I'm writing this post from a hotel room in central London. I'm visiting the UK in order to attend the Develop Conference, a Europe-centric conference for game developers. Yesterday I took the train south to Brighton for the first day of the conference, a special day focused on mobile developers, and gave a talk to a sparse audience about my Android game, Replica Island. This is the third big conference I've spoken at this year; last year I did about twelve different events, which, thinking back on it now is fairly crazy. My talk yesterday differed a bit from my normal pitch. I usually spend a lot of time telling game developers how to get the most out of Android phones. While there was a little bit of that in this talk, I decided to spend most of my time talking about my particular game development experience. What went right, what went wrong, what I intended to do and what I learned in the process, that kind of thing. Something weird happened while I was designing the slides for this talk: though my intention to was speak about how side-scrollers might be successful on a phone, I kept coming back to design ideas that originally clawed their way into my consciousness via horror games. I often reference Jonathan Blow's point about 'interestingness' in my talks; this is the idea that a good game design is one that keeps the player interested any way that it can, be that via interesting game mechanics or art style or narrative or music or whatever. Blow warns that pursuing innovation for the sake of innovation is "misguided" because innovation isn't always interesting. That idea was certainly instructive in my design of Replica Island: I explicitly chose to base my design on tried-and-true mechanics and then increase the "interestingness" of the game through other means. But it occurred to me while preparing for this talk that the real proof of Blow's point can be readily found in horror games, and that my approach to making my cute retro side scroller more fun was clearly influenced by common horror game patterns. For example, take a game like Rule of Rose. I feel pretty much the same way about Rule of Rose now as I did back in 2007: it's terrible. It's got fantastic art and an interesting story line, and I dug the music at first, but the game itself is basically unplayable: the collision detection doesn't work, combat doesn't work, the dog mechanic doesn't work; I finally quit playing it because I got stuck in a section where I cannot progress and yet I cannot go back. The game is broken. And yet, and yet, Rule of Rose has a pretty major following. It has its own high-quality fan site that, by the way, is still being updated here in 2010. Every time I post an angry rant about this game, a couple of hardcore fans come out of the woodwork to tell me to give it another chance (I expect the same result from this post, and it's not even really about Rule of Rose). Clearly some people didn't just complete this game, they really enjoyed it. Rule of Rose is, I think, an excellent proof of Blow's interestingness idea: though I didn't get hooked myself, a lot of folks were so in love with the art, the style, the characters, and especially the narrative that they were willing to forgive and ignore absolutely egregious design and implementation failures. There are lots of other mediocre games that have better mechanics but duller story lines (like, say, Cold Fear or Carrier, just to name two), but nobody makes fan sites for those games. It's not just that those titles are mediocre, it's that they simply aren't interesting enough. When I went about designing Replica Island, I did it the way I expect horror games do it: narrative first. I wrote an outline to the story, decided it wasn't interesting enough, and then reassembled it as an out-of-order mixture of past events ("memories" in the game) and present day. This narrative structure ended up defining the level progression and pacing for the game. I added a lot of dialog, and I tried to make my characters have a little more depth than the average side-scroller. Taking a page out of the book of traditional horror design, I added snippets of an old diary to each level, each revealing slightly more about the author than the last. I tried to make the narrative interesting first and foremost, though at the same time I worked to ensure that the narrative could be entirely skipped by players who just want to crush enemies. Once that foundation was in place, I spent the rest of my time actually making the game--getting the mechanics right and tuning the levels and doing all the super-important mechanical stuff that makes up most of the moment-to-moment gameplay experience. Ideally, my game should be rock solid without any narrative; just in case it isn't, or to keep players who aren't really partial to side-scrollers playing, I tried to use narrative as a way to increase the interestingness of my game. This is, thinking about it now, a throughly Survival Horror approach to game design. It's hard to tell how effective I was at actually making a fun game, or if the focus on narrative helped. The user reviews have been pretty good, but there's no obvious preference exhibited by commenters on Android Market (comments about the narrative seem to fall into "great story" and "tl;dr" categories with equal frequency). I'm certain that the art quality and style (courtesy of my good friend Genki) had at least as much to do with positive reviews as the narrative. And though I messed up the mechanics in a couple of places, the game seems to be generally fun for people to play. I'm quite proud that it's one of the most-played games I've ever worked on. Standing up on the stage in Brighton yesterday, I struggled a bit to convey this line of thinking to the audience. I mentioned the focus on narrative being a side-effect of my horror research, but I don't think this was a particularly salient part of the lecture (though I did notice a few raised eyebrows). But thinking about it later, it occurred to me that I probably couldn't have made a cute retro side scroller for a mobile phone if I hadn't had horror games in my back pocket as a reference. That's evidence that the thesis of this site--that the traits of horror games might be applicable to other genres--might be true. That's pretty cool.

