Game Season

Lots of new games have been released that are of top quality, or at least look interesting to say the least, and I've had very little time to write about anything. But finally I have a few minutes and a desire to update with a bunch of games waiting on my shelf, maybe only for historical purposes so I can look back and see "oh that's what I thought of it"! I'll write shortly about a few games every now and then.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
I have absolutely no idea why this and the one before it got anything even close to an 8/10 in reviews. The handling is terrible, you drive into walls constantly, there is absolutely no sense of speed and the levels are confusing. You only learn where to go after a few laps because of steep hills shadowed with tree branches or whatever and that's not how it's supposed to be. The graphics are screenshot-worthy at times but there are some effects that look horrible.

Burnout Paradise
Some don't like it but I think they're don't really understand how to play it. Burnout Paradise requires a different type of approach, you can't expect to retry a failed mission again for example, the idea is to create a more casual game, which is fine for me. You get new vehicles, want to upgrade your license, drive fast (that's what this game does amazingly well, you really feel like you're going at insane speeds), and all of this is done via casually doing a race/stunt run/etc. and if it fails then so what, drive to the next intersection and try another one. The game could be a bit clearer about which events you've completed already for this license but it's fine. The open world theme isn't that good for racing games because of taking too many wrong turns, etc. Midnight Club LA is quite a good game but then Need For Speed Undercover is not. None of these are great. They used to do them better back in the day (NFS Underground and NFS Most Wanted). Burnout Paradise is fun in a casual sort of way but you shouldn't have to tell your players how to play your game, outside of the basic game rules obviously, because currently I don't think everyone quite understands the beauty of this game.

Dead Space PC

The guy's helmet. That's all that made this game distinctly different for me before it was released. Because other than that it seemed like Doom 4. Now having played it, I feel my guess was right.

It's an action horror game in space. Like Doom. I've never been scared of the whole Alien space horror genre. This science fiction horror thing just seems too "cool" (with all these H.R. Giger Aliens with sleek designs and lasers flying around like Star Wars) to be scary for me outside the cheap sudden startle moments.

I've been hearing lots of people talk about how scary the game is and basically general praise towards how well it's done. Maybe it's the PC version but I don't agree at all. First off, the mouse lags behind terribly causing controlling to be fairly annoying. You get used to it in-game but the menus suck, just like in Fable 2. Oh and I'm not playing this with the XBOX 360 pad since I finally bought the Microsoft box and have the controller in use there. Maybe I should have played Dead Space with it since the mouse and keyboard combo just doesn't feel as good. But nothing would've helped the fact that when aiming with a weapon your vertical axis slows down, probably to try and help you with the cutting off limbs mechanic, but it's just more annoying than intuitive.

One thing I have to mention in the beginning here is the absolutely terrible narrow field of view and camera angle. The idea, I believe, was to create a claustrophobic feeling inside the ship and have the monsters feel like they REALLY get in your face at close range. The problem is you don't see enough and can't show the player anything really magnificent. They do try though but many times you actually miss it. Some people have said they don't mind the FOV being zoomed in like that and some have said they really dislike it. Having it zoomed in like this makes you lose sense of 3-dimensionality a bit too which makes things look almost orthographic at times and making sense of big rooms becomes more difficult than it should be. There aren't many big rooms in the game and the linearity might turn some people away (no, the guidelines on the ground weren't really needed) but a game like this wouldn't work in wide open spaces. The camera angle doesn't help either. Resident Evil 4 did it right, Gears of War 2 did it right. In Dead Space the camera is way too low making your character basically cover up the whole left side of the screen.

There are a lot of clichés here. An empty space station with audio logs and baby demons was done in Doom 3 (games never have any young kids you can kill, but demon babies are OK), flesh monsters running around that were once human but were infected with a virus and some crazy bad guy thinking this all has something to do with religion and Gods. But there are also unique concepts which I just feel aren't used well enough.

The no gravity zones and space areas don't offer anything new. Jumping from surface to surface in the no gravity zones was a let-down for me. Before the game was out I thought you could fly around freely and get this nice "they can attack from anywhere!" feeling going, but having started the game and realizing how the character controlled I realized the mechanic was going to be something different or it would feel too stiff to control. What it turned out to be was boring and it makes you lose track of where you were going too much with the way the camera handles. A smoother flow to it would've helped for example. The space areas just deplete your air reserves and muddles out sound a bit but in reality you can't hear anything in space. That didn't stop George Lucas though.

The monsters are a simple bunch. Shoot off limbs to win. In a way it's interesting and new but when you can't really kill them any other way (you can but it's so much easier to chop off limbs) it will get a bit repetitive. The weapons cater to that end a lot though and despite them being a fairly unique set, they just don't have as many uses. All I did was use the weird chainsaw gun contraption from start to finish. Oh and the monsters not following you through closed doors is a mood stopper to an extent.

The sound effects are something to be highly praised here. They are absolutely magnificent and have power to them that games rarely have. When you stomp your foot down on a crawling monster you really get the sensation that what your doing is crushing bones. The ambience effects are slightly overdone though, not that the effects are bad, just that there's too much going on. It's interesting to listen to no doubt but I would've gone with a more subtle mood and emphasized on the scary moments.

Speaking of scary moments, this is no Silent Hill. All the scares you'll get are sudden startles when a monster jumps out from behind a corner or your communication device goes on and one of the other characters sends you a message. Yes, the sound from a beginning video transmission is a bit too loud and imposing. OK, it needs to get your attention but pacing them during quiet moments would've been enough anyway. While we're at it, there's been talk about the pacing in general. Some say it's good and others don't really agree. I feel it works (you get quiet moments and then fights) but it's a bit dull. You don't have any real puzzles to solve (slowing time and moving things around aren't interesting core gameplay mechanics because they have been done to death and neither of these are used to create actual puzzles where you have to think longer than 2 seconds) and all you're basically doing is running around linear passages shooting monsters every now and then within very precise time intervals. It's more like a 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes loop instead of having more variety.

The lack of a HUD is excellent. Your information is shown on your character's back and it works very well. You can manage your inventory, look at the map, see audio logs, etc. through a menu that opens up next to you as a 3D plane like in Midnight Club LA for example. It's pretty neat. Other than that the inventory sucks. You don't have enough space (even though you can expand the available slots by buying a new tier of armour) and thus have to choose what weapon to gather ammo for and make room for health packs. The idea of a mechanic like this is obvious from the plethora of games that came before Dead Space but I've always hated it. Give me Simon the Sorcerer's hat!

