I went into Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy with fondness, having played and enjoyed the GameCube version with a little help from a Nintendo Power walkthrough a decade-and-a-half ago. Sphinx and the Mummy work together, though in separate locations, to collect the scattered pieces of Tut’s soul and take down Set.Īnd, boy oh boy is it excellent. In the game, Tut has been betrayed by the dark god, Set, masquerading as his jealous older brother. Gameplay is split pretty evenly between sections starting each of the two title characters: Sphinx, a young catman with a lion’s mane and tail and the Cursed Mummy who, underneath the bandages, is Tutankhamun, the real-life Egyptian prince mummified as a teenager. If you never played Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, let me explain the basics.
#THE MUMMY RETURNS MOVIE PS2 GRAPHICS PS2#
(Also, the Papyrus font that developer Eurocom used for the UI in the original has been mercifully excised in favor of something less clip art-y).īasically, THQ Nordic changed almost nothing and released a PS2 game on Switch. It’s functionally identical the original just looks like you’re watching the remaster on an old VHS tape. The animations are the same, the movement is the same, the character models are the same. But, if you, like me, need to watch a YouTube walkthrough on occasion to bypass some of Sphinx ’s more esoteric puzzles, you will see the same game represented in 10-year-old gameplay videos. The textures are smoother, the colors are brighter, the frame rate is faster. Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, on the other hand, is basically identical to the game it was in 2003. It’s still RE2, to be sure, but, also, it isn’t. So then, this Resident Evil 2, like the zombies that haunt its halls, has been resurrected but isn’t quite the same. You will never die because the controls got in your way. Whereas the original Resident Evil 2 milked scares from the challenge of controlling its unwieldy, tank-like characters, this new Resident Evil 2 is always perfectly readable perfectly clear. The map is impressively communicative, effortlessly expressing just how much of a room’s resources you’ve managed to exploit. The police station looks like it was designed with a protractor, a ruler and graph paper as symmetrical and right-angled as anything in gaming. The chaos of this no good, very bad night in Raccoon City is amplified by how clean and clear the world otherwise is. Resident Evil 2 is genuinely frightening a survival horror game that, true to the genre’s and the original game’s roots, derives tension as much from inventory management and ammo scarcity as from jerkily shuffling zombies and eerily fast lickers. Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, a 2003 3D puzzle-platformer, published originally by THQ and revived by THQ Nordic, made its Switch debut on January 29.īoth of these games are excellent. For the third year in a row, Capcom ruled the first month of the calendar year, this time with a remake (reenvisioning? Remix? REmake?) of their seminal 1998 horror hit, Resident Evil 2.