You are lucky to be here reading this, for today is a particularly auspicious occasion. Today is an anniversary. Long-time readers will recall that the very first game ever reviewed in “Plug and Play,” some seven years ago this week, was MediEvil, for the original PlayStation. So congratulations to you. That is about it for fun this week.

In theory, a MediEvil game is perfect for the week before Halloween. It is full of spooky vibes and walking sleketons and curses and gravestones and pumpkins. Its narration sounds like Boris Karloff doing a Vincent Price impression, only in an English accent. It aims to be The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, basically, only with higher production values.

The original MediEvil managed that beautifully. The hero was a dead knight named Daniel Fortesque, a would-be hero whose actual performance in battle (he cowered a lot, then took a bolt from a crossbow in the eye) fell far short of the legend that followed his death. So a hundred years later, when an evil sorcerer cast an evil spell and raised an army of the dead, and Sir Dan found himself accidentally resurrected, he quickly realized that keeping up with his own reputation would be a daunting, physically demanding task. Also, he would have to personally do away with the entire army of the dead.

What followed was lots of running around on wacky skeleten legs, waving a sword and indiscriminately killing monsters and zombies. MediEvil was old-fashioned spooky fun, which made it a refreshing change of pace from the hard-core terror of Resident Evil. In 1998, it was fresh, and funny, and charming, and fun.

A mostly-good sequel followed in 2000, and then Sir Dan was left to his rest, which, given the way MediEvil Resurrection turned out, really should have been eternal. The new game is essentially a remake of the original, with the graphics improved and the story line fleshed out and some new sidelines added. We hear the story of Sir Dan's demise in hairier detail, and we actually meet the ponce who held and fired the deadly crossbow, but mostly our job is still to run around with a sword, waving it at anything that groans.

In the early going Dan is unarmed, so his only choice is to use his arm as a club. The joke was funny seven years ago, and it's still funny now. All the jokes stil work, really. Dan's gait is hilarious, and the talking statues have the perfect wise-assed delivery, and the grunt the zombies emit when they die for the second time is note-perfect. As a package, as a thing to look at and consider playing, it is all but irresistable.

The sad news is that when you move from the considering to the play, all that charm turns out to matter for very little. The controls are sluggish and awkward, so that Dan is hard to move and harder to steer. The graphics code is poorly optimized, so the frame rate is generally choppy and frequently sluggish, which makes it tough to see what's going on. The fighting, which ought to be sloppy and jolly and splattery, feels merely sloppy. Dan can swing his sword in dozens of ways, but none of them matters for much, as simply mashing repeately on the “X” button does as good a job of moving the blade around as any of the more-elaborate button-tap combos.

In the heat of a fight, the tension ought to rise and the palms ought to get a little sweaty. The heartrate should rise. It should be fun, plowing through the undead hordes. Instead, it's frustrating. Dan rarely goes where we want him to, and his sword rarely goes where we want it too, and the evil swarms get him far more often than they would if the controls weren't so totally half-baked and phoned-in. You get the feeling the development team was rushing to meet the Halloween deadline. Let's hope that somewhere, a product manager has learned a lesson.

On the plus side, Dan still has no lower jaw.