The animation is done well except for a few interpolation glitches in taking off and landing (of the player character and enemies) in no gravity areas. The story is full of boring "fix the engines" types of missions and at one point we even get an attempt to match the Bioshock botanic garden type of environment (I'm not saying plants haven't been done before Bioshock) but it doesn't deliver apart from the amazing coughing monsters that just sit around and spread toxins into the air. The lack of real life items also makes this feel too sci-fi to my tastes. Star Wars always had the nightclubs, music and a good scope of human emotions but Dead Space only has a soda vending machine. It doesn't feel like an authentic environment despite the few benches here and there. It's a hard subject to get into because obviously there are medical labs and similar areas but all in all it gives off a sense of being generic and simply too sci-fi as stated above.

Supposedly this engine is up for sale and was supposed to compete with Epic's Unreal Engine but I don't see it as battling in the same league at all. Epic's engine looks so much better and runs smoother. I haven't seen the developer tools for this one though so who knows. Anti-aliasing (even though clearly present in the options) and anisotropic filtering don't seem very good and you actually get quite blurry visuals at times, and finally the textures are very low quality often (this is most likely due to the fact that it's supposed to run on consoles too and them having less memory causes problems if porting something that was tuned for PC usage only). Having played Gears of War 2 now just strengthens my opinion.

The game does keep you coming back for more for some reason and even though the general theme doesn't interest me one bit after Doom 3, I just can't help but come back to it wanting to find out what happens in the end. I'm very close to the end now but I have a strong feeling that nothing interesting or unique will happen and the game will just be brushed off as another Doom clone.

Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning

Decided to try it out too because Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an interesting piece about it a while back where the writers discussed the beta. They seemed to enjoy the game and said it was very much like World of Warcraft, one of my favorite games ever. So I thought maybe it might be good and if it's not then at least it'll be interesting to see how many ideas they took from WoW. Let's not get into the whole "but WoW stole many ideas from Warhammer and other MMOs". Plagiarism is different and this is not it. WoW is the most successful MMO ever and even though it took a lot of the core ideas from other MMOs that came before it, it was the first one that did it all right. The results can be seen by anyone.

Anyway, Warhammer. When you first start it up the similarities with WoW are made extremely clear. It's a good thing in a way because you'll know exactly how to move your character, how to talk to NPCs, how to navigate your UI, how to chat with friends, and so on. It even looks like WoW. The graphical style is very similar but then again this is how Warhammer has always looked in the books when I used to paint those little miniatures as a kid. But all in all Warhammer feels like its own game.

PvP or RvR as they like to call it is the main focus of the game I would say. The areas are locked into tiers and you fight over them by taking over locations and forts. The battle never ends and that's what's interesting about it. However, if you're of higher level and try to enter a lower level PvP zone you'll get a penalty in the form of transforming into a chicken. On one hand I understand this but then again it would feel a lot cooler if at the level cap (lv40 is the current maximum) you could fight over the entire world and not just at the few zones made for the level cap.

There are siege vehicles and turrets that you can use to repel enemy attacks too and they're done quite well. When aiming a huge bow for example you get a specific UI for it with a crosshair and instructions on what to do. You can also buy different things like rams and pots of boiling lava that you can put on pedestals at pre-defined spots near a fort that you're trying to take over or keep under control. I would prefer if you could set them up where you wanted but that might create some bugged situations and might be hard for the developers to implement. In the beginning now things haven't really been that hectic on the PvP front. There are a few sieges sometimes but not that many people take part in them. It would be good to have some kind of way to entice people to take part in these bigger events, for example giving rewards other than an experience boost that you currently have for taking over some parts. For example raise the experience gained from killing enemy players by 20% or something really meaningful for a while. People like going after the level cap in MMOs even though Warhammer seems to want to focus on taking levelling up slowly. It's just human nature to go faster to the end and a level cap makes it feel like the end unless some drastic changes are made to the core MMO design structure. Maybe they're more active on full PvP servers.

There are 2 ways to do PvP. Either join a scenario which is like a battleground in WoW. This can be accessed directly from a button above your minimap which makes joining these fights easier and faster than WoW. The other way to do PvP is to walk into a PvP enabled zone in the map/area you're currently in. Every map has those areas and when you walk into one you get a countdown from 10. If you don't leave the area or attack anyone before the time runs out you get PvP toggled on. There are of course full PvP servers where you always have PvP on but I tend to think those are for Counter-Strike kiddies :)

With PvP being in such a big role here it's weird that handling your character isn't done very well. You can move around just like in WoW but there's one major difference, the net code is buggy. The game was released in a rush, obviously because WoW's new expansion is out in a few months and releasing any MMO up to roughly 3 months after it is a death wish. But somehow Warhammer still feels very polished which is nice, however it does lack in certain places and maybe the reason it feels polished is that after playing the terrible Age of Conan I've lowered my standards. I shouldn't because I'm always looking for very high production values and Warhammer isn't one of those games. It's still buggy, some quests can't be completed, mob AI is odd and the net code is bad. What do I mean by net code? I mean the way information is sent back and forth between the player and servers.

The game doesn't lag exactly, meaning that I can run around fine, but what can happen and does happen very often is enemies standing in place and after a moment they teleport somewhere completely different and continue walking. It's like the information of the NPC's location wasn't sent correctly to the client side machine. Also, when fighting, especially with spells, you can never be sure if what you're casting is up to date. This is especially evident with damage over time instant cast spells. In WoW when you repeatedly press a button to cast a DoT spell fast after your global cooldown is over you can easily keep track of when to stop pressing because your cooldowns will show you the exact time the spell was cast. In Warhammer your cooldowns bounce around oddly sometimes showing 1.5 seconds left after a cast and sometimes 0 seconds because the information isn't handled well between the two ends. I think this has something to do with trying to make information flow faster than really needed because we all know in an MMO world nothing is exactly as it seems. Things that you're seeing now happened already a few seconds ago. However, WoW takes this into account and you get a very balanced PvP aspect to the game. That's why Arena matches are such a competitive area in WoW. In a game like Warhammer, where PvP is the main focus, you would expect more focus on the handling of information. Currently 1 vs 1 matches aren't about skill at all, but rather about who gets the most commands through the system by bashing buttons or who's of higher level and thus does more damage. PvP is simply about big groups running back and forth shooting and hitting each other randomly. I'm not saying NPCs don't sometimes act weird in WoW but that is definitely minor compared to Warhammer.

