And I don’t mean that in terms of actual testicles, but rather the gumption to sit through horrifying scenes and be terrified by shit coming in through windows. I had fun when I played games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but I had to play them in the presence of others. While I have never played the Zettai Zetsumei games before (released as Disaster Report and Raw Danger in the States) I had heard enough positive remarks to give the demo for 3 a try. Based on this demo, I think I’m going to hunt for cheap copies of the previous two games and throw them in the queue.
The PSP issues that I mentioned yesterday were actually easily solved by installing the official firmware over top of the custom one. It seems that with newer versions of the custom firmware this isn’t an issue at all, or at least with the original PSPs. So after finally spending too much time to get the chance to play this demo, I’m actually quite glad I went through with it.
Unlike games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, from what I can tell the obvious disaster survival instead of horror survival difference seems to be the action is entirely reactionary. A small earthquake occurs so you duck down. The car that you are standing on top of begins to slide into a pit, you run off of it. And so on. Other than that it seems to couple in a good amount of puzzles for you to solve. There was one “fetch-quest” in the demo and I’m sure the game is filled with more, but it makes sense given the situation. You’re just a regular dude, so you’d have to go find a car jack to help someone who is trapped under it. It seems to really flow well.
Yet aside from that deceptively simple formula, there is also a wealth of dialogue options which apparently change how events turn out. How drastic this can be, I can’t tell from the demo, but as there seem to be multiple endings in the previous games one would guess these could end up being fairly important. I have no idea how long the games are supposed to be, but if they are fairly short with tons of optional paths, this could be something I’ve been looking for.
It was a short demo, but has given me a healthy amount of interest in the series. While I am pretty packed with my backlog already, I think I have to squeeze these games in as soon as possible.
