Clive Barker’s Undying (PC, MA15)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

When it comes to horror, few games can match the sheer blood-chilling quality of a good movie. Watch Hitchcock's original Psycho in black and white, then try to find a 3D-accelerated, budget-of-millions game that comes anywhere near it.

It's apples and oranges, of course. You can't compare the range of emotions at an actor's disposal to those of computer-generated images. Not yet, anyway.

There are some exceptions: Resident Evil: Code Veronica had its moments, with its legions of flesh-ripping zombies, sinister music and moody lighting.

And Clive Barker's Undying registers a substantial tremor on the scariness scale by combining a quality plot with truly exceptional graphics.

Those two factors are necessary to achieve that suspension of disbelief which makes a game great: you live it rather than merely play it.

Clive Barker's stories are genuinely gothic and he has done more than just lend his name to the Electronic Arts/Dreamworks production, taking an active role as a consultant.

The original story had Count Magnus Wolfram, an aristocrat who boasts superhuman strength and a shaven, tattooed head, as its hero. But the producers didn't think a computer-game audience would identify with him, so Barker came up with the less flamboyant Patrick Galloway.

He's much more ordinary, but still very sexy. Barker says: "As a gay man, I wanted a hero I could sleep with." An air of gothic sensuality pervades the game, personified in the ghostly Lizbeth who wanders the corridors of the cursed Covenant family's home on the west coast of Ireland.

The game is essentially a first-person shooter, but blood-soaked riddles and a slowly unfolding story of truly horrific proportions takes it way above the level of another Quake clone.

Early user reviews give the game ratings in the 90 to 100 per cent range and it looks set to become one of the year's top-selling titles.

You'll need at least a Pentium 11 400 MHz with a 16mb graphics card to play Clive Barker's Undying. EA recommends a Pentium 111 500MHz with a 32mb graphics card and 128mb of ram.

Electronic Arts

peter_eley@nzherald.co.nz