Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is coming to Wii next week. It’s an excellent light-gun shooter that retells the events of Resident Evil 2. Thanks to our friends at Capcom, we have five Darkside Chronicles prize packs to give away.

Each pack contains:

* The Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles Wii Zapper Bundle
* The best promo t-shirt we’ve ever seen (pictured)
* A Darkside Chronicles pen
* A Darkside Chronicles medical mask
* A Raccoon City Police Dept wallet

How do you win?

You need to send us a photo of yourself (and a friend, it’s a co-op game after all) proving how well prepared you are for the zombie apocalypse. The most imaginative, creative, inventive and downright funny entries will win.

You’ve got until midnight, Sunday, November 29, to get your entry in. Send it to the usual address with Darkside Chronicles in the subject line. Only one entry per person, please!

Good luck!

[Terms and Conditions]

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is coming to Wii next week. It’s an excellent light-gun shooter that retells the events of Resident Evil 2. Thanks to our friends at Capcom, we have five Darkside Chronicles prize packs to give away.

Each pack contains:

* The Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles Wii Zapper Bundle
* The best promo t-shirt we’ve ever seen (pictured)
* A Darkside Chronicles pen
* A Darkside Chronicles medical mask
* A Raccoon City Police Dept wallet

How do you win?

You need to send us a photo of yourself (and a friend, it’s a co-op game after all) proving how well prepared you are for the zombie apocalypse. The most imaginative, creative, inventive and downright funny entries will win.

You’ve got until midnight, Sunday, November 29, to get your entry in. Send it to the usual address with Darkside Chronicles in the subject line. Only one entry per person, please!

Good luck!

[Terms and Conditions]

Access Games’ Deadly Premonition not only sounds a lot like Silent Hill, it also looks like it as well, with a bit of Fatal Frame thrown in for good measure. The game centres on FBI agent Francis York Morgan. investigating a murder in a small town. As the story progresses he unravels layers of mystery surrounding the place and its people. The game’s action sequences will allow players the chance to choose between slipping by enemies unnoticed or running in guns blazing and fists flying.

“Ignition Entertainment has done an incredible job finding and targeting each game’s primary audience and we could not be more excited to team up with them to publish Deadly Premonition,” said Hidetaka Suehiro, Director, Access Games. “We’ve developed the graphic styling and game play of Deadly Premonition to uniquely trigger the suspenseful emotions in every player. We promise an astounding ending if you can meet the challenge to solve the mystery and make it there!”

Even the marketing quotes sound like Silent Hill! Check out the first teaser trailer below, or visit the game’s official website for more info.

Halloween might be long gone for 2009, but Japanese horror is fashionable all year round. Or at least Hudson hopes to make it so with Calling.

As the name suggests, there’s an awful lot of cell phone usage in the horror/adventure game. During a demo given to games journalists by the Japanese director, a poor woman finds a haunted mobile phone that just wouldn’t stop ringing. Even worse, she keeps answering it and the ghost on the other end keeps giving her updates on its progress (e.g. “I’m on the second floor landing…”). I imagine it would have been scarier in context, but at the time, it was downright funny. Especially because I had no idea which floor the girl started on, so I wasn’t sure if the ghost was really close or just taking forever to climb the freaking stairs.

Also, if that haunted phone was the ghost’s phone — and she said it was — what phone was the ghost calling from to provide the status updates?

What Is It?
Calling is a horror/adventure game with four main characters for the player to guide through a branching storyline. There are multiple endings, ghostly encounters and creepy environments to explore and hopefully survive.

What We Saw
After watching the demo, games journalists were given the chance to play through a single level starring a male character trapped in the empty apartment of a traditional Japanese doll maker.

How Far Along Is It?
Still in alpha — the game isn’t due out ’til some unspecified time in 2010.

What Needs Improvement?
A Little Bit Waggly: For the most part, the Wiimote’s motion controls are limited to gentle flicks to open doors or slide screens aside. However, there were two instances in the level where a ghost got the jump on the player and to get free you either had to mash the A button with perfect timing (like a quick time event), or just waggle furiously until the ghost let go. Guess which method is easier?

What Should Stay The Same?
It’s Actually Kind of Scary: There was a part in the game where a guy comes upon a room where the sliding doors only open partway. Looking through the door and down, you can see the dead body of the doll maker. After sighting this grisly thing, I turned the character around to go into another room — but I stopped because I heard shuffling and giggling behind me. So I turned the character back around and — gah! — there were dozens of the creepy little dolls filling the slit of the partly-opened doors. Their hair fluttered and their eyes blinked and they were tittering at me in the creepiest way. It was genuinely upsetting.

