Montreal is a beautiful city. I have logged a lot of time in the air this month. I flew from Japan to the Bay Area in early April, then flew up to Oregon to see my family, and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Montreal. On Sunday I return to the Bay Area and on Tuesday I will get back in the plane and fly back to Japan. Hello frequent flyer miles! I am in Montreal, which is a fantastic (but very cold) city, for the first time in about eight years, to attend the Thinking After Dark conference, which is all about horror video games. Today was the first day of the conference, which runs for three days. On Saturday I am giving a (very short) talk about using horror games to study Japanese culture, a topic that I think is a pretty predictable selection for me. The conference is located in a neat old building that was selected because "it looks like something out of Resident Evil." I can tell that I am in the company of friends, though I have to admit that some of the lingo is so academic that I have trouble understanding it. Today's talks were all interesting, and I took a ton of notes. In fact, I have so many notes that rather than trying to describe each individual talk, I am going to just record some of the key interesting points that I heard today. I'm going to break the notes up into separate posts because there's just too much information. Also, even though there's a lot of content here you should understand that I am applying a pretty strict filter; these talks have way more info in them than I can possible transcribe here. The first keynote, by Barry K. Grant of Brock University, was about horror cinema. Grant is the author of numerous books on cinema and had a whole lot to say about horror films. Some points: Grant believes that "video games constitute the future of cinema." He sees them as "the eighth art," after cinema. Cinema is spatial arts + temporal arts, and games add interactivity to that formula. Horror has the most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions (next to Sci-Fi): magazines, web sites, zombie flash mobs, etc. Like comedy and porn, "horror is defined in terms of its intended affect," making it a "body genre." Contrast that with crime or mystery films which are about the narrative. Consequently, a "good" horror movie is one that is scary, even if it's not a particularly well-made film. Grant shows how German expressionism, for example the painted-on shadows, artificial lighting, and hard, distorted angles in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) jumped to Hollywood when German filmmakers fled to the US in the early 1930s to avoid the Nazis. "Horror movies are more about the time and place that they are made in rather than the time that they are set." Classic monsters are no longer scary because in the 1950s onward they were The venue. Not shown: entrance to underground laboratory. "juvenilized": put on cereal boxes, made into toys, etc. Psycho changed genre films by suggesting that monsters didn't have to be aliens or monsters. The horror still descends from the gothic mansion on the hill to arrive at the regular Bates Motel though. New vocabulary word: "splat-stick." Interesting idea that William Castle films (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, etc) are early experiments in interactive cinema. Second was a talk by Tanya Krzywinska of Brunel University. She has also written extensively about games and film. Her talk covered tons of bases and is difficult to summarize, so I'll just list a few interesting points: "Orchestrated" (= linear, pre-scripted, pre-determined) game play sequences vs organic, open-ended sequences. Phantasmagoria is extremely orchestrated, even down to the points in space that you can visit (as the motion is all based on live film), and borrows much from cinema. 3D free-roaming games, on the other hand, are harder to orchestrate and thus were unable to directly apply shock and tension lessons from cinema and had to invent their own. Krzwinska calls gamers "close readers," that is, games require attention to detail and pattern recognition. Compare that to TV or film which can "take you places" without effort. In games, your life depends on your ability to "read" the details of the game. She makes a distinction between game "grammars" for mechanics and for the genre. This is a similar idea to my idea about 'mechanical challenges' and 'cognitive challenges', but she's framed it very well. The game grammar is "how you play" and the genre grammar is "what is happening in the game." It occurs to me that game grammars must be as readable as possible (to avoid the frustration of not knowing how to control the game) while genre grammars may be intentionally misleading or obscured (in order to misdirect the player's understanding of the environment or story). She has a point about sound provoking action in games, as opposed to in films where it causes you to imagine an action. The radio in Silent Hill foretells of an approaching enemy which you can then encounter, etc. She's a big fan of Lovecraft and of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. But she points out that the game grammar and genre grammar are somewhat at odds (e.g. you must investigate things to learn about them, but looking upon horrors causes you to lose sanity points). Lovecraft doesn't fit well with game grammar norms. I'll save the rest of today's talks for a future post. In fact, at this rate I might just have to move everything to an article or present a less informative but more concise summary of the day's events. Which would you prefer?

I felt like this guy while playing this game. This evening I finished Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and posted a review. Basically, this is an extremely well-made game that has one major problem: the game play isn't fun. I was really disappointed by this one, as so much opportunity is wasted. Oh well, see the full review for angst-filled details.

