This is the fourth (and final) post in a series of posts about Deadly Premonition. You should read the first, second, and third entries first. THE OTHERWORLD I really like how Deadly Premonition deals with the Otherworld, a label I am borrowing from the Silent Hill series to describe an alternate reality, infested with zombies and other malicious creatures, that mimics the look and layout of the real world but seems decrepit and decayed. In Silent Hill, the Otherworld is often a form of narrative beat, a way for the characters to pass into a yet-scarier version of the game, a way for the designers to ratchet the tension up another notch (or, in some cases, two or three notches, all at once). Deadly Premonition uses the same sort of game mode a different way: to separate straightforward reality from the world of hidden connections and meaning. Agent York's descent into each Otherworld is more like a descent into the unconscious mind, where he's able to find links between things that are not obvious in the real world. This is how York performs his investigation, by finding bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated clues and then linking them together in a way that makes the picture clear. He does this in his dreams, and sometimes the middle of a normal day. But in the Otherworld, York has the ability to physically explore this space. He calls the method "profiling." The Otherworld is not a safe place, however. Though York is able to use this nether region to draw conclusions from uncommon sources, he also makes himself vulnerable to the malicious entities that reside in that space. Perhaps, if we see the Otherworld strictly as York's unconscious mind, we might conclude that these entities are of his own creation, based on what he knows about the case. I think it's more likely that York is visiting a physical space, a sort of distorted mirror of the real world, where evil takes a different, more substantial This chase mode? Genius. Annoying, but genius. form. This interpretation is reinforced late in the game, when other characters enter the Otherworld as well. In terms of pure game mechanics, the Otherworld gives the designers a way to cleanly break between the open world and a more traditional indoor level design. This is a great place for zombies, gun combat, and exploration, which are all hard to do in an open world setting. The decision to switch not only game modes but also thematic modes when entering the Otherworld is, I think, pretty smart. Deadly Premonition also uses the Otherworld to do something that is rare in video games: subtle foreshadowing. The game is the best example of foreshadowing that I've seen in quite a long time. One of the genius parts of Deadly Premonition is its use of color; the palette of the game slowly changes as Agent York gets deeper and deeper into the Otherworld, until finally the game simply smears a bright red haze over the entire frame. Silent Hill 2 used color to foreshadow, as did Condemned. But there are very, very few games that can make such a claim, and Deadly Premonition does it very well. Foreshadowing extends to level geometry as well; there's a particular section near the end of the game in which the player must climb an incredibly long staircase (sort of the reverse of Silent Hill 2 and 4's impossibly long staircases), all while very specific, crazy music plays in the background. The effect is pretty dramatic; the level of tension as the player reaches the door at the top of the stairs is very high. FINISH IT UP, ZACH This has been a long, unorganized stream of consciousness about a weird, delightful, scary game. If you couldn't tell, there's a lot of food for thought in Deadly Premonition, which I think is a mark of high quality. Though many reviewers may have been turned off by a lack of superficial polish, I think that Deadly Premonition is one of the best games I've played in a long time. It's absolutely worth playing, thinking about, investigating, and examining. It is a rare gem.

This is part three of a series of posts about Deadly Premonition. You should read part 1 and part 2 first. PROBLEMS, REAL AND IMAGINED Most of the technical issues with Deadly Premonition are not true problems, just systems that seem to be too simple compared to the modern state of the art. The textures and animation, for example, are pretty low quality. The aiming system is unwieldy, and for some infuriating reason the targeting reticle vanishes once you start to fire. The collision detection is pretty strict and angular. The movement of the enemies makes for challenging gameplay until a certain weapon is acquired, after which the combat is trivially easy (with the exception of one truly annoying enemy that took me five minutes to kill each time). The camera seems jumpy because it always aligns itself with the angle of the floor. These are the sorts of technical issues that crop up in Deadly Premonition; not really bugs so much as areas lacking in the polish we've come to expect from modern games. There's nothing here that really gets in the way of the game play either--no fatal flaws or deal-breaking mechanics. Just technical roughness. There is, however, a real problem that is worth mentioning. Deadly Premonition swings wildly between closed-off linear game play modes and open world, free form modes. Both are interesting in their own right, but the free form mode in particular has a lot of fascinating features, specifically, the way it manages time. The town of Greenvale is tied to a clock that controls when stores open, how characters move around, when the sun rises and sets, and there's a huge amount of content here. You can sneak up to a character's house and look in the window to see what they are up to at any given time. If they are home, they'll be moving around, doing chores or watching TV. The town feels alive. But the progression between these two modes is unpredictable. Most of the game is fixed and linear (though sometimes occurring within the open world), but at a few points the player finds himself with no immediate goal and is free to explore. The timing and frequency of these undirected sections is off. The first open world segment appears early in the game, before the player has had a change to grasp how the whole time-of-day system works yet. The player must be at a certain location at a certain time, and indeed, can choose to simply sleep in the hotel until that time approaches if they wish. I think most players are excited to get out and drive around. Only, there's not much to do at first; many of the shops open at odd times, and time in the open world mode progresses extremely slowly. Shenmue had a similar system and users complained enough that in Shenmue 2 they added a way for the player to accelerate time while they wait for a specific appointment. This first open world section seems to go on forever--I spent several hours of play driving around the city, running errands, finding items, and talking to characters. There are a few side missions that you can accomplish, but there's no way to get anywhere close to beating all of them in this early section. Instead, the mode seems to drag on until finally, thankfully, the meeting time approaches and you can get on with the story. And as it turns out, that moment is the only time in the game where the player is given such freedom; every other open world segment is tied to a specific goal, or a short time limit. After spending so much time in the open world mode, I wasn't excited to go back to it--I wanted to see the story progress, find the killer of the beautiful young girl. When I had a chance to do open world stuff again, I instead opted to beeline for the next obvious goal so that i could see what was going to happen next. Nothing forced me to do this, but since everything is tied to a clock, missing the next deadline would mean a whole 'nother 24 hour cycle in the open world. That didn't seem acceptable to me--I was hot on the trail of a serial killer and goddamn it, I'm going to catch him. There was just no time to waste. I think that the long initial open world section, combined with the subsequent velocity of the plot, sucks a lot of the life out of Deadly Premonition's dual mode design. I probably only experienced 1/5th of the total content available in the game (though it still took me close to 25 hours to complete) because I was more interested in advancing the story than driving around completing side missions. Perhaps that was the goal--to allow me to select the type of game play mode that I prefer--but it was still annoying. But that's the only real complaint I have with Deadly Premonition. The technical flaws were not a problem for me (though I do have a bone or two to pick with the aiming system and instant-failure quick timer events), and the rest of the content was so good that other minor flaws are easy to forgive. And really, when discussing the mechanical parts of the game design, Deadly Premonition gets much more right than it gets wrong. Next time: Part 4: Deadly Premonition's Otherworld and Wrap Up

This is part two of a series of articles about Deadly Premonition. You should read Part 1 first. THREE KEY SUCCESSES The August 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine has a lengthy post-mortem review of Deadly Premonition, written by SWERY (the game's director) and several other staff of Access Games. The developers select five areas in which they feel Deadly Premonition was most successful: character building, story and world building, distinctive music, casting and voiceover work, and the team's hardcore passion for the title. I think this is an extremely honest review (the "what went wrong" section is all about the technical aspects of the game that didn't work out very well, which I mentioned at the start), and I agree with the developer's selections. In particular, I think that they have hit the nail on the head by naming characters, story and world, and music as the three most important elements of Deadly Premonition. Deadly Premonition is a mystery, and it revolves around its characters. The central character, Agent York, is highly eccentric; his eccentricity makes him a fun character to play, and gives the story a reason to exist. His approach is unwaveringly serious, whether he is describing the mechanics of the relationship between Tom and Jerry (yes, the cartoon) or inspecting the teeth of a corpse. He's constantly smoking, something we rarely see in heros today, but for York smoking is a kind of meditation. One of the key elements of this game that propels it to such absolute quality is the way that York's character is delivered to the player in the game. York talks to himself constantly, and these conversations serve to reveal much depth in his personality. Even better, the conversations appear to be with the player himself; York addresses you, the person holding the controller, in a way that few games have ever attempted (Metal Gear Solid 2 is the only somewhat similar title that I can think of). These moments of dialog are fantastic, but I particularly enjoyed the discussions York has with Zach (the name he uses to address the player, and eventually an important character himself) while driving. Greenvale is a large area, spread out over a five mile region, and it takes a while to drive around. While in the car, York speaks to the player about his past, his relationships with other characters, and old movies. Few games, let alone open world games, are able to work this much dialog in without stopping for cutscenes; according to the developers, York has over 3000 lines of dialog in Deadly Premonition, accounting for half of the total dialog in the game. Other games have used dialog this way before: Bioshock used reams of dialog to teach the player about key characters and the surrounding world, and Silent Hill 3's world descriptions are all written in Heather's voice, teaching us much about her personality. But Deadly Premonition does it better than those games. By the end of the game we feel not only great empathy for York and some of the other characters, but also that we understand his eccentric personality. I also enjoyed the story in Deadly Premonition. Unlike another game I played recently, Deadly Premonition kept me guessing as to the real identity of the Raincoat Killer (though I did suss another, more important antagonist very early in the game). The story is interesting, and well told. It revolves around Agent York himself, and becomes intensely personal in its final act. It's a fairly complicated tale, and one that requires a few stretches of the imagination, but it's pretty interesting. And that's the point. The third success named by the developers is music, and I wholeheartedly agree. The soundtrack for Deadly Premonition goes with its content very well. Remembering that this game is directly descended from Twin Peaks, there are a few tracks that are clearly designed to fill the same ominous-yet-strangely-uplifting role that is filled by that show's main title theme. There's a lot of acoustic guitar, piano, jazz sax, and humming in the musical landscape--not what you might expect from a horror game. My favorite track has to be the Red Tree theme, which includes a "lunatic improvisational section" to describe the madness that grips the Raincoat Killer's subconscious. It fits right into freaky Red Rooms, angel twins, old men in wheelchairs and gas masks, and all of the other uncanny imagery that the game throws at you. Next time: Part 3: Problems, real and imagined.

I've been quiet for a while. I can legitimately blame this on work, and travel, and more work, but there is also another reason: Deadly Premonition took me a while to beat, and it's taken me even longer to start to wrap my head around. I have a lot to say about Deadly Premonition, but rather than simply post a mega-review, I'm going to split my thoughts up into a few news posts (which I'll collect at the end for the Deadly Premonition page itself). This isn't really a review as much as a stream of consciousness; the game pushes a lot of buttons and rather than trying to enumerate them all, I think I'll just meditate on the game a bit. That seems like the correct way to approach this particular game. Before I get started, let me give a short mini-review for folks who don't care what games mean. Deadly Premonition is Twin Peaks, in game form, as seen through Japanese eyes. Though wacky, it's fairly low-tech; some of the mechanics are extremely rough, the game play systems feel at least a generation old, and it's not going to win any awards for prettiness. But what Deadly Premonition lacks in technical polish it more than makes up for in storytelling, characters, and most importantly, its integration of game design and visual presentation. It's worth playing for any of those pieces, and in combination the game is fascinating. Deadly Premonition is to Resident Evil 5 what Tetsuo the Iron Man is to Terminator 2. If you have any interest in games that experiment with story telling and mechanics, Deadly Premonition is more than worth your time. THE UNCANNY The internet, particularly one specific blog about games, has made a big deal out of the ridiculousness of Deadly Premonition. The music doesn't match the scenes, the characters and dialog are often nonsensical, and the whole thing has a decidedly strange sense of humor. It's very easy to write this strangeness off as normal "Japanese insanity," and in truth, there are a few aspects of the game that seem strange because of culture clash. But I think that chalking Deadly Premonition's strangeness up to the cultural divide is a vast oversimplification; classifying it as weird just because it came from a foreign country does the game, and its designers, a disservice. Deadly Premonition is weird, but the odd, off-beat rhythm that it follows--something Freud calls 'the uncanny'-- is entirely intentional. The way to think about Deadly Premonition is to consider it the game version of Twin Peaks, the fantastic TV show by David Lynch and Mark Frost. I went back and watched Twin Peaks while playing Deadly Premonition, and the similarities are unarguable; some characters and scenes have been directly lifted from the seminal show for use in this game. At one point I was having trouble remembering which events were unique to the game and which had occurred in the show's plot as well. Replace the Log Lady with the Pot Lady, substitute the town of Greenvale for Twin Peaks itself, and insert Agent Francis 'York' Morgan in the role of Agent Dale Cooper, and you have created Deadly Premonition out of Twin Peaks. To say that one is influenced by the other is an understatement; though the stories do branch and change, for most intents and purposes, Deadly Premonition is Twin Peaks. The game even opens after each reload with a video summarizing recent events, mimicking the way Twin Peaks and other shows open with a short summary of the previous episode. Both Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition star FBI agents who use unconventional means to locate their suspects. Agent Cooper throws rocks at a milk bottle while Agent York goes fishing for missing files. They both have a love of food, particularly coffee, and they both speak with a timbre that we, and the other characters in the game, find strange. Both are visiting rural American towns from the big city, both are investigating the murder of a young woman with a double life, and both are outsiders. They both use dreams to guide them, and find significance in bits of evidence that appears inconsequential to the police. Agent Cooper notices a picture of a suspect on a particular magazine page and Agent York gathers clues by reading words out of his morning coffee. It is within this context that Deadly Premonition must be understood. The game is not a carbon copy of Twin Peaks, but it's a very close relative, like The Magnificent Seven is to Seven Samurai. And within the context of Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition's strangeness doesn't seem so out of place. Twin Peaks itself is very strange; there is much that goes unexplained, so many scenes that leave the viewer feeling more confused than ever. This is, after all, a production involving David Lynch, a director who's never been particularly interested in handing the answers to his audience on a silver platter. No, the strangeness in Deadly Premonition is mostly intentional, as it is in Twin Peaks. Agent York sort of acts like a lunatic because that's the sort of personality required to resolve the mystery with which he is tasked. Agent Cooper is able to track his ghostly killer because he is able to follow a path that leads away from the rational world and yet eventually arrives at the correct result. Deadly Premonition may be strange, but it's strange for a reason, and that reason has a lot more to do with its story than just being from Japan. That said, the sort of unbalanced, off-kilter, uncanny feeling that Deadly Premonition promotes is indeed at least partially the result of culture shock. As I've written here many times before, culture shock is an asset to horror because it makes us feel like we've lost control. Deadly Premonition does this intentionally as well, but as with many other Japanese games, its very foreignness helps it scare us. The town of Greenvale itself is perhaps the most obvious example of this effect. The town looks like a rural American town in the Pacific Northwest; it has been painstakingly reproduced in digital form by the developers, who visited parts of Oregon and Washington to do location research during Deadly Premonition's development. As diligently as it's been recreated, Greenvale feels, to my American eyes (and as somebody who grew up in Oregon), a little like something out of The Twilight Zone. It reminds me of Santa Destroy from No More Heros, another game by Japanese developers that attempts to recreate an American town (though that one appears to be in Southern California). Little things here and there are wrong; for example, not only does each street in Greenvale have a name, the street names change every block. Most streets in Japan do not have names, so perhaps the designers at Access Games misunderstood how street names are used in the US. Or perhaps it was intentional. So much is intentionally odd in this game that it's hard to tell. Whatever the rationale, the result is that Deadly Premonition can be more engaging and upsetting than it has any right to be. Next time: Part 2: Three Key Successes

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.