How can this possibly go wrong? ¥980 is about $10 right now. That is to say, it's not very much money. It's particularly cheap for a DVD containing "over 120 minutes of astonishing horror footage." And yet, that's exactly what 本当にあった 恐怖の心霊・都市伝説DVD BOX ("Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX") offers at that price. I was more than a little skeptical. I mean, the price point was the first warning sign. The second was that I found this cinematic tour de force in my local Family Mart, of all places, stuffed in-between the weekly women's magazines and ¥100 onigiri. Family Mart does not sell horror, you know. They're mostly focused on essentials like potato chips, coke drinks, extra batteries, and umbrellas. A giant box proclaiming to have "real footage so scary you can't shut your eyes" was a bit conspicuous. But, I mean, for ¥980, I figured what the hell. Worst (and most likely) case, it's terrible and I can laugh at it. And maybe, just maybe, there'll be a gem hiding in those 120 minutes. At 8 yen per minute, you can't really go wrong. Heck, if I bought this thing off Amazon I'd have to pay for shipping. So I bought it. This is not the first time I have done this. A couple of years ago I came home with a set of DVDs called Tales of Terror from Tokyo, which sounded terrible and, based on the packaging and box notes, looked like complete schlock. I was pleasantly surprised by Tales of Terror; it turned out that small, 5 minute episodes were a pretty good format and that a couple of the directors involved with the series had produced some pretty neat stuff. I like the idea that a director has a very short amount of time, and probably no budget whatsoever, to find a way to make things scary. Some of the best horror has its roots in simplification by necessity; The Blair-Witch Project is one famous example. The first hilarious thing about Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX is that it really is just a box. "DVD BOX" usually means "box set," here in Japan, but in this case, it's just a giant, empty box. Well, it's not entirely empty: there's some filler cardboard and a single disc. But that's all. No liner notes, no There it is in all of its glory. ¥980 well spent. nothing. At ¥980 these guys are probably making a killing. The first "story" is a collection of shinrei shashin pictures: photos of regular people in which ghosts are supposed to have been inadvertently captured. The first one is clearly a simple photoshop of the vampire's face from Nosferatu, and the rest are similarly lame. The sequence of photos ends with the sound of a woman screaming. Not a good start. Fortunately (and I say "fortunately" because anything is better than watching a video of still photos), the remainder of the DVD contains actual video. The rest of the DVD is a series of "stories" (their word, not mine) about a young woman who ventures into scary, and reportedly haunted, places with her video camera. She carefully climbs a long rock staircase to a supposedly haunted shrine, she ventures into old, abandoned houses looking for certain mirrors that are said to reflect ghosts, and generally freaks herself out. The presentation is more than a little Blair Witch inspired; she keeps a running monologue going and periodically turns the camera to face her (which I found particularly improbable, considering that she's supposed to be in a scary dark place and the camera is her only source of light). This really is horror on a shoe-string budget. The thing is, as simple as it is, it almost works. Japan is chock-full of fantastic places to make scary videos like this. It's got old, moss-covered, dilapidated shrines, there are war-era tunnels and bases to be found, not to mention your standard set of abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. Even with no budget, the producers of these stories have absolutely fantastic sets to work on because Japan is full of scary-looking places. But of course it does not work. There are too many basic problems for the scenes to be involving; the reporter woman can't seem to keep the camera pointed in the way that she is moving so half the footage is a dark view of a floor someplace. And she keeps complaining about how dark it is without once activating the night vision mode on her camera (which the filmmakers make the mistake of introducing to us in the first scene). But the most amazing thing about this series is that nothing actually happens. The reporter ventures into a scary location, gets scared, and then leaves. No ghosts or otherwise scary things ever show up. And then, and then, as if the producers of this set were on some mission to make the most impotent horror film ever, the series gets even more boring! After the initial reporter has ventured I'm so scared, I'm filming myself! into scary-but-ultimately-harmless places several times, a new series starts in which a different girl does mostly the same, but in places that are even less scary (one of the sequences is, I shit you not, about a hill that, according to the DVD, some people think looks like a face). "Oh, I feel something. It's very sad here. I can feel something like an old man, and he's very lonely," the girl drones. Five minutes later the sequence is over and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. And then another starts and again, NOTHING HAPPENS. The last sequence they mix up a bit by having two girls (!!) and a couple of guys venture into some supposedly-cursed area (if people dying in a location is enough to curse it, every square foot of Japan must be cursed), and talk about it for a while, and guess what? NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS AND THEY LEAVE!! This is so far worse, so far, far worse, than I had imagined it could be. At least if they had a guy in a rubber mask I could believe that they were trying. But no, despite the fantastic locales (goddamn face-hill excepted), any potential these sequences might have had for horror is absolutely, completely squandered. They could have made them 10x better without actually spending any more money. Having a guy in a black outfit with a black face mask standing unobtrusively in the corner of one of the scenes, unnoticed by the reporter but obvious to the viewer, would have been enough to push this nonsense into the realm of "potentially watchable." The reporter people don't even get properly scared; they just sort of complain about the spot and leave. I mean, come on, I'm going way out on a limb for you guys here. I purchased a video for ¥980. Throw me a bone! Or at least a plastic skeleton! ANYTHING. I guess that if there is one interesting takeaway from this video, it's that the filmmakers are obviously working under the impression that their target audience already believes in ghosts, curses, evil spirits--the whole package. They believe their audience to be in such a vulnerable state already that they can get away with simply suggesting that maybe, possibly, according to somebody's brother's sister's mailman's uncle, there's a ghost around here somewhere. The whole set operates off this idea that the area is scary because it is potentially haunted; the stories don't give you any reason to believe in them--you have to be a believer already. And maybe that actually describes some people in Japan. In any event, 8 yen per minute was a rip-off for Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX. But at least I got this blog post out of it.

