Corpse Party
Oct 24, 2010 16:23:20 GMT -5
Post by wyrdwad on Oct 24, 2010 16:23:20 GMT -5
OK, so I could post about this game in any number of other threads, but with Halloween coming up, I figured it deserved its OWN thread. (:
I decided last night when a houseguest and I were kinda bored to try hitting up PSN for the first time in a few months, and see if there were any good PS1 games or PSP game demos to check out.
What I found was a demo of a PSP game called "Corpse Party: BloodCovered: ...Repeated Fear" (yeah, stupid title, I know!) that looked pretty cool from the screenshots (and also caught my eye by its content rating, which was CERO D -- a rating you don't see very often, which is basically the Japanese equivalent of a high ESRB M or somewhere beyond a PEGI 16)... so I figured I'd give it a download and see if it was any good.
Decided to give it a trial run before bed and... well, my 10-minute trial run turned into almost 2 hours of play! It's actually really, really good!
The basic premise of the game is that some time ago, there was an elementary school where 4 children were kidnapped and murdered. The school wound up getting closed down, but was reopened later as a high school. A bunch of students are gathered in one of the classrooms late at night to tell ghost stories about the building's elementary school days, when suddenly there's a huge earthquake that causes the rickety floors to start collapsing... and when two of the students wake up, they find themselves in a room in the same building, but the desks are smaller... and they realize, it's now back to its elementary school days (but still in ruins from the earthquake).
The two of them then try to find a way out, but it seems almost as if the elementary school exists in some sort of vacuum in space, where there IS no way out... and it's full of ghosts, creepy imagery, corpses, blood, and anything else you can imagine!
In other words, it's Japanese horror. But GOOD Japanese horror!
Some of the creepiest things I've encountered thus far in the demo include:
* Examining a glass-doored bookshelf, only to find that it's FILLED TO OVERFLOWING WITH HUMAN HAIR. And then as you press the X button to cancel and move away, you VERY BRIEFLY catch a glimpse of a child's face in the glass door.
* Examining a newspaper on the ground about the kidnapping and murder incidents, only to have the door to the room close and lock. If you examine the newspaper again, the headline is now showing as "YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE THIS ROOM." And if you examine the chalkboard, you'll now see it's full of the hastily-scribbled words "LETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT" over and over again.
* Suddenly having a ghost materialize in the front of a classroom, and you hear the sound of chalk writing on the board as images are suddenly drawn of a man with giant scissors chasing a bunch of very tiny kids.
* Leaving the girl's bathroom, only to have your friend not step through the doorway with you. When you go back in to look for her, you find her in one of the stalls, HANGING FROM A NOOSE, and have to rush to save her from dying.
It's creepy as hell, and VERY intriguing. And it seems like it's pretty open-ended, too -- the order in which you go to the various rooms seems to determine what happens in them, so it seems quite possible to play the game differently every time (which is supported by the existence of multiple endings, since one of the menu options is "ENDING LIST").
The downsides? Well, the graphics are kinda crappy. It's very 8-bit-esque, with OK tile-work, but AWFUL character sprites -- the sprites are actually far lower-res than the tiles, which just looks kind of jarring. The perspective, too, is really weird, with things jutting out at very unnatural angles. And like a lot of NES RPGs, every tile is completely solid, so no walking behind walls or anything -- the top of the wall is an obstruction.
The game is also somewhat poorly programmed and at least a little bit buggy, as I had to return to the title screen once due to an event that seemed to trigger when it wasn't supposed to, which got me stuck in a wall (!). And there are lots of random pauses where it's obvious something is being loaded.
On the plus side, though, the character art is fantastic, and the music (where music exists, anyway) is absolutely incredible. The voice-acting, too, is spot on, and sounds exactly like actual Japanese high schoolers.
Here are a few YouTube videos to give you an idea of what this game's like:
Opening FMV (very Higurashi-esque, with a few hints of Persona 3 influence as well)
A little bit of gameplay from the same demo I played (with the awesome music!)
Apparently, this was originally a doujin game made in 2008 (remade from a PC-88 adventure title?!), which the creators somehow got the chance to publish on the PSP. That seems to be happening a lot more lately, and it's a really great trend!
Anyway, just figured I'd spread the word, as this game really took me by surprise. I didn't even know it existed, much less that it was THIS GOOD. I'll probably be picking up the full version sometime, though I haven't the slightest idea when I'll get a chance to actually play it. Still, I want to support the doujin effort, AND this seems like a great survival horror/adventure title in general, so I'll be happy to shell out money for it.
Anyone else who likes horror and can read Japanese, I recommend it. At least check out the demo -- it's free, and contains the entire first chapter of the game, which seems to be several hours long!
ADDENDUM:
Seems the PC demo of chapter 1 is free as well, and has a translation patch!
