Recently Sony announced Siren: New Translation, a remake of the original Siren for PS3. Now they are announcing something else called Siren Blood Curse, which sounds like an episodic version of New Translation. Details are scarce but it's hard to tell if Blood Curse is New Translation, or if one region will get one and not the other, or if they are the same game in two different packages, or if they are entirely different products. Huh?

I recently purchased The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, a collection of horror comics spanning the era before and after the Comics Code Authority was instated in 1954. Though I enjoy comics (as a kid I had a pretty good collection), I've kind of fallen out of sync with the comics world. I have friends and family who occasionally direct something fantastic my way, and I'm really interested in the medium, but this collection was the first comic material that I've purchased in about ten years (although I recently enjoyed and can highly recommend Jason Shiga's online stuff, particularly Meanwhile, Fleep, and Bookhunter). I decided to pick up the Mammoth Book because I also just bought The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America and I wanted to do some brushing up on the works that caused the Comics Code Authority to be created in the first place. I think that the fear and uncomfortableness that the older generation sometimes feels about video games today very much mirrors the way that horror comics were viewed in the 1950s, so in the interest in understanding the present better, this stuff seems like pertinent knowledge. I guess some people on Amazon were disappointed that The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics isn't a full-color reproduction, but for $12 I can't complain. The collection is filled with mostly obscure horror comics--48 in all--published between 1944 and 2004. About half of the comics are from the '40s and '50s, which is good because frankly, many of the later works are pretty dull. Nothing in the Mammoth Book is famous; there are no prints of well-known EC comics like Tales from the Crypt. I think that the book is a collection of whatever random works that the publishers were able to obtain the rights to for little or no cost; those looking for a collection of the most famous (and most controversial) horror comics from the last half-century will be disappointed. Each comic is introduced by the book's editor, Peter Normanton, and describes the authors of the comic and the era in which it was published. Though Normanton clearly knows his stuff, his command of the English language is tenuous at best; after a couple of really annoyingly bad introductions, I skipped the rest and just stuck to the comics. Despite its faults, the Mammoth Book does contain some really good comics. It's fascinating to see the dramatic change in style and approach before and after the Comics Code; in some cases, the censorship seems to have actually improved the writing because authors were forced to use suggestion rather than all-out gore. The Monster of Dead End, which was published in 1962, is an excellent example of effective comic horror that doesn't rely on melting faces or decapitations to get its point across. I also found it interesting that the tone of the earlier comics is much more depressing; though evil-doers often get what is coming to them, the endings of many of the 1950s era works are not uplifting or satisfying. The later books tend to play up the "you will reap what you have sown" approach to storytelling, where everything works itself out because all of the bad people have died and all of the good people have triumphed, but before the Comics Code Authority things didn't always end quite so neatly. Though more recent tales like Over His Head (1983) began to experiment again with rather unpredictable stories, the dramatic difference between the 1950s and 1960s comics is really interesting. So, while this is hardly a collection of the "best" horror comics, or even the most well-known horror comics, I enjoyed most of The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics. If you skip the introductions and stick to the comics and I think that collection is a really interesting example of how the medium progressed in terms of story telling technique and art style in the face of cultural fear and censorship. It's hardly a definitive work, but as a (rather random) sampling of horror comics from the last fifty years, it's not half-bad.

In unsurprising news, Kotaku is reporting that Double Helix (previously known as The Collective) has cancelled vampire staking game Harker in order to finish Silent Hill 5. That's probably a worthy trade off, though it's always a bit sad to see original IP die off for the sake of a sequel (even a Silent Hill sequel). In other news, a new Splatterhouse game is in the works (thanks to forums member Johnny Feldman for the tip). You know, because, who needs new ideas when we can just regurgitate old ones?

Kotaku reports that Silent Hill 5 will be out for PS3 and Xbox360 in September of this year, and that the name on the box will read Silent Hill: Homecoming.

September is pretty soon. I'm looking forward to seeing what The Collective has done with the game.

