Corpse Party Blood Drive Free Download
Stetson Saenz
The Corpse Party series of games are a blend of survival horror and visual novel that emerged from Japan's dōjin games scene (analogous to Western indie development) in 2008, and build on an RPGMaker original from a decade earlier.
The Corpse Party games pit doe-eyed anime youth against dark forces inhabiting abandoned schools. As I was coming in cold on the third US entry in this series, I expected to be terribly confused for a bit while I worked out who everyone was, but this is one of the few things Blood Drive handles well. The character ensemble and their situation were laid out efficiently so I never felt like I needed to stop and play a previous game.
Unfortunately, the cast is too large to get characterized beyond the broadest strokes, and most of them feel less like distinct entities and more like manifestations of anime archetypes. If anything, I would have preferred less backstory than I got, because I felt that it didn't add anything to the narrative.
Blood Drive constantly elaborates lore only to immediately disregard it or work around it in order to move on to the next plot point. The story therefore feels completely ad hoc no matter how much time the writing spends explaining the intricacies of its world. The plot is a bit of a jumble as a result, with characters' stated motivations and actions never quite aligning. This is frequently true even within particular scenes: nearly everything bad that happens in Blood Drive occurs because characters stand still when they should obviously move.
It also doesn't help that the game wastes time, space, and atmosphere on terrible digressions and bad character design. A scythe-wielding character wearing a top that seems to have been made from two handkerchiefs is the wrong kind of fantasy for this game. That's no worse, however, than a side plot featuring an adult woman with a crush on a high-school boy, or a pointless episode showing a topless middle-school girl.
Because the story spends most of its running time in a wobbly state, it falls to the more active portions to sustain suspense and build horror. They're not up to the task. For the vast majority of Blood Drive, the gameplay takes place in a dark, decrepit school of repetitive classrooms and barely-distinguishable hallways. These hallways turn more freakish and interesting later on, but the game constantly suffers from not being able to show how frightening the school looks to the characters.
The weight that should be carried by the visuals is instead left to text descriptions of objects. The problem is that each object the characters examine is potentially dangerous. Only by walking up to, say, an ordinary-looking cabinet and interacting with it can the player learn that it contains dozens of eyeballs. Performing that inspection, however, may cause the character to get attacked by a tentacle in short order. Because this system encourages the player to avoid content as a means of managing risk, it actively makes Blood Drive more boring.
That said, risk can't always be managed in Blood Drive, and death is bound to happen more than once. The game is filled with gotcha moments that will result in a messy end, as one would expect from the genre. Blood Drive makes dying more irritating than necessary, though, by not including any way to skip or even fast-forward through dialogue the player has already seen.
However, even that is nowhere near as irritating as the pace-killing loading screens. Opening any door triggers one, and so does opening the menu. Worse, once the menu is open, going to a submenu also invokes a loading screen. That means there are two loading screens between normal gameplay and the inventory, for instance.
Corpse Party: Blood Drive has very little going for it. The amusing contrast of seeing cutesy anime kids in a horror story can't sustain such a jumbled plot, muddy visual design, and irritating construction. It may be worth investigating as a cultural curiosity, but otherwise this is a party to avoid. Rating: 4 out of 10
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains blood, partial nudity, strong language, suggestive themes, and violence. The violence includes things like on-screen decapitations and disembowelment, which is good enough reason to keep this away from kids. The "partial nudity" encompasses a gratuitously topless middle-school girl, which is good enough reason not to let anyone you care about play this game under any circumstances.
Council Members will find at their seats a blue sheet with information on where we're gathering this evening for dinner and there are three additional handouts here that are pertinent to tomorrow. Let me just mention them while we're looking at this. Professor Merrill who has sent in an advance paper, sent along the notes which are the outline for his talk and suggested that Members might want to have it in advance. And then there are the latest issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has an essay on the "Psychotropic Practice Patterns for Youth: The 10-Year Review." And then an editorial from the same journal on this question of prescribing psychotropic medicine to children. I'd like to ask Council Members to just glance over these things in relation to the discussion we're to have amongst ourselves in the last session tomorrow morning. This is not for careful reading, but at least to help us get started in thinking about how we want to proceed in the area of neuropsychopharmacology with special attention to children.
In this session, we will be discussing the ethical considerations in relation to procuring organs for transplantation. The Council has neither determined, nor has it been asked to study organ transplantation, yet the topic is going to be of increasing interest. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has indicated his own grave concern regarding organ supply and I'm pleased to see that we have with us Jack Kress, who is the Executive Director of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation. They have their first report soon, I think, to be issued.
The AMA and Congress have variously considered plans and legislation to increase the supply. Legislation was introduced into the last Congress and is likely to be introduced again. And therefore the Council might be invited into these discussions, but in any case I thought it would be worthwhile if we would engage ourselves in the preliminary consideration of some of these proposals that are floating out there to increase the supply.
We are not altogether new to this topic. Already in Gil Meilaender's survey paper, "Toward a Richer Bioethics," in the very first meeting, the meeting of embodiment, the relation of parts and wholes and integrity were questions that were raised. We had that short story which at least some of us liked in the donation of the heart, "Whither Thou Goest," to at least address this question of part and whole. We had some discussions on commerce and the body, more in connection with patenting, but that was an issue of concern here.
And it does seem to me that in keeping with the search for a richer bioethics, the full human and moral significance of innovations and practices growing out of the relation to advances in biomedical technology belong to our domain.
A background paper that was prepared was intended to bring to the Council's attention the range of practical suggestions that are now under discussion to increase the organ supply, but to do so in the context of questions that deserve further attention and in the background paper, at least these were mentioned and raised for view, the value of saving life, the desirability of preserving bodily integrity and respect for mortal remains, and the importance of individual autonomy of the potential donor, as well as the rights and responsibilities, needs and wishes of surviving family members.
But I would at least like to add to the questions for consideration two points. One, the need to appreciate the heterogeneity when we come to talk about organs and supply. There are different organs for different diseases with differing success rates and differing age and ethnic populations, of donors and recipients who have also not only different medical conditions, but also differing cultural attitudes that affect this problem.
You cannot, it seems to me, talk about supply neutrally without paying some attention to why it is that some people do and other people do not donate. In some cases, expressed fear of decreased care, if one is known to be a potential donor, inhibits some people. There are other people who might express concern for bodily wholeness in death when they go to meet their maker. It seems to me terribly important that we not homogenize this subject and treat in the abstract.
And then a more philosophical question, not necessarily for discussion, but something to keep in mind is the human body really like a car with completely fungible and replaceable parts, not just morally, but even medically. Medically, of course, we have the immune rejection problem which no automobile has, suggesting that there is some kind of difference between us and simply a heap of spare parts.
To talk about the person that somehow survives the replacement of these parts invites the kind of person, machine or person-body dualism and one of the questions I think that we want to keep in mind is what kind of a view of ourselves are we tacitly promoting, not only in organ transplantation to begin with, but how might that view be affected by the varying proposals to increase the supply. The culture is not homogeneous on this one. We don't have a single answer, but it does seem to me that those larger questions of self-understanding are at issue here, in addition to the questions of just saving lives, of respecting the wishes of the deceased.
With that in mind, I think I can summarize the present situation as follows. The present policy seems to be that organ transplantation is a great good. The practice is donation with individuals and also families free to decide to donate, but only to give and not to sell. Allocation being separated from supply. We have an allocation system with triage based on need and the probability of success.
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