Zero: Gesshoku no Kamen

[HandsomeDead]

This is that game that no-one can be arsed to release in the west on the Wii.

One thing I should get out of the way is I've never played any of this series before so I don't know how good they are. I'm over an hour in and its okay. At the moment I'm just following clues in a creepy hotel (I think) pointing to the disappearance of my friends, the story is a bit vague but I'm hoping it will become clearer with progress, the fan translation is functional, there has been a couple of spelling mistakes, if I managed to spot them then they're obvious.

I have a problem with the controls, they're usable but still counter intuitive, get this. The nunchuck moves you around in a tank/Resi 4 way but the Wiimote moves the camera up or down, and it isn't done using the pointer, just the tilting motion thing.. I forget what its called. It works okay while walking around but then you use the Obscura Camera for defeating ghosts - yeah, thats how you exorcise the ghosts by the way - you press left/right to look from side to side and tilt the Wiimote for up/down.. I don't know why they didn't use the pointer.

Finding clues has been a linear affair, you can only find most of them one at a time, after finding it another comes to your attention and you go and find it. Some puzzle solving has been done too, early Resident Evil sorts of things.

Another thing I maybe should mention, I'm shit when it comes to horror games and this one is proving difficult to play. In the short session on it I did stand up and nearly turn it off on two occasions, its pretty fucking intense. I think its just the ghost thing, you could be looking around a room and you'll see one in the corner of your eye, you get your camera ready and its gone.. well, its not, its just done its ghostly disappearance thing and you can't chill out and check a dining room out knowing a ghoulie there. It doesn't help that when you reach out to pick something up you have to hold the A button down while the wee girl - yes, you play as a young girl in a bonny dress - takes her sweet time about it, anything could jump out at me! I don't need that!

[HandsomeDead]

I haven't been playing this game as much as I wanted to, 3 reasons really.

1, After milking Mass Effect 2 and jumping right into Fahrenheit I'm fucking done with games for a bit... fucking burned out. Just been playing tiny bits of DJ Hero since.

2, Its too fucking scary, I get back from a hard days work and I don't want to go through the stress. I can only manage it on a dead weekend

3, And most importantly, its buggy as fuck. Now I don't know if its because of the way the hack boots the disc or it is inherently fucked. The most distracting thing is the frame rate randomly drops, you can be walking around fine but you go back to an area, where it was smooth before and it drops to 10 frames a second, nothing has changed, its not like there are 10 ghosts floating around, its just the same as before but it chugs like a pro. My favourite bug is the one where you go through a door, say the door to upstairs corridor and you go through it and end up in a window in the downstairs dining room. The funny thing about this is I thought it was some 4th wall shit because I know Suda51 was involved, I thought I was getting fucked with but going into the next room took me outside the game, where its all black.

Its happened twice in 3 hours 30 mins and you have to turn the thing on and off again and reload an old save. I guess thats why its not getting released because it needs another 2 or 3 months in development... its not done yet.. put it back in the oven.

Its really annoying because when its running its brilliant, structurally its like early Resident Evil, exploring and weird puzzles, combat is like Resi 4, its clunky and you are always running for safety, finding somewhere to plant yourself and unleashing hell... camera style. But it has that heavy and intense feeling of Silent Hill 2.

Its exactly the type of game I could loved to bits but its fucked, proper fucked.

[HandsomeDead]

Done, busting makes me feel good, etc.

I've got alot of mixed feelings about it, under those technical issues is a fantastic survival horror, its consistently atmospheric, just when you get used to the feel of the game it throws more things at you, the story itself is some uneasy stuff, if a little vague, I think I got most of it but it still left me bewildered at times. The last few hours were a bit of a chore, the environments started getting bigger, couple that with your slow speed and getting around was tiresome. I wraps up nicely, though.

If it wasn't for a really shitty framerate and it crashing at any given moment (although that did stop in the last two thirds) I'd have called it out as the best survival horror this gen, but it does have issues.. along with the stupidest control scheme ever.. so it isn't. The title still belongs to Dead Space I guess.

While its not amazing, or probably not worth the trouble of getting it I'm still glad I got to play it.