You might recall that about a year ago, I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Thinking After Dark conference (my notes: one, two, and three). Now, several of the papers presented at that conference (including, I'm honored to report, my own) are available in the latest issue. Half of the issue is in French, but for those of you who (like me) don't speak that beautiful language, there's still a lot of quality to digest here. I particularly enjoyed William Huber's Catch and Release: Ludological Dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, and Clara Fernàndez-Vara's Dracula Defanged: Empowering the Player in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which, as she clearly points out, is not a horror game). My own paper is about Japanese culture as viewed through the lens of horror games. I've gone ahead and posted the slides (2.4mb pdf) from the talk (though they might make more sense if you read the paper first). My idea is that Japanese horror games, even when trying to appear western, are throughly rooted in their home culture, and by studying Japanese horror game tropes we can actually find clues to the way that Japan works as a whole. I'm also really interested in the idea that culture shock--this unbalanced feeling that we get by seeing works that were developed with motives we do not understand--is a huge affordance to horror because it is so unbalancing. As I've written here before, I'm sure a big part of the draw of Asian horror movies is that they do not follow American cliches, and without the bedrock of comfortable patterns to assist us, we feel out of control and, consequently very scared. Anyway, check out the issue! It's pretty awesome to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, especially alongside such other interesting research.

In the April 2010 issue of Edge Magazine, at the bottom-right hand corner of a page about Alan Wake, there's a little sidebar about this site. It's been chosen as "Website of the Month," and to my pleasant surprise the author sums up this site succinctly and accurately. It's clear that whomever wrote that sidebar actually spent some time here, looked through the database, and noticed funny things about how I've structured the Quest (they even mention Dino Crisis--ha!). Anyway, if you live in an area where Edge is sold (and if this issue is still on the stands), check it out! The magazine was also nice enough to send me a copy of this issue when I couldn't find it here in Japan.

My burning question about this game is, is it genius by accident or design? I can't tell yet.

I finished Heavy Rain last week. Despite director David Cage's insistence to the contrary, Heavy Rain isn't really a horror game. It's a thriller, or maybe mystery-suspense; if it were a film, it would live in an adjacent, but clearly separate section from the horror flicks. So, being a not-horror game, I'm not going to include it in the database here. It is, however, quite good, and like Quantic Dream's earlier effort, Indigo Prophesy, readers of this site will probably find a lot to enjoy.

Heavy Rain is a pretty high-profile game, so I'm going to skip the paragraph where I tell you what the game is about and how it works. You already know that it's a cinematic narrative that plays out from multiple perspectives and features a branching story line and a whole crapload of endings. And I'm sure that you're aware that the control scheme is a mixture of Type C controls and Quick Timer Events. And the plot is about a guy trying to save his son from a serial killer called the Origami Killer. You know all this already, so consider this paragraph skipped.

I really enjoyed Heavy Rain, but I was also somewhat disappointed with it. It's everything that I expected it to be, and yet, somehow, it felt a tad flat. I mean, the game itself really works: the art and graphics are phenomenal, the acting is good (I played in French with English subtitles, which was neat), the story is interesting, the branching gives the game decisions real weight, and the quick timer events actually work pretty well. There are some problems (some of the QTEs are pretty much impossible to pull off with a time limit, the movement controls lack a lot of precision, and the plot has some major gaping holes), but none of them really damage the experience. I think my problem with the game is that it represents such a huge effort to create an interactive story, and while it succeeds in so many ways, the actual story itself was somewhat predictable. It's like the game graduated from all the pedestrian implementation flaws that drag other games down and ran instead into the much more complex problem of actually having competent plot.

I think that where Heavy Rain is most successful is in its use of camera work and character development to make game play decisions feel like they really matter. Knowing that if I mess up a branch I cannot go back, and also getting to know the characters enough that I want to play them in character had a huge impact on the value of the plot. This is also something that other genres have a really hard time with because they have to balance "story parts" with "game parts." In Heavy Rain, it's all the same mode.

So really, I have nothing too negative to say about this game. The few missteps are more than forgivable; this game design takes so much risk and pulls it off so well that a few misses here and there are hardly important. You should go run out and get this game right now.

Though the game itself is interesting, I also find it fascinating to see how other gamers respond to it. A lot of folks I know had a very negative response to the early part of the game, in which nothing particularly exciting happens. This section exists to define the main character and make his motivations for the later parts of the game seem plausible, and I personally had no problem with it at all, but some people I've spoken feel that any time spent playing a game in which exciting, extraordinary things are not happening is time wasted. They see the game as an action game waiting to happen, a constant tease that leads you on, promising to become a thrilling, button-mashing experience, and then just never does. "And when they get to the combat," one friend laments, "it's all goddamn QTEs!"

