ruin the entire experience. The game isn’t a total disaster (I was able to finish it, which is more than I can say for some games), but it wasn’t very fun either. Unless you are really a glutton for punishment or have some insane drive to play all Lovecraft-related games, I must advise you to pass Call of Cthulhu up.

Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File

Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2003-08-07
Regions: Japan

Translated by IGN as “Kyoufu Shimbun (Heisei Version): Mystery! Spirit File.” This game sounds like a blend of Kamaitachi No Yoru and Fatal Frame.

The game is based on a manga series about a mysterious newspaper that reports on deaths and calamities that will occur in the future. Unfortunately, reading the newspaper also shortens one’s life to 100 days. The game was created based on input from the original mangas author.

The game has two modes: a text-based conversation mode and a third-person exploration mode. Interestingly, the second controller is used as some sort of enemy radar: you place the controller on a special sheet and apparently it warns you (presumably by vibrating) when enemies are near. The game apparently works this feature in by claiming that the controller is possessed by protective spirits.

It is very difficult to find screenshots for this game… Konamis site only contains very small thumbnails. If you come across a good source for images of this game, please let me know!

Koudelka

Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 1999-10-30
Regions: USA Japan Europe

A sort of survival horror RPG.

Resident Evil: Dead Aim

Also known as: BioHazard – Heroes Never Die
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2003-06-17
Regions: USA Japan Europe

Technically a gun game, but since it has a strong 3rd person mode I’ll include it here.

Resident Evil 4

Also known as: Biohazard 4
Platforms: GameCube, PS2, Wii
Release Date: 2005-01-11
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
This fantastic transformation of the Resident Evil franchise manages to revitalize the series without losing its thematic core.

While the roots of the survival horror genre can be traced back to early game systems, it was Resident Evil in 1996 for the Sony Playstation that popularized the genre. The Resident Evil series has since sold over 26 million copies (according to a GDC 2005 presentation by Capcom president Kenzo Tsujimoto), making it Capcoms strongest selling franchise (Street Fighter is a close second at 24 million units). However, after six major releases and numerous offshoot titles, the formula was beginning to feel old and tired. But in February 2005, Capcom released the highly anticipated Resident Evil 4, and in one fell swoop managed to revitalize not only the series, but the survival horror genre as a whole.

If youve been living in a cave for the last three years or so, you might not have heard of Resident Evil 4. Heres the skinny: excepting Code Veronica, all of the Resident Evil games to date have relied on pre-rendered backgrounds. This means that the camera cannot follow the player as he moves around, and instead has to cut between fixed angles. This method was both a blessing and a curse to the series; it allowed the developers to utilize cinematography to an unprecedented degree, but it also mandated a difficult-to-learn control scheme (since the camera cuts, the controls must be relative to the player, which makes the characters drive like tanks). Code Veronica employed 3D environments but still relied heavily on fixed and tracking cameras. Resident Evil 4 changes things considerably by giving the player a true 3D camera and allowing entirely camera-centric movement. Mounted over the protagonist’s right shoulder, the camera follows the player around at varying distances depending on the environment, which dramatically changes the way that the game feels.

There are many other changes as well: gone are the item boxes, the mansions, and the underground laboratories. Gone is the rationing of ammunition and health; both are plentiful throughout the game. Gone are most of the puzzles, and those that remain are usually simple reflex challenges. The trademark Resident Evil antagonist, the zombie, returns as a more intelligent “Los Ganados,” and are more like crazed drug addicts than classic zombies.

Resident Evil 4’s single largest departure from the series is the role of combat. In classic Resident Evil games, combat was a source of tension: there was never enough ammo or health to take down every enemy, and if you were stuck in a densely populated section with few resources, you had your work cut out for you. Previous Resident Evil games have regarded combat as almost a punishment for the player, and the role of the zombies has always been to slow the player down between puzzle rooms. But in Resident Evil 4, combat is a means and and end. The vast majority of the game play has become focused on combat, and consequently it is not only encouraged, the player is rewarded for fighting well. Dead enemies drop items and money that can be used to purchase better weapons to kill more enemies, and ammo is almost never a problem. Rather than finding keys with symbols on them and clocks that can be set to open secret passages, the player spends almost all of their time exploding the heads of the various forms of the Los Ganados. The focus on combat dramatically changes the pace of the game as well, as the goal of almost every area is to kill all the enemies before progressing.

All that said, however, Resident Evil 4 is still a Resident Evil game at heart. Though the game features many outdoor environments, the indoor levels will immediately remind fans of the series of previous games. And though the item boxes have been removed, item management itself is still quite important, as Leon can only carry so many things at once. The game is suitably gory and still provides you with a team mate for some levels, just like classic Resident Evil games. There is plenty of item searching, herbs to combine, and health sprays to collect. The boss fights are still over the top and still involve humans sprouting lots of tentacles and extra limbs. In short, though the execution may have changed, the underlying concepts we identify with Resident Evil remain largely the same.