I know I've been fairly negative lately about the games I am playing. I really don't want to just hate everything that comes my way and hold it up to some impossible golden standard, but damn, there's been so much disappointment in my gaming life lately.

Take Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, for instance. I really, really want to like this game. There are a ton of neat game play ideas in it, and the narrative is so well told. But part way through the game stopped being about horror and started being about shooting, and as a shooter it's pretty miserable (even with my discovery of the Aim button--holy crap it was hard before that). The damage model is too unforgiving, the reload time is way too long, and your short-term goals are really unclear. I've had to use a faq twice now for this game (which I loathe to do), and both times the places that I got stuck at were really trivial tasks. I find myself playing the same section over and over again, not because it is hard to figure out what to do, but because it's so easy to fail. These are sections that the game designers probably intended the player to spend less than five minutes on, and here I am wandering around for hours because an item that I needed to collect refused to be collected when I tried or because the subtitles don't show up reliably. It doesn't help that the health and damage systems, which I discussed in the previous post, are harsh even for a stealth game, and then the designers drop you into situations where gunplay is the only option. In these cases (like the raid on the boat) you basically can't take any hits because you don't have time to heal and even the most trivial hit will kill you eventually thanks to blood loss. Argh!

It is rare for me to feel so mixed about a game. Usually it's a failure at every level, mediocre across the board, or consistently inspired. But with Call of Cthulhu, I'm finding a huge amount of variability in the moment-to-moment quality. The insanity effects, the audio design, the story, and the story telling are all excellent. The graphics are good and I like the character design, the dialog is well-written and well-acted, and the way the narrative branches is really interesting. But on the other hand, the gun play is a disaster (and a central game mechanic), the stealth aspects are unrewarding, and the game is really poor at communicating goals to the player. Some of the puzzles are needlessly obtuse (don't tell me to go find an item that doesn't actually exist, please) and the game has actually crashed on me twice now (though I am running under emulation on a 360, so I should probably give the developer the benefit of the doubt).

Call of Cthulhu should, by rights, be a great game. It's got everything it needs to be absolutely awesome. And yet I feel like I have to punch myself in the face while playing it in order to get to the next awesome thing.

One thing about having a kid is that you don't sleep very much. But for me, that means that I've had some time to play some video games in between cuddling my daughter, feeding her, and generally trying to let her Mom get some sleep in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason I've been on a FPS tangent recently (actually, I know the reason: I bought a 360)--I've played through Halo, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Portal (all kinds of awesome, by the way), and I've put a little bit of time into a couple of horror games: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and Condemned. Call of Cthulhu is a game that I really want to like because the narrative is so well told. We've got a by-the-books Lovecraftian tale here, and it's executed within the game systems quite well. Flashbacks, insanity effects, and generally hot level design make the game play (which involves a lot of exploration, puzzle solving, and sneaking) pretty fun. That is, unfortunately, until they introduce the firearms. Once the guns show up, the game mechanics seem to fall apart. The story is still very well told, but the game play takes an immediate and dramatic nosedive. There are a couple of issues that together cause Call of Cthulhu to be way less fun than it should be. First of all, the shooting mechanics are terrible. There's no aiming reticle, and the angle of the protagonists arm on the screen makes it really difficult to judge exactly where the gun is pointing. Furthermore, weapons that should have a significant target area (like the shotgun) sometimes miss at point blank range. The switching of weapons and reloading is also incredibly arduous--on the 360 pad, switching weapons while moving isn't really possible because the D-Pad is used to select weapons, requiring you to take your thumb off the analog stick. Maybe it was easier under the original Xbox controller. None of this is helped by the fact that the enemies seem to be able to withstand much, much more damage than your character. But even worse than the aiming mechanics is the damage system used in the Call of Cthulhu. The idea is that you can get hurt in different ways and need to bandage yourself up rather than just magically healing. Applying bandages and splints takes times, and leaves you vulnerable in the world. If you don't bandage wounds, you can become further hurt by loss of blood. The problem with this system is that different types of wounds require different types of health items, and I perpetually seem to be out of the one that I need. And since you can just die by walking around with an unbandaged wound, it's important to patch all of your wounds up all the time. Even then, an enemy with a shotgun can kill you in one hit, or his friend with the pistol can shoot you in the foot and laugh as you limp five feet away before dying of blood loss. I understand that the developers wanted to use resource management as a way to make healing more realistic and to make the player more vulnerable, but this implementation just makes playing the game unfun. It strikes me as similar to Illbleed--too many resources that interact in ways that are not totally clear. I'm still trying to like Cthulhu, because like I said, everything else about the game is pretty phenomenal. It's just that first person mechanics are really well defined at this point, and the shooting mechanics in Dark Corners of the Earth feel like a regression to 1996. I shall complete this game for the story alone, but I'm disappointed that the weak shooting mechanics replaced the much more interesting sneaking and puzzle solving aspects that dominated the first part of the game. Condemed, on the other hand, appears to be freaking fantastic! I need to qualify that statement: I've only played the first hour or so of Condemned. But goddamn, what an awesome introduction. I'm really impressed with the art style, especially the use of lighting in the levels; the developers were able to get away with bright spaces without detracting from the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression that the dank environments are intended to invoke. The pressure upon the player is immediate and constant from the first moment of the game. I really hope it stays this good throughout its entire length.