Movement Is Controlled With The analogue Stick: This is the best possible way to control motion from the first person perspective, I think.

Final Thoughts
I came down pretty hard on Ju-on not because it was a nuanced Japanese horror experience (which Calling also strives to be), but because it fell flat on its face in the scary department. I realise minimalist storytelling is a big part of Japanese horror films — but I think this cost Ju-on dearly in the gameplay department. So already, Calling is a cut above where Ju-on wound up even in this early stage of development. Here’s hoping the final product goes even farther toward that ideal scary experience.

I never played the Gamecube version of Resident Evil Zero, which tells the story of rookie S.T.A.R.S. member Rebecca Chambers and ex-Marine Billy Coen as they discover the origin of the T-Virus. I’m not even sure I owned a Gamecube when the game was released, and by the time I got one I had other concerns. Now Capcom is re-releasing the game on the Wii as part of the Resident Evil Archives series, tweaking it for Wii remote and nunchuck control, but otherwise leaving the game intact.

Resident Evil Archive: Resident Evil Zero will be released on December 1st. Wii owners lacking the patience to wait until then can probably find a cheap copy of the Gamecube version used somewhere for less than the $US29.99 asking price for the new one. Just saying.

Kotaku AU Note: We’ll be waiting an extra month and will see it in late January in Australia.

And that date is someday in February of 2010, according to an update on the matter from Eurogamer. Since Konami hasn’t responded to requests for clarification, we’ll mentally prepare ourselves for the psychological impact of a similar release time frame.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for Feb [Eurogamer]

With Resident Evil 5: Alternative Edition, Capcom is bringing RE5 to the PS3 with new content and PS3 Wand controls. The game is also coming to the Xbox 360 as a “director’s cut” — minus said PS3 wand controls.

Starring Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield, the new mission is another 2 hours of content and takes place three years before the main plot line of Resident Evil 5.

The updated version of RE5 will be released next spring in Japan.

That was until I had played through the Tokyo Game Show demo.

The section we were coaxed into playing by the helpful Konami staff involved one of the game’s chase sequences, a heart-pounding and smart addition to the game. The series isn’t generally known for its action qualities, but the mad dash through the altered streets of Silent Hill added a new kind of fear, helped by some interesting mechanics.

It took a few moments to get accustomed to the new controls—I hadn’t yet played the Wii version of Shattered Memories, mind you. Players control Harry Mason with the analogue nub, switching to flashlight (read: camera) controls by holding the right shoulder button. More interesting to me was what the left shoulder button does: look over your shoulder. Not particularly innovative, but it helps seal the fear of something quietly lurking behind you.

My first attempt at playing the game met with failure. After hopping over a wall—one of Harry’s new moves—I ran into a few of Silent Hill’s fleshy, mutated denizens.

They quickly piled on top of me, my only option to elbow them off with a press of one of the face buttons. They’re mapped to the location from which you’re attacked. If something’s grabbing onto you from the left, press the square button at the right time. From behind, tap X. Getting double-teamed? You’ll have to hit both buttons when the on-screen indicator pops up. Unfortunately, I didn’t figure this all out until my second attempt, attempting to figure out where my bludgeoning implement was.

Eventually I figured out that I was supposed to run like hell, not fiddle with the cell phone and GPS device Harry sports in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. So I ran, guided by walls of nearly clear ice, shouldering my way through blue-tinted doors at full speed. I’d made the mistake earlier in the demo to slowly open of Silent Hill’s many closed doors, which one can do by pushing slightly on the analogue stick after grabbing the doorknob.

Really, after finding my rhythm and getting an eye for where each door would be, running like a madman was all I did. With enemies difficult to see in the dark and the fear of hordes of Silent Hill’s demons bearing down on you, it’s the best thing one can do.

Granted, chase sequences, while interesting, do not a quality remake… make. But the smart implementation of these moments helped me get over my own fear of slogging through the streets of Silent HIll again. Another minor thing that won me over were the visuals. While not mind-blowing—it is the PSP after all—it looked sharp and I dug the VHS tape tracking-like visual effect.

We’ll know how good the final game will be when it ships this November.

This starts off as a developer diary. Don’t let that bother you. For starters, the clip is full of in-game action. And secondly… their Scandinavian accents are just so soothing.

But the first-person survival horror adventure crowd is probably going to adore Dementium II’s box art, because having a hand attack you from inside your own mouth is proven to tickle the first-person survival horror bone. Sure, I suppose you could just bite down really hard in that situation, but when you’re regurgitating an arm—a vicious arm intent on doing harm to your face—you’re probably not capable of rational thought.

So we’ll consider this box art a win, then.