So I’ve been rambling on about how Resident Evil 4 compares to its predecessors, but what I am sure you really want to know is if it is any good or not. Let’s get this out of the way: Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever made. It’s easily my favorite GameCube game, which is saying something because I really like Animal Crossing. It looks simply amazing, but the game play is just as tight as the graphics. There are a few flaws, but almost everything is polished to a shine. It is rather astonishing that production values can be so high without the fun factor decreasing, but Resident Evil 4 is proof that big-budget games can be worth their cost. It’s by far the best action game I’ve ever played.

So what’s wrong with Resident Evil 4? Well, there were a few things that bothered me. The middle section of the game drags a little bit. The boss fights seemed all incredibly easy or incredibly hard (excepting the second Krauser fight, which is the best boss fight I’ve ever seen). The story was interesting but not particularly thought provoking (though it did thankfully have nothing to do with Umbrella–boy was I tired of that). But these complaints are quite minor, and I really don’t have too much to say about problems with the game.

However, it’s important to note that Resident Evil 4 is not very scary. There are a few moments of tension, especially when Ashley, the girl whom Leon is charged with rescuing, is involved. But most of the game is about action rather than fear. The Resident Evil series has always used ammo rationing and pop-out-of-the-dark scares to build a sense of artificial urgency because the characters it employs are not the type that are easily frightened. But these factors are almost nonexistent in Resident Evil 4, and it’s pretty hard to be scared for a guy who can pop a cap in just about anyone he meets. If you are looking to be scared, Resident Evil 4 may let you down.

Resident Evil 4 is about 20 hours long. I completed it in 12, but only because I refused to continue. Unlike previous games, it’s almost entirely linear as well, and there is very little backtracking. In fact, if you’ve played previous games, it may be hard to get out of the feeling that you need to return to a previous location or hoard a particular type of ammo. My advice: sell all items as soon as you get them, upgrade all your guns as quickly as you can, save nothing for later.

So, in summary, Resident Evil 4 is a fresh perspective on the Resident Evil series and the genre as a whole. Its fast pace and action focus are directly opposed to most of the other titles in the Survival Horror genre, and Resident Evil 4 proves that good games don’t have to fit the mold. It’s still a Resident Evil game at its core, but the minute-to-minute play experience in Resident Evil 4 is very different than its predecessors. Though it isn’t particularly scary, Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games released in the last few years, and it’s a worthy successor to the franchise.

Hungry Ghosts

Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2003-07-21
Regions: Japan

From 1Up.com:

It’s hard to imagine a darker adventure game than Hungry Ghosts. As the game begins, you are dead, and what’s worse, you were such a bastard in life that although you’re currently tooling around in the land of the dead, your ultimate destination is Hell. There’s no getting around that part of it.

You can still change things for yourself, however, by behaving properly in the limbo-like dimension before you’re sent to your eternal reward. It won’t be easy, though, as there are often no right or wrong decisions. What’s good in some circumstances might be bad in others, and the netherworld is such a corrupt place by nature that coming out of it clean might be very difficult.

It breaks new ground for nonlinear gameplay and goes further along the path set by games like Way of the Samurai, with the addition of a creepy, bleak story and setting. It almost makes us want to go all fanboy and start a release petition. (Almost.)

Source: http://www.1up.com/article2/0,4364,1403904,00.asp

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly

Also known as: Rei: Beni Chou
Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: 2003-12-10
Regions: USA Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
This sequel perfects the format defined by the first Fatal Frame, and its unique game mechanics are complemented by fantastic art and atmosphere.

If you liked the first Fatal Frame, you’ll enjoy Fatal Frame 2. The mechanics are almost identical, the strategy remains unchanged, and the most annoying ghosts have been fixed. And everything is bigger and better in Fatal Frame 2: the game takes place in an entire village rather than a single house, the story is complicated and disturbing, and the cool rendering effects are even better than before.

If you never played the original Fatal Frame, the game works as follows. Your character is stuck in some very scary place with a very bad history. There are ghosts haunting the area, and they are pissed off about being dead. They can attack you, but you have a way to defend yourself: an antique camera. When you use the camera the game switches from third-person mode to first-person mode, so targeting is pretty easy. Taking a picture of a ghost will hurt it, but you can do a lot more damage if you time your shot correctly. Just before a ghost attacks you, there is a small window of opportunity to take a “fatal frame” shot, which will deal heavy damage to the ghost and win you a lot of points. You can use points to power up your camera and do even more damage. The games take place in extraordinarily Japanese locals, which makes the ghost angle work even better (seeing a woman crawl out of a kimono box is some pretty scary stuff). The atmosphere generated by the Fatal Frame series is some of the best in the genre, and the horror component is quite well done.

In Fatal Frame 2, twin sisters Mio and Mayu get trapped in a mysterious village named All God’s Village. The village was apparently abandoned a long time ago, because there is nobody around and everything is dilapidated. But when Mayu disappears, Mio must save her by uncovering the secret (and horrific) past of the village, armed only with her mini skirt and antique camera. Over the course of the game, Mio will visit many different houses and explore the areas surrounding the village, making the game much larger than the original Fatal Frame.

