Comic Con 07: Dead Head Fred
I've been privileged to see Vicious Cycle's action horror adventure game, Dead Head Fred, at various stages of its development: first at D3Publisher's press event in New York, again at E3, and then at a soirée thrown last night by D3 and Tomy - where I tuned out the fabulous crowd (even my secret girl-crush, the beautiful D3 PR powerhouse Tamara Sanderson) to spend a solid half hour playing the game.
Dead Head Fred was designed for the PSP alone, and this tight focus on platform-specific development pays off with details we haven't seen much of on the PSP: graphics that don't look ported, compressed, or compromised to fit on the handheld system, a decent control scheme, and perhaps most impressive of all: super-swift loading times.
Those three features nearly make Dead Head Fred a PSP owner's must-have all by themselves, but the addition of terrific voice acting (including John C. McGinley as the titular headless revenant) and fun gameplay seal the deal. (Another indirect mark of D3's faith in Dead Head Fred might be D3's recent acquisition of Vicious Cycle.)
Make the jump for more headless fun!
Fred's controls handle well, and both combat and interaction with the environment were engagingly easy to master. As a headless re-animated corpse, Fred acquires a variety of creepy, spooky and amusing heads that grant him special attacks and environmental abilities.
The tiki idol head, for instance, gives Fred an area-of-effect attack with the ability to slam his big stone head down on the floor - this Easter Island face-dive also deforms certain objects in the world, like busting the doors off a locked meat freezer to acquire the item hidden within.
Another head - a big, bloaty alien face - can inflate itself with water or other liquids, briefly turning Fred into a fire hose or, if you ingest a flammable liquid within reach of a source of fire, a flamethrower. Meanwhile, the default jar head - literally a brain in a jar - helps regenerate health and is more effective against certain types of enemies.
With eight heads to collect in all, the three I saw definitely whetted my appetite for more, and also implied the scope of the game to be more than just a few well-designed levels with environmental puzzles and a slick B horror movie feel. The story unfolds in pace with the game, which should have something for everyone when it hits shelves on August 28.
tiny dancer
Posted to E3, Hot Stuff, Video Games on 27 July 2007
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: d3, dead head fred, psp, vicious cycle
Nice impressions, Tiny. I have been curious of this game for a while now, but haven't heard too much about it. Sounds like my kind of game!