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).

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!).

I just put another solid four hours into Silent Hill Homecoming, and man, the game is weird. Not the story or the game content itself--that part is sort of run-of-the-mill Silent Hill fare. It's the pacing that's all weird. I only found one serum in the first six hours, for example, and this evening in the space of an hour I picked up four more. Characters are introduced and then quickly vanish, and are subsequently gone for hours at a time. I keep getting the feeling that I'm not playing the game the way that the designers intended (although, to be fair, the game is also sometimes gives misleading objectives). The placement of health items and ammo is also weird--I made it through two bosses with only one or two health drinks the entire time. It's really annoying to limp around for hours at a time. Even the Otherworld transitions seem to be irregularly organized on the game's timeline.

But it's the save spot placement that throws me for a loop more than anything else. Four hours of play this evening and I only saved three times--and I didn't once continue. That means each play session requires at least an hour to get to the next save spot, which is stupid! I suspect that the designers expected continues to compensate for distantly-placed saves, but in my case, I rarely have this much time to play. I have no beef with save spots but damn, they could be just a tad more frequent.

The result is that I am never sure how close I am to the wire. Maybe that's the goal--to keep me off balance and guessing. It sort of sucks, though; I'm having trouble deciding how to ration my health and ammo because the narrative beats are so irregular.

Otherwise, the game is pretty good. This evening I made it through the Doctor Fitch section, which was absolutely phenomenal--the best Silent Hill descent / otherworld / boss sequence I've played since Silent Hill 2, I think (although Silent Hill 3 is a strong contender).

It's just that, I played this fantastic section, beat the boss at the end of it, got deposited back in the town, B-lined for the next objective, and then... walked around for 30 minutes trying to find a save point. I fortunately found one before it was too late, but man, if I had been killed by some stray zombie dog (of which there seem to be an infinite supply), I would have lost close to two hours of play.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I'll finish it, hopefully soon. But playing it is a trade-off, like a cool-looking jacket that has a label in the collar that occasionally scratches the hell out of your neck.

So Silent Hill Homecoming sat on my shelf for a whole year and I never even took the plastic off. I wanted to--don't get me wrong--I just had other games ahead of it in the pipe (and, frankly, my game-hours-per-month was down in the single digits for most of 2009). So after I finished Cursed Mountain a while back, I decided to make Homecoming my next game. I'm several hours in now and so far it's pretty good. The camera, which I identified back in 2007 as a potential problem, is indeed not very good. It's not that the camera doesn't work, it's just that it's a standard, 3rd person camera. All of the composition and framing that the previous Silent Hill games have done is lost on this Western 2-stick generic system. Other than that, things are pretty good. The Silent Hill vibe is well captured, the influence from the Silent Hill movie is clear and not nearly as annoying as I feared it would be. Pyramid Head looks good (though it remains to be seen if they'll actually use him correctly or just make him a cool-looking boss), the combat system is pretty slick, and the levels are pretty well designed. I'm surprised that there have been so few Otherworld transitions so far; by this point in any other Silent Hill game, I would have gone into and out of the Otherworld several times, but as it is it's only shown up once or twice (and even then for very short durations). I will say that the game has a few issues above and beyond the camera. After playing for a while this evening, for example, I stopped being able to bring up the item menu. I can bring up the weapon menu, and if I try to transition from the weapon menu to the item menu, I can see the item menu appear for a brief second, but then it drops me back in the game (I even tried to switch the buttons around to confirm it's not some problem with my controller). This is a problem because it means I can't access health drinks, and that's a problem because all of a sudden the difficulty of the game has spiked. I've gone for three or four hours without a single death, but at my current save I've died ten or fifteen times (the last two or three because of this bug with the item menu, admittedly). This brings me to another problem: after fifteen deaths I realized that I've actually been carrying a gun around for most of the game. The gun icon appears at the bottom of the screen, far away from all the other weapons, and though I've probably had it since the first hour of game play, I never saw it there and never once used it (the game probably told me that I collected it, but after that I probably saved and promptly forgot it was there). I only found it because I tried hitting the d-pad in a desperate hope that the health drink command was mapped to some other button (no luck). The game hasn't been very hard so far and I really haven't needed the gun (I mean, Silent Hill is about lead pipes), but it sort of sucks that it's been there the whole time and I didn't even know it. I even dispatched a boss or two without ever realizing it was there. So, my impression so far is that the game is pretty good. It knows the history of the Silent Hill series and has chosen a path that is sincere to that history without being a carbon copy (unlike some other games I could mention). I'm disappointed with the camera (especially for the indoor environments) but I like the combat system. The game's been pretty easy up until this one difficulty spike, but the real problem is probably that the UI for the item and weapon screen is a) buggy and b) hard to read. The bugs will probably go away with a system restart, and now that I know to look more carefully at my item screen, I hope I won't miss an important part of my inventory again. If my impressions were a terrorist threat level, I'd be "guarded but optimistic."

Today I have posted a review of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which I urge you to go read forthwith. My work-related horror game slump continues, and to tell you the truth, I haven't actually played Shattered Memories yet. Instead, this review is written by one of my best friends, Casey Richardson. Casey is an authority on video games, and we've played many of the games on this site together (including, at my urging, atrocities like Michigan and The Ring: Terror's Realm). Today he's provided a through review of Konami's latest Silent Hill entry, which has caused my interest in this game to increase ten fold. Check it out.

Thanks Casey!

I finished Cursed Mountain this evening after two marathon play sessions this week. My new years resolution is to pick up the pace when it comes to completing games this year, and first on my list was the game about Buddhist ghosts in Tibet.

The game is good but it needs another two months of polish. It's got lots of minor, easily-fixable problems that end up dragging the overall quality down. Which is a shame, since the story and setting are pretty great.

If you're interested, check out my full review.

I put a couple of hours into Cursed Mountain this weekend. So far I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected to.

The thing about Cursed Mountain is that it is an old-school horror game that is trying its best to learn from new-school games. The camera system, in-game UI, ranged combat system, and several other core elements clearly mark the game as post-Resident Evil 4, but the pacing, storytelling, and level design are based in the norms of a generation prior. If you are the type of horror gamer that thought that Resident Evil 5's focus on intense zombie-capping action was the worst idea ever, and you can't wait to get back to searching rooms for hidden items and reading lots of diary entries, Cursed Mountain may be something you want to check out. The pace is very slow, the majority of the game play is walking around and examining things, and there's lots of story to keep track of (protip: turn on subtitles to avoid missing key info in crazy flashing cutscenes).

Personally, I am a fan of this kind of game play. I really enjoyed Resident Evil 5 as well, but Cursed Mountain's let's-explore-the-narrative-as-physical-space design fits like a glove. The game has some issues; the camera is jittery and makes the frame rate look like it is stuttering when it really isn't, the collision detection seems to snap on square-shaped objects, and the cutscene system makes the story is a little difficult to follow. But I like the control scheme, I like the combat system, and Cursed Mountain's content is nice and fresh: I've never played a game about ghosts in remote Himalayan villages before. It's not totally grabbed me like some other surprisingly good games have, but after my 2 hours of play it feels pretty solid.

One bit of advice: the game makes it harder than necessary to follow the story. The cutscene style is interesting but hard to follow--there's a lot of benefit to turning on subtitles. Also, when you collect documents, you can't read them directly from the item collection screen; you need to back out, go to the inventory, and read the document there. It took me a while to realize this. Since this kind of game makes up for slow pacing by giving you narrative content to chew on, I recommend focusing on the story and not letting the cutscenes or documents slip by when you play.

So far my impressions of Cursed Mountain are pretty positive. It's trying to stay fresh in the game play and narrative department while simultaneously giving props to its survival horror roots. I'm hoping that it can pull off that balance for the rest of the game.

It's with great shame that I admit that I finished Resident Evil 5 more than a month ago, wrote 90% of a review, and then did nothing with it until now. You can go read my thoughts on the game if you are interested.

The executive summary is thus: Resident Evil 5 is clearly a horror game, and clearly a Resident Evil game, but more importantly in terms of its design focus, it's an action game. It shows that action and horror do not need to be mutually exclusive, and also follows Resident Evil 4's lead and brings many of the elements of its previous format into its new design, but it's ultimate goal as a game is to be fun and action-packed rather than scary. And in that regard, it's almost entirely successful.

Seriously, this is important. The recently released Wii horror game, Ju-on: The Grudge, is not a fantastic game. It's plagued by a game design that values one-hit kills and requires levels to be replayed over and over, and yet it's so simple that no amount of replaying can really make you a better player. The level designs themselves are schizophrenic; you are required to explore each level in order to find batteries, but the battery mechanic also acts as a time limit, which encourages you to b-line for the end of the level with minimal exploration. The art is good and the scares, while repetitive, are effective; the controls are interesting and the sound is pretty great. But while there are a few glimmers of brilliance, the level design relegates the game to mediocrity. And yet, I think that Juon is an extremely important game. It's the best example I've seen, in any genre, of a game made to target a specific audience the way that movies are. Juon is the exact equivalent of a teen horror movie; it's simple and designed to be enjoyed with friends. And as far as I can tell, the target audience for this game is teen girls. What Hollywood (and its equivalents here in Japan) understand is that generation after generation of teen movie-goers will spend their $10 to see whatever shlock the gets thrown on the screen as long as a few basic tropes are maintained. Pop-out scares, sex and gore, ominous or vaguely unhappy endings, and improbable twists are common traits, but there are many others. See also: Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th/Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer/etc etc etc. It's not that all of the films in the teen horror genre are bad--the key observation that Hollywood has made is that their income is fairly reliable regardless of the film quality. Anyway, one of the reasons that these films are successful is that they encourage kids to watch in groups. The fun part about horror movies when you're a teenager is seeing them with friends, even when the scares are cheap. Even really, truly bad movies can be fun when you've got somebody to wisecrack with, and a lot of folks will sit through films with friends that they wouldn't have the nerve for alone. I think it's this social aspect that makes horror films--particularly those aimed at teens--so successful. The creators of the Juon game get this idea at a fundamental level. The game is aggressively casual--the control scheme is simple, the difficulty never spikes, and there's no real rules to learn before jumping in. And, most importantly, it supports a second player: using the second Wiimote, a friend can cause scary pop-out events to take place whenever they want. It is this feature that is key to understanding why Juon matters: the game is not intended to be played alone. With friends around, the snail-like movement system and cheap one-hit kills are more forgivable. I think that this game is targeted squarely at young, casual gamers who enjoy horror with friend but are not about to go buy Resident Evil 5. A large segment of that group, I think, is young women, a large audience that rarely receives recognition. Juon is exactly the game version of a teen horror flick. Yeah, it's shallow, the scares are cheap, the story goes nowhere, and the gameplay is kind of annoying. But it was designed, I think, with a specific audience in mind, one that is a huge segment for horror films but rarely a target for horror games. And in that respect, it's extremely well done. Perhaps this is the result of Juon director Takashi Shimizu's participation in the project, or maybe it's just the work of a smart developer. Either way, I'm impressed that the model was so effectively translated. It will be interesting to see if this experiment results in financial success. It should also be interesting to compare and contrast Juon with Calling, which came out in Japan this week. Like Juon, it's a first-person flashlight-wielding horror game for Wii involving Japanese horror film tropes. I'm interested to see if it will feel the same as Juon, or if it follows a more traditional horror gamer-focused route.

As good as it gets? Problem: Balancing game difficulty across ten or twenty hours of play in a way that enables all types of gamers to enjoy your game is hard. Games that get too hard will be frustrating, but games that are too easy are boring. There's a sweet spot between those two that makes a perfect game, but the trick is that the entire scale changes from player to player. If you're a game designer, one of your primary challenges is to ensure that your players don't get bored and don't run into difficulty cliffs. Solution: Let the player buy their way out of difficult situations. Rather than just relying on maximum gaming prowess, you can let the player who is bored or the player that isn't quite good enough to side-step a particular challenge by putting in effort somewhere else. Very often in horror games lately, this system takes the form of an in-game store. For example, consider Devil May Cry. That game very quickly sizes you up as a player; you're either hardcore or casual, and by the end of the first chapter the game knows which and can taylor the rest of the experience accordingly. It does this by throwing a huge difficulty spike at you in the form of the very first boss. The path from start to that first boss, which is a sort of giant lava spider thing, is pretty smooth and easy; there's only two different types of enemies to dispatch and Dante is such a badass that just about any player should be able to make it. The boss, however, is incredibly difficult for a first-time player. Everybody I know who played Devil May Cry had the experience of hitting a brick wall when they faced the first boss. The genius of this system is that there are basically three ways to get passed the boss, and depending on which you choose the game can safely label you as hardcore or casual. The first way is just to be a badass player from the first level--this clearly marks you as hardcore. The second way is to enable the easy mode when prompted; after you beat the first couple of rooms the game lets you know that you can tone the difficulty down if you choose. Players who do this are not in it for the challenge (and aren't putting their prides on the line), so it's safe to assume that they want a more casual experience. The third way is to power up Dante before facing the boss by beating an inordinate number of enemies. It's this third method which is key to identifying the type of player who is in it for the challenge but isn't necessarily interested in having to do every single challenge flawlessly. By killing enemies you can collect orbs, which you can use to purchase power-ups at an in-game store (you also have the chance to power-up Dante between levels). For the first boss, a particular powerup--"Air Raid"--is extremely handy. But to buy Air Raid you need to fight a lot more bad guys than you would normally face if just progressing through the game normally. A player that does this is intentionally grinding; he leaves rooms and then re-enters them so that the enemies will respawn and he can fight them again. This kind of player is also encouraged to graduate into the flawless hardcore player by rewarding him when he uses variety in his combo strings (which Devil May Cry links to "style points"). The happy-to-grind player is also hardcore; they don't want any hand holding but are willing to work around a particularly hard section by putting in extra play in other sections. The game store is key to capturing this type of game. This system actually works very well, which is why tons of games use it now. God of War, Ninja Gaiden and other brawlers have similar systems, but so does Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5, and Dead Space. The implementation in each of these last three examples varies, but the intent is the same: to give players a way to explicitly control the difficulty of the game without making them feel like they are being given a handicap. It also gives these games a way to reward exploration. The problem with the in-game store is that, when it comes to horror games, the game mechanic can come into conflict with the game narrative. Demons leaving glowing orbs in the world when they die is pretty easy to accept, but snakes dropping gold coins? Or hulking flesh monsters keeping valuable weapons schematics in their back pockets as they lumber around their derelict space craft? Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense. In Resident Evil 4, the store is an actual in-game guy. Though campy, I think that this implementation is the best; it makes narrative sense that different store owners, despite all looking like clones of each other, might have different stock. In Resident Evil 5, the store guy has been dispensed with and now you can only make purchases and level up before entering a level. For no particular reason (well, actually, to prevent the player from powering up too quickly), certain upgrades for weapons are not immediately available. As a in-game guy, this might make sense; the clerk can just be out of stock. As a sterile UI screen, it makes a lot less sense. Dead Space's implementation also bothers me. If we're to believe that Isaac is this awesome engineer, shouldn't he be able to like, I don't know, hack the store software and get the items he needs rather than having to loot the corpses of fallen scissor hand monsters? Maybe that was too Bioshock. Another issue with this kind of upgrade system is that it can't be relied upon for normal game play. The game designer must assume that the player will not upgrade his weapons, or that he will upgrade them in an inefficient way. The goal is to provide a workaround for difficulty cliffs, not a new minmax problem. Games like Fatal Frame 2, the upgrade system was intended to reward players who are good at difficult "zero shots," but the end boss was balanced such that players who didn't upgrade their camera in the right way could get to the end of the game with a bunch of useless skills. To fix that problem they had to move the last save point far away from the end boss and put a bunch of easy enemies in between the two so that players could get some extra level-up points after they had saved their game. I complained about this at the time--it was a hack necessitated by the way that their upgrade system works and by the design of the end boss, and it made the end of the game very frustrating. But the worst offender has to be the Resident Evil 5 money system. Other than the upgrade gating, there's no problem with the actual implementation: pick up funds by killing enemies or by finding them hidden around, and use those to buy weapons and upgrades. The problem is that, in the context of the game, this turns Chris and Sheva into grave robbers. Never mind the ever-present colonialism overtones that have sparked debate in the past (which I still maintain are unintentional--the game strives to avoid this linkage, but it often fails)--it doesn't feel good to go into the ancient ruins of a lost civilization and steal golden statuettes in order to buy bigger guns. I'm not just trying to be politically correct here: for the protagonists, who are ostensibly working for an African aid organization, this sort of behavior is in direct opposition to their character. In fact, the narrative and the believability of the game's world and story are hurt by this system. So I'm beginning to think that the in-game store system isn't a very good fit for horror games. It works well in games like Devil May Cry, where there's not much need to get the player to suspend their disbelief and keep it there. But in horror games, working the store into the narrative in a way that makes sense seems pretty tough. I've yet to see it work smoothly; Resident Evil 4 is probably the best example, and even then the system adds to the game's overall ridiculousness. Usually these games take place in extreme situations, so it's reasonable to expect the characters to act in extreme ways. When they instead steal lost relics out of burial grounds or take a break from rescuing the president's daughter to shoot a diamond out a rock, we are reminded that this is a game system and encouraged to think of it only as a collection and minmax challenge.