Me, I see this game as the ultimate evolution of the Adventure genre. Back when it was the Text Adventure genre, we had paragraphs of text to explain the situation, and then a passive blinking cursor to input commands. The major game play mode was exploration; look at this, examine that, try going over here. The genre graduated into the Graphic Adventure sometime in the late 1980s, and in those games there was still a lot of text, and still a lot of exploration, though mostly performed though point and click. We dropped the prefixes sometime in the '90s, and Adventure games split into a couple of different groups (including a branch that eventually became Survival Horror), but the common traits have remained the same: heavy focus on plot and exploration of the environment. In Heavy Rain, plot is communicated via cinematography and spoken dialog. Exploration is still a major part of the experience, though the method involves hot spots littered throughout the environment and some QTEs. So to me, this is sort of a mid-90's Adventure game with all the dials turned to 11 and cinematography and branching content sort of grafted on the top. And as Adventure games go, this one is one of the most action-packed I've ever played.

Part of the reason people are drawn to horror games, I think, is that they require some sort of narrative focus to effectively build tension. I think a lot of horror gamers, myself included, might be more interested in games with good, well-told stories than games that happen to feature ghosts and demons and flesh bag monsters. If you feel like you're in that camp, give Heavy Rain a try.

I'm several hours into Heavy Rain now, and I'm throughly enjoying it. There are some flaws here and there but generally the whole thing is amazingly well done, and unlike 99% of other games on the market today. I'll post a lot more about it when I finish.

Playing Heavy Rain got me thinking about the Inversely Suspicious Character Problem. I just made that phrase up; maybe there's a formal way to describe this literary problem. The Inversely Suspicious Character Problem is an issue that plagues all types of mysteries, but is particularly damaging to whodunits. I define the problem as follows: Regardless of how dramatically suspicion is cast on a particular character, an astute reader will tend to suspect the most innocent character. Another way to say that is: mysteries authors that design their stories to surprise the reader by revealing the evil-doer at the very end must take steps to ensure that the criminal is beyond suspicion up until the last moment. If the reader already suspects a character and their suspicion turns out to be correct, the surprise is lost, so the author must work to mislead the reader. But a reader who is familiar with this sort of mystery avoids jumping to the obvious conclusion and instead simply looks for a character who seems to be entirely free of taint; this character is most probable to be the real criminal at the end. This doesn't really take any brain power, and so it's not as rewarding as deciphering the mystery given the clues that the author provides, and the result is that the surprise ending loses much of its punch.

Different authors deal with this problem in different ways. One way is simply to introduce so many characters that many end up being incidental, hopefully making inductive selection of the real culprit difficult. But even then, the author runs the risk of annoying the reader when a character who has absolutely no bearing on the story takes the blame. Criminals who turn out to be characters who were introduced early in the work and then quickly discarded (see: any given Scooby-Doo episode), or even worse, characters who enter the story only at the very end, are infuriating to readers because the clues that they've been mentally tracking over the course of the story turn out to be worthless.

Another approach is to avoid the problem entirely by revealing the criminal early in the drama and then making the story focus on the detective who figures it all out. Columbo works this way, and it's quite satisfying. Other authors reveal the criminal but then provide the reader with a different problem, such as how the crime itself was committed (and indeed, in many locked-room murder mysteries the actual murderer is much less important than how they did it). In The Hound of the Baskervilles, as in many other Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle casts doubt over everybody by using an obviously unreliable narrator (Dr. Watson) and integrating the secret movements of the Holmes into the set of clues presented to the reader. This is genius because when it is revealed that Holmes has been working on the case in secret, many of the unresolved loose ends suddenly resolve themselves and the reader has a chance to make the mental leap to the real killer just as the story is about to reveal him itself, thus magnifying the surprise and satisfaction felt by the reader. Many Golden Age detective novels rely on a secondary character who jumps to all of the obvious conclusions before the reader has a chance to, thus focusing (sometimes deceivingly) the readers attention on a subset of clues. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot has Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes has Dr. Watson, and there are many others. Sometimes the side-kick is just there to give the detective a reason to talk about the case.

Whatever the method, mystery authors who seek to surprise the reader have to do something to conceal their criminal without lying to the reader or holding back clues. But this very act of attempted misdirection is a way for the reader to identify the real enemy; whomever the spotlight of suspicion shines on the least is quite likely to be guilty. So there needs to be some extra step, some other sort of twist, to keep the story relevant.

