Here's a couple of videos I've come across lately:

• Some super alpha handicam vid of Sadness actually running. I think that this footage is legit; that black box on top of the guy's TV is a Wii dev kit (I used to have the same kind on my desk), and the footage looks like prototype-level quality (minor, obvious things, like interpolation of the rotation angle of the characters, is missing, which means that this is really, really early in the game's development). What we don't know is when this was shot--if it's recent, I think this game has at least another year of development ahead. If it's fairly old, then the game might actually be in active development now. Either way, Sadness just got one (very tiny) step closer to not being vaporware.
• Here's some early footage of a recently-announced Wii horror game called Cursed Mountain. I'm not one to hang a lot of value on trailers, but this looks pretty neat! Thanks to forums member suedepup for the link.
• Finally, another gem from suedepup is this absolutely fantastic claymation zombie short. In six minutes the author has captured the essence of the Romero zombie formula, and he or she has done it with humor and style too.

Kotaku is reporting that with some new footage from Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, it's been revealed that the game is a horror game. This is fantastic news because Quantic Dream's stuff is awesome and Heavy Rain has sounded extremely promising from day one. I really enjoyed their last game, Indigo Prophecy, and finding out that their next title is horror-themed has made my day.

Update: Now there's a neat trailer to watch.

I haven't seen the other news sites pick this up yet, but it looks like EA has agreed to publish an as-yet-unannounced "action horror" title by Shinji Mikami and Suda51, with some help from Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Q Entertainment. No details whatsoever are available at the moment, but the names attached to this announcement alone seem it worthy of anticipation!

I'm on vacation at the moment (cooling my heels in Southern California on the beach) and trying to catch up on my DS gaming. I'm like three Phoenix Wright versions behind, and my friends are already on their second play-through of The World Ends With You. I tried to play some more of Dementium: The Ward, but I'm having trouble staying interested in it.

The problem is two-fold: first, the story is mostly non-existent: you're trapped in a crazy mental institution, get out. I mean, there's probably more to it than that, but so far that's all I've encountered. The level design doesn't properly build tension either: though there is blood splattered everywhere, there's no sense that things are getting better or worse as you progress; it's just more similar-looking hallways and lots and lots of closets.

The bigger problem, though, is the save system. The game helpfully auto-saves for you every time you enter a new room, so you can turn the machine off at any time and come back to where you were. However, if you die your save file is reset to the beginning of the chapter, forcing you to redo work. This might have been an OK idea if the chapters were short, but they're not; twice I've played for close to an hour only to die at the exact same location and lose all of my progress. Losing two hours of game play (not to mention two hours covering the same material) is a pretty bad flaw, and it's enough for me to put the game down.

That said, the rest of the game works ok. Being on the DS doesn't hamper the horror factor at all, though the aforementioned story problems keep the game from being very scary. The stylus-based mouse look works perfectly, and I like the infinite-beam flashlight. I hope that the game gets better because the components are all there.

Holy crap, this site has been up for five years! My first post was on August 6, 2003, which on Wednesday of this week will have been exactly 5 years ago. Damn, it doesn't feel like that much time has passed, but the blog archive proves it. It also shows that I've managed to post on average two items a week for the last five years (487 posts total), which I think is a pretty good rate considering the duration and the slowness with which I am actually able to progress on games for the Quest. Speaking of the Quest, my stats page shows that I'm close to 50% complete, which will be a big milestone; for the longest time I wasn't able to get past 35% because horror games were being released so fast that I could barely keep up, but now that the releases have slowed down a little I'm gaining a little ground. This site began as a simple spreadsheet which I printed out and posted on my bulletin board. My original intent had been to just catalog all of the horror games available so that I could have a convenient shopping list when I went to the game store. There couldn't be that many of them, I figured. Once I started to research the genre I realized how wrong I was. This was in late 2002, and I was writing GBA games from home after a short stint on the East Coast. That summer I had completed Silent Hill 2, and my budding interest in horror games blossomed into an acute obsession. I pretty quickly realized that a simple spreadsheet wasn't going to cut it if I really wanted to catalog all of the obscure games in this genre, and being a programmer the most logical solution seemed to be to write some code. The first page titled Chris' Survival Horror Quest was the search page. Actually, it looks pretty much the same now as it did then--pretty crappy. But back then I had this awful powder blue color scheme and no images of any kind (I'm a programmer, so the laws of the universe require me to be bad at art). I built up the info and screenshot pages, but I realized that having the ability to comment on games would be great, so I made myself a comments system. Once I had a way for people to leave comments, I realized that I had enough infrastructure for a blog (although in 2003 that word wasn't yet in wide circulation, and I remember calling my front page the "news page"). Though the site has changed a lot since then (it's been through two major layout changes, I eventually had to kill the comments system on game info pages, and the database content itself has changed a couple of times), the basic format is the same: front page musings on horror game design and developments, a section for more in-depth features, a forum for community discussion, and a database of horror game information and reviews. In celebration of this anniversary, I've made a bunch of minor improvements to the site. The most obvious is the new right bar, but I've also tried to clean up and make improvements to lots of the other pages on this site. One of the things I've added is the ability to quote other people in comments and to wrap spoilers in special spoiler tags. I hope that these changes will make the site more fun, easier to navigate, and more informative. Thanks for reading, especially those of you who've been here since the beginning. Horror games are fun, but it's you guys, the people who read my stuff and give me feedback, that drives me to maintain this site. Hope to see you here for another half-decade!

