home again + many cool new games

I'm finally back in town and back to a normal schedule, for a little while anyway! Traveling gave me great opportunity to play my DS and I actually picked up an awesome new game called Dementium: The Ward. It's a very freaky, fairly graphic survival horror shooter with a pretty twisted plot involving an insane asylum where something went horribly, horribly wrong. The gameplay is really smooth and intuitive; you steer yourself with a flashlight, meaning much of the top viewing screen is shrouded in darkness most of the time. The bottom screen is inventory and vital signs, including a heartbeat sound effect that gets faster and more frantic the lower your health drops. The monsters are very scary and I have totally jumped in fear several times so far playing it. One bad aspect is that if you die you automatically have to restart the chapter, rather than picking up at a save point, which means you just have to get comfortable with quitting and reloading your game right before actually dying. One cute thing about this game is that its creators are clearly very proud and actually used their own names as names on the medical charts of patients-turned-zombies with prognoses like "delusional parisitosis". Anyway, two thumbs up for Dementium: The Ward, which IGN gave an 8 in its review.