Even cooler. A while back I posted a short and completely off-topic piece about wireless headphones. Basically, good wireless headphones are not cheap, and though there are pretty good alternatives, some of them (like the Sony IR headphones I ended up buying) get interference from plasma TVs (hooray!). Despite the color-induced static, I toughed it out with my IR 'phones for several months; though many of you suggested that I just get a nice long cable and forget about the whole wireless business, my TV's lack of headphone port kept that option out of reach. I played through all of Bioshock with the IR headphones, I watched several movies with them, and I used them to improve my Rock Band singing. I was hoping that I'd just get used to the wavering layer of static that my TV caused, but I didn't. The wireless headphones weren't totally useless, but I was pretty disappointed with them. Then yesterday I happened across a Sharper Image store. If you're not familiar with Sharper Image, it's a store that sells random gadgets and techie thigamagigs that you didn't know you needed for exorbitant prices. As the name suggests, Sharper Image is all about techie fashion; it's a place for people who want a gadget that looks cool go to be relieved of their cash. Actually, I have often enjoyed browsing the random contraptions for sale at Sharper Image, but I've never actually considered purchasing anything there. Anyway, Sharper Image is exactly the kind of place that people stop going when the economy is bad, and so they ran out of money a couple of months ago. Yesterday while tooling around Burlingame looking at expensive baby stores, I noticed that the local Sharper Image was having a going-out-of-business sale. I looked around inside but was unimpressed; I don't need a $500 pair of nightvision goggles, or a memory card that fits in your phone, or a set of spoons with digital displays in the handles, or any of the other crap they had for sale. Just as I was walking out, however, I noticed that they had wireless headphones! Upon further inspection it turned out that the 'phones were Blue Tooth, came with a transmitter (which is a non-trivial addition), and were going for about $80, marked down from $199. And to top it all off, these headphones had big, wrap-around ear pads, the kind that I like. So I bought them. I don't need two pairs of wireless headphones, but on the other hand the Sony IRs should work better away from the TV, so maybe I can find a use for them. I hooked up the Blue Tooth headphones and am extremely happy to report that they sound phenomenal (at least, compared to the IRs). There's no static, the sound is crisp and clear, and unlike the infrared headphones they don't require line-of-sight to work. Ok, so the volume controls are pretty unresponsive and I couldn't get the damn things to pair with my computer, but who cares: these headphones are exactly what I was looking for. My quest for wireless headphones has, for the moment anyway, come to an end. Which means, just so you know, that I can get back to playing horror games on a more regular basis. I'm most of the way through Hellnight and I've put some serious time into Siren 2. I've been temporarily distracted by the hilarious (and very fun) No More Heros, but I'm closing in on the end of that game pretty quickly. Thanks to new (non-sucky) wireless headphones, I hope to retire and review another game or two in the next month.

Sony Japan has a website up that looks an awful lot like a Siren 3 announcement. The red background, rain, grainy and scary soundtrack, and even the clock design are a perfect fit for the series (not to mention the giant "sa" character in the background). Back in 2006 there were some rumblings about a Siren 3 announcement, but this site is a lot more convincing. I have to remember to check it in a few days when the timer has run out.

Update: Well, that was fast. Kotaku has confirmation that a new Siren game is on the way for PS3. It's called Siren New Translation, and apparently it's a "reworking" of the first title. Confirmation came from Famitsu, and a scan of the pages is available (file was removed and replaced with a porn-filled 404 page. note to self: never ever link to 2chan again). The release date is set for July 24th in Japan.

Update #2: The site is up now, and it includes a trailer that is pretty neat. Rather than watching it in terrible Windows Media format, why not check it out over at Kotaku, where it actually plays correctly. Apparently the new game involves an American TV crew, but it's not clear if they've been added to the characters in the original Siren, are replacing characters from that game, or if all the characters are going to be new. The architecture in the demo is familiar, and there are a couple of scenes that I remember from the original version; it's hard to tell exactly what this "reworking" is all about.