Game demo: www.gris2.com/~corpse_pc/dl_top.html
Patch: tlwiki.tsukuru.info/index.php?title=Corpse_Party
Happy Halloween, all! (:
-Tom
I decided last night when a houseguest and I were kinda bored to try hitting up PSN for the first time in a few months, and see if there were any good PS1 games or PSP game demos to check out.
What I found was a demo of a PSP game called "Corpse Party: BloodCovered: ...Repeated Fear" (yeah, stupid title, I know!) that looked pretty cool from the screenshots (and also caught my eye by its content rating, which was CERO D -- a rating you don't see very often, which is basically the Japanese equivalent of a high ESRB M or somewhere beyond a PEGI 16)... so I figured I'd give it a download and see if it was any good.
Decided to give it a trial run before bed and... well, my 10-minute trial run turned into almost 2 hours of play! It's actually really, really good!
The basic premise of the game is that some time ago, there was an elementary school where 4 children were kidnapped and murdered. The school wound up getting closed down, but was reopened later as a high school. A bunch of students are gathered in one of the classrooms late at night to tell ghost stories about the building's elementary school days, when suddenly there's a huge earthquake that causes the rickety floors to start collapsing... and when two of the students wake up, they find themselves in a room in the same building, but the desks are smaller... and they realize, it's now back to its elementary school days (but still in ruins from the earthquake).
The two of them then try to find a way out, but it seems almost as if the elementary school exists in some sort of vacuum in space, where there IS no way out... and it's full of ghosts, creepy imagery, corpses, blood, and anything else you can imagine!
In other words, it's Japanese horror. But GOOD Japanese horror!
Some of the creepiest things I've encountered thus far in the demo include:
* Examining a glass-doored bookshelf, only to find that it's FILLED TO OVERFLOWING WITH HUMAN HAIR. And then as you press the X button to cancel and move away, you VERY BRIEFLY catch a glimpse of a child's face in the glass door.
* Examining a newspaper on the ground about the kidnapping and murder incidents, only to have the door to the room close and lock. If you examine the newspaper again, the headline is now showing as "YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE THIS ROOM." And if you examine the chalkboard, you'll now see it's full of the hastily-scribbled words "LETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT" over and over again.
* Suddenly having a ghost materialize in the front of a classroom, and you hear the sound of chalk writing on the board as images are suddenly drawn of a man with giant scissors chasing a bunch of very tiny kids.
* Leaving the girl's bathroom, only to have your friend not step through the doorway with you. When you go back in to look for her, you find her in one of the stalls, HANGING FROM A NOOSE, and have to rush to save her from dying.
It's creepy as hell, and VERY intriguing. And it seems like it's pretty open-ended, too -- the order in which you go to the various rooms seems to determine what happens in them, so it seems quite possible to play the game differently every time (which is supported by the existence of multiple endings, since one of the menu options is "ENDING LIST").
The downsides? Well, the graphics are kinda crappy. It's very 8-bit-esque, with OK tile-work, but AWFUL character sprites -- the sprites are actually far lower-res than the tiles, which just looks kind of jarring. The perspective, too, is really weird, with things jutting out at very unnatural angles. And like a lot of NES RPGs, every tile is completely solid, so no walking behind walls or anything -- the top of the wall is an obstruction.
The game is also somewhat poorly programmed and at least a little bit buggy, as I had to return to the title screen once due to an event that seemed to trigger when it wasn't supposed to, which got me stuck in a wall (!). And there are lots of random pauses where it's obvious something is being loaded.
On the plus side, though, the character art is fantastic, and the music (where music exists, anyway) is absolutely incredible. The voice-acting, too, is spot on, and sounds exactly like actual Japanese high schoolers.
Here are a few YouTube videos to give you an idea of what this game's like:
Opening FMV (very Higurashi-esque, with a few hints of Persona 3 influence as well)
A little bit of gameplay from the same demo I played (with the awesome music!)
Apparently, this was originally a doujin game made in 2008 (remade from a PC-88 adventure title?!), which the creators somehow got the chance to publish on the PSP. That seems to be happening a lot more lately, and it's a really great trend!
Anyway, just figured I'd spread the word, as this game really took me by surprise. I didn't even know it existed, much less that it was THIS GOOD. I'll probably be picking up the full version sometime, though I haven't the slightest idea when I'll get a chance to actually play it. Still, I want to support the doujin effort, AND this seems like a great survival horror/adventure title in general, so I'll be happy to shell out money for it.
Anyone else who likes horror and can read Japanese, I recommend it. At least check out the demo -- it's free, and contains the entire first chapter of the game, which seems to be several hours long!
ADDENDUM:
Seems the PC demo of chapter 1 is free as well, and has a translation patch!
Game demo: www.gris2.com/~corpse_pc/dl_top.html
Patch: tlwiki.tsukuru.info/index.php?title=Corpse_Party
Happy Halloween, all! (:
-Tom