I'm close to ten hours into Resident Evil 5. So far, I'm throughly enjoying it; it's not some great masterwork but it's an extremely well-made game and I haven't run into any major frustration points. Unlike the technically similar Dead Space, the moment-to-moment game play is deep enough that simple pattern alterations (new enemy, new weapon, new location) are enough to keep the whole thing from feeling repetitive.

Still, it is quite repetitive. The formula is very well defined at this point: traverse through an area that establishes the current location, spend some time shooting zombies, move on to a simple puzzle or QTE event, uncover some story details, fight something new, fight the boss monster. The boss monsters are, as in every Resident Evil game, people that transform into giant tentacle monsters who have conveniently-colored bulbous weak spots. After shooting the red or orange swollen spots and then doing a particularly strong attack when the monster is down, we are treated to a cutscene about the story and the end of a chapter. At the beginning of the next chapter we get the chance to buy items and organize our inventory before continuing. The reverse influence from Devil May Cry is very clear.

But despite the rather systematic precision with which this formula is iterated, it actually works pretty well. I am particularly interested in the segments that aren't about fighting, the location-establishment and story-building sections. These are the areas where Resident Evil 5 is strongest as a horror game. As in every previous Resident Evil game, there are files to find that fill out the back story and ancillary characters though diaries and reports. Along with the cutscenes, these documents are the player's primary source of information about the context within which they are operating, and though they can be skipped, the game is much more interesting with them.

The locales that the players visit are the other major storytelling vector in the game. When in exploration mode, Chris and Sheva move through areas that bear the mark of past events. Sometimes this is simple foreshadowing; an empty, quiet, blood-spattered hall is always a good place to heal and reload, as some new threat is surely around the next corner. But other times, the locales themselves suggest a much larger story world. For example, the goal for the first couple of chapters is to track down a slimeball arms dealer named Irving. Irving only has about five lines in the entire game, and they are all conveyed through cutscenes, so he's not a deep character by any means. But if you are paying attention, you eventually realize that he ran an oil field in Africa that served as both cover and a source of funding for biological weapons research. His work is recent, but later evidence that you uncover links it to the operations of the Umbrella corporation and provides backstory for the company's movements long before the first Resident Evil events occur. The oil field and subsequent processing plant are just set pieces along the way for players who are not paying attention to the story; a new backdrop against which to shoot zombies in the head. But to people who care about the narrative, the locales provide very specific story context.

The other narrative method that Resident Evil 5 uses is dialog between Chris and Sheva. Since Resident Evil 4 the background environments in Resident Evil games have become much more visual and static; it used to be that every interesting corner of every room would have a line of text associated with it, and by throughly investigating everything the player could learn, often through simple suggestion, about their environment and their character. But the increase in pace and streamlined approach to the series defined by Resident Evil 4 doesn't really allow for (or encourage) ransacking and investigation of everything. So instead, the characters talk to each other about what is going on and what they see. It's a method that is used sparingly but to great effect; Chris and Sheva's observations on their environment do a lot to tell us about how they feel about it.

I don't mean to suggest that Resident Evil 5 has some fantastic story. It's just the standard evil-corporation-bio chemical-underground laboratory-conspiracy schlock that they repeat every iteration. It's fairly predictable and, unless they pull off some crazy Bioshock twist in the next few hours, I think it will end the way most Resident Evil games end: with a giant base explosion enveloping the otherwise-indestructible final boss and the fate of key antagonists left ambiguous. But the story that is there, however trite, is well-told. For players interested in more than just exploding heads, there's more here to find.

This is my primary complaint with games like Gears of War, which an extremely similar type of game system. In Gears, there's absolutely no time spent on exposition. The cut scenes exist only to progress the active plot, and while there are some clues about the background of the characters and the events that lead up to the story, it's so out of focus that it really doesn't matter at all. The locales really are just set-pieces; despite being beautifully rendered they have no particular meaning or relevance. Nothing can be investigated, and the characters never talk about their surroundings. Even when the protagonist visits his home after spending years in prison, he doesn't have a single comment to say about it. He's too busy shooting aliens in the face to notice.

But as a player, I want my characters to notice. I want more information than what is immediately available on the surface. That's what keeps the game interesting when the game play itself starts to wear thin. In extreme situations, a compelling narrative can keep people playing an otherwise terrible game. Resident Evil 5's story is nothing to write home about but I'm very happy that it's there. While the game play is deep enough to last for a while, the addition of story and narrative, especially when communicated a variety of ways, makes Resident Evil 5 a much more interesting game than some of its contemporaries.

Not too crowded, but the waits are still pretty killer. Please, my dear readers, accept my apology for a recent lack of updates. While things have been happening on the Survival Horror front, my attention has been diverted to more pressing matters, namely working my ass off and visiting other countries to see my (recently enlarged--congrats Adam and Sarah) family. Yesterday I attended the Tokyo Game Show 2009. I don't know why they call it the "Tokyo" Game Show--it's actually in Chiba, which is a long-ass way from everything. It took me two hours to get there and two hours to get back. I gave a talk about my work (which sadly isn't horror related, though I was able to work in a shout-out to Mystique: Chapter 2), visited with some friends, and had a tiny amount of time left over to check out the actual show floor. I have never been to a TGS before, but my impression was generally favorable. It's a smaller show than E3 (and this year it is particularly small, I gather), which means you have a chance of actually seeing everything without wearing holes in the soles of your shoes. The problem with it is that even when there are not many people around (as was the case on the first day, which is open only to developers and press), you have to wait for a long-ass time to actually play, or even get a good look at, games. I waited a total of 1.5 hours in line to play just two games (described below). When the show opens for general admission on Saturday, I am sure the wait times will be counted in hours. Ugh. I don't know if this is just me getting old or what, but I have to admit that I was totally uninterested in 99% of the titles on display. This year seems to be YEAR OF THE DEVIL MAY CRY KNOCK-OFF, which is actually YEAR OF THE GOD OF WAR KNOCK-OFF, except that God of War itself is based on Devil May Cry. I mean, sure, there's a new God of War that was playable, and a new Ninja Gaiden, but there are also a bunch of other similar games like Darksiders that I have absolutely no interest in. I already played a bunch of Devil May Cry and God of War games; just changing the character and the name of the game isn't enough to interest me in a new one. The only exception seemed to be Bayonetta, which looks slick, fast, stylish, and fantastic, despite being clearly aimed at 16 year old males exclusively. There were also a number of Samurai Warriors/Devil Kings/Too Human knockoffs, but they also looked exceedingly dull. There was a pervasive sameness about many of the games on display; at one point while I was standing in line waiting to play, I realized after 30 minutes that the game to my left and the game to my right were not, in fact, the same game. I played two horror games: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Heavy Rain. Alan Wake wasn't playable (and I couldn't find a video reel for it, though apparently one was hiding somewhere), there was no demo for Calling (though I did speak to the president of Hudson for a bit about that game--can't wait) or many of the other titles I was interested in. Left 4 Dead 2 was being shown but I couldn't be bothered to wait 40 minutes for it; same deal for the new Metal Gear Solid except replace "40 minutes" with "3 hours." Basically, there were not a lot of horror games on display this year. The Silent Hill Shattered Memories build I played was the Wii version. It was clearly an early build; some of the UI was placeholder debug menus, and there were a few glitches with streaming upcoming rooms. But basically the game was playable. I found the setup very cool (it seems like pretty much a new game with a few common plot points with the original Silent Hill) but the camera and control scheme were hard for me to wield. The camera system is a close-in Resident Evil 4-style follow cam, with the Wii remote controlling the character's flashlight hand and the nunchuck driving him around. As with other games that use this method, I sometimes found myself looking straight up at the ceiling and unable to recenter my view. The demo level had some generic flesh monsters jump out and grab you, and since you can't fight at this point in the game the only thing to do is run away. If they grab you the remote and nunchuck can be shaken in a specific direction to get them off. Sometimes the game would show you what motion to perform, but other times not; I died several times in the first few minutes because some flesh thing grabbed me and I couldn't figure out the right movement to shake him off. Combine that with the camera issues and a sort of same-looking blue palette and the result was, I'm sorry to report, a fairly frustrating experience. However, we must remember that a) this is an early build, b) in a real play environment, you would not start on this level with no previous tutorial or training, and c) some cues (like sound) were totally shot due to the loudness of the show floor. So I'm holding out hope that this game will be pretty good. I think that the version I played would have been much better with a few minor fixes, which it's reasonable to expect the developers to actually perform before the game is released. Heavy Rain was exactly what I hoped it would be. If you played Indigo Prophesy (or Shenmue 2, for that matter), you have a good idea what to expect. The basic form of those games (which, if you haven't played, is third-person-adventure-as-a-film) has been improved and polished to a shine. The controls, as usual, are non-standard but correct for the system. It lives somewhere between the full analog control that most 3rd person games provide and the highly-scripted quick timer event approach. It works really well. I played a segment in which a police detective visits a store looking for clues, and happens upon an in-progress robbery. There's got to be a ton of ways to get through this part, but I mostly screwed them all up. I snuck up on the guy and planned on hitting him with a bottle, but I went for the bottle too quickly and ended up dropping it. Then I had to talk him down, which I also did poorly, and while the situation ended without anybody getting killed, I felt like I wanted to try it again. The characters, acting, and script were all fantastic; I can't wait to play this game. In fact, other than Metal Gear Solid 4, this is the only PS3 exclusive game that I've felt any real excitement for. And that is pretty much all I got to see in my short time at the show.

Trunks in a storage room About four years ago I was working in the game industry making video games. At the time I was getting ready to start on a PSP game (this was before the PSP had shipped, but game development was already in full swing), and I wanted to get up to speed with my company's 3D graphics engine. So I decided to make a couple of simple game demos to improve my understanding of the tech. First I made a 3D knock-off of an old NES puzzle game called Lot Lot, which worked out well but wasn't very sexy. At the same time I was trying to pitch the idea that my company embark on a 3D adventure game (horror or not), so to back up that proposal I decided to build a 3D horror game demo using the company tech. My good friend (and fellow hardcore horror game fan) Casey Richardson agreed to make the art, and our goal was to spend a month or two and make something that was playable on PS2 and showed that this style of game could be accomplished without huge changes to our existing codebase. Since we were only working in our free time, the total duration of the project ended up being closer to three months (though we could have easily pulled it off in a month if we worked full time on it), but the result was pretty cool. What we ended up was an engine that supported fixed and tracking cameras, the Devil May Cry control scheme, dynamic lights and shadows, Silent Hill-esque film grain effects, and a pretty neat system for dynamically blending movement and animation to produce believable analog motion. We had a single test character named Trunks, which Casey hilariously made look like a pair of disconnected legs with a little bit of spine coming out of the severed hips, and a map containing a bunch of rooms that you could walk around and explore. Though we were just using test art (which turned out to be The Way To Go with this kind of game--see the next section), the game ran at 60fps and the game mechanics were immediately obvious to anybody who picked up the controller. Casey came up for the name: Terminal Station, taken from a 1954 film by Vittorio De Sica. This exercise taught me tons of stuff about how survival horror games are made. One of the first things we learned was that placing regions in space that cause certain cameras to activate is way harder than it looks. You know how in Resident Evil you can run around and eventually see every corner of a given room because the various cameras in that room are set up to show different angles without overlapping? Yeah, setting that up is really hard. Casey did it by hand in the 3D modeling tool, but we quickly realized that a real game in this style would require a special tool to make camera regions. Otherwise it was too easy to make a room in which the player could walk off the screen, or simply be unable to explore a section of the space. Moving cameras make this a little bit easier, but it's a much harder problem than I expected it would be. Another thing we learned was that fixed camera games make so many real time 3D graphics problems easier. For example, our PS2 engine only allowed the character to be lit by 4 dynamic light sources at any given time, but we wanted to have rooms with a lot of localized lights (see the shot of the open refrigerator for an example). We realized that you can secretly turn lights on and off when the camera cuts and the player will never notice. This is a super simple solution and it worked great--we were able to make rooms with tons of lights and just link sets of four to specific camera angles. When playing the game, the player would appear to walk through the environment and be lit by all the lights in the room. We did the same thing with the shadow: the shadow can only be cast from one light (we only supported a single shadow), but depending on the angle of the camera we allowed which light was responsible for the shadow to change. That made it pretty easy to set up really dramatic shots without compromising the design of each room. (As an aside for the graphics programmers out there, this method also let us separate "shadow-receivable" geometry from "shadow-immune" geometry so our projective texture shadow only had to render a subset of the level art twice). Though my company didn't end up pursuing this style of game, I am extremely glad to have done this project because I learned tons about how many of the games listed on this site work. A lot of the code (or, more often, the general approach rather than the actual code) got reused in other projects (the blending motion and animation system survived for another year, only to be killed when the real game it was in got cancelled), and Casey and I learned a boatload. I'll post some screenshots from our demo below. This isn't a real game, and will never be a real game, it was just a learning exercise. But it was a lot of fun and it played pretty well! Screenshots: In the kitchen Dorm hallway Dorm room A secret passage The storage closet