My one complaint with Heavy Rain is that I've deciphered the killer after only a few hours of play. I had a pretty good idea who to suspect even before all of the principal characters had been introduced. You can see the game going out of its way to cast suspicion in certain directions, but I'm pretty confident that in doing so its creators have instead highlighted the real criminal. It's not that the story or characters are poor, it's just that this is a form with which I'm familiar and the regular tropes are all accounted for. Now, I could be wrong, or the game could get real tricky and feature multiple endings with different characters named as the antagonist, but probably the end will reveal the character whom I've suspected since the second hour of play. There are quite a few other loose ends to tie up that I have no idea about, so I'm hoping the end isn't completely predictable, but now that I've fixed the killer in my mind there's much less brain power needed to play the game. Hopefully I'm wrong, and the Inversely Suspicious Character will turn out to be just another red herring.

Final note: DON'T YOU DARE discuss the real killer in Heavy Rain in the comments. Not even with spoiler tags. As confident as I am in my selection, having the game spoiled for me would ruin all of the anticipation of finding out if my theory is right.

I finally finished Silent Hill Homecoming this evening and posted a review. It's not a bad game, and it's more like classic Silent Hill than anything released since 2003, but a few key derivations from the formula damaged the experience for me. Still, it's a positive sign that the series is moving forward (evidenced more dramatically, I suppose, by Silent Hill: Shattered Memories).

