I know I went over this before, but I'm on mission to clog Google bots with the Good News. To play the game, you first need to own the game. As in, an official imported edition. There's no torrenting or thievery here. Then you need to copy a heap of files over to an SD card and pop the whole schmear into your Wii. The bootable app on the SD card will run a couple times and prepare the game for you... and then it bypasses the region lock, starts the game, and serves up English subtitles as you play. Incredible.

It remains sort of bizarre that Nintendo took a pass on localizing Fatal Frame 4 for a western release. It's a known T/M-rated franchise (not THAT known, to be sure, but there is a good cult following). It was co-developed by gaming rockstar Suda51's group, Grasshopper Manufacture, the team that also brought us No More Heroes and Killer 7. Nintendo published it themselves in Japan, so they had to have some faith in the title. It went on to be the best selling entry in the Fatal Frame franchise in Japan. And, had it arrived sometime in late '08 / early '09, it could have been leveraged by Nintendo as a super-M second-party title, perhaps serving as a counterpoint to those months where Nintendo delivered nothing but Wii Music, Animal Crossing, and some GameCube rehashes. Furthermore, if Nintendo had permitted Tecmo to publish it outright in the States, it could have been pitched as a third-party mature contender.

Word is, Nintendo wanted more polish for the regional releases, and Tecmo/Grasshopper wanted more cash. In a complicated backroom game of global chicken, only Fatal Frame fans came up the loser.

Until now, anyway.

Here's some of my first ghost captures. They scream out of the Wii Remote when you snag them.

That's the Fatal Frame version of a nurse. The first bit of the game takes place in an abandoned sanitarium.

This early ghost has an attack where she dives off-camera and then comes up after you.

Yes, Fatal Frame, we get that you like to field the ghosts of dead children.

This happens a lot... you turn a corner and suddenly the sensors start freaking out and you see a frozen ghost somewhere in the room. This guy appeared outside the window. You only have a few seconds to capture these non-combative types.

Here's a nice closeup of a ghost in mid-attack.

So far, Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is damn near functionally identical to 2005's PS2 exclusive Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented. I don't see much of a Suda51 flair at all, which I recall was sort of a concern back when it was announced that Grasshopper was handling the game's development. Same save points. Same Camera with film and filaments and lenses and crystals. Same awkward album-saving structure. Same young-girls-in-miniskirts-exploring-abandoned-locales kind of vibe. The cutscenes are as good as ever, keeping in the series' dark, realistic CG.

Being on Wii brings a couple stupid motion controls to the table. If a ghost latches on to you during a fight, you have to shake it off. And occasionally when you go to pick up an object, a spirit hand will appear and make a grab for you... and, again, you have to shake.

The Wii Remote-as-flashlight controls are nowhere near as smooth as in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. For whatever reason, the Remote only controls up and down, so you have to use it in combination with the Nunchuk analog stick to point around the room. It's not onerous by any means, it's just not as good as what Silent Hill did a year later.

Speaking of Silent Hill, here's a possible tip of the hat to Fatal Frame, found early in Shattered Memories:

Between Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Animal Crossing and the upcoming No More Heroes 2, my Wii is getting quite a workout this month.