Siren: Blood Curse - This is that survival horror dealie that's coming to PSN episodically in a few weeks. I haven't seen anything on the episodes' price or bonus features, so I'm still thinking about importing it from Japan. It will be sold in four parts, with a combined size of around 7 gigs. Urgh. I guess they're expecting you to pay for the episodes, finish the game, and then eventually get tired of having it around and delete it. Because 7 gigs is kind of a lot for a game that will likely have zero replay value and therefore no real reason to keep it on the drive.

The demo can be played in about ten minutes, but I enjoyed it.

Oddly, the demo does not employ the series' trademark feature... sight-jacking zombies. Instead, it's just very normal horror stuff. Scary cutscene, sneak past this guy, find a weapon, kill that guy, kill these other guys, take the girl to the mission end point. Looks great though, so maybe that's all the demo needs.

I guess it's loaded with context-sensitive animations, because I played through it twice and saw some different kills in the same situations. The first time through, for example, I just hacked a zombie with my lead pipe and she crumpled to the ground. The second time, I was close enough to a wall that I beat her with the pipe, then shoved her through a boarded-up window.

Blood Curse seems to continue the series' practice of hiring actual human actors to use as models for the in-game characters. It also has very, very sharp menus. This is why I really like HD, because even the menus can get so goddamn beautiful. Siren's menu structure - and this dates back to the first game in the series - is compelling because it purposefully sidesteps the whole Horror Games Must Have Gothic Menus and Spiky Fonts trap. It's a very classy UI, although I think the sans serif font they used is some variant of Impact.

Play Asia has the Japanese version for $60 and a rest-of-Asia version for $55, presumably both include the English voice track and menu option. I have no idea what the $5 difference means.

WALL-E - Why do "kids" games always have uncontrollable whipsaw cameras? Do game developers genuinely not give a shit when they win the licensing bid to crap out a kids' movie game? Shouldn't these games be easier to play, not harder? WALL-E would probably be a perfectly respectable platformer collect-a-thon, if the fucking camera wasn't zipping around like crazy. Particularly when you jump.

Kind of a long demo, and has a few completely frustrating parts where death chasms will reset you to a checkpoint too far gone. The demo takes place in a rather boring spaceport, surrounding a brief glitzy shopping mall zone. It gives away the Earthlings-are-all-fat-uber-consumers thing that Disney was trying to keep a lid on in all the preview materials.

Clark watched me play the entire thing, on the alert for little red coins you're expected to collect. WALL-E himself is cute as balls and has some interesting platformy functions, like sticking to magnetized surfaces. One of the d-pad buttons is actually mapped to "Play SFX," which is nothing more than a random WALL-E chirp or beep. Cool.

Still, fix the camera.

Monster Madness: Grave Danger - Until I stole the screenshot from IGN and saw the retail box art for this game, I would have sworn that it was a PSN downloadable with tons of micropayments. Like that terrible Rocketmen game done right. Turns out this is an enhanced version of a 360 game from last year. So now, where I was formerly mostly up on this one, now I'm like, ugh, $60?

It's a 4-player co-op top-down brawler, with plenty of customizable weapons and an only moderately annoying cast of characters. Clark and I played all the way through one of the supplied demo levels. Although his hand-eye isn't developed enough to walk and attack at the same time, so I would have to reach over and steer his analog stick back into the fray. Noteworthy: while the usual button presses handle the hand-to-hand weaponry, if you switch to your machine guns, you use the right stick to shoot in a circle.

The character walk cycles are very floaty, which is disconcerting for a while. Enemies seem to lack health bars... which really sucks on the mini- and end-bosses. And the audio for the voice samples was all distorted. But it's a 4-player co-op top-down brawler, and there will always be a need for such things.

Also, I am really sick of game developers cheaping out on cutscenes by turning them into slideshows of comic book pages and then pretending that's some kind of acceptable fucking substitute. That's an instant non-starter for me.