There's also a lack of character feedback. What I mean is you don't feel like you're really playing your character. Sometimes your spell doesn't show any visual effect, sometimes you don't hear sound effects at all for it and in many cases sound effects weren't even added for a specific event. For example, casting a fireball type spell on the Magus class causes a sound effect to start when you press the button to cast it. However, this sound effect ends before the casting time ends, whereas in WoW every cast has a looping effect that lasts even if you get spell pushback from someone hitting you and thus the cast time increases. In addition to that you don't get an audio clue when the cast really end and the fireball goes flying. To top it off you get no sound when the fireball hits your target either. This simply makes you feel like you're distant from the game world.

Healer and Tank. Theses two classes are a bit problematic. I played a dwarf tank for a while and got utterly bored within the first few minutes. It takes ages to beat down one enemy. You're making people not want to level up such an important class if you take away all their abilities to perform alone. Healers are the same but can be better used when playing with friends because you can heal them and do damage yourself. I didn't get very familiar with the classes but this is the impression I got and I would definitely put more focus towards the important classes being cooler to play. WoW has done that too but in the beginning it was hell and even now levelling up a warrior is much harder than say a warlock.

The level design in Warhammer is interesting. It seems like some artists (not game designers) were given the world building tools and set loose with only a few requirements as to where to place camps for the 2 factions order and destruction. The reason I say this is because the maps look quite good (absolutely amazing in some areas, for example The Inevitable City), but they flow badly at times. The gameplay isn't good and the overall design is very linear. It's not like Age of Conan though, which is a good thing, but it's far from WoW. You can only run to the next map in line and between tiers (2 maps per tier) you get a loading screen. This does not create an open world feel. The maps funnel players toward certain areas and don't give you the same sense of freedom as in WoW. The maps aren't bad though and the quests do move you around a bit but in my opinion for an MMO it should be way more open. Some of the distances between areas aren't great either, especially seeing as you have no means of moving faster between them.

Having no mount also makes things annoying because there are only flight paths at one camp in each map. The camp near the PvP zone. This is good once you understand it but it took a while to grasp. It would still be better if all the other camps had flight paths leading to the RvR flightpath. Without a mount moving around is very slow and having played a few alts up in WoW I feel very bored running around. On the other hand, you get a mount at level 20 for 15 gold and at level 16 (when I quit playing) I had over 17 gold already. I can only hope the mounts are a big enough speed boost.

You have a sort of compendium with you that you can open to check up on quest progress, monster kills, titles and so on. A lot of the ideas are taken from WoW again but the book itself is a very nice touch. The linear gameplay lends to not only making the PvP aspect work better but also to building a story for your character chapter by chapter as you progress onwards. You will unlock different stories and chapters as you explore the world and complete quests and you can read about them in your book. There are also lists for each type of monster you've killed and special quests for them like each one having a quest to kill 25 of that type and you get an experience bonus. It's an extremely cool idea. Also, titles are more frequently given out than in WoW and you can get some really nice tasks like clicking on yourself 100 times gives you the "Ow My Eye" title. Funny stuff for sure! Giving players things to unlock is cool like the XBOX's achievements, but then giving them the opportunity to show off that achievement in a big way like a title above your character name is even cooler. Everyone likes to stand out from the crowd.

You level up by getting experience by killing monsters and doing quests. Same old same old. But you also can gain experience by doing PvP which is another example of how much this game focuses on the PvP side of things. You get PvP quests and there's also a separate PvP level called Renown Rank. You have a special talent tree for the renown points you've earned too that gives stuff like more health, more experience or gold from killing PvP players, and so on. Very nicely done. There's also your core talents that you can buy when you level up and add to your action bar and then some special talent trees like in WoW. These are simplified though in Warhammer and also work linearly. You go through them in order out of your 3 different talent specializations. 25 points in total at the level cap and 15 points in each of the 3 trees. Somehow I didn't get these to work though so I don't know what the idea was. I unlocked the first one and couldn't use it. The spell wasn't found anywhere.

In WoW there are gems for your gear and in Warhammer there are talismans. In Warhammer there are 3 slots for tactics too: Core, Renown and Tome. These are like 3 buffs you have on all the time. They could cause you to shield yourself against some damage at times or gather more gold when killing PvP enemies like stated above. It's a nice addition. There's also a morale system which is a bar that gets bigger the longer you fight and more you get hit I supposed. The bar has 4 stops in a linear fashion and you can set up rank 1-4 morale spells on them. When you fight long enough you reach rank 1 and can use the spell there, which could be an instant cast fireball that does a load of damage. Once used it goes on cooldown and the morale bar resets. It's a very interesting tactical addition especially for longer fights. If you're killing single enemies alone then you can also use the morale bar because it doesn't immediately reset after you go out of combat. Your health and action points (mana) recharge so fast anyway that it's not a problem. You also get a rolling experience boost the more enemies you kill in a row without the boost resetting. This is a cool idea that makes "farming" that much more fun and Blizzard should think about implementing something like this into WoW too.

The gear you get, at least early on, is an issue again. Players look the same because everyone basically gets the same gear. It seems later on you'll start getting more stats like spell damage and so on but for now the stats also seem very simple. The game seems fairly balanced (not perfect by a long shot) for now though so it's fine. But the gear still looks very much alike for the same classes. You can color your gear though which is a very nice addition but not all pieces will accept color. You can also add little tokens to your shoulders for example that further distinguish your look but up to now I've found no real visually great additions, they're all just small pieces. People like to stand out from the crowd as I said earlier. Give them more opportunities to do so.

The UI can be changed quite nicely in Warhammer. You have a UI editor directly in the game and that's a big plus. You should be able to set your key bindings directly in the UI editor though. Now you have to go through a menu that has every action listed in alphabetical order for some odd reason. That means Left, Right, Up and Down (as in movement directions) aren't listed next to each other but all over the list. The UI editor is nice though.

Animation is quite nice when up close. Characters walk past you and their heads turn to look at you. It's all very cute but then when they're further off some form of highly annoying animation degradation is used. It eats up frames from between and makes it look like you're viewing some old keyframes only. At least give us an option to turn it off because I don't think something like this should be that affected by the net code if at all. The textures also, especially on bigger areas like mountains, are extremely blurry and this is one of the reasons the game actually looks worse than WoW. WoW is the same throughout, under your feet and in the mountains, but Warhammer looks highly detailed under your feet but very blurry in the mountains because of low resolution textures used to drop system requirements. Anisotropic Filtering does not help here, the issue is with the game engine and how it renders things. The player characters also look bad up close but I guess in a game with huge fights and focus on PvP you'll want to create easily distinguishable (and this is probably why the gear looks the same too) classes at a distance and not really something that's perfect up close.

