Review by: Brandon "Leg Brace" Cackowski-Schnell

Upgrades are always hard to review. To whom do you write your review? Do you write it for the person who hasn’t played the game or for the person considering playing the game again in its updated form? How do you score such a game, especially if it’s worth it for one party but not the other? It’s enough to make your head spin as much as a severed arm hurled from a floating, psychokinetic, handicapped guy looking to save his stripper sister from the machinations of a murderous, cravat bedecked villain.

If that last sentence intrigues you, then you’re firmly in the first camp and you should stop reading this right now and go pick up House of the Dead: Overkill -- Extended Cut Edition. Go on. If you know exactly what I’m talking about already, well, sorry old chum, but there’s just not enough here to warrant taking another trip down the viscera soaked mansions and strip clubs of small town Louisiana.

When I played this game on the Wii, I thought it was gloriously over the top with its grindhouse style, terrible voice acting and “did that just happen” vibe to the plot twists and bosses. The final battle and closing cut scene still ranks as the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in a Wii game, and possibly any game ever. None of this has changed for this new version, with the profanity and absurdity elevated through two extra levels, a new, dimwitted stripper character named Candy Stryper, some new weapons and even more collectibles to distract you while you blow the heads off of mutants.

It’s still a light gun shooter though; a genre that hasn’t gone through much of an evolution since the days of playing Virtua Cop at the arcade. Mutants pop up, you shoot them. Sometimes they throw things. You shoot those things and then shoot the mutants. Power ups and collectibles appear, you shoot them. What makes the game so great is the sense of humor and the complete and total inability to take itself seriously. After all, this is a game that won the World Record for the most F-bombs in a video game. It’s silly and stupid, gleefully so, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The upgraded visuals add a nice coat of polish to the proceedings; however said polish is overlaid on three year old graphics originally made for a console far inferior to the PS3 in terms of graphical chops. It’s still the best that the game has ever looked, but by 2011 standards, that’s not saying a whole heck of a lot. You can always turn on your fancy 3DTV to make things pop out more, using either whatever sorcery powers 3D these days, or kick it old school with the red and blue glasses, provided you have some hanging around. The game loves to throw all sorts of weird things at you, literally and figuratively, making it more the game equivalent of Piranha 3-D than Avatar, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As a light gun controller the Move has a nice heft and a decent trigger resistance. You can use a regular Sixaxis while playing, but I wouldn’t recommend it and honestly, don’t know why they even made it an option other than trying to get non-Move people involved. Don’t fall for their PR shenanigans. Unfortunately the Move calibration is terrible, asking you to aim at the corners of your screen without giving you a targeting reticle for reference. Calibration becomes a process of trial and error as you try and figure out where the blasted thing wants you to aim, and what you have to do to get the right-most third of your screen back as usable real estate. As a first impression, it is distinctly lacking.