Yeah, screw the loft. I don't usually buy games on the day that they come out because a) I have a lot of games in my backlog already, b) getting caught up in hype is a bad thing, and c) the longer I wait the cheaper games get. But as I was ordering something of Amazon the other night, I noticed that Ju-on: The Grudge was scheduled for release this week and that the online retailer had it for $10 off. So I bought it, and because shipping services in Japan are freaking awesome, it came on the day of its release (today). You might have seen the trailer for Ju-On a while back. It's a first-person Wii game based off the series of movies of the same name and supervised by the director of those films, Takashi Shimizu. Apparently the entire Western world mistook the developer's logo as the name of the game, so you might have seen this title bouncing around news sites under the name "FEEL" (in fact, the name of the game is 恐怖体感 呪怨, kyoufu taikan juon, which is something like "fear sensation Ju-On"; the developer is a company called Feelplus). Anyway, it's a first-person Wii game where you use the Wiimote to explore scary areas with a flashlight. Word on the street is that XSEED is bringing the game Stateside this year. I've played the first episode and a bit of the second so far, so I thought I'd weigh in with some initial impressions. The game is well done, but it's also exceedingly simple. You move around through the environment by pointing the Wiimote (on screen, a flashlight) in the direction you want to go and holding down the B trigger. This method of movement actually works really well; it's so smooth that I thought the game was on rails at first. The side effect of this system, I guess, is that you move really slowly. There doesn't seem to be a run button. Anyway, you move through the environment collecting items--particularly keys and flashlight batteries. If you run out of flashlight batteries it's game over, but (at least in the first episode) they appear to be pretty plentiful. As you progress through the environment Ghost kid on opposite side of window: check. various scary things will happen, mostly involving stuff falling near you for no obvious reason, the series' signature cat-ghost-kid running by, or the Dead Wet Girl antagonist grabbing your arm. These are almost exclusively pop-out-of-the-dark scares, and they get old really fast. There's a few legit scares here, and the environments are very well done, but once it's clear that something sudden is going to happen every two minutes or so, it stops being surprising. What's really intriguing about this game is that I think that it's designed to be played with friends. It's a one-player game, but a second player can cause similar pop-out events to occur by pushing buttons on the second controller. To me this sounds like an attempt to recreate the feeling of watching a horror film with friends--especially for teens--and trying not to get freaked out. This is really interesting; I love the idea that the basic horror premise might actually be improved if you were to play with somebody along for the ride next to you. The complaints from review sites like Famitsu are that the game is very short (5 hours, they say), but if the purpose of the design is that it can be played in a sitting or two with friends, that length actually makes a lot of sense. Perhaps this is the way in which Shimizu has influenced the development of this game: it's clearly designed not to be played alone, even though it's a single-player game. I haven't seen that before. The other thing that strikes me about this game is that it's very close to being a more modern incarnation of Hell Night. Not that it's nearly as good as Hell Night; it misses the beat when it comes to sound, I think, and since avoiding death is fairly easy there's very little of the pressure that Hell Night applies. But the system, the way that the game works and is played, is very similar. If nothing else this game could serve as a reference for how a more competent game might get started; the game mechanics seem solid and slightly wasted on this particular game. As usual, I should note that I've only just started Ju-On and my impressions are subject to change. Stay tuned for a full review.

Holy crap there are a lot of horror games coming out real soon.
 Ju-on: The Grudge is coming out in a few days here in Japan, a sequel to Nanashi no Geemu called Nanashi No Geemu: Me (that's "Nameless Game: The Eye") is scheduled for the end of August, Calling has been promoted from rumor to a real, live game, and Cursed Mountain is supposed to come out in about two weeks.

That's not even considering Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which is supposed to ship this year, or the new Resident Evil PSP game that Capcom just announced, the game that materializes on the media radar once ever six months before vanishing without any new information, the still-in-development Dead Island, or the Saw game that is looking increasingly likely this year (sigh).

There's no way I can keep up with this kind of pace! My goal is to finish my 50th horror game his year; that shouldn't be too hard, as I only have about four more games to go. On the other hand, if I don't pick up the pace a little bit finishing four games in the next five months may be rough.

PS: Thanks to all the folks on the forum for keeping me in the loop about new games and posting links
PPS: 4 out of 6 console games in this post are Wii-exclusive. Did I call it or what?

"Hmm, maybe I should just leave? Nah." ... which isn't a bad thing. I'm of the opinion that if you don't mind the slow pace and the unique combat system, the Fatal Frame series is probably the single most consistently frightening series out there. Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was the first game I purchased when I bought a Japanese Wii (making it my second Wii and fifth game machine connected to my TV--region locking can kiss my ass), but I haven't been able to play it much because my wife refuses to be in the room when the game is on. Even when I play with headphones, the visuals are effective enough that she wonders if she'll be able to sleep. To tell you the truth, I was not expecting FF4 to be all that great. The chatter on the web about the game when it came out was that it was not sufficiently Wii-ified, that it was a poor port from the PS2 engine, and that it was generally a weak horror game. And the publisher decision not to export the game outside of Japan seemed to back up those concerns. I've played about two hours of the game now and some of the impressions I read on the net are sort of true: there are a few technical problems (loading of rooms seems to be way slower now than it used to be, there are noticeable drops in the frame rate when passing from one room to the next, etc) and using the Wiimote to aim is taking some getting used to. So maybe, I thought at first, the game isn't all it's cracked up to be. But the thing is, this is a classic Fatal Frame game through and through. The art style, the sounds, the ghosts, the menu UI, the particulars of the story--all of core components of this game are right in line with the rest of the series. And the game looks pretty great; other the occasional drop in frame rate there's nothing to complain about here on the graphics front. What is most interesting to me is the ways the game has changed from its predecessors. Some of the changes are very subtle, while others are a little more dramatic. The controls, for example, have been modified to match the Wiimote: the thumb stick on the Wii Nunchuck drives the character around and the wiimote is used to look up and down. The camera is placed pretty low. I haven't quite gotten the hang of this yet--it's hard for me to remember to tilt my hand down to aim downwards when fighting ghosts, for example--but I think that phase will pass. It's also now necessary to hold the A button down for a while to pick up objects; the protagonist bends down and slowly reaches her hand out before grasping the item. I am sure by the time the game is done there will be at least one moment where a ghostly white hand shoots out and grabs her hand in mid reach, causing my heart to stop (D2 did something similar with trivial action cut scenes). There's also a neat "item filament" bar that glows blue when items are near (and some of them do not appear until you get close enough to grab them), which makes ransacking areas for items a lot less tedious. A much more subtle and (now that I think about it) major change is the way that the camera works. Previous FF games have been one of the last holdouts on character-centric "tank" controls (though the series made a few neat changes), probably because character-centric controls enabled the series to have some of the most interesting and complicated camera shots that I've seen. Fatal Frame 4, on the other hand, has opted for a behind-the-character camera view. The camera sits much lower than in most other 3rd person games--the protagonist takes up a large portion of the screen. If anything, it's most similar to the camera system in Resident Evil 4, though pulled back from the character a bit. Like I said, the change is subtle; despite having played all of the other Fatal Frame games to completion, I didn't notice this particular difference right away. I'm also not sure what the goal of this change is; it probably is an attempt to get away from tank controls, but I'm not sure if it was necessitated by the single-stick Wii controller or if it's a nod to RE4 and its brethren. Anyway, I've only just started to play and the game is sufficiently freaky that I will probably play in short bursts. But so far my impressions of the core game mechanics and the engine it is built on are very positive. All that remains to be seen is whether or not the game content will live up to its potential.

I finished Alone in the Dark 5 this evening and posted a review. Hey, look at that, I posted something on this blog again! Holy crap, bet you didn't see that coming, huh? I actually have two more articles about Thinking After Dark to post, and something about The Path still, but those are not ready to go yet and work has been even crazier than usual lately.

Long story short: I gave up on F.E.A.R. (only the third game so far that I've been unable to complete; Rule of Rose and Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within are the others) a few weeks back and decided to try Alone in the Dark 5. I still have some things to say about F.E.A.R., but out of order here are some thoughts on the latest in the Edward Carnby saga.

Alone in the Dark 5 is an ambitious title. I played the PS3 version because I heard that it was much improved over the unpolished and buggy Xbox360 version. Even so, there were a lot of problems. At the same time, there are certain sequences that totally blew my socks off. Overall I didn't think it was a fantastic game, but there is certainly a lot of stuff we can learn by examining it. Check out the full review.

I bet you thought I just wasn't going to post any more about the Thinking After Dark conference that I attended last month. The truth is that I have pages of notes waiting to be turned into blog posts and I'm running very behind. So, in the interests of brevity, here's some short thoughts about some of the other talks from the conference. Clara Fernandez-Vara gave an interesting presentation on the Castlevania series about why it is not a horror game. It clearly uses themes from Dracula, and, as Fernandez-Vara points out, many other classic (and generally unrelated) Western horror tropes like Frankenstein. Yet for some reason it doesn't come off as a horror game. This talk was an exploration as to why that was the case. Fernandez-Vara's suggests that Dracula, as a symbol, has been iterated too many times and has lost its original meaning. She points to the beginning of Symphony of the Night in which Dracula is basically reduced to acting like Bowser: he shoots fireballs and eventually turns into some giant generic monster. No biting, mesmerizing, turning into mist; he's not even killed by a stake through the heart, but instead by a whip. Dracula isn't scary any more and the developers had to turn him into something else to make him a threatening boss. Fernandez-Vara's theory is that this reliance and modification of a worn-out trope empowers the player; by using Dracula (the "satanic lord" version; there are many others) as an antagonist, the designers are giving the player a leg up on the competition: we already know all about Dracula and all that's left is to go into his castle and take him out. Fernandez-Vara also points out that in Symphony of the Night, the protagonist Alucard actually gains Dracula's traditional powers, which ends up making him even more powerful. Alexis Blanchet presented a bunch of data related to some fascinating research he has been performing for the last three years. He is trying to catalog and categorize all games based on films ever made, and his database appears to be fantastically complete. This talk was in French but I think you can get a lot out of just looking at some of his graphs. Rather than reproduce them here, check out his web site and blog post about his talk. Jonathan Lessard's talk was about Lovecraft's influence on the adventure game genre. It turns out that there are a bunch of horror-adventure games (mostly for the PC) that use Lovecraftian themes or are directly based on his work. Lessard wanted to know what the appeal was specifically with regards to adventure game translations. Lessard points out that the license is practical because it is not under copyright and the Lovecraft name is fairly well-known (though it can't compare to, say, Agatha Christie). There are also structural compatibilities between Lovecraft's stories and the adventure mold: Lovecraft stories are often about researchers or investigators setting out to find hidden truth, which maps very well to adventure games. Adventure games are indirect and contextual, which is a better fit for Lovecraft than verb-oriented action games (not a lot of running and jumping in Lovecraft's stories). So the mode of play and general format of adventure games seems to be a snug fit. However, Lessard points out that most of these games fail to be scary because eventually the game-related goals come into conflict with Lovecraftian norms. Lovecraft's "cosmic fear" concept is really hard to describe visually; it's not about things popping out of the dark or gore. Instead, it is about knowledge leading one into the darkness rather than to reason. But in an adventure game, discovery of truth is a reward and not a method of alienation, so that same psychological evolution of the character is difficult to achieve. It's also hard to get the characters in these games to sufficiently emote, and many end with the triumph over evil, which is hardly Lovecraftian. So most of these games are not very scary. Lessard points out one major exception: a game called Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, which apparently follows the Lovecraftian narrative flow to a T. Gabrial Knight also gets a mention for its attention to cosmic fear. So the format is capable of hosting Lovecraft in a very authentic way, but it does not happen very often. Another interesting talk was Matthew Weise's discussion of "rules of horror." His idea is that it might be possible to make horror games by translating the rules and tropes from specific types of horror movies directly to game play. As an example he talked exclusively about Clock Tower: The First Fear (though I think that the focus on this game was forced by the very short time limit for presentations). Clock Tower is, Weise points out, a very authentic translation of the "stalker" type of horror film (Halloween, etc). The protagonist is clearly a Final Girl. She fits the formal definition (Clover's model) to a T, and the game can be seen as a simulation of the stalker film genre. It is one of the few games to show the protagonist's face up close so you can see when she is frightened, and this feature, Weise argues, is required by the genre. Weise suggests that one way to adapt horror games from films is to see the genre rules of the film as game systems instead of just lifting the narrative. If you watched the film, would you be better prepared to play the game? If so, that would indicate that the game play itself is based on rules and systems defined by the film. And that's all I have time for today. I have at least two more posts on the conference to write, so please stay tuned.

From left to right: Ewan Kirkland, Carl Therrien, and Dominic Arsenault You know, on second thought, I think it will be better if I post my notes with more background. I looked back over my post from last week and it seems like it's almost meaningless to people other than myself because it lacks so much context. From here on out I'm going to post summaries of what I thought was interesting. If you are interested in a particular point, please ask and I will elaborate. On the first day of the conference there was a fascinating discussion about how genres are created and defined. Dominic Arsenault and Carl Therrien talked about this topic at length, and I think that it's a very relevant topic with relationship to horror considering all the arguments discussions that we've had about it here. Arsenault makes the point that genres for games are problematic because there is no single authority. Genre is often defined in terms of a hierarchy of characteristics; GameSpot's find-by-genre page, for example, sorts everything by pace, then mechanic, then view point, and then theme: Action > Shooter > First-Person > Fantasy. Other lists of game genres (such as this one, this one, and this one) do not agree, and some even contain a meaningless classification like "hybrid." There is no definitive consensus, new genres are born and die constantly, and most games are combinations of other genres. He went on to talk about how genres are created when they become necessary. Is it really possible, he wondered, to define a genre of spiky hair sword-wielding protagonists that can then contain both Final Fantasy VII's Cloud and No More Heros' Travis? Not really, and the reason is that "genre is not only defined from the elements of a [game], but also from a common cultural consensus" (Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film, 1974). So the genres that stick around are those that people agree upon. At this point Arsenault had an awesome graph. He plotted the number of usenet posts per month containing the phrase "doom clone" against posts containing the phrase "first person shooter" from about 1990 through 2008. The term "Doom clone" appeared like a bell curve; it starts around 1992 and peaks in 1996, then dies off by 2000. Individual spikes in the usage of the term correlated with releases of games like Duke Nukem. "First person shooter" appearers in 1996 and rockets upwards, surpassing "doom clone" in usage by 1998 and then subsequently rising to much larger usage than "doom clone" ever achieved. By the time that Unreal is released, nobody is calling first person shooters "doom clones." So, the conclusion is that game genres are not defined by logic, or by a central authority, but by "what we collectively believe it to be." Aresnault went on to talk about the separation of thematic and gameplay genres, which an especially important topic for survival horror games. He mentions that "survival horror" seems to be about gameplay (survival) + theme (horror), and is therefore a hybrid of both a thematic and gameplay genre. Survival is pretty easy to define in terms of game terms, but horror is more difficult. It turns out that people have been trying to properly define the horror genre for years, with a number of interesting results. Bruce F. Kawin, for example, separates horror from science fiction by suggesting that the end of the narrative is a genre signifier: horror games end with a "re-establishment of the status quo," as the world goes back to the way it was before the narrative began, while sci-fi ends in a progression of understanding of the universe rather than a concrete resolution. But that sort of dichotomy does not help us categorize hybrids like Dead Space. Perhaps, then, we should separate the hybrid into its gameplay and thematic genres. They seem to grow and change in different ways. "Gameplay genres are born from reiterations and successive imitations that aim to better the model, while thematic genres feed on transmedia borrowings with an aesthetic aim." Aresnault references Fowler (1982) who points out that genre is not just a classification tool, but also a communication tool: it manages expectations. Hans R. Jauss (1978) points out that the "horizon of expectations is made up of first, the player's knowledge and cognitive schemata, and second, the generic markers that puts the work in place." (Or something like that; my notes are unclear if this is a direct quote). Therrien (who referenced this site--thanks!) makes a similar point. Per T. Apperley, the problem with genre is that it doesn't describe a particular game but rather tries to link it to earlier forms of media. Almost any game play classification we can come up with will have exceptions: rather than a strict definition the concepts involved in game genres are constantly evolving. "Evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species." (T. Todorov). Since we've had so many discussions on how best to parse the collection of horror games that are cataloged on this site, I found these talks particularly interesting and pertinent. I am still going through my notes but in the next few days I will post about subsequent topics that were covered at the conference. There's also some pictures online now if you are interested.