All in all Warhammer is a nice game with very many ideas from WoW but also lots of great ideas of its own. The game feels like its own game but still very familiar to those who've played WoW, which isn't a bad thing. Now if all those idiots who whine about comparisons between WoW would shut the hell up. This game is like a tribute to WoW. It's a lot more linear and the net code along with character response rates gives it a big minus but all in all I'd say it's a great way to spend a few months while waiting for Wrath of the Lich King, or if you're an anti-WoW kind of person maybe you'll find your new favorite MMO in this simpler and fairly buggy but still second best kind of MMO.

Crysis Warhead

I took a chance and decided to try Crysis Warhead. I didn't think it would really be any better than Crysis but they seem to have tuned the engine better this time, in that it doesn't crash as often and doesn't have weird textural problems. Or then it's because I'm now running Vista and DX10 instead of XP, otherwise the system is the same.

The guns sound good, there are lots of interesting choices and just enough room on your character to carry a few (not too few, not too many) while making it possible to choose the ones you like best but also keeping it limited enough to make you take the best ones for the current situation. The suit enhancements are great and all can be used to create your own way of playing, run through fast, jump to high places, go invisible.. And by the way the sounds muting down a bit when going into invisible mode is a very nice touch.

The levels are nice and cut-scenes are done very well this time round. Last time it paled in comparison to Call of Duty 4. This time the action and tasks you are set out to do are a bit more interesting but still mostly generic it they don't really put the levels to good use. There's still the freedom to choose which direction you want to approach from but in a game that people generally only play through once what's the point? Maybe add some better side missions, like hacking into computers or sniping an important sergeant, that you get great rewards from like UI modifications that give you a different color and layout or add a radar that shows hidden areas or something. The lead character's British tough guy accent annoyed me. The enemies see you from way too far and I don't think occlusion is handled very well. In Unreal Engine 3 even a leaf from a tree in front of your view will cause the background to be occluded and thus making the whole thing faster, whilst in Crysis Warhead you can experience insane framerate drops even inside small huts that have nothing but a few walls and a chair.

I had some fun in the first few forest sections with 1280x960 resolution (usually all games run at 1600x1200 fine on my top of the line Geforce 8 series, Core 2 system with 4gb RAM), and with graphics set to "Gamer". Try to put these in order by the way: Gamer, Minimum, Enthusiast and Mainstream. That's how Crysis Warhead lists the graphical settings for Low, Medium, High and Very High in whatever odd order it was. Quite silly and not really needed. It doesn't simplify it for anyone and neither does it make it "fun".

Anyway, the game was running OK until the first snow mission. Then everything slowed down to around 5 fps. Turns out it was the effect above the mountain basically and turning down the shader quality helped a bit because of the ultra complex shaders used in the scene. The problem is that stupid mountain shows all through the snow areas and thus you get an insane drop of framerate for quite a few levels. Sure it looks nice but Crysis Warhead is once again nothing more than a complete and utter mess regarding performance optimization. At one moment your system runs the game fine and the next you suffer lag like no other. If you want a game to feel consistent then you need to optimize your levels and make sure it runs the same way throughout the experience. I don't want to go and tweak every little graphic setting separately for each section of the game.

Crysis Warhead looks good but is optimized like shit. Seems like a fairly fun game too, just not worth getting until computers have advanced a year or two. Or if you want another take on benchmarking to complement your Futuremark Vantage software.

It gets even more ridiculous when during an extremely visually complex area you have to stay and defend against a swarm of monsters coming at you with 5 fps instead of running through with Maximum Speed on like I tend to do and just hope for the best. Sure you can tweak your graphics down again but Crysis is all about looking good (in outside tropical areas, because inside it looks generic, boring and simple) and with your graphics down it looks like Duke Nukem 3D. With gameplay that's not even close to Duke Nukem 3D why not just download the old classic on XBOX Live Arcade and play that instead.

Devil May Cry 4 PC

- Focus on being cool. From the way the characters speak to the way your character slides across the floor with his sword to the side after taking a big hit that knocks him back.

- Supposedly it doesn't work quite well with a mouse and keyboard combination but I'm using the XBOX 360 for Windows controller again.

- New hero, Nero. The hand is a cool concept, albeit not exactly new, and it offers a crucial boost to the feel of the game I would say. It makes you feel like you have more control over what's going on around you. Sometimes I don't like new lead characters like in MGS2, but seeing as I haven't played the previous parts of the series I can't really say much here. Dante's still in though later on.

- Cloth effects are very nice on the heroes and animations are smooth all round.

- The music is nice and the mood is good. Overall it doesn't seem to have as much of a personal identity as God of War or Ninja Gaiden, the two that it could easily be compared to. Even though all three are different games, I would say the whole demon thing, up to their design in a way, is much closer to Ninja Gaiden though.

- The gameplay is very classic in that you move from area to area basically, some of which are gorgeous and others which are simpler. Developing a game like this can easily create a feel like it's not all a complete whole when different level designers are building parts and others simply know more about aesthetics and use more visual effects, but generally all the views of mountains and other larger landscapes are done well whilst smaller corridors sometimes look more plain. These areas sometimes get cut off with the red demon walls again, just like in other games of a similar genre, and then you have to fight off some monsters until the walls open up again allowing you to advance. It's been done already and feel a bit old since the gameplay really is nothing else than moving from area to area killing a few baddies. There are the occasional small puzzles but they're in such a small role here it's barely worth mentioning. The level design is very linear too with certain areas that you can open later. Mostly I think it might've been cooler on a console. You also visit some of the cooler locations rather fast and then they're over, like the forest section.

- The enemies are sometimes a bit dumb in design and maybe too far out. Demons with stitched clothes that look like scarecrows don't really match any stories you've heard as a kid. Other than the evil scarecrow man or something, but none of these look like a traditional scarecrow. There are some great enemies too though and the overall design of the enemies and items is still pretty good. The enemies that change from sword to flying rodent, or something, are again far-fetched as an idea but are done very well. They transform very fluidly and the 3D is perfect with no textures left Z-fighting or anything. The mini grim reaper type of monster is also amazingly done. The black smoke that creates a sort of cloak around it is amazing and moves very nicely. There is one problem though, in certain parts these guys tend to want to go inside walls and hang out there for a while until attacking you.

