Cursed Mountain Limited Edition - Nintendo Wii Game | Horror Survival Adventure for Family & Friends Game Night

I ordered the Limited Edition version of Cursed Mountain with some uncertainty whether or not it would meet my high hopes. Fortunately, it exceeded my expectations in many ways. It's definitely not for everybody, but for the right kind of gamer this will be a welcome addition to your video game collection.What's the difference in having the Limited Edition version? The case is made of tin rather than plastic, the cover art is different (it features a bald, nasty looking, monster-like Buddhist with a dark background) and has a Limited Edition marking on it, and it comes with a CD that has a making of video on one side and the music track for the game on the other. It was definitely worth the extra [...] bucks. Having a tin case with different cover art is pretty cool, and the music is atmospheric enough that it's actually cool to listen to it while driving. Unfortunately, I have yet to watch the making of video. Once I have, I will probably update this review. Now to the game itself.Plot: You are Eric Simmons--a famous British mountain climber that is searching for his brother Frank Simmons. Eric knows that his brother climbed Mt. Chomolonzo with Paul Ward (an American), but he is not sure why Paul returned without him. To make things stranger, the famous city of Lhando has been deserted by its Buddhist inhabitants for some unknown reason. It doesn't take long to find out that there is a curse on the mountain, and the few Buddhists left are more than glad to share their knowledge and wisdom of what happened. The story gets pretty deep, so get ready for some interesting stuff.Graphics: Pleasing to the eye, and very realistic for a Wii game. The atmosphere is expressed amazingly well, and the enviornment is detailed well enough that you almost feel like you're in the locales that you travel through. The immersion is truly amazing, especially with the "cinematography" of the game. Frequently, Cursed Mountain uses camera angles that remind you of well filmed movies. From walking through the deserted town of Landho to climbing the blizzard torn peak of Chomolonzo, you will feel like you really are on a Cursed Mountain.Music/Sound: The music really evokes the enviornment well. The absence of music does the same thing. Silence is implemented perfectly in this game, and when some suspense needs to build up the music comes in to creep things out. Deep Silver knew what they were doing when the arranged the music for this game. Also, the voice acting is excellent. The authenticity of Eric's accent adds a lot to this game.Gameplay: Your enemies are ghosts rather than zombies, so you can expect a change of pace with this game. Instead of blood and guts, you will be "killing" your opponents by performing compassion rituals (typically) on their immaterial selves. You will be shooting beams of energy from your pick axe (embued with holy power through additional artificts), or you can just swing away at the ghosts. Either way you will have the opportunity of using the compassion ritual when they are near death which requires some motions of the Wii remote to finish (the controls work very well, so don't worry about poorly implemented motion functionality). These motions are actually pretty fun, and get progressively more lengthy as the game progresses. Improved artifacts for your axe will be discovered during the game to improve your fighting ability, and you can also find health upgrades if you do a little exploring. Overall, this game isn't all that difficult, although I did die on several occasions.Cursed Mountain can pretty much be described as a horror game with lots of exploration. The enviornments are a big part of what makes this game so great, because you're always finding yourself in a different setting that is very well detailed. Here's a basic breakdown of the pros and cons of this game.Pros:Deep and interesting storyHigh quality Wii graphicsRealistic enviornmentsGood controlsAwesome voice actingUnique settingCons:May be too slow for some gamersNo multiplayer or rewards for beating the gameIs there any replay value? It's hard to decide. I have a desire to play through the game again right after beating it. There's just something about this game that draws me to it. But there won't be anything different about it, so I'm not sure what is making me want to play again. The average person probably won't find any replay value in it's exclusively single-player and nothing is modified after beating the game, but there is definitely a lasting feeling after you get through the end of Cursed Mountain.When I first heard about this game, I think it was actually in danger of never being released due to publisher issues or budget, can't recall which. So I jumped on it when I later found out it had been released, and got a good deal on the collector's edition.As the title says, I really wanted to like this game. I'm a fan of the Resident Evil & Silent Hill series, as well as other titles on the genre spectrum like Siren and Fatal Frame. Add to that the location setting of Tibetan mountains and Far East mythology, and it sounded like an awesome entry into my library. Alas, I was to be disappointed.Some people have stated the game was slow, but I agree with others that say that for survival horror, it's pretty standard, so I didn't have a problem with that. I was even enjoying the story and main character, for as far as I got. What killed my enjoyment was the controls and laggy response in the combat system. Encounters with one or two monsters was manageable, but the controls were clunky enough that more enemies than that made it extremely difficult to keep going and eventually I got frustrated and stopped playing it.The game mechanic of 'slashing' the enemies with the Wii-mote was intriguing, but the way the programmers implemented it, was far too twitchy to keep the game fun. I would vastly have preferred something like the glyph system in Castlevania: Dawn Of Sorrow. For those not familiar with it, different monsters were defeated by a particular glyph you drew with your stylus. Something like that would have been fairly easy with a Wii-mote. Instead the game had trouble registering basic movements with it, probably due to poor programming.It really was a shame, because I was looking forward to this game. Perhaps some day I'll go back and try again, but I have a lot of other things to play first so it doesn't look very likely. I'm sure plenty of 'hard core' gamers out there will think I'm just a wuss with poor skills, but I literally own about 800 games across a dozen consoles and the PC. I'm not a top-tier 'twitch' gamer, but I think my skills are pretty good most of the time. I've also noticed that it seems like some consumers are retaliating against lower-star reviews, despite those reviews being pretty well written, almost like they're down-rating because the person didn't like the game. In my experience (six years selling them at retail), EVERY game is going to have someone that didn't like it for one reason or another. I don't mind people defending why they liked a game, but don't take it out on people who didn't agree with you.