Pax East 2010: Hudson Hurts My Brain

So while at PAX East 2010, I swung by the Hudson Entertainment booth to see what they had on offer, specifically wanting to try out the survival horror game Calling. I was able to get my hands on it, but unfortunately, even with headphones, the mood was hard to get into with all the chaos around me. Calling is basically your typical J-horror movie turned into a videogame, so why the characters are using computers and cell phones is beyond me. I mean, have they never seen one of these movies? That's exactly how the ghosts get you! As a Wii title, the graphics were about what you'd expect, although the shadow effects were good. I was told there's an option for Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, which would be good because the English voice acting I heard during a cut scene was a little stilted. There was plenty of mood and puzzles to solve (I had to rely on the crowd behind me to solve one because I couldn't add up that many numbers in my head! Luckily there was a genius in a Professor Layton hat who did it in the blink of an eye!), but as I said, it was hard to really get into it because when I took over, I was plopped right in the middle of the story with no idea what was going on and a noisy crowd all around me on the show floor. Still, if you're into J-horror movies, Calling seems to give you the opportunity to star in one yourself!

The other game I had a chance to play was Rooms: The Main Building on the Wii. Basically, it's a sliding puzzle game where you work your way through buildings room by room. Each room is broken up into puzzle pieces, and you have to slide them around the screen to get them into the right position so your on-screen character can get to the exit. And it's a lot harder than it looks! I had no trouble with the first puzzle I was presented with, but when I jumped ahead to a later one, I was completely dumbfounded. And it only had six pieces! Though to be fair, no one else in the crowd behind me could figure it out, either. Some pieces have ladders you can use to climb up and down and others have wardrobes that can swap one piece for another. Now that I'm trying to explain it, I realize how hard it is to put into words. You sort of have to play it. It is a port of a PC title, and is also on the DS. In fact, while both games have a level editor that allows you to create your own brain-melting puzzles, the DS version actually allows for local sharing to torment your friends with your creation. I have to say that while the graphics are relatively simple, since it's a puzzle game, I loved the retro-cheesiness of your on-screen character being a little live action guy. There's also other gameplay aside from the puzzles, but I didn't have a chance to try that, and besides, the puzzles are what you're going to play a game like this for, anyway. And I'd also like to think that if I played through from the very first room, the one that completely stumped me would've been a piece of cake. (But probably not!)