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?

So I missed April Fools this year. Sorry. My excuse is that I was on a plane over the Pacific, which is true. Next year I'll have some totally mind blowing joke prepared for you all (I considered posting that Alan Wake had been announced as an iPhone exclusive, but I figured that probably won't have gone over well).

I have a post in the wings about The Path. The short version is that you should go buy it. While it is in many ways a classic adventure game, it's been filtered and twisted and it's like nothing that you've seen before. It's a different kind of horror game, one that will require you to think. I've only spent a few minutes with it but that's more than enough to recommend it to you here. I'll have a much more in-depth post about this game when I get to spend a little more time with it.

Last week was also GDC, and there's been some horror-related news to talk about. Here's some screenshots from the new Silent Hill remake, which looks, uh, odd. I'll play it, and I'm very happy to see that somebody is finally using the Wiimote as a flashlight (ok, Fragile did this first), but I can't tell much about it yet by just looking at the screenshots. Also, I was surprised to learn that the Saw game is still in development (apparently Konami is the new publisher), and even more surprised that there are screenshots available. The database is quickly falling out of date!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at the Thinking After Dark conference. The list of speakers is impressive, and the topics are all things I am interested in, so I am quite excited about attending. Any of you in upstate New York or Montreal should come attend!

When I was a kid some developer realized that with the advent of the 2x CD-ROM drive you could stream really tiny, really crappy video off the CD onto a PC. This lead to an explosion of universally-terrible "interactive movie" games like The Journeyman Project and Spaceship Warlock. Though the genre probably contributed to the advent of good games like The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria, and Myst, there were a couple of years where the genre was entirely crap. One of these games was called The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum, and it was yet another click-randomly-until-you-win type of game. I saw an awesome, one line review for The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum at the time that simply read, "Great graphics, but where's the game?" Dead Space isn't that bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it reminds me of The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum. The production value for Dead Space is off the charts, the game play is fun, and there are some neat innovations to be found in the game. It's just that the whole thing is so slick that you can pretty much zone out and play it through without the need to think anything through. It makes sense to me that the next Dead Space game will be an on-rails shooter; the first sort of felt like that to me as well. Dead Space is a good game, but it's not a fantastic game. At least, I don't think so. You can read about it in my full review.

I'm playing through Dead Space at the moment. Well, more precisely, I've been playing through Dead Space for close to three months. I am having a lot of trouble staying interested in it. This is kind of surprising to me because there's really nothing wrong with the game at all. It's a model of modern game design, the technical execution is fantastic, and there's even been significant thought put into the systems that are responsible for most of the horror content (the sound system is great). But for some reason I just can't be bothered. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the game, and playing it is fun and all, it's just sort of uninspiring for some reason. Sometimes, a game comes along that is fatally flawed in a certain way but also has a spark of brilliance. Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) was like that for me. The game had a vision, and it was pretty well executed, but at the end it totally fell apart. But the vision alone carried the entire experience; even though the last third or so was pretty shoddy compared to the initial experience, I ended up really liking the game. Hellnight is a similar story: the graphics are bad, the controls are dated, the collision detection is wonky, and yet the whole thing is held together by a few genius design choices. Dead Space feels like the exact opposite of that phenomenon. There's nothing wrong with it--nothing at all. And yet, there's no spark of brilliance either; it's very, very well executed, but ultimately fairly routine. It's even pretty innovative for this kind of game, and yet the innovations, while good, are all minor improvements over a well-defined formula. There has yet to be a moment where I see the hand of a designer with a complete vision of the experience moving behind the scenes. Dead Space is really slick, but it feels like it was built by robots who were programmed to know the core features of all horror games. There's just no character to the game. I'm not finished with Dead Space, so the game may yet prove me wrong (that's certainly happened a few times before). I will hopefully finish it off in the next week or two, at which point I will have to figure out a way to write a review for a game that is perfectly executed and yet somehow lifeless.

It goes downhill from here. Lately Nanashi no Geemu has got me thinking about how horror operates at a fundamental level. One of the keys, it seems to me, is connection with familiarity. Silent Hill uses normal, every day locales (an elementary school, a mall, an apartment complex) and then taints them with monsters, death, and eventually decrepitness. Nanashi No Geemu's cursed RPG works the same way: it evokes a feeling of familiarity in the user--an involuntary feeling of comfort--and then twists that feeling into something much more sinister than it really has any right to muster. I ran across another game this evening that strikes me as an excellent example of this theory. Eversion is a light, Mario-esque platformer. It has happy music, 8-bit graphics, and a unique game mechanic. It's unfortunately only available for Windows (though it ran without error on my Mac via Crossover). At first, it seems like somebody's cute attempt at 1980's era platforming game play. But very quickly it becomes clear that the game has an agenda and it's not all blue skies and happy flowers. I won't ruin it for you, but give the game a shot. It gets pretty hard but I advise you to stick with it. Be sure to ignore the comments on the main download page, as they will spoil it for you. Eversion works very much like Nanashi No Geemu in that it lulls you into a comfortable zone with a familiar style. It also twists its particular knife pretty slowly; it's not until the fifth or sixth level that you really realize how carefully the entire thing has been planned. But the result is pretty neat, once again proving that horror does not require high-end graphics tech to be effective. (Interestingly, the game also adds more weight to the idea that sound plays a much more important role in the creation of tension.) So, another ingredient of successful horror games: familiarity as a way to surprise the player. Not every title does this, but I think that a number of the really good ones do.

I have completed Nanashi No Geemu, SquareEnix's Nintendo DS horror game about a cursed 8-bit RPG, and posted a review. The game is a paradox. On the one hand, the game play is extremely shallow and repetitive. On the other hand it's amazingly innovative and, at times, genuinely scary. Excellent execution of a mediocre idea, or mediocre execution of a great idea? I am not sure exactly with this one. In any case, read the review for details.

Thanks to forums member faDeD for turning me on to a new WiiWare horror/puzzle game called LIT. I haven't had time to play it yet--as you can probably tell from the dearth of posts recently, it's been a busy month--but it looks like a lot of fun. I am keenly interested in how horror games might perform on services like XBLA and WiiWare; I suspect that the types of horror/adventure games that are being made for DS could work on these platforms really well, for about the same development cost. And damn it, somebody has to make a proper point-and-click adventure game using the Wii remote (to be fair, there are a couple of attempts already).

I am trying to decide if I should loosen the Quest criteria to include hand-held games. I am still working my way through Nanashi no Geemu (damn, that game needs save points), and with titles like Silent Hill: 0rigins already in the wild it seems like it might be a good move. I initially omitted hand-held games because there are very few portable horror games and I didn't want to have to track down every last NeoPocket or Wonderswan to complete the Quest. But it seems like the only real contenders are the PSP and the DS, and even then most of the titles are on the DS. So maybe I should go ahead and count games on those platforms--they are certainly relevant from a content perspective. What do you think?

Out with the old, in with the new! If 2009 is anything like 2008, we've got a lot of horror games to look forward to. 2008 was a good year for us horror gamers; in fact, it was the best year we've had since 2005. A total of seven horror games were released in the West, and if we throw in DS games and games that were released in Japan only (for now, we hope), the number is closer to 10. Dead Space, Alone in the Dark 5, Silent Hill 5, Silent Hill: 0rigins, Siren: New Translation, Fatal Frame 4, and, uh, Obscure 2 were all released in 2008. Compare that to 2007, a year in which only two games released, and one of those was Escape from Bug Island.

No, 2008 was pretty good. Here's the games that are on my radar for 2009:

• Alan Wake. (Xbox360, PC) It looks cool, but will it ever ship?
• Calling. (Wii) I just posted about this game a few months back.
• Cursed Mountain. (Wii) I posted some early footage of this game about mountains, curses, and apparently Buddhism.
• Dead Island. (Xbox360, PC) Details are sparse as ever on this one. I posted about it last year.
• Hydrophobia. (Xbox360) Game or tech demo? You decide. I suspect that this one is never coming out, actually.
• Resident Evil 5 (Xbox360, PS3, PC). The demo is pretty hot. This will ship soon, I think.
• Heavy Rain (PS3). According to the developer it's a horror game. Rock!
• F.E.A.R. 2 / Project Origin. (Xbox360, PS3, PC). Alma is back. Interesting history to this project.
• Rainy Woods (PS3, Xbox360). It's Twin Peaks in game form! I posted about it.
• Sadness (Wii). A little bit of evidence that this vaporware might actually exist popped up in 2008.
• Unnamed, mysterious Shinji Mikami/Suda51/EA "action horror" game. And that is all we know about it.

That's a pretty good lineup! Lots of variety, lots to look forward to.

Scary stuff. My train ride to work only takes 30 minutes, but it often feels much longer. I ride Denentoshi-sen, a line that runs from Shibuya all the way down into Yokohama, and has the unfortunate distinction of being Japan's second-most crowded train line. Even a a short ride like mine is exhausting when you spend the trip crushed up against other commuters. But for the last couple of days the trip has gone by so quickly that I almost missed my stop. I've been completely engrossed with SquareEnix's DS horror title, ナナシノゲエム (Nanashi No Geemu, lit. "Nameless Game"). My first impression of the unnamed game was, I must admit, a little cool. The game at first appears to be Yet Another Visual Novel Adventure: the introduction consists of white text on fuzzy backgrounds and a crush on a girl who is already taken by an upperclassman. In other words, it starts off as just about every other visual novel ever made does. Don't get me wrong, there are some real classics like Kamaitachi No Yoru within the Visual Novel genre, but most of the games are trite Choose-Your-Own-Awkward-Romance adventures with little or no actual game play. Not to mention that the story involves a cursed video game that kills those who play it in seven days; though this sort of premise pre-dates The Ring, it's so often used in Japanese horror that it's pretty worn out. So I was a bit disappointed to see the game open with a bunch of text describing a routine story. But I knew from the trailer than that lurking somewhere in this game was a 3D mode and some sort of NES-era RPG, so I decided to stick around for at least the length of my train ride to work before giving up on Squeenix's first horror game since Parasite Eve II. The story is that a new kind of game machine called the TS has become extremely popular in Japan. The TS is a combination portable game machine and phone, and its killer feature is that games can be exchanged over the air, and can be played online. There is, however, a rumor about a strange TS game that causes the death of those who play it. Since TS games are exchanged amongst friends over the wireless network, nobody really knows what this cursed game is called or if it even exists, but the rumor persists nonetheless. For the first five minutes I was sure that Nanashi No Geemu was going to be lame. And then the aforementioned cursed game showed up. What's so awesome about it is not just that there's a Dragon Quest-like RPG embedded inside this DS game, it's that the developers have gone all out in their attention to detail. In my initial post about this game, I noted that the game appears to show corruption errors that are common on tile-based game consoles like the NES. As the screen scrolls around, little bits of junk tiles appear off on the sides, which back in the day indicated some sort of mismatch between tile indexes and the actual contents of VRAM. This is a pretty hard-core detail, and I love it. But the attention to detail doesn't stop there. The whole presentation, from the moment the game boots up, is expertly done. There's even a fake DS launch screen (appropriately renamed to say "TS") from which the nameless game (nameless because the name appears all garbled) is opened. Everything from the difficult-to-read 8x8 pixel Japanese font to the background music has been meticulously recreated for this title. If I saw just the RPG running without any context, I would easily believe it to be a title from the mid 1980s. What's so fantastic to me about this is that the developers are using a game-within-a-game to generate a plausible world within which horrific events can occur. Dragon Quest is possibly the most well-known game franchise ever in Japan; I'd wager that the vast majority of Japanese people between the ages of 15 and 30 have played at least one DraQue game. So what SquareEnix is doing here is tapping into a familiar, believable, even nostalgic memory shared by most gamers in Japan, and using that to legitimize the otherwise unbelievable otherworldly events that occur in the game. The game and its surrounding context is the axis by which they are able to help the player suspend their disbelief. The story is about a person playing a corrupted game on a handheld gaming device, and it is presented by giving you a corrupted game to play on your actual handheld gaming device. This is, to me, an excellent example of how horror can be developed without graphical prowess, or gore, or even any sort of scary monster. All Nanashi No Geemu provides is a convincing context and a story, and it works really well. Fortunately, Nanashi No Geemu also uses a 3D first-person exploration mode. The interface is similar to the one created by Cing for Hotel Dusk: Room 215, and while it is pretty good the only reason it works at all is because the story context has been set up by the corrupted NES RPG. The majority of the game play seems to be moving around an area, looking for things and trying to solve minor puzzles. The nameless game interrupts these searches periodically, and playing it either gives you hints about how to progress or causes things in the real world to change. I've only put a few hours into the game so far, but it seems like a pretty neat formula. But by far the most impressive thing about this title is the use of another game to make the story events believable. I'll post a full review when I am done, but so far I am hooked. My only concern is that playing Nanashi No Geemu may cause me to miss my station and be late to work.