I finished Condemned 2: Bloodshot yesterday evening and I've just posted a review. It's a pretty good game, and at some points it's absolutely brilliant, but I found the story and level progression to be a bit random and unfocused. Still, the Condemned series represents an example of how horror games can diverge from the formulas defined by Resident Evil and Silent Hill and still be very high quality. I enjoyed Condemned 2, though I think that the original had a better story.

It's E3 time again, and there's been a few blips on the horror game radar. Of particular note is the tons of press that Resident Evil 5 has been getting, even though it's not due out until next year. There's also a little video of water physics from tech demo / horror game Hydrophobia. And Dead Space, which used to look like Bioshock to me and now looks like Doom 3, has gotten a fair bit of coverage itself. Oh, and Dead Rising 2 is coming out for Wii. Bet you didn't see that one coming!

I went to E3 a couple of times before it was cancelled and reincarnated as (as far as I can tell) exactly the same thing, and I didn't like it very much. It's cool to see what everybody in the industry is working on, but it also brought out the worst parts of the industry (namely, shameless marketing to cover lacking content). I'm not there this year (and really have no desire to ever go again), and since it's been transmogrified into the "E3 Media Summit" maybe it's gotten better. I'm still waiting for more information on games like Dead Island, Alan Wake, and Rainy Woods.

I don't like to post very much about my personal life; this isn't a personal blog and I'm not really a fan of putting personal information on the internet. But on the other hand, I suppose that my thoughts might be more interesting to read if I talk a little more about myself. Plus, I have an opportunity to promote some of my day-job work and I'm not going to miss it. For the past year or so I've been working on a project called Lively by Google, which was just released today. I left the game industry last year and joined Google after my previous employer shuttered the office that I was working in. I'm pretty passionate about video game development (if you couldn't tell from this blog), so some of my friends were a bit shocked to see me leave the industry and get a "regular" software engineering job. But what they didn't know is that I was secretly working on something that, while not exactly a game, is pretty darn close. Lively is a free 3D virtual world for hanging out and chatting with friends. It's about as far away as one can get from horror games, but I've really enjoyed working on it and am looking forward to seeing how it is received. If you have a Windows computer and are interested in browser-based 3D chatting and room creation, check it out.

I've had many, many requests for a walkthrough for Dark Messiah, aka Hellnight, a fantastic first-person horror game for PS1. I recently posted a review of this great game and as a result received even more requests for a walkthrough. Well, in response to that post, one dedicated reader named Rob decided to actually sit down and write a complete guide to beating the game with Naomi. On top of the walkthrough text himself, Rob also produced a complete set of annotated maps for the game, which is extremely helpful for a game like this.

Read the walkthrough here! Also, if you have no idea what this Hellnight stuff is about, here's a pretty good write-up about the game.

Aha! I've found the script! I finished Obscure 2 last night. It was not good. You should not play this game. I wrote a review with details if you are interested. OK, ok, I'll provide a little more context. Obscure 2 is a game that cuts its own throat with a terrible plot and asinine characters. It's got the right elements to make a good game, but in the end it was really quite bad. It's too bad because I enjoyed the first game more than I expected to.