Games Played 07/05/2009

Demigod - PC
Okage: Shadow King - PlayStation 2
Raiden Fighters Aces - X-Box 360
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - PlayStation 3

RANDOM GAME OF THE DAY:


Enemy Zero (1997)
Developer: WARP
Platform: SegaSaturn
Purchase Date: 11/21/1997


The game's quiet moments eventually lead to some seriously horrific scares.

Nothing is scarier than being trapped inside an isolated space station with something murderous occupying the same space. Ridley Scott's masterpiece, Alien, has immortalized this fear cinematically and the video game equivalent of that has got to be Electronic Art's morbid Dead Space that was released late last year. More than a decade before Dead Space though, the best representation of ultimate fear in the deepest reaches of space belonged to Enemy Zero. You play as Laura Lewis, the co-pilot of the spaceship Aki. During the course of the ship's return trip to Earth, something has happened inside the ship that caused everyone to be forced out of hyper-sleep. Laura soon discovers that an invisible alien is roaming about the ship, killing its crew. The game is a combination of a point-and-click adventure that utilizes full motion videos to show your every move and a first person 3D shooter while travelling between the rooms of the ship. To truly enjoy this game, you do have to put yourself in a mindset that you are playing an interactive movie. The pacing is incredibly restrained and slow with the FMV showing detailed animations of every interaction that takes place between Laura and everything else around her. But it is this kind of pacing that gives the game its high level of tension and fear. The FMV sections' relaxed but disturbing aura is a sharp contrast against the fluid 3D sections of the game and this provides the player with an effective sense of paranoia and panic. Oh, did I mention that the aliens that she is facing are invisible and the only way she can avoid death is by using aural queues that signify the location of the creatures? Scary from the beginning until the very end in a very unique way that even its more playable sequel, D.2, failed to replicate.

LIBRARY STATUS: 5 out of 5