The Resident Evil 5 demo went live on Xbox Live today, but only for residents of Japan. Luckily enough, I happen to now be a resident of Japan, and I've put a little time into the demo (if you live in another country you'll have to wait, but if you are adventurous you could try this). The game is very clearly an evolution of Resident Evil 4--it's the same basic interface, the same controls, the same enemy reactions, the same sort of game play. Run into a house, barricade the doors, fight off the hoards of zombies that approach. The graphics are in HD now and look great, but they retain the same sort of feeling as the previous game; dilapidated shantytowns inhabited by angry zombies are again the norm. There's even a couple of analogs for the chainsaw man, including an axe-wielding giant. The second character, Shiva, seems to be more of a burden than a help, which is unfortunate; Resident Evil 0 had really nicely controlled AI partners that didn't need a lot of hand-holding. I feel like this game is a culmination of all of Capcom's recent Resident Evil work. The co-op mode works off the rules defined by Resident Evil Outbreak, the moment-to-moment game play is all Resident Evil 4, and the play-with-a-partner puzzles are straight out of Resident Evil 0. One biggest change compared to RE4 is that the item select menu does not pause the game; switching weapons and using health items doesn't stop the crazy knife-wielding zombie dudes from bearing down on you. While this change makes the combat all the more stressful, I think its a feature that was necessitated by the network play requirements of this game rather than the horror aspects (Outbreak, if I remember correctly, works the same way). The demo contains two missions, "Public Assembly" and "Shanty Town". Both are hard. It's been a couple of years since I played Resident Evil 4, and my Xbox controller is running out of batteries which causes the game to pause annoyingly every few minutes, but I was still surprised by the level of difficulty that the demo commands. I have only played about an hour so far, but in that hour I've died several times and I have yet to complete either mission. I suspect that the final game will be quite challenging, though I also think that it will get easier as I remember how this type of game is supposed to be played. Interestingly, the zombies themselves come in several shapes, sizes, and ethnicities. I wonder if Capcom added non-black zombies to the game to address the accusations of racism that early gameplay videos received. In any case, other than their appearance the zombies themselves seem to be absolutely the same as those in Resident Evil 4. All that said, I think that the co-op mode may be the feature that sets this game apart from its predecessors. There's a lot of opportunity for interesting co-op play (one character reaches a sniper location and covers the other, etc), and games like Gears of War, which were clearly inspired by Resident Evil 4, have received a lot of praise for their multiplayer. I'm really interested to try this online with friends and see how well it works (offline co-op, a rare feature nowadays, is also supported).

It's been pretty quiet around here lately, for witch I apologize. But, I have a good excuse: I'm preparing to move, and not just down the block. No, my family and I are moving to a whole 'nother country next week, and I'm frantically trying to close all of my accounts, cancel all of my services, and sell all of my belongings. That hasn't left a lot of time for horror games, though I did recently put some time into Siren: New Translation and (I am somewhat ashamed to admit) Escape from Bug Island. Also, my brother hooked me up with The Darkness and F.E.A.R., so I have a lot to play.

But I've also been playing some non-horror games lately. Shocking as it may be, I actually try to interleave my horror games with my non-horror games so that I don't get too burnt out on any particular genre. I thought I'd talk a little bit about the non-horror games I've been putting some time into:

• Assassin's Creed - This game got pretty slammed by reviewers, but I can't figure out why. The game's a little repetitive, yes, but that's ok because the stuff that is repeating is fantastic. The art, particularly the animation, is fantastic, and the game really succeeds at making you feel like an awesome ninja killer dude. The controls are a little wonky and I don't totally understand how to be reliably stealthy yet, but I'm very happy with the couple of hours I've put in so far. This is an interesting game with an interesting theme and I'm extremely impressed with the cohesiveness of its presentation. In my day job I work on animation systems programming a lot, and the animation system in Assassin's Creed is really, really cool.
• Pure - OK, so I've only played the demo, but I really enjoyed it. Pure is SSX on ATVs; the mechanics of jumping and performing tricks to get boost is almost exactly the same as SSX. However, SSX was awesome and Pure seems like it works very well too.
• Earth Defense Force 2017 - This is an ultra-budget game by D3 publisher, the hard-working folks responsible for classics THE Zombie VS Ambulance and THE Onneechanbara. 2017 is pretty budget-looking, but it was recommended to me by a friend as being "hilarious fun," and I have to concur with that assessment. The controls are fairly bad, the story is beyond terrible, the graphics suck, and yet I've played this thing for several hours already. On level one they give you a gun that blows entire buildings up! You can't go wrong with this formula.

What are you playing lately?

A return to survival horror's roots? Leigh Alexander has an excellent article on the way survival horror games have changed up on Kotaku this morning. If you've never read Alexander's stuff before, she's one of the few game journalists that really gets genres like survival horror (I've linked to her writing before). Her latest article, Does Survival Horror Really Still Exist? is, as usual, in-depth, well written, and thought provoking. In it, Alexander considers the way that lousy combat, a hallmark of traditional survival horror games, has evolved into something very different in recent games like Resident Evil 4. The article describes how the era of Japanese-influenced games, which prioritized psychological fear and slower paced game play, has given way to an era in which Western action-oriented game mechanics are popular. This is certainly a hot topic in the survival horror community. Alexander ends the article on a promising note--apparently after playing through Silent Hill 5 she feels that it is a return to form. It's not often that the mainstream gaming press is able to capture this genre as a whole and discuss it intelligently, and so when a gem like this comes along I feel almost obligated to direct you towards it. She was also nice enough to link to me.

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii is right. What a terrible game. Last year I wrote about how I learn a lot from bad games. But what I didn't say in that post was that I secretly love to play bad horror games, just as I secretly relish terrible horror movies. There's a certain type of humor that is evoked by games and movies that are so terribly flawed that they become funny, and I find myself playing these games through just to see what the developers will screw up next. Fortunately for me, there are tons of awful games in the horror genre, and today I thought I'd talk about a few of them that you might not have heard of. 厄　〜友情談義〜 (Yaku ~Yujyou Dangi~; literal translation is something like, "Misfortune: Friendship Lecture") is a visual novel by prolific Japanese developer IDEA FACTORY. Yaku appears to be their first game, and maybe that has something to do with why it's so god-awful. Now, I'm not the kind of guy who really cares about graphics in games (though I am keen on good art styles), but the graphics in Yaku are some of the worst ever. The art style might have worked in 2D, but instead the designers at IDEA FACTORY, perhaps enamored with the art of Myst, decided to render everything in 3D cut scenes. The art and animation has all the earmarks of early attempts at 3D graphics: the camera moves very awkwardly, people don't seem to be able to move and rotate simultaneously, and everything is so slow that it feels like the action is taking place underwater. The introductory movie looks like an Amiga ray tracing demo, with perfectly reflective spheres moving in slow motion. On top of this horrifically dated art is a standard visual novel: the player reads text and then makes a selection from a list of options. In Yaku most decisions are followed by a short (but not short enough!) movie displaying the consequences of the player's selection. The watch film in slow motion, read text, make selection, watch film cycle is so slow that the game is, for me anyway, neigh unplayable. In fact, I've only played the first few minutes of this game, as that is all I could stand. I'm pretty sure the text on the back of the box that says, "THIS GAME IS SCARY!!!" is false. Michigan I gotta tell you, I dig games by Grasshopper's Suda51. I liked Killer7 a lot, I enjoyed No More Heros, and I'm very interested in what his collaboration with Tecmo will produce for Fatal Frame 4. But even though the guy is awesome, and even though he made Michigan, Michigan is not awesome. In fact, it's downright terrible. The premise is bad, the controls are bad, the level design is bad, the graphics are bad, the story is really bad and the game play is an atrocity. The idea is that you are a TV camera man thrust into the middle of some terrible monster attack in downtown Chicago (which, I might point out, isn't even in Michigan). You, a female reporter, and a truly annoying sound guy must capture the events as they occur, and you are rewarded for filming "scoops." A "scoop" is when you film something that is supposed to be interesting, sexy, or scary; you can get points for looking at things on the wall, or finding weird ghost things in the levels, or trying to film up the reporter's dress. Occasionally the game will put you in a situation where the reporter is in danger, and you can choose to help her (at a cost of scoop points) or let her die for the camera. If any of this sounds interesting, your expectations are too high; nothing in the game is scary or erotic in any way, and while the idea that voyeurism might fit well in a horror game (as it did in Silent Hill 4) is interesting, the execution in Michigan is abysmal. To tell you the truth, the only way I got through this game is by kicking my teammates Clearly she's booting up a computer. Can't you tell? down stairs, around corners, and into walls. The kick is a useless move, but it's unintentionally hilarious when used on a reporter or the boom mic operator. Otherwise, everything about Michigan is really, really bad. The Ring: Terror's Realm I saved the best for last. The Ring is, hands down, probably the worst game that I've ever played, in any genre. Everything, everything about this game sucks. Technically it is related to the fantastic Japanese horror film of the same name, but there's no way that you would know that just by playing the game. Rather than tracking down cursed video tapes made by disturbed psychic children, The Ring video game is about shooting ape monsters in some sort of awful Silent Hill-knockoff Otherworld. Even minor details are executed poorly; the texture map used for every door appears to be misaligned (the knob is close to the center), the rooms and characters were not modeled to the same scale, the pause menu takes close to 30 seconds to load, and the music is the most annoying four bars ever to infinitely repeat. There's a boss that looks like a normal enemy but has a huge number of hit points, and a particular stairwell that causes the music to skip every time it is traversed, and the characters express themselves by repeating the three animations each of them has. Don't even get me started on the story or dialog; at one point in the game, there is a lengthy conversation in which one character explains that she's been "reincarnated as a child" over and over again, while the other character laments that she "doesn't understand what you're saying at all." The Ring is truly the worst horror game ever, and possibly the worst game ever; it is an absolute failure in every respect. That said, if you can find it and you have a friend who enjoys this sort of thing, it's good for a few laughs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the last post I talked about how game reviewers often approach their reviews of games as if the games are consumer products. They evaluate each feature in isolation from the others, and at the end assign a score based on some attempt to objectively determine the "quality" of the game. This is in stark contrast to reviews of other media, such as books and film and music, which are reviewed based on the reviewer's subjective opinion of the work. Actually, it's not just reviewers that assume this attitude. Just look at the back of the box of any game: the game is invariably described in terms of the features that it contains. Consider the "Product Features" section from Amazon.com's page on Resident Evil 4 for the Wii: Advanced AI makes enemies smarter than ever and use their cunning in deadly attacks Use the Action button for better player control New 'Aim and Shoot' targeting for zeroing in on enemies with your weapons Behind the camera view for intuitive movement Conversations and monologues can be heard in real time Now, in addition to being pretty poor English, this list of "features" fails really dramatically to effectively describe Resident Evil 4. They are similar to the back of the box (though the box at least contains a few plot details). Now compare that list of features with the product descriptions of the first Resident Evil film (a synopsis of the plot is given), the Resident Evil soundtrack CD (samples can be listened to), and even this Resident Evil book (the first page can be read). All of these other forms of entertainment give some sort of information about the content of the work, not just a sterile description of "features." The game page is much more similar to the page for the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Controller, which is a consumer product and, as such, contains a list of product features. So the games-as-products mindset doesn't begin and end with reviewers. Games are advertised this way, and marketing makes a big deal out of the special features that each game contains (consider the common tactic of releasing a "game play video" to show off some unique mechanic; Alone in the Dark 5 is a recent example). Reviewers are not solely to blame for this product-oriented approach (and actually, I think that many reviewers try very hard to give readers good information without realizing that their style of writing is vasty different than other forms of media). The real question is, why does this discrepancy exist? Why are games treated differently than other types of products? Maybe it has to do with the persistent association with toys. The Nintendo Entertainment System's primary competitor in 1985 was Teddy Ruxpin, and to this day many people consider video games a branch of children's toys rather than a medium (which is also the cause of a lot of controversy surrounding video game violence, I think). Or it might have something to do with video games being interactive: perhaps by enumerating features that are related to how the game is played, marketing is attempting to show how playing this game will be better than playing anything that you've ever played before (which, if you think about it, makes game reviewer's tendency to compare games to other titles make more sense). Or maybe it is because games are sold with PCs and game consoles (which are certainly consumer products), and the product-ness of these host platforms "rubs off" on the media as a whole. Those aren't bad explanations, and they probably are at least partially true, but I think that there's a more important reason that trumps them all: the price point. Games cost too much, both to develop and for the consumer. High development costs push the street price up, and the street price is extremely high compared to other media. Here in California, it costs $10 to go to a movie in a theater. Renting a movie is around $3.00. Buying a DVD is usually around $15. A new novel costs between $8 and $30 (hardbacks are more expensive, but paperbacks are always available eventually). CDs cost $15, and though that form of media is on the way out, it is being replaced by digital distribution models like iTunes that work out to just slightly less. But a new game for your Xbox360 Most PS2 games didn't review well. or PS3 is $59.99. A game for the Wii is probably $49.99. Though budget titles do exist, they are the exception rather than the rule (and usually hover between $20 and $30). That means a new game can cost four times the cost of a new DVD! Now, some might make an argument here about the length of a given game vs a movie or book. But I think that "length" is just another technical detail, not a real metric of quality. If you read the reviews of The Orange Box, you might have noticed reviewer after reviewer harping on the amazing "value" that the set provides (several high-quality games for the price of one). But no reviewer rewards a long book for having "value" because it takes you longer to read it; in fact, excessive length is often considered a negative when books and films are reviewed. And other media isn't priced based on its length; Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon only costs $8.99 despite its lengthy 1168 pages. His interesting In the Beginning... There Was the Command Line is a thin volume (160 pages), and it still costs about the same. No, the "duration of entertainment" isn't a factor in pricing other types of media, and I don't see why it should be for games either (and, as an aside, 100-hour RPGs don't cost more than 5 hour adventure games, so even within the game market length doesn't seem to be a factor). The problem with expensive games is that a lot of games are actually pretty bad, and the consumer can't tell which are good and which are bad by looking at the box. When I did research for my article on sales vs game scores, I found that, across all PS2 games, the majority of titles got a rating lower than 80%. About 20% of all PS2 games got "good" reviews and the rest got mediocre to poor. That's in keeping with Sturgeon's Law, which stipulates that most things are really crap, which I think applies to movies and books as well. The difference, of course, is that for $8 - $20, the amount of risk that the consumer assumes when buying a book or movie that they know nothing about is very small. $50 - $60 is a much larger investment, and therefore the consumer is likely to be much more careful about what he buys. My theory is that the high price point of games moves them out of the "disposable media" category and into the "product investment" category in the consumer's mind. In that context, the consumer needs to know if his purchase is really going to be worth the money. And as I mentioned in the last post, things like plot are subjective and are not guaranteed to be liked by everyone, so marketing, reviewers, and in turn, consumers, fall back on objective facts about the game in an attempt to define where that $59.99 is going. You can see this mindset everywhere in the game industry if you look for it; consider, for example, the customers who got angry that Halo 3 only supports "640p", as if 80 pixels of screen real estate have any tangible effect on the quality of the game. You can see this mentality in the way that games and game hardware is marketed: the PS3 had better be able to make games that we've never seen before; otherwise what's the point of spending all that money for it? And I think that endless flame wars amongst fanboys usually boil down to insecurity about a purchasing decision; once a fan has made up his mind to drop his cash on a specific game or system, it's common to really want to believe that the decision was correct and the money not wasted. The price point for games, and, to a lesser extent, game systems, changes the tone and context within which games are perceived in the market. If all games cost $15 new, I don't think we'd have very many discussions about quality in terms of feature sets; at a lower price, the risk of failure is lower and people will be more willing to try new things, and I think the conversation would shift to being about the content rather than being about the technology. Alas, until games can reach a much larger market, or until they can break out of the never-ending technical arms race, there's not much hope that the street price of video games will fall any time soon. You can see, though, that some companies are trying; Nintendo's strategy of cheaper hardware, cheaper games, and a wider target audience is definitely designed with these goals in mind. The jury is still out on whether or not they'll actually be able to make a long-term difference, though some people think that the evidence is already clear.

