Desperation Games

The Wife has been getting the twitches somethin’ awful ever since playing the hell out of the Civilization: Revolution demo and checking the calendar every half hour to see if it’s July 8th yet. In order to try and kill some of that time and make the days go by faster, she was more than willing to indulge my list of “games I’ve been meaning to pick up one of these days but aren’t real high on the priority list,” and a trip down to Eaton Center meant I came home with these goodies.

Since the heavy hitters in the horror genre of gaming aren’t out on the PS3 yet (by that I mean Silent Hill, Resident Evil or Siren) this is just about the only thing I can pick up that spits out graphics in High-Def. I’d played the first on the Xbox 360, and while it lacked the same super-creep out factor of a Japanese horror game, it still provided some jumps and thrills. The second is more of the same, crawling around with a pipe in hand while hobos and other homeless types try to kill you.

One of the things I like about this game is the CSI style element that’s been built in. It’s obviously not the chief component (and now that I think about it, that’s a darn shame, because the interactivity of games is perfect for a detective-work style game) but it allows you to do cool stuff like visit crime scenes, run a UV light on the ground for blood samples, take murder victim photos, and try to deduce methods of death, where you’ll get rated on your accuracy. It’s a nice little break from all the super-natural, psychotically enraged, hobo attacks you have to fend off with a bat, pipe or any other handy melee implement you can find.

This, on the other hand, is by Atlus, meaning we were pretty much guaranteed to get it at some point since the Wife has turned into a total Atlus fangirl.

It’s not the kind of game that would go over very well these days because it’s in 2D instead of the “traditional” polygons that have been a mainstay of graphical presentation since the mid-90′s, but it’s got some amazingly detailed artwork, and actually plays pretty well for those of us that still remember a time before games came in 5.1 surround sound and juggled a million, buzillion particles in real time on the screen.