SURPRISE!  The Third Birthday is really Parasite Eve III.

Great news, if you love the series.  If you've never heard of it, the Parasite Eve games are survival horror RPG with the usual Resident Evil-esque overtones.  The story first began with a novel - “Parasite Eve”, in which a geneticist driven mad by grief attempts to regrow his late wife by harvesting her mitochondrial DNA.  Mitochondria (the “powerhouse of the cell”), it is theorized, started hanging out with our earliest simple-celled ancestors and over time became a part of our cellular makeup.  Sort of a couch-surfing friend who eventually becomes a roommate.  So, the novel proposes, if these little tenants in our cells were somehow awakened they could produce tremendous, powerful changes in our bodies.  As always in this sort of raised-from-the-dead scenario, things do not go well, unless you like giant, bloodthirsty frog men.

The first game served as a sequel to the novel, in which the daughter of the original “Eve” must fight her mother, reconstituted in the body of a young woman who received one of her kidneys in a transplant.  It's a classic of the genre, and a favorite of horror RPG fans.  The second game of the series offered more of the same, but a few years later and with a West Coast flair.

- Yes, it really is Parasite Eve III -

Square Enix (formerly the venerable Square Soft) is turning that fertile soil once again, this time with perpetually mutant-beleaguered Aya back in NYC.  At Christmas, no less.  She and her comrades with the special mutant investigatory body (CTI) are beset on all sides by a new batch of mutants fresh from a rip in space.  She'll have to use the usual combination of her wits, weapons, and what her mama gave her (mutant mitochondria).

The devs at Square Enix have been stingy with gameplay details, with the exception of tales of a new mode of control called “Overdrive.”  The player will be able to switch, mid-firefight, between Aya and any of the characters in her team.  Not exactly reinventing the wheel here, but a nice change from the solo act from the first game.  Clothing will play a greater role than in previous installments.  Wear more clothes, take less damage, so resist the urge to don the Lara Croft sports bra and hot pants.  The trailer, while loaded with flashbacks to previous games, looks good enough to excite die-hard fans of the series.  Originally developed for cell phones, The Third Birthday will, like its predecessors, find a home on a Sony console – the PSP.  That much more mobility for those who just have to take their Parasite Eve action al fresco.

- Take dead aim and squeeze the trigger -

So if you've had an empty feeling in your gut since you beat Parasite Eve II, let this one work its way into your system and, with its familiar tone and gameplay, you'll soon be inseparable. Unfortunately, as of now, a release date has yet to be announced for The Third Birthday.

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