I need a smaller screenshot of this game. I'm pretty excited about the next version of the Fatal Frame series, especially since it's headed for the Wii and involves Suda51 somehow. So it was cool to see scans from Famitsu about the game, but even better news is that the game will be released at the end of July in Japan. Between this game, Silent Hill 5, Alone in the Dark 5, and the already-out Condemned 2: Bloodshot, 2008 is looking like a really good year for horror gamers.

I picked up Obscure 2 for the Wii a while back and am just now getting around to playing it. I enjoyed the first Obscure, mostly because playing with another person made the otherwise mediocre horror game a lot more fun. This time around I'm playing on my own (so far--maybe I can convince my friend to reprise his role as my backup monster smasher), and so far I am enjoying the experience a whole lot less. I've only played for an hour or so, and it's far too early to pass judgement on the game at this point, but I thought I'd post a few of my thoughts anyway. The graphics and art style in Obscure 2 is pretty nice. Ok, I should qualify that statement; the cutscenes look terrible, but the actual in-game graphics are very good (I dig the slightly-cartoonish art style too). The monsters are sort of your run-of-the-mill fleshbags and zombie velociraptors, but they look alright. The actual character design for the protagonists seems a bit naff (they're all cliched stereotypes), but the models are well done and the animation is fine. The background art in particular is very good; I've only witnessed a few scenes so far, but the environments are really solid. There seem to be some odd control choices, though. First of all, the camera is controllable with the Wii pointer (you point at the edge of the screen to rotate the view in that direction), which has so far been really disorienting to me (the camera spends a lot of time spinning in place). There have been a couple of nice fixed cameras (good composition, too), but I'm not used to the pointer-based method at all yet. The character control itself is alright (though movement is aggravated by the camera), but shooting monsters seems incredibly complicated. To shoot a monster you must go into aim mode (button #1), point at the monster, lock on to the monster (button #2), and then finally shoot (button #3). I'm getting used to this but it's taking a long time. The melee attacks are done using Wii remote gestures, which seem to work ok. The dialog in Obscure 2 is terrible. The characters are paper-thin, and their jokes and one-liners have already gotten super old. The game has a lot of dialog about the environment, which is good (it makes it feel like these characters are actually experiencing the events portrayed by the game), but sometimes the delivery of the lines is so stoic that it renders them useless ("there's blood on the floor" isn't a tension-inducing line when it's performed in the same tone as one might describe a planned trip to the laundry mat). So far, the characters and their asinine dialog is by far the worst part of the game for me. I want to talk about an early puzzle, so if you want to avoid minor SPOILERS, skip this paragraph. The puzzles seem to be either really easy or really obtuse. So far most of the puzzles have involved collecting items or just moving boxes around. The one sort of terrible one so far was the first hacking puzzle, in which you must input the name of a "famous person, like an artist" given a limited set of letters in order to unlock a door. Now, right next to this door is a statue by an artist whose name we can learn by examining it. And this artist's last name is in all caps, and the letters necessary to spell that name are available in the hacking puzzle. So, I thought, no-brainer; they want me to use the name that I found on that statue as password key. But no, entering that name does nothing. I tried different combinations but eventually had to resort to a faq. What do you know, the password is "mozart." What the hell, game designers? I hope that the rest of the game isn't like this. SPOILERS END HERE. So far Obscure 2 seems pretty mediocre. Maybe the addition of another player would help, I'm not sure (sadly there is no online option--this game is a perfect fit for two player online co-op, but on the other hand, finding another person who has this game might be a challenge). I'll post a full review when I've completed the game.

Nightmare material Having a baby has really changed my gaming habits, but this week I managed to finish two different games. The first is Hellnight, a phenomenal (and pretty obscure) PS1 horror game. I've posted a review, but the short version is that Hellnight absolutely rocks, it's pretty damn scary, and it succeeds despite PS1 graphics and an extremely simple game interface. This is a game that anybody who thinks next gen is required to make new experiences should play. The second game isn't a horror game, but since I've discussed Suda51's games before, I thought I'd give a little shout out to No More Heros. Grasshopper's latest is as self-referential and post modern as it is hilarious and fun. With constant references to video games as a medium, No More Heros is a game clearly made by gamers for gamers. At the same time it experiments with "breaking the fourth wall" all the time; the characters are often speaking to you the player rather than to other characters in the game world. Other than the Metal Gear Solid series, this is pretty much unprecedented in medium, and I really enjoyed it. Oh, and the combat system is pretty hot too.

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?

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.

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.

I keep forgetting to post about Project Origin, maybe because the name is so forgettable. This game is the sequel to F.E.A.R., but sports a different name because Vivendi, the publisher of F.E.A.R., owns the copyright. Monolith, the developer of the game, was purchased by Warner Bros. a couple of years ago, which required that they sever ties with Vivendi. Needing a new name, the development team invited people to submit ideas and then held a contest to pick the most popular name. Project Origin is the unfortunate result of that contest, yet again proving that gamer-selected names often suck (thankfully, the last time this happened to a horror game, the developers opted to use their original name rather than the terrible fan-selected name).

Anyway, the game itself looks pretty cool. There's an official website with a trailer, and Kotaku has a clip as well. Since it's been announced for PS3 and Xbox360, it seems like an obvious match for the Quest. Project Origin is currently slated to ship this fall.

As an aside, Monolith has really been racking up the horror games lately! Not only did they just release Condemned 2: Bloodshot, they were also apparently involved in the new PS2 port of Silent Hill: 0rigins. In fact, they haven't worked on a non-horror game since 2005.

Back in September forums user ramfeild66 posted some information about a game called Rainy Woods. Destructoid has some information about the game, Famitsu has screenshots, and there's a trailer on YouTube. The game is clearly influenced by The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and The Shining, but it nevertheless looks like it might be pretty good. So given the sparse information that is currently available, do you guys think that this will turn out to be a horror game? I have the same question about Alan Wake.

Agartha looked like a cool game. This weekend I made a new list of cancelled games. This list tracks games that were announced but then died, and it is in no way complete. I made it so that I could move games that I had information for out of the main quest list and close calls list without losing the information. If you are interested in cancelled games, there's a rumor-heavy blog about the subject. I should warn you though that the blog isn't 100% correct; of the games I've worked on that have been posted about, the information is about 70% accurate.

Ever wonder what the hell is going on in the Fatal Frame series? I mean, usually the plot of any particular game in the series is pretty clear, but every once in a while you realize that the story is tied back into the seemingly unrelated plot of the other games. Fatal Frame 3 in particular made me realize that there's probably a lot of story connections that I was missing.

Well, thanks to user "Arnav" on wikipedia, we now have a fantastic chart of the entire series, including every major character and the various complicated connections between them. Somebody spent a lot of time making this, I highly recommend that you check it out. Note that if you read it really close there are some spoilers, but it's not very interesting unless you've played the games to begin with anyway.

Shot from the DS version In Japan I picked up a copy of Flower, Sun, and Rain (花と太陽と雨), an early game by Suda51, the brains behind Killer7, No More Heros, and, unfortunately, Michigan. Like Killer7 and No More Heros, the game uses a flat, cell-shaded style to tell a crazy story. Fans of Suda51 games will notice his fingerprints all over this game: everything from the excellent style to the creepy voices to masked pro-wrestlers are present here in protozoic form. The game plays a lot like Hotel Dusk, another game that I enjoyed that mixes stylized art with adventure mechanics. The protagonist, Sumio Mundo, is a professional searcher; people employ him to find things that don't want to be found. He's visiting the tropical island of Lospass ("Lost Past"--the game is full of oddly contorted English) for work; the owner of the local resort hotel wants him to track down a bomb that terrorists have hidden at the airport. Before he can even begin his mission, however, Sumio becomes distracted by events within the hotel and the plane explodes. The next day he wakes to find that time has reset; though he doesn't realize it right away, he's been given another chance to stop the plane from exploding. And so the game consists of a series of days, each occurring on the same date and each ending with the destruction of a plane. Each day Sumio is faced with a new puzzle, from the fantastic ("my room was rearranged by ghosts!") to the mundane ("how can I get passed this guy who is blocking my way?"). Each puzzle is eventually solved by entering numbers into Katherine, Sumio's rotary computer-in-a-briefcase. Jack Katherine into some object, enter the correct sequence of numbers, and proceed to the next day. Like Michigan (and maybe No More Heros--I haven't played it), Flower, Sun, and Rain is sort of nonsensical and funny. Or rather, it tries to be funny. As a non-Japanese who can just barely parse the excessive text in this game, the humor seems out of place to me. And the game is tough to play, not because the mechanics are hard (you don't actually do much besides walk around and talk to people), but because the puzzles involve reading a huge amount of Japanese text. This game is just slightly beyond the level at which I can read in Japanese, so while I'm able to get enough to keep playing, I don't always have much clue as to what the heck is going on. Of course, this is a Suda51 game, so confusion may be intentional rather than the result of my failed reading ability. Flower, Sun, and Rain is headed to the DS sometime soon, which is a good thing. Not only is the laid-back adventure style a good fit for the DS (games like Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory have already proved this market), but it means that somebody will have to translate the damn thing into English. And though some of the sites on the net are complaining about the reduction in graphical quality for the DS version, I don't think any of them have actually played the PS2 version; while the art style is excellent, the actual graphics look incredibly dated. Flower, Sun, and Rain isn't a horror game (at least, I don't think it is--I'm only a few hours into it), but it's a pretty interesting game from a pretty interesting designer who tends to make games that are hard to put into concise categories. I'm looking forward to playing this game on the DS when it comes out--even if it doesn't make any sense, at least I'll know that it's not just me.

Destructoid has new high-res screens of Silent Hill 5. Among the collection is a shot of the protagonist shooting a zombie dog. Zombie dogs were pretty funny back when they were jumping through windows in 1995, but they're getting pretty tired lately. On the other hand, the screens also contain a giant dude who's face appears to be made out of hands, which is actually pretty cool.

See this? It's reality. Thanks to forums member RainbowDispair for pointing me to this interview with Nour Polloni about the up-and-coming Alone in the Dark 5. Polloni is the producer on the project, and she reveals a lot of details about what the game play will be like and what players should expect from the game. From the interview it sounds like it will be an action-oriented game in a large, almost free roaming environment, and by the way they want you to know that they have PHYSICS that are JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Polloni seriously harps on this point several times; the focus of the game, at least according to her, is to be as realistic as possible. That's certainly a really hard thing to pull off, and precious few games (Half-Life 2 is the only one that comes to mind) have really made it work. That said, I'm very interested in what they come up with; the move toward action-oriented game play certainly isn't surprising (le sigh), but on the other hand this game could turn out to be the best Alone in the Dark since Alone in the Dark 2: One Eyed Jack's Revenge.

One of the great things about running a site like this is that I get to meet people who have interests similar to my own. One of these people is forums member hellsing, who has been generating quite a bit of online content related to survival horror himself lately. First of all he's got this pretty neat video review of the GBA version Alone in the Dark 4, not to mention his recent interview with the writer of Silent Hill 5, which by the way is posted on his survival horror-themed blog.

A lot of content here, and all of it pretty interesting to boot. If you have a blog or site that is horror related, why not take this opportunity to post about it? I'm especially interested in sites that, like hellsing's, are focused on game design, industry, and review as they relate to horror.

Thanks to forums member Feighnt for pointing out this announcement over at Destructoid about Fatal Frame 4. In addition to the news that such a game exists (not to mention some creepy screenshots), the announcement also notes that the game is coming to the Wii (hello Wiimote camera!) and that crazy awesome game designer extraordinaire Suda51 is somehow involved. The only thing that could make this announcement better is a release date, but sadly none is yet available. Still: awesome! In much, much less exciting horror game news, Kotaku is reporting that a game based on the movie Saw will land around Halloween of this year. In other news, Fatal Frame 4 is coming out on the Wii! AWESOME.

