CURSED MOUNTAIN PC VERSUS WII FULL

There's rarely a moment where you don't know exactly what's around the corner - which is a shame, because in the two or three instances where it does manage to evoke tension, Cursed Mountain is almost entertaining. Once you've played through the first hour you've seen pretty much everything the game has to throw at you, and it gets very repetitive. The complete lack of enemy variety doesn't help you have ghosts that walk, ghosts that fly and a couple of bosses. Oh, if only the combat were ever actually exciting. Ghosts never appear from thin air or take you by surprise - they're signposted with in-game cut-scenes showing you exactly how many there are and where they're coming from. It's because you always know exactly what's about to happen. Ghosts sashay flouncily towards you in a strange sort of dance rather than shambling or scuttling or doing anything else remotely threatening.īut the real reason that Cursed Mountain isn't frightening has nothing to do with its visual limitations. Darkness and foggy visual effects are overused to the extent you can't actually see what's going on, which builds irritation rather than suspense.Įric never really inhabits his environment - for all his mountain-climbing prowess, he can't step over tiny bits of scenery or skirt chunks of rubble - and his animation looks incredibly old-fashioned. Unfortunately, despite the occasional impressive moment when you turn a corner around a summit and catch sight of the village you're heading towards, or walk up some narrow stairs to find they open out onto an impressive Buddhist monastery, Cursed Mountain's visuals are so decidedly low-rent they ruin the atmosphere. Combine all that mist with less-than-crisp Wii graphics and you can barely see what you're doing. As you get higher up the mountain there's a constant need to find oxygen canisters - searching for them does build tension, even if it does seem unlikely that they'd be conveniently hidden in smashable pots. It's occasionally well-drawn, too the deserted clumps of houses, narrow trails and monasteries can be genuinely atmospheric. A mountain trail provides the perfect framework for the action, keeping you following the game's intended route without making you feel restricted. The setting is easily the best thing about the game. It's linear, old-school survival horror, with all the associated backtracking, key-finding and awkward combat. Protagonist Eric must overcome these using motion controls and the religious door-unlocking trinkets hidden in obscure places.

CURSED MOUNTAIN PC VERSUS WII FULL

Ghosts have infested every village and monastery on the way up the mountain, leaving them desolate, empty and full of sacred barriers. After all, the Wii remote is just as suited to throwing torchlight into dark corners as it is to pointing and shooting.Ĭursed Mountain tracks a Scottish mountain climber's ascent up a Himalayan mountain in search of his (strangely non-Scottish, judging by the voice acting) brother, who has stirred up trouble by attempting to scale the mountain without completing the appropriate religious rites. Survival horror is still relatively unexplored territory on the system, and it's one genre where motion control could really add something to the experience. In order to create an exciting atmosphere when battling the ghosts, the game employs a number of custom-created special effects such as the shader simulations as well as a newly developed post-processing framework.Ĭursed Mountain, developed by Sproing, is scheduled for a worldwide release for Wii in 2009.These days you feel obliged to reward any Wii game that's been purpose-built for the console and isn't depressing licensed shovelware - but that's not the sole reason Cursed Mountain looked promising. The engine highlights of “Athena” include amongst others, HDR-Rendering, shader simulations developed especially for Wii in order to display ice, heat and water (realistic reflections and refractions), an ultra-fast particle system for amazing snow storms, soft particles for realistic fog and smoke, depth of field, motion blur, dynamic soft shadows, spherical harmonics lighting, as well as a high performance level-of-detail and streaming system in order to provide long viewing distance of the entire surrounding. To deliver on these goals, the Sproing team relies on its proprietary “Athena” game engine, which is rendering the Himalayas on Wii at a quality never seen before.

Cursed mountain pc versus wii