TITLE: Destined to Obscurity AUTHOR: Anonyymi DATE: 6/12/2005 09:11:00 ip. ----- BODY:

Obscure. Ob-se-cuuure. LES OBSCEUEUREUX. This word is so fucking French it hurts my hateful heart to pump the blood through my veins to the muscles and tissue in my face and throat to allow me to pronounce it. But that is besides the point. Obscure is a survival horror game. Teens trapped in highschool, nightmarish creatures of the night, have to solve the mystery and save their friends and themselves, yadda yadda. It's all pretty generic, yet told in a very solid manner. Documents you find are written in a convincing way, voice acting is annoying but suitable fora bunch of American highschool trash. Graphically, Obscure is fairly good, I guess, for current gen consoles. Solid modelling, nice, detailed highschool enviorments ranging from an abandoned dormatory through the classes and labs and to the big gym. Sound is very good, atmospheric. Monster design is okay, all of your generic horrors, from humanoid to creepy crawly to wall and cieling clinging and more. Creepiness levels are okay, nothing Silent Hillish, but you get the hibby jibbies from time to time. Biggest problem is probably the camera, typical survival horror on rails camera that sometimes fucks the action, although controls are much better than RE's, being camera relevant instead of character relevant, so you don't end up trying to out run the evil undead with a control scheme more suitable for a tank. The characters you control vary - Kenny, the jock can sprint, Ashleigh, the ugliest "babe" ever, can apply her self defense skills in close quarters, Josh, the journalist, can save you the time hunting and tell you if there are items in the current zone or not, Shannon, the smart one, can give you clues as to what to do and Stan, the jive talking skater boy, can pick locks almost instantly as opposed to the rest of the guys who struggle for annoyingly long periods of time. Of course, Stan is useless since picking locks isn't that big a deal if you just clear a room of baddies, Ashleigh's close quarters combat is absolutely useless against the onslaught of darkness, Kenny's running is just pointless since rooms are so small you can make it to the door anyway and the game isn't complicated enough to get through to actually need Ashleigh. Josh is really great because I'm too lazy to scour every room for every little fucking box of bullets. But it's still cool, because even though they don't have much to go on, they're fucking highschoolers versus the Dark Armies of A (sort of) Ageless Evil, didn't expect them to fart lasers and wield Katanas made of calcium they themselves ooze out of their palms and shape at will or something. So yeah. What's the point of reviewing this game, then, if it sounds like nothing special? Well, there's the fact these kids are more capable than Mr. Doom Marine and KNOW how to combine a flashlight and a pistol with a handy roll of duct-tape. There's also the very neat factor that, like in a true horror movie, when your characters die it's not game over if you still have any of them standing, which means the game could end with one survivor or five. ...Or none at all, but then you're a loser worse than Gremmi. But these are not the reasons. The reason is, ladies and gentlemen, that during the vast majority of the game you play two characters, not one, alternating between the two at the press of a button. What's so cool about that you ask? Nothing, but plug in another controller and press start and you've got a very solid survival adventure CO-OP. That's just _it_. COOPERATIVE PLAY. One guy hogs the pistols, the other hogs the shotguns, and the two of you go out fighting the armies of evil while being mildly scared if you allow yourselves to, and having a really good time solving puzzles, killing baddies, uncovering the plot and getting new stuff. It's not too exciting in itself, but with the right person, it's a lot of fun. One thing I must mention though: when you finish the game you get alternate outfits. The girls look like whores, the guys look like fags, and it's all extremely pathetic really. The only conclusion is that the French developers of this game wanted the French youth to have someone they can relate to as well, but France sucks, so the game should be American. Don't laugh this off, I'm afraid it's quite possible that this is true. My god, they look so horrible that it just might be that someone actually thinks that is cool. And then you realize there's a whole country of them.

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