Japan: Not this (This is an open letter to Tim Rogers in response to his extremely lengthy column Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore, which was posted on Kotaku. I think I'm just about done reading Kotaku, as the signal to noise ratio has really gone south lately, but before I quit I thought I'd respond to Tim's not-really-video-game-related post with a not-horror-game-related post of my own.) Tim, man, how's it going? We've never met, actually, but we both live in Tokyo and we both write about video games and we both have a lot of game industry experience. I've been following your work for a couple of years, back when it was all on insertcredit.com. Dreaming in an Empty Room is one of my favorite examples of honest-to-goodness real, insightful, video game journalism. So, as one white guy in Japan to another, we're cool. You're not the type of guy who avoids the natives at all costs. I can tell you're not the particular type of foreigner to arrives in Japan looking for a girlfriend and a job teaching English and leaves a year later with the comfortable sense that Japanese people are all crazy and your home country is infinitely more enlightened. You don't spend your nights at The Hub and you don't hijack every conversation with comments about how hot the girls are or how stupid the guys are. You speak Japanese; in fact, you put significant effort into learning the language. In short, you're a foreigner in Japan with an open mind, somebody who's here to learn, somebody who has a sense of respect for the locals even when their behavior doesn't make sense. You are, therefore, part of the minority group of foreigners that I refer to as "not assholes." We've never met, but I can tell. So, we're cool. But Tim, man, I gotta talk to you about your article about Japan. Not the article itself; I'm mostly in agreement with your complaints. Smoking really bothers me, I've sworn never to work for a Japanese company, I don't drink alcohol, and the TV is pretty bad (although, if I had to choose, I would have personally taken the people-eating-food shows to task before comedy). No, the problem here is your very thesis: "I haven't changed. Japan hasn't really changed, either. Something else, however, has." Dude. You've changed. Let me restate this thesis for you in a way that, I think, sums up your problem more succinctly than your 15,979 words. "I've slowly come to the realization that my initial understanding of Japan, my corpus of knowledge about the country that brought me here originally, is woefully incomplete and, in some cases, idealistic and naive. And the more I learn about the Japan, the more mundane and flawed it appears. What originally looked like a theme park has proven to be just another country, with all the warts and problems that every country and culture has. I ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and now Eden looks a whole lot more like a highly landscaped pile of moss." It's cool man, everybody goes through this stage. That's right, it's a stage. Some people hit it earlier, some later, but eventually everybody who spends significant time in Japan passes through it. The good news is, it's the second to last stage. The earlier stages, which consist of wide-eyed awe, then short-lived self confidence, then utter confusion, and finally anger, are all behind you. Now you're in reconciliation, which is a rough point to be, but like I said, it's second to last. The next step, which is the last step, is acceptance. Japan is a culture with a lot of history, but just like any culture in the world it has positive and negative aspects to it. If you choose to live here, you get positive and negative input in equal doses, just like in any other culture in the world. If I can just throw this out there with no context and we're cool, right? Nerd cred represent. you return to America now, after living here for so long, you'll find a whole lot of negative things about American culture that might have forgotten about. A whole lot of positive things too. Not more or less than Japan, just different things. I don't mean to get all zen on you here man, but reconciliation is about changing from within. You can either adjust your perspective or you can leave (or, option three, stay