Monday, January 02, 2006

Condemned: Criminal Origins (Xbox 360)

I've been playing the demo for Sega's Condemned: Criminal Origins, downloadable through the Xbox Marketplace.

This game is a lot of things I look for in a game -- next-gen gorgeous, new game play twists on a standard genre (survival horror), and excellent use of 6-channel audio.

This is just the demo, so I don't know if the melee combat will get a little repetitive. But if it does, it's going to be brutal, visceral repetitive.

Horror films could learn from this game. It's one thing to sit and watch a movie for an hour and a half, and see something unknown scurry through the dark. It's something else altogether to spend eight hours stuck exploring abandoned warehouses, seeing things scurry away from you, and having to choose to go after them of your own volition.

Oh, and playing this thing at 1 a.m., alone in the dark, with surround sound so I can hear things in the abandoned building creak and break behind me? Creeped ... me ... out.

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