- The bosses are among the best I've ever seen. The fights could've used a bit more tuning in that they could've required you to play more with your character. Sure you're jumping around avoiding attacks but mostly they're quite easy affairs that require some button-mashing. They do look amazing though and move around very well. The game is worth buying simply to experience the bosses. The stone slabs alone where they come out from are a great and interesting idea.

- The orbs with faces (different types, used to buy powerups for example) are great and look very nice after defeating a boss and a bunch of them come rolling at you. It makes you think of some crazy drug-induced nightmare from a Studio Ghibli movie. Like the 3 crazy heads (Kashira) in Yu-Baaba's room in Spirited Away.

- The secret missions are a good idea but why does dying in them affect the normal game you're playing? Also, they require you to play the game mechanics more than play the actual game, which is annoying in some of them like the jumping platforms where you have to get up to the top within a given time limit. The problem is because of how Nero handles in the air it's actually hard to aim him at the correct spot even though you see perfectly well where it is you have to go. Nero can't be moved around when he's falling down, ie he has no air control after the peak of a jump. Which sucks.

- The menus aren't very good or clear. It's a console translation of course but why the fuck does it take so long to exit the game again (see Assassin's Creed... ugh)? Systems -> Quit mission -> B -> Yes -> Start Game -> Quit Game. Can't all menus have Quit to Main Menu and Quit to Windows options??

- I only found out near the end of the game that the idea is for you to actually spend your points on talents you want for the current level and then redo them for the next level because you get all the points you've gathered, and then spent on skills, back easily by choosing to redo your setup. I kept thinking that you'll start getting exponentially more points near the end like in other games and thus eventually get all the skills, but that's not the case. Maybe this could've been made clearer. The ability to automatically choose them all makes it easy for casual players.

- The difficulty is quite easy on normal. If you choose a harder mode you'll have to focus more on the fighting but in a game where the fighting isn't THAT fun, I don't see why you would want to. Seeing as there's a lack of real puzzles and adventuring/exploring too I don't know what exactly you're supposed to be playing here.

- Some of the puzzle mechanics (other mechanics than fighting) seem far fetched like punching around the moving pillars. First of all it doesn't really suit a game like this where you can move around freely in the 3D space without constraints. A more logical solution would be if the pillars were set on tracks so that they only moved in 1 of the 4 general directions and you'd have to punch them at the correct time to pass closing walls or they'd bounce back to hit you (with all those spikes) or something similar. Now it feels a bit too loose and you don't know where it's going to fly off to, or if it's going to move at all since some little bump in the wall can cause it to not go where you want it. This happens rarely though. Also, the random dice game rooms are dumb. You have no control over where your piece will land when hitting the dice and thus it makes an annoying random element that will piss you off eventually if you can't get to where you have to go in order to proceed. Something like this should be optional.

- Gloria's tits bounce all over. Then there's Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur, Ninja Gaiden.. I'm not really a big fan of enormous digital bouncing breasts made of jelly although it seems the Japanese are.

- The camera angles seem very amateur at times. They move to show something in a way that's not "cool" (as the game attempts to be) or productive/helpful. A good example is the part where Nero is running along a snowy ledge after the first big flame boss to the temple (or whatever it was) and the camera is following him. The following is fine but it changes angle about 3 times always to something a bit different and again right behind him. If you're going to change camera angle it needs to be for a reason like showing a new area or room, not just for the sake of it and roughly into the same place it was in the previous shot. The cameras change according to a volume, like in there types of games it seems to be, and you'll get the same angle and distance to the character always when standing in a certain spot even though the cameras sometimes move, but they'll always move the same way.

- Jumping isn't very fun. It's odd and too fast. It needs to be smoothed out a bit and like stated above, some air control would be good.

- Nero cries too much. Some would call this emo. It's annoying mostly. Nero's and Dante's attitude might annoy some people but these "young cool guys" have been done to death in a million games and it doesn't come as a surprise if you've looked at any of the screenshots or read about the series before trying a game.

- The cut-scenes are very well done and the camera angles there are mostly professional. Nothing like MGS4 but certainly up to the "required quality standards" in games currently.

- The language seems a bit mature at times with stuff like "Go blow yourself" being said and flipping the middle finger. Although I'm not 100% sure that was meant to be his middle finger in one cut-scene... it sure does look like it though and would fit the scene, even though a bit tastelessly.

- Why does the image stretch out as if you were in widescreen mode after completing a mission? It looks ugly. Console translation lazyness I bet.

- The final and most important point about the game is the overall game flow. You play to the "end" with Nero basically after which you play backwards through everything again with Dante. The idea is quite dumb to begin with BUT it could've been executed well if you ran across some other areas of the level as Dante. For example you saw a cliff high up that you couldn't reach with Nero and then when coming backwards you would be on the cliff with Dante. There are a few things you can only unlock as Dante later on but they hardly make it worthwhile. You even have to kill all the bosses again. 3 times to be precise. First as Nero, then as Dante and then once more all of them one after another. I know some games love to do this (Viewtiful Joe for example) and it's "old-school" in a way but I think it's closer to cheating your players than actually making things more complex. Of course you need to have a certain amount of belief in your own bosses if you're going to trust that players can get so good at the fight they'll bash through it in no time the next go, but mostly it feels like artificially adding length to the game. Maybe it's a western/eastern difference.

- Overall not as beautiful and interesting as God of War and not as precise in combat as Ninja Gaiden. So what's left? The bosses look cool and the game relies on being "cool" to play, and it is up to an extent, but overall it's the weakest of the three series in my opinion. It's still a decent game though.

Soulcalibur IV PS3

Fighting games. I'm not that big a fan of them even though I really looked up to Street Fighter 2 back in the day (probably more because of its amazing character design and awesome graphics, which still to this day make me smile whilst playing it on the Wii Virtual Console). I've never been against beat-em-ups but it's just not the genre I'm most interested in. Nevertheless, I've almost always bought the newest Tekken and Soulcalibur games because they do represent the top tier in the genre and the character design has been phenomenal. Soulcalibur's newest version still has the oddly stupid stories and dumb voice acting but at least the character selection menu's music is great. It's also still about the weapons as much as it was before and you won't find any boxers here.