and be miserable and complain all the time and move out of the "not asshole" group). Adjusting your perspective doesn't mean you have to like all the things that bug you about Japan, it just means that you accept some of those things as normal operating behavior and not some aberration of common sense. My suggestion, dude, is to separate your complaints into two categories: stuff that bugs you because it makes no sense, and stuff that bugs you because it makes it hard for you to live your life the way you want to. The latter category is probably things like "it's hard to be a vegetarian here," or "working late every night for no reason is a horrible way to live," or "I cannot afford to live here." These issues could be deal-breakers, and if you can't satisfy them somehow, you should probably consider moving to a different country. The former category, however, doesn't really have all that much to do with you; businessmen screaming drunkenly at night is weird, but only because your definition of "normal" doesn't include it (and, I imagine that many of the locals would agree with you on this point). Common sense is not, in any way, shape or form, common. Letting that former category go and realizing that It's Ok Even If I Wouldn't Do It That Way is the first step to the acceptance stage. That's not to say that anything goes, or that you have to like everything you see. Au contraire, when you reach acceptance it's easier to separate the real problems with the society from the flamboyant-but-non-representative actions of vocal minorities. Personally, I live in Japan because it requires me to learn constantly. The volume of information that I do not understand about the language, the culture, the history, and the people is infinitely vast. There's lots of stuff I don't like about Japan, but I live here because it requires me to keep thinking, to keep learning. There was a time when I didn't know why I wanted to live in Japan, and another time when I thought I wanted to live in Japan for the wrong reasons. So I know how this feels, man. When I leave, it'll either be because a better opportunity comes along or because one of those lifestyle deal-breakers rears its ugly head. So Tim, dude, I gotta wrap this up before it turns into my own little novella, but please, take this to heart: it's you who is changing, and the change isn't random. It's a natural progression and it's the direct result from living and learning about a foreign culture. Love it or leave it, but don't blame the locals for odd behavior that doesn't conform to your internal correctness barometer. If you're going to take Japan to task about something, make it a real issue, like the treatment of women in the workplace or the status of Japanese people with Korean heritage. Figure this out and move on or drop out and find something less challenging to do with your life. Seriously, that's the junction that you're at right now. Alright, I'm getting off my high horse now. London Hearts is on in 5. I've got some Deadly Premonition to catch up on, too. Talk to you later, Chris PS: If you haven't done it yet, try getting out of Tokyo for a while. Out of Kanto, I mean. In my limited experience, every other part of Japan is very different than Tokyo. People are jerks in Tokyo. PPS: If you want to hang out some time and swap game industry war stories, drop me a line. I know a good tan-tan men place in Shibuya. Oh, right, you don't eat meat. Do you eat fish? How do you survive here, man?

This has nothing to do with horror games, but since a few of you asked about it I thought I'd mention Replica Island. My day job involves working on Android, and for the past year I've been putting all of my free time into this little side-scroller starring the green Android robot. In fact, work on the game took so much of my free time that my regular posting schedule on this blog degraded (and I played fewer horror games last year than in the last five or six years). Now the game is complete and I can go back to wasting my life away playing horror games!

If you're interested, here's a short video I made of the game. There's more details (and source code) on replicaisland.net. If you have an Android phone, try it out and let me know what you think (it's free!).