E3 is over, and nothing really new has been said. How uneventful. One excellent thing did come out of it all though: the demo for Siren: Blood Curse is now up on the PSN for your shiny PS3 that sits around being used as a media center and PS2 machine without any lovely games of it’s own to keep your interest (outside of MGS4). Well, that could just be my PS3 anyways.

The original Siren for the PS2 is an excruciatingly difficult game for reasons that are hard to explain without playing through it. It took me and Sara probably a good year of starts and stops and over a hundred hours, but we did eventually finish the first game. I even liked it enough to purchase the sequel which was only released in Asia, but never got around to playing it in hopes of an eventual US release which never came about.

Even though the demo for Blood Curse is new to the US, it’s been available in Asia for a little while now, and this game was announced quite a while ago. So, honestly, E3 brings most of us nothing new. If you go about looking for information on Siren at IGN or any of the major news sites, you’ll probably come away with less information than you previously knew about the game, or less than you get from spending the 10 min with the demo that it takes to complete. Ultimately I’m severely disappointed with the only thing announced that was previously unconfirmed: the US is only getting a episodic (though, you get three episodes per… episode) release of the game in four parts for $15 each or $40 for all.

[Sidebar: I don’t like Sony’s trend to release full games as downloadable items. It’s not that I’m against digital distribution for full products (you should see my Steam list of games), It’s that they have the audacity to think that the PS3 is the same as a PC. You’re offering me proprietary software on a proprietary system that I am pretty sure Sony’s going to drop support for in the next 5 - 7 years. Something like this doesn’t really make me feel comfortable or safe plunking down that much money for, and I’d rather have something tangible that I can use to SELL and get retribution for if it’s shite. Now, calm down, I know what some of you are saying: “but Matt, the first game was a disaster sales wise, why would they want to release a physical version just to lose money on again?” First, it’s not like they lose money on it, they have all their other games supporting the occasional failure. This is how all other publishers work. By making it digitally distributed it actually lowers the amount of people who will know about the game, and hence worsens sales yet again. To top that off, it’s not like there’s a wealth of other great games for the system that’s going to get your average customer to overlook this one (which was much more the case with the PS2 release). So, in conclusion, I’m going to wait and see if the Asian version (which isn’t region coded, nor is any other PS3 game) has English menus and pick that up. This way I support the game, but stick my nose up at Sony’s inflated ego.]

Whatever, back to the game at hand. As I said there’s a new demo for Siren: Blood Curse on PSN, go download and play it now. I want to explain exactly what’s exciting about this demo, because honestly it gives initial impressions of being very mundane. The game starts off both feeling way too dark, and–ARGHmyhand–brings back awful tank controls. There’s also an new focus on combat, which is a bit misleading because your fists really aren’t going to do you any good. And, top this all off with the little niggling bit of needing to press the up button on the d-pad twice to make your flashlight turn on or off.

Moving along, the demo decides to give your your first weapon: a rusty pipe. How suiting. Now, you find that using this pipe with the control scheme is a bit unwieldy, and if there’s other survivors around you even hit them with no apparent way to avoid hurting your partners. Then the demo give you a gun. See this is where the real control scheme shines through: as soon as you pick up the gun hit R3 and never look back.  This puts the player into first person view. With no obscuring HUD or pesky aiming reticule, suddenly I’m completely absorbed into the tension and horror of the situation. The control scheme becomes natural, and the camera movements only enhance what was being shown from an outsider perspective previously.

The cherry here is that the auto-aim system is seamlessly integrated into aiming effectively feeling more like they game’s reading your mind than that it’s auto-aimed. While experimenting with the fps view on subsequent replays of the very short demo I went back to a previous area where I left a zombie (shibito) alive. I had unequipped my gun for a shovel (I don’t know why the demo makes you wait to get a gun to go into the fps mode) and try to find him. While running down some stairs, suddenly from the darkness he emerges. I swing the shovel in hopes of knocking him out, but he deftly avoids my swing and heads straight for my partner. Now, I don’t realize what’s happen at first, because after I swung the shovel the zombie disappeared below my field of vision, but the auto-aiming tracked them in a way that slowly turned me around (as though the character was looking for the zombie, rather than quick snapping zombie-locked-to-center-of-the-screen) to face them. Brilliant little moment.

After initial impressions I wasn’t so excited about Siren:BC, but now after playing around with first person perspective I’m stoked once again.

As a special bonus for all you horror fans, I’m mirroring the greatest B-Game wallpaper ever created here for your PS3’s pleasure. It reminds me of Bio-Zombie for some reason.