In Soulcalibur IV (SCIV) you can progress sort of naturally through the game and the difficulty curve is excellent. So, I've chopped up the game into PHASES below each one getting more complex and meaning you learn more about the game and become more involved. That's part of the reason I love SCIV, they developer really knew what they were doing. It attracts beginners in the genre as well as hardcore fighters.

PHASE 0.

First of all you notice the game looks absolutely amazing. Nothing to add to that, it looks great and the animations are extremely smooth. It felt really good to finally play a real fighting game after a long time with no new note-worthy releases in the more hardcore sector.

Basically you could go and do some training first off. Not everyone does it in the beginning but that's why this is Phase 0. You can practise whenever you want and the practise mode is excellent, unlike Smash Bros Brawl, which I wrote about a while ago. You get to view lists of all your chosen character's moves, you can even see the character perform the move and what it should look like, you can set up your opponent with simple scripts so you can test out attack patterns, your health always replenishes thus making it impossible for you to die except in certain arenas due to a ring out, and so on. If you wanted you could set your opponent to the hardest difficulty level and keep fighting for 30 minutes. In the end you'd have a much better understanding of the speed the game moves at and you'd basically become a better player. Training is actually worth being in this game.

PHASE 1.

SCIV starts off easy by letting you play through Story mode on NORMAL difficulty and thinking "I'm not too bad!", whilst in reality NORMAL seems to be the "ultra-easy" one. You just feel like you're better because it's not called ultra-easy! You get a lot of in-game currency for completing story mode (which is a short 5 stage romp through some bad guys in regular 1 on 1 fights) and thus you can open up all the "locked" character pretty fast by buying them after a few playthroughs. This is how they reel you into the game and get you familiar with the system. At this stage it's still button mashing that'll get you through.

In each stage of Story Mode you have a certain amount of bad guys up against you ranging from 1 to 4. They could have special abilities too such as preventing you from doing grab moves or something. It's an interesting approach because you have to fight these bad guys in a row with the same health bar. You might have an ally or two to accompany you though at some points and those you can switch with at any time. The other character rests while not fighting and regenerates health slowly. You also can't switch too fast between them because of a timer but it's quite fast in replenishing itself so that's not a concern at all really.

PHASE 2.

After completing Story Mode on normal difficulty for all the characters you start wanting more from the game. There are a few options, move on to Tower of Lost Souls (yes, the name is generic and sucks) or go for Arcade. Generally I would think people are scared of the Story Mode's HARD setting still at this point so they go for something else but little do they know that Arcade Mode is actually comparable in difficulty for the last fights. Arcade mode is a traditional fight against 9 other characters in stages in-between which your health does replenish.

Tower of Lost Souls is actually more interesting but still generally a simple trick to make the normal 1 on 1 fighting (or Active Matching Battle, AMB, where other characters can swap in whilst another regenerates health) seem different. It works well enough and just like in Smash Bros Brawl, the Subspace Emissary seems like a good idea but doesn't work, I'm happy they didn't go that route with SCIV. They focused on what works best. It's just a different way of looking at things like the world map in Soulcalibur 2.

PHASE 3.

During the end of Phase 2 you'll get more interested in the Character Creator. Some people have no doubt tried it out in the very beginning already but you're not going to get a lot out of it until you've played the game for a while first to understand how everything works and what's really needed statistic-wise. Sure you can make a cute anime inspired chick with a huge sword but if the armor statistics don't work then the character will be useless.

So, what you need is to level up one of the character styles (level 9 is the max and can be achieved with a few hours of play). This is one of the interesting things you start noticing that the manual lacks. The manual is in fact extremely vague. There are good tips to get your started but the way Soul Crushes and Critical Finishes are explained makes you think they're the same thing. There's a lot of stuff in the game that's not easy to understand and the logic seems far off but once you put some time into it everything becomes clear (or search around the Internet a bit, even with the lack of good FAQs on Gamefaqs you can find some stuff through Google). Anyway, once you level up a character's style (note, the character doesn't level up, his or her fighting style does) you can use that style on your own characters (or modify an existing one) and with a higher level style, buy better skills for your character. There are lots of different skills all placed under nice World of Warcraft type icons (yeah icons aren't a WoW thing, it's just that these ones look like they could be direct spell icons from WoW).

Learning the character creator is a task on its own and it took a while for us to figure out that when choosing an armour piece the game shows your statistics as if you didn't have any armour on for that slot as opposed to what you would have if you replaced your current one. It gets even more complicated when certain armour pieces overlap one another graphically and thus can't be worm at the same time removing the other. This makes it look like you're gaining a percentage of health whilst actually losing a numerical value. Would have been better if they simply made the conflicting armour piece's graphic turn itself off automatically but still let you keep it on for the statistics it provides. But it seems the pieces that cause overlaps have better statistics anyway.

The menus are OK for a console but seeing only 3 pieces of armour at a time is a bit limiting for an HD resolution.

PHASE 4.

The requirements for Honor awards become more central to play because you get new items for your custom characters with each 5 Honor bonuses you collect. There are things like "Clear story mode with Darth Vader", "Clear arcade mode" and so on. They range from the easy to insanely hard and some of the descriptions in the Honor (Rewards) menu itself are too vague. For example, most of them keep track of your progress like the Honor for doing counters, which shows how many you currently have, whilst some like acquiring all the available weapons for 5 of your characters doesn't show any progress even though you've already acquired all for 2 characters for example. Also, it doesn't say anywhere that there are 8 weapons per character (which is fine because some things can be left a secret for the player to discover) or that you actually have to buy the weapons too and simply unlocking the right to buy them isn't enough (this is silly because once you buy all the 8 weapons for one character and don't see the Honor slot for the reward updating, you assume that's not how you do it, luckily the Internet had some helpful forum posts through Google).

Custom characters also become very important for the Tower of Lost Souls gameplay mode which is quite fun. You progress up floors fighting difficult enemies with 1 health bar as briefly mentioned above. There are secret "chests" on each floor and tips on how to obtain them. The requirement could be something like "switch character 3 times" or "block 5 attacks". The thing is that they get harder from Floor 11 onwards and without custom skills set up for a character you've made, you're going to have a harder time. With custom characters you could also have more than 1 health bar of health but this requires that character's fighting style to be of higher level and for you to have unlocked a few Honor rewards to get to choose the really nice pieces of armour.

