Games that should be: Fatal Frame for Wii U

I’m pretty sure as soon as we all first laid our eyes on the Wii U GamePad, the idea of a Fatal Frame game or the next instalment of Pokémon Snap that was floating around in our imaginations… or both. Either way, Fatal Frame for Wii U HAS to happen. That game along with the GamePad are such a perfect match made only possible by ghosts… most likely.

Let’s all close our eyes (figuratively, you still need your eyes open to read this!) and imagine for a moment what would make a Fatal Frame game absolutely mind-blowing on Wii U. Right off the mark, we’re all thinking the same obvious thing, the Wii U GamePad becomes our very own real world representation of the Camera Obscura and we’ll be using it as such throughout the game. Now it’s a pretty simple concept to understand, the GamePad has a screen, you look at it as if it were your viewfinder and press a trigger button to snap shots of ghosts here and there… but that’s too simple and too boring, more needs to be done to shake things up.

While the Fatal Frame games usually take a third person perspective throughout the game, only moving to the first person viewfinder mode when you’re ready to take pictures with the Camera Obscura, why not have the entire game set from a first person viewpoint through that viewfinder. To add to that, why not encourage the player to stand up and use the GamePad’s nine-axis motion controls to literally look around as if you’re in that virtual 3D space yourself? I’m sure they can come up with some kind of plot point to explain why you’d need to do that, the female protagonist in our game is a very shy girl, only able to look at the world through the viewfinder, something along those lines.

Now, instead of removing the TV entirely from the equation, why not delegate the images on the TV to handle a different task… lighting and ambience. Imagine, playing in a dark room at night with nothing but the glow of the video coming from the Wii U GamePad and the ambient light effects coming from the TV as you take a picture and there’s a snap of light… or perhaps lightning striking in the distance.

Imagine now, you have a 5.1 surround system and you hear that crack of thunder relative to the position you’re facing at the time it happened… You, alone, in a dark room at night with that immersive surround sound all around you, the ambient effects the TV is producing and your focused attention on the viewfinder directly in front of you on the Wii U GamePad, this would make one hell of a game that really sucks you into its world in every way possible with what Wii U can offer you.

It has to be done, it would be a tragedy for everyone if it’s not done and not pushed out to every corner of this planet so that everyone has a chance to experience it.