Nonchalant LANs

Earlier tonight (5th May 2005 05/05/05) Cameron and myself went to Blockbuster in Diamond Creek and we decided to pickup a copy of Silent Hill 4. Cameron didn't have his block buster card on him so he had to give them information and proof of his identity. He gave them his phone number, his address & his name was on the back of his bag. They still had to ring his house for some strange reason even though he knew the names of everyone the card was registered to. Seems like needless security to hire 1 XBOX game. So anyhow I paid my $4 and we got the game onto Cameron's card after a needless call to his dad which went like this:

Woman: Hello this is Blockbuster Diamond Creek, your son Cameron wants to borrow an XBOX game.
*Cameron's dad speaks for a bit*
Woman: Alright thanks *Hangup*

Seriously, that was it!

So anyway I got home with the game and tried to play it. XBOX Logo then just my dash with "Unknown" as the disc type. I cleaned the disk than begun to rip it to my XBOX hard drive and then one of Josh's crappy songs started playing (The Beetles - Yellow Submarine) so I decided to watch Judge Judy which sucks majorly while it copied. A few of the movies had problems copying so I cleaned the disk and then resumed the copy. After awhile we had it copied.

We booted the game (From hard drive, of course) and then were confronted with a movie which basically spoiled everything that happens during the course of the game. We were then presented with a crappy main menu from which I could start a new game or load an old one (Which I don't have, oddly enough Continue is disabled yet Load wasn't!).

We started a new game and watched a low calibar intro movie which just zoomed around the apartment. Anyway you start off this game in your apartment and there is blood and rust everywhere. There is a face in the wall which when looked at reveals "It looks like a face". You look around your room and go "This is odd x is not x" a few times then it does some weird FMV thingy and you wake up. It was all a dream...or was it?

You then learn your character has been having recurring nightmares every day and all the windows and doors have been stuck closed since these started so you get up and walk around. Your door is still chained so you battle with the controls and try and look around in the horrible first person mode. You get your first weapon from inside the fridge which is a "White Wine Bottle". You can look out the Window and see some chick go into the Subway and then you see your neighbour outside your front door through the spyglass. After this a weird noise comes from the bathroom. You decide to check it out and find a mysterious hole in the wall.

Your character goes into the hole in the wall and you have to crawl through the tunnel for the next minute or so until you reach the other end. All the while having some crappy "old school" filter applied to the camera. You find yourself on an escalator coming down into a subway which looks a lot like the one from Hunter The Reckoning. There is a girl ahead of you which you go up to and talk to. She says this is all a dream and you are inside her dream. Of course being the cool guy you are you start to wonder if she's right or not and then insist that she is wrong.

You walk around with her trying to find the exit and she says she feels sick. She enters the womans toilets and your character waits outside for her. After awhile some mutant dog things come out of the men's toilets. The game doesn't tell you how to use the combat system so you have to try and work out the controls for yourself. Up arrow to equip your Sewerage Pipe and then hold R and press A to attack (Either A or X, I forget now actually). After owning the dogs you are free to walk around once more. I went inside the woman's toilets and found them completely empty except for a pipe in the wall (Much the same as the one in my apartment).

I entered the hole and crawled through (Automaticly this time, through the wonders of FMV) to find myself waking up in my apartment again. Once again it was all a dream and then I went and saved my game. After this I proceeded to re-enter the hole. I wandered around in the subway for about 20 minutes and found some pistol ammo. This is all I got to in this game as I can't for the life of me work out where I have to go next. The game is horribly vague and has the worst camera angles i've ever had to deal with. I wasn't scared once throughout the play and CAmo said "Well i'm not scared but i'm a little freaked out".

This game was a big disappoint and could've ammounted to more.

If LOST was going to be made into a video game i'd have to pick this one as the best fit. Every time it answers a question it asks a thousand more and leaves you in a state of confusion until the very end when it presents you with a completely profound solution to everything which your supposed to accept.

You may have read my review and thought that I was giving a negative basis towards the game. Well of course I am! There is nothing positive about this game at all! When me and Cameron were first playing CAmo though the chick was a drag queen lol

Worst. Game. Ever.

Here is a flash animation I spent 15 minutes making.

I give it a rating of 2/10 (We've switched to the Gamespot rating system now)
(Changed from my previous rating of 3 in the revised edition)