Fatal Frame IV: The Mask of the Lunar Eclipse

This would all be fine if it worked, but it's horrible to use for much the same reasons as general exploration. Although some might argue that the soupy aiming, turning and movement speed all add to the sense of nerve-jangling desperation, that's no excuse for a system that defies reasonable input expectations.

Eventually, one of the characters, detective Chouschiro Kirishima, adds a welcome element of novelty to proceedings with his special Spirit Stone Flashlight. This operates in roughly the same way as the Camera Obscura, except it damages ghosts with charged beams of light instead.

With movement mapped to the nunchuk stick, and aiming performed via the Wii remote, it ought to be a beautiful combination almost tailor-made for a game like this. But for some reason you're blessed with all the turning and aiming speed of an stricken oil tanker - useless in the context of a game where enemies disappear and reappear out of thin air, often right behind or beside you.

Sharp movements and nimble evasion are nearly impossible, and are limited to ducking out of viewfinder mode to run, or shaking the remote to perform a 180-degree turn. At first this isn't a huge problem because enemies are equally slow and ponderous, but when the game starts throwing faster enemies, and more of them, you're in trouble.

Even the most basic actions, like adjusting your aim to react to a downward lunge, are hopelessly sluggish, so combat is actually more challenging on the Wii than it ever was on PS2 or Xbox. Rather than redesign the game for Wii, Tecmo and Grasshopper have retrofitted the old-style gameplay to pointer mechanics that might as well have been designed to be counterintuitive. The sensation is akin to controlling a mouse cursor on a choked PC.

And yet despite being mercilessly unpleasant to control, there's still a degree of grim enjoyment to be had locking horns with such wilfully unhelpful mechanics. As many a survival-horrorphile will attest, taking such games at face value is never a good idea. There's always a pain threshold to negotiate, and once you get over that the enjoyment intensifies.

This is definitely the case here, because once you start to accept the crippled movement, the stodgy aiming and the incessant need to crawl over every room to get a key to unlock a door somewhere, you stop griping and start enjoying the intrigue and narrative again. You start to stay one step ahead of the game; saving at every opportunity, stocking up on health items, and upgrading your camera abilities with all the red and blue crystals you've been slavishly collecting.

You can't fault the game for its art and all-round style, either. The atmosphere is as intense as ever, and its neglected environments and unhinged enemy design still has the capacity to chill the blood all these years later. One can only ponder what these talented artists would come up with on more technically advanced systems, but with Mask of the Lunar Eclipse hardly selling in vast quantities in its homeland this may be the last we see of their series.

In which case, fans may want to overlook its numerous flaws and take what they can get. The nonsensical premise is strangely absorbing, and the tense routine of battling spiteful spooks with the camera remains enjoyable. In fact, even all these years on, there's nothing quite like it.