The lights are on
Veteran Member - Level 14
A few years ago, I was stuck in a ridiculously line at TGS. Level-5 was giving away a free DS sampler that included some bizarre soccer RPG, and I promised to snag one for a co-worker. Unfortunately, everyone else in Japan seemed to have had the same idea. To get the sampler you had to play a bunch of games in the booth, and the line was slow as anything. Level-5’s booth was right next to Marvelous Entertainment’s, and so I saw this trailer about a million times over the course of an hour or so.
I watched and loved Twin Peaks back when it first aired, so the trailer stuck out to me. Again, I saw it about a million times, so maybe my mind just snapped somewhere along the way. Regardless, the thought of a game that was clearly modeled after the show sounded pretty cool. (Twin Peaks’ legal team apparently wasn’t quite as hot on the idea. Access Games had to change a few characters and some set pieces to avoid getting sued into oblivion.)Eventually, I managed to completely forget about the game. That’s what happens when a name changes—from Rainy Woods to Deadly Premonition—and nobody in the United States seems vaguely interested in generating any buzz. I only noticed it when I saw the game’s name on a list of this week’s game releases and looked it up. Aha!Ignition Entertainment has brought the game to the U.S. for the shockingly low price of $19.99. Yeah, I sound like an infomercial, but the thought of a new game selling at retail for that price on the Xbox 360 and PS3 stuns me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I picked it up this afternoon, figuring that even if it was completely terrible it wouldn’t be that big of a financial setback. So… is it completely terrible? The answer is kind of complicated.I’ll just come right out and say that Deadly Premonition is better than the sum of its parts. That’s a relief, because a lot of its components are completely shoddy. It’s ugly. Combat is not very good. The sound design is broken in a lot of ways. And yet, I definitely want to see it through to the end.
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