On a lighter note, Destructoid has a humorous list of 10 Golden Rules for Survival Horror. It's mostly commentary on Resident Evil, but fun nonetheless.

MTV's Multiplayer blog has an excellent series of articles about black professionals in the game industry. The entire series is a really interesting, and I recommend that you read the whole thing. I decided to post about the series because one of the topics that is discussed is the Resident Evil 5 trailer, which, as we've discussed before, ended up offending a lot of people. What's so fantastic about the series is that the diverse opinions that are expressed are coming from people who are authorities on video games. Unlike many other discussions about this topic that popped up on the net, there's no confusion about what games are about or who they are for; the topic is not diluted by general misinformation about video games as a medium. Also, all of the people interviewed for the series explain their perspectives with extreme clarity and articulacy.

I wanted to post a couple of quotes about Resident Evil 5, but if I did that people would probably take them out of context and respond without reading the article as a whole. So instead, I'll just leave you with this quote by Newsweeks' N'Gai Croal that I found really insightful and well-stated:


Go. Read the whole series.

Wii-focused vaporware horror game Sadness is probably never coming out. It probably doesn't even exist, except maybe on paper. But if it does exist, and is actually in development somewhere, then this might be a screenshot from it.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the film section of my local Japanese bookstore when I came across a box set of four discs called Tales of Terror From Tokyo and All Over Japan. Now, to tell you the truth, the set looked like utter schlock. In addition to the awkward title and terrible cover art, the distribution company responsible for the series is a group called "Tokyo Shock." There's no useful information on the back of the box and the whole thing was selling for $30 for all four discs (most of the other films at this store go for $30 each). It looked like a very blatant attempt to ride the post Ring wave of interest in Japanese horror films; I could tell right there in the bookstore that this Tokyo Shock group got the rights to whatever they could in Japan and released it here in hopes of making a quick buck. I bought it. I mean, four discs for $30 is a steal, and I figured that even if it was utter crap I could peruse it for funny screen captures for blog posts. And the back of the box said something about "over 60 episodes," so I figured they can't all be bad, right? Plus I recognized some of the director's names that were listed on the back of the box, and some of them have been responsible for films that weren't half bad. So I said to myself, "what the heck." That was about four weeks ago, and I'm just getting around to watching the damn thing now. I've only watched the first disc so far, but I am happy to report that I am so far pleasantly surprised by the set. As I imagined, Tokyo Shock has snagged whatever horror-related material they could and reissued it here in the states. It turns out, however, that the material they were able to grab isn't all that bad. The series is from a TV show called Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro (怪談新耳袋), which started running in Japan in 2003 (meaning that the show itself was probably an attempt to ride the Ring boom to profitability). What's really cool about the show is that each episode is really, really short: five minutes at the most. This means that the directors have a very little amount of time to set up a scene, introduce characters, and then get to the scary bits. The results are definitely mixed, and the acting is pretty mediocre across the board, but I found many of the episodes to be quite good. The episodes that keep things simple are the most effective; those that try to be a regular film in a five-minute timeframe are less stellar. And some of the stories are just sort of nonsensical rather than scary. Each episode is a self-contained story. The format resembles an earlier Japanese TV show, Yonimo Kimyouna Monogatari (世にも奇妙な物語), which was sort of a modern-day version of The Twilight Zone when it aired throughout the 1990s. The biggest difference is the Shin Mimibukuro's five-minute format, which is what I think saves the series from being bad. The stories themselves are often just scenes: an elevator is headed down but it's already on the ground floor; somebody is at the door and they sure don't sound like your Aunt; something is wrong with your sister's new apartment; your childhood diary warns you of a cheating lover. But that's what makes the series fun--the episodes that are well executed just examine one particular scene and then end; they don't have time to get bogged down and start sucking. Anyway, I was surprised to find the first volume of this series as interesting as it was. Hopefully the rest of the set will be good as well. If you like this sort of thing and see this set for cheap, I think it's a worthy purchase.