You start learning more about countering and blocking at this Phase too and basically should have realized a while ago that you can't survive some fights without moving a lot and watching carefully what your opponent does. There are lots of mechanics that become apparent here such as blocking at the exact correct time and stuns through such manoeuvres. There is also the Soul Gauge which is a ball next to your health. It starts off green but can turn blue (good) if you attack a lot or red (bad) if you play passively and just hold your guard up. The only function it really has is to speed up gameplay so that nobody wants to go to the red side. The reason for this is if you're completely red and your health bar starts blinking red too, you go into a state called Soul Crush, the moment your opponent breaks 1 piece of armour from you and presses L1, they perform a Critical Finish and you die immediately, no matter what your health is at the time. This isn't explained well enough in the manual but it might be because it's wanted to be kept a mysterious thing. I just found it more annoying because L1 did nothing by itself when the opponent was simply flashing red. This brings us to armour which each character has 3 pieces of (high, mid and low). Repetitive attacks to a certain area will break your opponents armour from that slot or in Soul Crush mode the armour breaks a lot easier.

PHASE 5.

Many people will try online mode earlier but it might be best to go and play with the real pros only later after you've learned to play the game a bit. However, at some point you'll want to go online due to the few Honor rewards you can get from it (such as playing a set amount of games and winning some, etc.).

I've heard about online mode being laggy but I haven't had any problems with it yet. I haven't played it too much though but everything has worked fine and it's always nice to set up a quick game against someone in another country. You can see statistics for players and leaderboards and you can use your own characters which is great. It's not very complex but there are enough options to get you by and it matches up people fast which is extremely important. People also have a level there so you can play and win to progress along and the system matches you up against someone closest to your level from those available. I've fought against people 20 levels higher than me who go down easily so either they didn't focus as much that time or the levels don't work as well but it does seem fair because you only gain a small amount of "experience" per win.

Update: Been playing online a lot more recently and there are a few things that bug me. First of all it seems like you can't level up without actually winning a fight even though you do get points ("experience" if you will) for certain things like first attack and so on. The opponents seem to be really difficult during the night but it's probably because only the hardcore play then. But it doesn't matter when you play, you rarely get matched up with someone near your own rank (at least at the lower levels). I don't know if the system matches players up but I'd hope it does. The highest level player on the leaderboards is around level 200 and I've been put in fights against people 100 levels higher than me, so that gives you an idea of the "fairness" of some fights. However, the queue times are quite short possibly because the system doesn't wait so long to find someone perfect to match you up against. I would've wanted an automated "re-search" each time it fails to find a group for you though because currently you'll have to choose the "search for game" function manually every time you're late to enter a game (meaning the technical side of it, not related to the player's speed). Also, the whining about having lag doesn't seem to hold any water, I've played over 100 games and in only 2 of them was there lag. And I'm on 2mb WiFi. You really start to learn to play the game after honing your skills on one character you like online for a long time. The levels are spread out between normal games and games where you can use your custom equipment and skill setups. Mostly it's best to go for simply 200% health. I find it odd you can't play tag team games with your friends on the same console against people online though. It would be fun to switch around. Maybe it's a technical limitation, who knows. Also, sometimes people seem to disconnect mysteriously after I win. I'm not sure if it actually counts as a victory then or not, maybe there's info around the net about it. It seems bugged in some way at least because right now the Honor rewards screen has a different number for "Current record" on wins as opposed to what my online account says. All in all, online play is quite fun and even though the levelling up system is fairly weird (in addition to the above, if someone 50 levels higher than you wins you in a fight, they still get full experience points sometimes taking them halfway through the next level already after levelling up, which is odd in a way. Doesn't the levelling slow down later on?) it all works quite nicely.

Everything in SCIV is related to gathering some bonuses and making your custom characters better and thus performing better. The character creation UI isn't the best and seems a bit confusing at first (and why do you have to have text directly on TOP of the character when choosing whether to buy new pieces of armor? You can't see the character well then!). Finally after you've cleared the entire game you can keep playing random matches online when you feel like some good fighting. I really love the game and being able to change the absolutely terrible voice overs from English to the original Japanese ones is excellent. Although hearing Darth Vader say something that's not in English seems odd. The game is an excellent fighter for those looking for some in-depth skull bashing with weapons.

There's one empty character slot between Darth Vader and The Apprentice in the character selection screen so I'm hoping it's for Yoda in a future DLC, but people have been wondering about it all over the net. Speaking of DLCs, the XBOX360 version of the game got a patch with new items for all regions but the PS3 version patch hasn't been released in Europe yet, which is frustrating as hell. I have no idea why it's not possible to release it here too when it's out in other regions already and also on the XBOX360 here. If the reason has anything to do with money, release schedules or bureaucratic crap then I'm going to be pretty pissed off. I highly doubt there's any technical issues with releasing a simple DLC such as this seeing as it's already out in the US.

Siren Blood Curse

I love how it's written like that without anything to separate the Siren name from the secondary title sort of. This is a sort of semi-remake of the original (some things are the same but it's got a lot of new stuff too) but split into episodes that you can play in any order. Get the whole pack for 30 euros or pay 40 euros in total after realizing after the first one that this game rocks like hell. I'm not even going to start about the file sizes (around 700-1000mb per episode, 12 in all) because fast connections are so common all over the world currently so it shouldn't be a problem at all. Besides, it's fun to download a real full game, especially if you haven't done so before. The only thing I wonder about is why release them as episodes and why do you have to download each episode pack in each chapter separately? If you release episodic content then why not release more later like a TV series instead of everything at the same time?

The graphics are up to date for the PS3 although at times the shadows are a bit too defined. The transition from light to dark is very rough and if you thought Doom 3 had too many dark areas this one will be like walking in a pitch black room at times. Areas that are important for gameplay are mostly well lit though. I know the overall visual experience here is something that not everyone might like and at times it is a bit too unclear especially with your huge character in front of the screen blocking most of it. It works well enough in outside areas but the game has lots and lots of small corridors and houses that really don't come to justice because you can't see enough. Obviously you can switch to 1st person perspective but a game like this is meant to be played from 3rd person view because of the different characters you play. 1st person mode doesn't even support strafing whilst moving forward/backward and turning is slow. It's meant for short usage to explore corners and such anyway. The slightly artificial darkness is there to add to the horror experience though and it makes you feel even less in control of the situation.

Speaking of controls, I heard they were bad but this is classic survival horror and it works just fine for it. You have to base your game's difficulty on how the player character moves and it works well here except for a few parts with flying enemies that shoot at you. I've heard of the sniper zombies in the original version that people hated but gladly they have been removed from this version. You have to make the difficulty fair to the player and can't have enemies that require you to turn around at fast speeds without a quick "turn 180" action on the player character like in Resident Evil 4.

