The flashlight exploration feels really natural.
The game's free-form exploration--which has you pointing directly where you want to shine your flashlight with the Wii-mote--feels perfectly natural, and the real-time lighting effects look extremely good for a Wii game and are roughly on a par, I'd say, with the lighting in Doom 3-era games. (That's in terms of general fidelity, not the specific lighting tricks being used.) Harry's tendency to comment on things he has something to comment about is also a nice touch; it makes the exploration feel streamlined.
After checking out an abandoned, pitch-black building to see how these controls worked, the E3 demo jumped ahead to a combat scenario--or what passes for combat in Shattered Memories. One of the bizarre conditions afflicting the town of Silent Hill in this game is a pervasive deep freeze, where everything around you becomes suddenly and violently encased in ice. I started fleeing the ice as it spread, only to come face to face with some of Silent Hill's trademark repulsive monsters.
GET IT OFF GET IT OFF
Like the flashlight, the defensive controls felt natural and actually tied into the frenzied panic of what was happening onscreen, which--if you'll allow me a Wii cliche--drew me a little more intimately into the action. The developers at Climax seem to be distilling what makes a survival horror game scary and focusing directly on those elements, finding ways to make the Wii's controls work for those elements rather than allowing them to be an obstacle to good, direct control.
These scenes were shown at the Konami event a few weeks ago, so I'm merely verifying for you that they play as well as I hoped they would then. But here's your brand new information about Shattered Memories, a truly unique and sort of creepy technique for personalizing your experience that I didn't expect. Essentially, the game has its eyes on you at all times, watching what you're doing and recording what sounds like an enormous array of minutiae about how you're playing. The game starts with a psych exam, which you can see a bit of in the trailer below, where the doctor asks you increasingly personal questions about your likes, dislikes, bedroom behavior, and other strange topics.
Somebody's watching you.
Shattered Memories seems like an ambitious game, from the eschewal of standard survival-horror tropes like shooting, to the quality of the graphics the Wii is crunching here, to the application of data-mining to a psychological horror context. I really hope Climax pulls it all off; if it does, this seems like it could be one of the better third-party games from a traditional "hardcore" genre we've seen on the Wii yet.
Should have recorded your hands-on, good stuff like this would ensue.
Also is it just me or is video volume way too low?
I do think their modeling/texturing work isn't as good as that of their Japanese co-workers though, alas what can you do. Also held back by PSP.
This game looks amazing and if it works as well as it sounds like it's going to... well then I'll be putting this up there as my Game of the Year. (I mean, at least this far. It's just really hopeful at this point, I guess?) That trailer itself is decidedly creepy.
On that note, the animations in this game are amazing. Both the facial animations and just the character movements all look really impressive. Maybe I just played a lot of Fallout 3 recently, but they're some of the best animations I've seen as of recent. And the monster's still have that classic insane movements that make them so damned terrifying. I can't wait for this game.
(Also this game isn't held back by the PSP. This is the main SKU. The PSP and PS2 (if they're still making that version?) will be the ones that get shafted if need be.)
Fatal Frame is a great series and Nintendo deciding not to release it outside Japan is a dick move.
Some import hands-on articles stated the controls are bad but they're just of an acquired taste from what I gather, not game breaking. It's not an FPS where you need precision control, the controls hinder you similarly to the first RE games' tank style controls, to show your character isn't the most agile in the world that can just sidestep all the monstrosities. In Fatal Frame IV they did it by gimping the camera controls. Instead of aiming with the IR like in an FPS, you use tilts to move the camera view. Adventure fans would probably love the game anyway.
Okay there was a game-breaking bug under very specific conditions and possibly other issues. They could have fixed it for the US/PAL releases. Tomb Raider shipped with a game-breaking bug as well, there was a little noise about it and nothing more, no recalls or anything. In this case they already know the issue and can fix it so there's no such danger. A bug is not an excuse.
But Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is completely unrelated and looks like an awesome game. Let's hope it is :)
But yes. Let's all just watch Silent Hill which will be awesome~
You can just as easily blame Namco (it is Namco, right? I could have that wrong) for not publishing it locally. The fact is NOBODY wants to publish that thing here.
Looking forward to it.