I have no clue what is going on in Pulse, but it's awesome. My wife and I (and our brand-new daughter, though she wasn't yet born at the time) moved to a new neighborhood this year. For the first time in almost a decade, I think we'll be living in a place that actually has kids going out to Trick or Treat the neighborhood. Some of our neighbors have gone all out--one guy has created an entire cemetery in his front yard, while another has rigged some sort of contraption to make a life-sized model of Death hang menacingly over his front door. The leaves have turned color and are quickly migrating to the ground, and the TV stations are running films from every 80's horror series that they are able to edit into politically correct submission. I love this time of year, both because it's fall, the weather is nice, and the foliage is beautiful, but also because Halloween is a holiday where we celebrate our enjoyment at scaring ourselves. Unlike most of the other holidays, Halloween in America is an exercise in honoring horror--an emotion otherwise thought to be negative or mind-warping--as a basic form of human entertainment. Despite all the gaudy plastic pumpkins and marketing blitzes that define the holiday for many, I think that at its core Halloween is an admission that scary stuff is something that everybody can enjoy. I have a couple of recommendations for this year's Halloween. First, you could mull over the announcement that Capcom is making a Resident Evil CG movie. If that's not enough for you, you could go rent yourself some quality horror films--none of this sanitized-for-television garbage, but the real, genuine article. I've recommend Pulse (the origin of this neat shot on the left), Session 9, The Descent, and Don't Look Now in the past, and I would like to reiterate my approval of these films. Or, you could check out this fascinating (if somewhat informal) book about Japanese horror films. I'm about half way through it myself and will be posting a full review when I'm done, but so far it's been pretty good. Finally, you could play some Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which I found mostly satisfactory until the shooting bits started, but I can still recommend it to fans of the genre (which, if you are reading this site, you clearly are). Anyway, I have to go buy some candy and get myself a mask or something. I'm totally unprepared for all the kids that are going to be knocking at my door in a few short hours. Trick or treat!

Many thanks to forums member Craig for donating his copy of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. In return I am posting these links to sites Craig contributes to:

• 360 Gamer
• NEO Magazine

Check them out! Thanks Craig!

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is finally out, and the reviewers seem to like what they see. Fatal Frame 3 is also out, but is so far fairing a little worse (though there are still very few reviews--I'll update the world score here when there are at least 10). Both look like awesome games to me.

I'm struggling to come up with the motivation to finish Kuon. Forcing you to play as two people is fine, but what is the point if the game is exactly the same the second time around?

I'm still way behind because my computer is in the shop, but here's some recent updates. For some reason they all involve zombie games. City of the Dead may or may not be cancelled. No confirmation yet. However, a new Romero horror game, Land of the Dead, has been announced. Stubbs the Zombie came out last week and is getting pretty good reviews. Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End may not be a zombie game, but I added it to the database. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is supposed to be out tomorrow!!

Man, tons of updates today.

Some games came out recently that I forgot to cover on the front page:

• Cold Fear is out in the US and Europe. You can see some gameplay movies at the official site.
• Constantine came out with the film. It has not been well received.

Next month Doom 3 Xbox is coming out, and if they make their release date, so will Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

C&VG have posted an interview with Chris Gray, the producer and lead designer of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The title is still in development, and apparently now sports a whole new engine. Via Slashdot Games.

I've added Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth to the database.