I have to say I played the game through on Easy mode. I thought I'd focus on the story more and not worry about fighting because in horror games I'm more interested in the adventure aspect than than killing anything and I was a bit afraid the fighting might be an annoyance at places like other survival horror games have proven with limited amounts of ammo and so on. When you get to choose your difficulty I would list them as "I prefer story" and "I prefer action" because choosing Easy makes you think you're a wuss. Or then simply Normal and Hard but that wouldn't be accurate really. It's a tough call because you don't want to make players then think, if they chose "I prefer action" that they're losing out on some story elements which wouldn't be the case obviously.

The story is fairly good but it reminds me of Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill. Resident Evil 4 came after the original Siren in 2005 (original Siren in 2003). The Silent Hill references are obvious because a few of the developers that were working on the first Silent Hill worked on Forbidden Siren. It's interesting to see the story for different perspectives because you get to play so many different characters. It gives a sort of variety while still keeping the story intact. There are some risks to an approach like this, for example people might not feel as emotionally attached to the characters when there are too many of them. It's fine in Blood Curse though and seeing your characters as zombies when playing with other characters is cool. The chronological order of things is a bit weird because you're not entirely sure why you have to run through a certain area again and why your friend isn't a zombie anymore whilst they clearly were one in the previous chapter. Speaking of chapters the episode system works like a charm. It has the classic "Previously on Siren" types of flashbacks in the beginning of each episode and the "Next time on Siren" clips at the end. It felt really cool even though I know Alone In The Dark 4 announced the feature on their game earlier but I never got around to playing it.

I have to say part of the scare factor of Blood Curse is lost because it's so spread out over little areas and you know you just have to get to the end of the map basically. Obviously the easy difficulty setting also does its fair share of calming things down. Luckily the game doesn't rely on sudden scares which I think are a really cheap way of creating horror. Only in the very beginning do you see a zombie burst through a wall but nothing compared to some bullshit moments in Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill. I raise my hat to games that make you play on the edge of your seat because of the atmosphere. There's enough variety in things you have to do but there aren't enough maps really. You find yourself running through the same areas a lot. Not too much but its right there on the line, if a few of the levels were repeated just one more time I would've been very disappointed.

More about the gameplay, it's actually interesting because the game is a mix of stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, Thief,..) and horror, making it stand out from the survival horror camp. The enemies, for some reason, don't react to your light but who cares, it's WAY too dark when you put it off even though a subtle high definition range type of system is in play, in which your sight adapts to darker areas after a while when moving indoors for example. Lighter areas grow and you see more.

The inventory is a bit weird. I only realized in episode 11 that you can actually see how many bullets you have left. Why doesn't it show it in the main screen? I know they're trying to reduce HUD information though (you can't see your health either, although on easy mode you can take quite a lot of hits so it doesn't matter really). In that episode I also figured out that a Shibito Brain (a type of enemy) doesn't always look the same. Finding them is a pain, even with sight-jacking which I'll get into later. The game should tell you more distinctly how to track it down or what it looks like, perhaps with a glow around the enemy or them talking very distinctly (fast and high for example) when you're in sight-jack mode.

There are way too many weapons. Each of them have their own finishing animations which makes me wonder why resources were put into making them. They don't take a lot of space (talking megs here) but they require a few man-hours to implement. Animations and all. The game isn't exactly about killing, so half the current amount of weapons would've been just fine even though it's nice to find different items you can use always. I tend to beat down all the enemies I encounter rather than hide because they go down fairly easily on this difficulty setting and it's scarier to let them live and try to sneak past! I like the fact that they get up after some time but then again why can't you just rip their heads, arms and legs off or something to stop them from getting up?

The animations are obviously not motion captured and the characters' hands flail around loosely quite a bit. They don't seem firm. Makes them look weak and made of paper sort of, but this is an "issue" in many games. Nothing really bad but you notice it especially when in a few other games it's done so well (Uncharted, but then again that was motion-captured).

So, what about the feature that sets this game truly apart from the rest, sight-jacking. It's fun and all, and it's a feature that needs to be implemented in the very early stages of design to work well. For this series it was in all the way from the beginning so things work well. The action doesn't pause when sight-jacking so you need to be careful which is fine. Sight-jacking automatically comes on when an enemy spots you and I think it can be turned off from the setup menu if you don't like it. It slows down the framerate quite a bit (maybe on purpose, so as you don't run around with it on always, as if losing around half your screen already isn't bad enough). You can "bookmark" monsters and see what they see. It's a fun little feature and used cleverly in a few cases (looking at your friends in another room to check a clue from the environment). The monster growls and talking is very nice too and their movement is fun to follow. Voice-acting is terrible on the story character side (goes so far as to completely break the mood a few times), of which to note especially is a Japanese man who tries to talk English sometimes. It's not a problem that his English is bad, not everyone can speak the language, but it's like the actor never spoke a word in his life and is reading from a piece of paper. Truly horrible to hear him speak.

When you play the game you get to open up extras that tell more of the backgrounds of your characters. Some of these are really great like short video clips and so on. I like checking through the archive screen to find out all these little things that have been collected along the way. I think you get them simply by completing episodes. Completing the game gives you a summary of how well you did along with some "achievements" like not killing anyone etc. I've never been that interested in playing through highly linear story-driven games a second time (there are a few exceptions with some games that are just too good like CoD4) so they're not that interesting even though you can go through the game in chapter mode. It's not like Call of Duty 4 where you can show off the levels to your friends because they're all so different, this game is pretty much the same from beginning to end but not in a bad way, just in a "not much replay value" way for most of us. The ending is a bit weird and having a heavy metal background myself I found the final song to be insanely stupid :)

So that's Siren Blood Curse. I think it's an excellent game with fun gameplay for an excellent price. It's scary but not to the extent that you truly feel sick when playing it :) Silent Hill did that to me at numerous occasions but I still consider it one of the best series ever. The terror you feel when going through endless hospitals, misty streets and schools is too much at times in the Silent Hill games. In Blood Curse you have the fun "previously on" and "next episode" clips as well as a feeling like you're progressing from place to place in smaller blocks between which you can relax and have a Pepsi or something.

I'm a huge horror fan so maybe that's why but for some reason this game really hit a sweet spot for me. It's different enough to keep you interested to the very end and it plays well. Probably the best game on PSN currently.