The thing that Fatal Frame 2 does better than any other game is scene composition. The atmosphere is excellent, and the Japanese themes make it even more disturbing. The camera placement in Fatal Frame 2 is top notch, easily the best of any game in the genre. Fatal Frame 2 is technically a “fixed camera” game, meaning the camera doesn’t adjust its position based on the direction that the character is facing, but Tecmo (the developer) has gone out of their way to use their 3D engine to make intriguing shots. Many of the cameras move with the player, and often they will twist and use odd perspectives to increase the uneasiness that the player experiences. Fatal Frame 2 also makes excellent use of alternate rendering methods, such as high-contrast black and white rendering, and super-heavy-film-noise rendering. Mix in a very well modeled character and some excellent ghost effects, and you have one of the best visual designs in a game ever.

The camera functionality has been improved over the first Fatal Frame as well. The Fatal Frame 2 camera itself hasn’t changed much, except that the HUD is more informative and there is a slight delay between the motion of the lens and the motion of the world, which gives the player a lot better feeling of movement. New to Fatal Frame 2 is the ability to add and equip special items that add permanent functions to the camera. While some of these are cool (like the one that shows you how much life a ghost has left), some of the others seem useless. You can also power up your camera by “purchasing” special lenses with Spirit Orbs (an item found throughout the game) and points. These special lenses take spirit points (accumulated when you do shots worth a lot of points), but they give you special abilities that can help combat the ghosts. As with the first Fatal Frame, the strategy for fighting ghosts with the camera is to learn their pattern, wait for the fatal frame shot, take it, and then move away.

The ghosts themselves are very similar to the ghosts in the first game, though the designers have thankfully toned down some of the behaviors that made the first game so annoying. Ghosts will no longer circle around you faster than you can move, nor will they vanish and appear behind you. You do get into fights with three or more ghosts sometimes though, which can be tough because you can only keep an eye on one ghost at a time. However, using the camera upgrades can help you quickly put ghosts out of commission. The ghost designs are pretty cool. My favorite is the ghost of a woman who died by falling about three stories down onto her neck; every time she appears there is a horrible scream and you she her body crash into the ground in front of you. Then she crawls toward you upside down using her shoulders, which is particularly creepy.

The controls are pretty good. Fatal Frame 2 follows the Resident Evil mold, but they have also mapped the run button (Square on PS2) to mean “move forward,” so you can hold it down and continue moving forward even if the camera changes angles dramatically. However, I found myself automatically turning around each time I went through a door, probably because I have trained myself to automatically compensate for new camera angles.

The plot in Fatal Frame 2 is similar to the first game, and while interesting is somewhat under-developed. You’ll find plenty of manuscripts describing the plot throughout the game, but there’s never really any point to the plot other than to describe what happened to the village. Your goal is always to rescue your sister, so the back story of the village is somewhat secondary. There are three possible endings, but you can’t get the “real” ending unless you beat the game on Hard mode (which is only unlocked once you beat it on Normal mode). They did this in Fatal Frame 1 as well, and it bothers me. The Normal Mode ending is commendable because Tecmo has chosen to try something new with the story, rather than reverting to the Hollywood cliche trap of solving all problems and killing all bad people by the end. But the Normal Mode ending is also very sad, and is a bit of a downer after all the energy required to beat the last boss. I don’t have time to play the game again and get the “best” ending, which is too bad because it sounds much better.

When I wrote about the first Fatal Frame, I noted that it was “sufficiently” scary. That probably applies to the sequel as well: the atmosphere is very well done and the game has some really good scares in it, but above and beyond the scary locations and scary ghosts, there’s not a whole lot going on. Fatal Frame 2 avoids pop-out-of-the-dark scares, and the environment is done well enough that opening doors can cause you to catch your breath. But if you get over the ghosts and the creepy locals, there isn’t a lot of scary content left over. Though the protagonist is quite vulnerable-looking (which is usually an easy way to make a game scary), the game itself isn’t very hard, so you never really feel like she is in danger.

Speaking of difficulty, Fatal Frame 2 is pretty easy. Though the camera can be powered up, doing so isn’t really necessary until the very end of the game. I actually finished the game having never used any of the special camera power-ups or powerful film until I got to the end boss. The puzzles are pretty simple as well, and like the original Fatal Frame, they either take the form of navigation puzzles or of move-icons-around puzzles. I finished the game in 9 hours (Rank E! damn!), but I suspect that a dedicated gamer who wasn’t interested in exploring much could finish much quicker. Really the only place where the difficulty level changes dramatically is the end boss, and that’s only because the end boss doesn’t follow the regular rules of the game (I wrote about this in a news post).

Overall, Fatal Frame 2 is an example of excellent execution of a so-so concept. The atmosphere is great, the graphics are great, the controls are great, and the visual style rocks. The story is ok and the scares all follow the same format, but these are not really failures of design, just aspects of the game that are a little simplistic. The series remains rather unique in the genre for both its combat system and its choice of enemies, and I recommend anybody who loves horror games check it out.