![]() Now, ten years later, with still no memory of the events surrounding their disappearance, two of the five girls have died - discovered with covered faces and found in a tragic, crying pose. While all of the girls were eventually rescued, their memories were lost, with only the faint remembrance of a single melody and a seemingly possessed masked woman dancing in the moonlight. While all of the girls were eventually rescued, their memories were lost, with only the faint remembrance of a Fatal Frame (aka Project Zero): Mask of the Lunar Eclipse takes place a decade after five girls mysteriously disappeared at a festival on Rogetsu Isle, an island in southern Japan. Summary: Fatal Frame (aka Project Zero): Mask of the Lunar Eclipse takes place a decade after five girls mysteriously disappeared at a festival on Rogetsu Isle, an island in southern Japan.Full instructions can be found elsewhere on the internet. Getting it working on a PAL or NTSC Wii involves little more than dragging and dropping a few folders onto a blank SD card. Maybe Nintendo was onto something.įatal Frame IV is out now in Japan and available on import. ![]() ![]() In fact, even all these years on, there's nothing quite like it.įor others, however, this is essentially more of the same with dodgy controls - and that's after you go to the trouble of getting it working. ![]() The nonsensical premise is strangely absorbing, and the tense routine of battling spiteful spooks with the camera remains enjoyable. In which case, fans may want to overlook its numerous flaws and take what they can get. One can only ponder what these talented artists would come up with on more technically advanced systems, but with Mask of the Lunar Eclipse hardly selling in vast quantities in its homeland this may be the last we see of their series. The atmosphere is as intense as ever, and its neglected environments and unhinged enemy design still has the capacity to chill the blood all these years later. You can't fault the game for its art and all-round style, either. You start to stay one step ahead of the game saving at every opportunity, stocking up on health items, and upgrading your camera abilities with all the red and blue crystals you've been slavishly collecting. This is definitely the case here, because once you start to accept the crippled movement, the stodgy aiming and the incessant need to crawl over every room to get a key to unlock a door somewhere, you stop griping and start enjoying the intrigue and narrative again. There's always a pain threshold to negotiate, and once you get over that the enjoyment intensifies. As many a survival-horrorphile will attest, taking such games at face value is never a good idea. The sensation is akin to controlling a mouse cursor on a choked PC.Īnd yet despite being mercilessly unpleasant to control, there's still a degree of grim enjoyment to be had locking horns with such wilfully unhelpful mechanics. Rather than redesign the game for Wii, Tecmo and Grasshopper have retrofitted the old-style gameplay to pointer mechanics that might as well have been designed to be counterintuitive. At first this isn't a huge problem because enemies are equally slow and ponderous, but when the game starts throwing faster enemies, and more of them, you're in trouble.Įven the most basic actions, like adjusting your aim to react to a downward lunge, are hopelessly sluggish, so combat is actually more challenging on the Wii than it ever was on PS2 or Xbox. ![]() Sharp movements and nimble evasion are nearly impossible, and are limited to ducking out of viewfinder mode to run, or shaking the remote to perform a 180-degree turn. But for some reason you're blessed with all the turning and aiming speed of an stricken oil tanker - useless in the context of a game where enemies disappear and reappear out of thin air, often right behind or beside you. With movement mapped to the nunchuk stick, and aiming performed via the Wii remote, it ought to be a beautiful combination almost tailor-made for a game like this. This operates in roughly the same way as the Camera Obscura, except it damages ghosts with charged beams of light instead. Although some might argue that the soupy aiming, turning and movement speed all add to the sense of nerve-jangling desperation, that's no excuse for a system that defies reasonable input expectations.Įventually, one of the characters, detective Chouschiro Kirishima, adds a welcome element of novelty to proceedings with his special Spirit Stone Flashlight. This would all be fine if it worked, but it's horrible to use for much the same reasons as general exploration. ![]()
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