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| 95. Fatal Frame (2001, Playstation 2) by Ice Cream Jonsey 06/22/2026, 10:08pm PDT | ||||
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| 95. Fatal Frame
Creator: Tecmo Genre: Survival Horror Year: 2001 Platforms: PS2 (I played this on a PS3 through their very janky PS3 store, that lets you buy PS2 games and play them on your PS3) Mobygames link Available through: I grabbed the .iso from Internet Archive and I used the PCSX2 emulator, but also as noted above, I played it on a PS3. A remake for the sequel was just published through Steam. I got to this series of games very, very late - I started playing Fatal Frame games in 2025. I would have bounced off tank controls earlier, but I have accepted them as an adult. (I also had some kind of vision or brain change where maybe 5 years ago I went from someone that needed controls inverted in all first person games to not needing them, but still needing them for flight sims. This has nothing to do with Fatal Frame, but I wish I knew what happened to me.) Using a camera as your weapon in this game is brilliant, it's "non-violent," except you are trying to destroy the ghosts and they are trying to drain your health. Like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, the game has a save system that is integrated into the environment. I usually don't care for these, but the emulators offer save states, so I have gone back and forth between the real thing and being able to quit and return at any time. The Ring, the American version, was released to theaters in 2002. I loved it. Fatal Frame offers the same kind of bleached out, transparent, extra creepy - forgive my ignorance, I don't know what else to call it - Japanese Ghost Art Direction - that I also enjoyed in P.T. I think "discovering" Fatal Frame almost 25 years after it was first created matched an interest in photography that I had developed in that gap of time. When my friend The Milker was alive, he let me go into his haunted house business that he ran and practice photography. Years later, Fatal Frame is kind of is the same thing. The picture below I want to inline because I believe it justifies the tank controls and different camera perspectives. You can't really get this view of an old guy (ghost?) looking down over you, with the ability to move, except for these different angles that we got with Resident Evil and (I think) Fear Effect and Fatal Frame. 
And then lastly, I tried to take a screenshot of our first fight: 
That still picture doesn't do the ghost justice. It's unsettling. (And look at that palette! That took balls.) There is something just as primal and satisfying about shooting with the Camera Obscura, I would give it the same "oomph" feeling you get from the Doom shotgun or Duke 3D rocket launcher. Maybe it is because I did not think it would "work." I've been on plenty of shoots, I can't even make anyone cry, much less vapirize. I thought it would be a slog to "kill" a ghost with a camera, but no, it's awesome. The ghost takes its damage and staggers and disintegrates. That first fight is as difficult as it needs to be and not a touch harder. At this point, I am invested in this entire cursed family and their ability to disappear when they keep investigating haunted houses. I see that some people think the second one (Crimson Butterfly) is better but the original Fatal Frame was just so different when I played it, it's tough for a sequel to top it because so much of Fatal Frame was new to me. |
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