This picture is not out of date, I swear. If you run a site about video games, or read message boards about video games, or even give Wikipedia articles on video games a passing glance, you are sure to find people arguing about asinine details of unimportant topics. I'm sure this is true for all kinds of subjects, especially those that have to do with popular culture, but since most of my internet surfing time is devoted to video game related sites, I've noticed it most dramatically in relation to video games. This site is no exception, of course, and today I am going to present an argument for an asinine detail of an unimportant topic that I've seen come up a few times: whether Resident Evil 4 should be considered a horror game or not. There are a few arguments in particular on this topic that I want to address, and I've enumerated them below. My real message here is that classification of media is an inexact science, and therefore it is pointless to argue the particulars of any particular classification. That's a little academic and esoteric-sounding, though, so I'm going to use RE4 as a way to ground that assertion. Point 1: Resident Evil 4 is an action game, which means it can't possibly be horror.. This is a very narrow-minded viewpoint that I've come across several times. The idea, I guess, is that horror games, particularly survival horror games, are required to scare the player by de-emphasizing combat or making it arduous. Previous Resident Evil games have rationed ammo and health, the Silent Hill series prefers bludgeons to guns, and games like Siren make combat extremely difficult on purpose. As I've written about in the past, many horror games seek to make the protagonist more vulnerable by weakening them in combat in order to increase tension. The problem with the idea that action and horror are incompatible is that to believe it you must assume that there is only one right way to make a scary video game. Consider horror film: we have no problem lumping Child's Play, Jacob's Ladder, and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu into the same "horror" category even though all three of those films are very different. I think the key requirement for a horror game is that it must attempt to be scary any way it can; whether that is achieved by making the player vulnerable or rationing save items or using excessive darkness is just a detail. I also think that Resident Evil 4 is very clearly designed to scare the player. The key difference between it and previous Resident Evil games is that the protagonist is much more deft at combat and ammo rationing has been removed from the equation. But think about how the Los Ganados swarm Leon from every side; consider the unkillable Chainsaw Man; recall the tension that is induced by those goddamn Regenerators; remember how the first encounter with a Verdugo made you dread the second. These are all classic Resident Evil-isms: they are the developers using over-the-top monsters to put the otherwise tough-looking protagonist in a weak position to induce fear. Making Ashley's life the player's responsibility has a similar effect, as does the extremely personal camera perspective. The fact that Leon cannot move and shoot at the same time should be a clear indication that the developers didn't want to make him so competent that he is never in danger. Compare their approach to the one used in Gears of War, which takes many of its stylistic cues from Resident Evil 4 but fails to induce tension in the same way. Point 2: The controls in Resident Evil 4 are too easy. Other Resident Evil games made controls difficult in order to increase tension. I am constantly astounded by this perspective. Perhaps it's my experience as a games developer that makes me feel this way, but Point 2 is so wrong in Holding up to run towards the camera can't be done in a lot of games. so many ways. It's true that the earlier Resident Evil games were known for their difficult control scheme, but the idea that such a scheme was intentionally used in order to make the player feel even more vulnerable is nonsense. Here is why the original Resident Evil control scheme was made the way it was. When it came out, the Dual Shock controller with its analog sticks had yet to be released; the controller that came with the PS1 only had a simple D-Pad. Most 3rd-person 3D games then (and now) employed a camera that followed behind the player, rotating with the player's movement; when the player pressed "up" on the D-Pad, that translated into "forward" in the world, where forward is whichever direction the camera is facing. Resident Evil, on the other hand, used fixed cameras, cameras that never rotated or moved from their position. This style of camera was a requirement, as Resident Evil used pre-rendered backgrounds (the fixed perspective also helped Resident Evil be so scary). The problem with that approach is that the definition of "forward" changes with every camera cut, and the player has no idea when that is going to happen. If you are holding up to run forward down a hall and then suddenly the camera cuts to an angle perpendicular to the previous view, your character would rotate 90 degrees and run straight into the wall. To compensate for this, the developers at Capcom made the control scheme local to the player rather than related to the camera. Thus "up" on the D-Pad moves the player in the direction that their character is facing. This way the player can run forward across any number of camera cuts without worrying about their character accidentally changing direction. The problem with a character-centric control scheme is that it makes no sense to people at first. The camera-centric scheme that most other games employ makes a lot of sense, and so to play Resident Evil people needed to train themselves to be able to drive their character around like a tank. A few years later Parasite Eve would mostly solve this problem by allowing the player's movement direction to persist across camera cuts; this approach was eventually polished and made standard by Devil May Cry. But in 1996 when Resident Evil shipped, the only reference for this type of game was Alone in the Dark, which used the same sort of control scheme to solve the same problem. Resident Evil's awkward controls were designed out of necessity, not because they served another purpose. If the developers had really wanted to make the control scheme difficult, they wouldn't have included the auto-aim functionality when shooting. More recent Resident Evil games (such as the GameCube remake) have featured other, better control schemes (Type C is awesome) without damaging the horror elements of the game at all. Point 3: Resident Evil 4 isn't horror because it is missing < insert favorite feature from previous games in the series >. A surprisingly large number of people can't get past the fact that the game says Resident Evil on the box and yet the content is so different from previous games. I don't really know what to say to these people; just like everything else, video games change and evolve. You don't have to like the new format, but I think that you are fooling yourself if you believe it to be intrinsically inferior to the previous format. It's a different design with different goals, but it reuses characters and themes from the rest of the series. That's not complicated, right? And there you have it. As promised, this was a lengthy rant on an asinine detail of an extremely unimportant topic. I feel like I've done my part to contribute to the internet, and no longer have to worry about getting into some flame war on a forum in order to fill my asinine topic debate quota for this month.

I finished Condemned this week and posted a review. I thought it was excellent; one of the best recent horror games that I've played. I went into the game with low expectations (the E3 2005 demo made it look really bad), but by the end boss I was throughly satisfied. Check the review for details about what makes Condemned such a neat entry into the horror genre.

Back around Halloween I mentioned that a CG Resident Evil movie had been announced by Capcom. Well today the first screens from the film are available over at Destructoid. The aesthetic reminds me of Resident Evil 2, which is good because Leon S Kennedy and Claire Redfield are the main characters.

Update: Kotaku has a whole trailer for you to peruse in all of its computer (de)generated glory.

Bioshock Dead Space A bunch of horror games have been announced this year, so I thought I'd take a step back and see what we can look forward to in the near future. I think this list is pretty complete, but please post information about upcoming games that I miss. Also, until the titles actually ship it will be pretty hard to tell if these games are really horror games or just some other genre in gothic trappings. With that, here's what's on the horizon: Condemned 2: Bloodshot - Q1 2008 - Xbox360, PS3 The sequel to the CSI-vs-demons Xbox360 launch title. Official site Left 4 Dead - Q2 2008 - Xbox360, PC Annoyingly named online horror-themed shooter; this one may not be Quest material, but I'll keep it on the radar. Here's the official site. Dead Space - Q3 2008 - Xbox360, PS3 Dead things in space, with a pretty Bioshocky aesthetic. Official site. Dead Island - 2008 - Xbox360, PC Zombies on a tropical island. Sounds like the House of the Dead move, though this game is guaranteed to be better than that film. Official site. Hydrophobia - 2008 - Xbox360 Mercenaries vs something scary in perpetually flooded environments. I think there is a pretty good chance that this is less of a game and more of a vehicle for water graphics, but we'll have to wait for it to come out. Official site. Silent Hill: 0rigins - Release Date Unknown - PS2 (already out on PSP) The PS2 version of this game was recently announced. I recently reviewed the PSP version. Resident Evil 5 - 2009 - Xbox360, PS3 Yes, it's Chris Redfield vs zombie villagers in Africa or maybe Haiti. Official site. Alan Wake - Release Date Unknown - Xbox360, PC A fascinating-sounding title that bills itself as a "psychological action thriller." Details are still sparse on this one, but I have pretty high hopes. Official site. Alone in the Dark 5 - Release Date Unknown - Xbox360, PS3, Wii, PS2 As I posted about before, Alone in the Dark 5 is now coming to the Wii and PS2 thanks to Hydravision. I think we'll see this game in 2008, but no firm release date has been announced yet. There's a sort of official site, but it's also one of these marketing countdown things and doesn't actually have any game info. According to the countdown the "truth will be revealed" in a couple of days. Shockingly, I suspect the truth to be that Alone in the Dark 5 takes place in central park. Silent Hill 5 - Release Date Unknown - Xbox360, PS3 Another title that will probably make it in 2008. The rumor mill says Q3 2008, but that's not official so I've left the date open for now. There doesn't seem to be an official site, so here's a pretty complete fan site. It is interesting to note that all of these games except for Resident Evil 5 are being developed by Western developers. Japanese developers haven't announced any horror games lately, which might have something to do with the absolute dominance of the Nintendo DS and Wii in Japan (those platforms are dominating here as well). I know for sure that there is another as-yet-unannounced popular Japanese horror franchise headed to the Wii (again, via an American developer). On the other hand, it seems like the Wii is particularly suited to horror gaming, as the Wiimote would make a perfect flashlight and Resident Evil 4 for the Wii kicks ass. I'm hoping that we hear about some new games for those platforms early next year.

The pretty great-looking Penumbra: Overture is now getting a sequel, which looks pretty neat. Destructoid has the scoop (as well as a video), and there is more info at the official site. I don't have a PC and thus wasn't able to play the full version of Overture, but the demo seemed very neat. I liked how the developers used physics to force the player to actually perform actions within the game world; that seems like it could be an interesting axis for horror, and the trailer for the sequel seems to really play that aspect up (analog control over doors, etc).

Destructoid has some new footage of gameplay from the upcoming Silent Hill 5. Everything about it looks pretty good except for the camera; it looks to me like it's a standard American third-person-on-the-second-stick camera rather than the rather brilliant camera system from previous games in the series. I hope that I'm wrong and that the Collective has a system just as awesome as the previous games (cue slight rotation to the left as I approach this door) in the works.

Kotaku is reporting a fairly substantial-sounding rumor that Climax and Konami will be bringing Silent Hill: 0rigins to the PS2 in 2008. Makes sense--ports are pretty cheap and the PSP isn't exactly a money-making machine. Here's looking forward to a PS2 port of the latest addition to the Silent Hill series.

I've posted a new feature with a lengthy title: The Changing Utility of the Otherworld in the Silent Hill Series. This article is about how the use and meaning of Nowhere, the Otherworld that appears in every Silent Hill game, differs from game to game. I wrote this after thinking about how Silent Hill: 0rigins' use of the Otherworld really changes its effect on the game (which I touched upon in my review). After thinking about it for a while, it seems like the effect generated by the Otherworld is actually pretty different in each of the Silent Hill games; the same basic mechanic is being used in different ways with different results. So in this article I tried to explore what some of those uses are, and how they affect their respective games as a whole.

Blood? Check. Gore? Check. Fun? Nope! I finally completed Cold Fear this evening and posted a review. Unfortunately my opinion of the game did not improve very much over the last time I posted about it; despite the excellent graphics and fairly solid control mechanics, I found Cold Fear to be almost entirely devoid of fun. While the game does improve once you move from the ship to the oil rig, its lack of map, horrible save point system, and unpredictable ammo rationing approach pretty much doom the entire experience. Don't even get me started on the end boss--what a load of crap that section was. I know a lot of you guys enjoyed this game. What I'd like to know is, why? What did you enjoy about it? I had a really hard time thinking of anything other than the graphics and presentation that I thought was well done.

I finished Silent Hill 0rigins the other day. It's a solid Silent Hill game, absolutely worthy of inclusion in the series. Though it's technically a prequel to the original Silent Hill, it plays like an amalgam of every game in the series. The locations and progression through Silent Hill are very similar to the original game, many of the graphics effects (like the fog and shadowing system) are taken directly from Silent Hill 2, the monster designs are a mix of the second and third games, and there are even a few aspects of Silent Hill 4 thrown into the mix (voyeurism via holes in walls, chargeable melee combat, weapons that degrade with use). There's an analog for Pyramid Head (though he can't approach the awesomeness of the original triangle-topped antagonist from Silent Hill 2), extrapolation of the monster design themes defined by Silent Hill 2 and 3, and a (somewhat awkward) story line involving both the cult from Silent Hill 1 and 3, and an introspective protagonist working his way through manifestations of his own problems.

And, as a mixture of four awesome games (well, three awesome games and one mediocre one), it actually works pretty well. The game play in general will seem intensely familiar to anybody who has played a Silent Hill game before--everything from the rate at which maps are completed to the placement of health drinks in doorways and alleys throughout the town has been duplicated with meticulous care. It's almost pointless trying to describe it; if you've played any of the first three games in this series, you know exactly, down to the very last detail, what to expect.

There are only a few minor points at which the game differs from its predecessors. Combat is similar to Silent Hill 3, except that charging hits (per the fourth game) has been added and there is a mechanic for new, one time use weapons (heavy things you can break over enemies' heads). Some monsters are now able to grapple, and a key sequence mini-game is required to get them off without taking damage. Weapons also break after you use them for a while (an amazingly short while--three or four hits sometimes), so you have to keep picking up new bludgeons as you move around the world. But fundamentally, even the combat feels pretty much exactly the same as the previous iterations. It even suffers from some of the same problems as the earlier games: the bosses are all trivially easy as long as you save your guns, etc (at least there's no giant moths in this version).

The other major change to note is the way that the character accesses the Otherworld; unlike previous games, Travis can switch from one world to the other at will as long as he has access to a mirror. This changes the role of the Otherworld somewhat--it becomes part of the larger traversal puzzle gameplay, rather than being a dramatic plot point. I have more to write about the Otherworld, but I'll save it for a different post. Suffice to say that the implementation in Origins, while different, works well.

As the story line goes, it's a little bland. The story in Silent Hill 4 was pretty bland as well, I thought, but the previous games, particularly Silent Hill 2, had excellent stories to tell. The problem with the story in Origins is that, like the game play, it's just an mixture of things that have already happened in the previous games. While that sort of dedication to the precedent is welcomed for the game play, it makes the story fairly predictable, and drains it of some of its life. Also, while the level design does an excellent job of building tension, sometimes the payoff seems weak (particularly, the fight with the Pyramid Head knockoff was pretty anticlimactic). Also, the protagonist himself is a pretty thin character; though we learn about his life while playing the game, we learn almost nothing about his personality or feelings as an adult. I mentioned in my initial impressions that I felt like he didn't comment on his situation enough, and now that I've finished the game, I think that being so stoic hurts the game's ability to make him a convincing character.

But really, I have very little to complain about here. The graphics are good, the art style is spot-on for the series, the soundtrack is, as always, phenomenal. Being on the PSP does hurt the game a bit, as it's harder to forget that you are playing a game and the stupid analog nub is a much suckier interface than a control stick, but these complaints are hardly the fault of the Origins developers. One thing that did suck is that about half way through the game I lost most of my sound effects permanently. This is probably due to the way that developers use the PSP memory during sleep mode (we had similar problems on a couple of the PSP games I worked on), but it was too bad because the sounds are pretty good.

Silent Hill Origins is an enjoyable amalgam of the previous Silent Hill games. While it's hardly a game play revolution, it doesn't need to be: the tried and true Silent Hill mechanics continue to work today as well as they did before. As a developer, I find it impressive that a third party developer has been able to reproduce Konami's formula so throughly; this is not an easy task and the guys at Climax have done an excellent job.

Kotaku is reporting that Alone in the Dark 5, previously announced for PS3 and Xbox360, will also be coming out on PS2 and Wii. Obscure developers Hydravision will be handling the ports, it sounds like. As an unnecessary aside, I'll take this moment to complain again about how next gen development costs hurt innovative games, which is certainly the logic behind this announcement. I'm sorry for Hydravision, though--downports from next gen systems are rough, I've been there and it's not fun. That said, a Wii version of ALOD5 would be very welcome!

I've put about an hour into Silent Hill: 0rigins so far and I'm having a pretty good time. This game is different from the rest of the Silent Hill series because it's exclusive to the PSP and was developed by Climax rather than Konami, and I think a lot of people were worried that the magic would be lost without the golden touch of Akira Yamaoka and his crew. I'm happy to report that, at least for the first hour or two, Silent Hill: 0rigins is extremely faithful to its predecessors in almost every way.

It's kind of like when you buy a tribute CD to a band you really like, and on it is a cover of a song that you particularly like. The cover isn't really all that different than the original, just performed by different people, and you find that you enjoy it almost as much as the original track. Silent Hill: 0rigins is like that.

The game is extremely similar to the original Silent Hill in terms of progression and presentation, though little bits (the monster design, mostly) have been taken from Silent Hill 2 as well. Some points in the game feel a little like fan service, but mostly the homages to earlier Silent Hill games are welcome. The designers are clearly huge fans of the series, and they know what players want as well. In the first five minutes we're plopped in foggy Silent Hill, and of course our first destination is the hospital. Within ten minutes we've killed our first zombie nurse and already transitioned to the otherworld with the help of a certain young woman who's last name is probably Gillespie. The game hits all the right notes in quick succession; it almost feels like I'm back in 1999 enjoying my favorite PS1 game all over again.

I do think that the developers should have allowed the protagonist to self-reflect more. One of the great things about earlier Silent Hill games is that the characters are constantly talking to themselves while exploring. Almost every time you examine something, even if it has no gameplay bearing, the character will comment about it. I think this effect was perfected in Silent Hill 3; Heather's comments about the things she sees not only explain the game world to us, they develop her personality as a character. Travis, the 0rigins protagonist, seems unfazed by pretty much everything. He doesn't react when he kills his first body bag monster, or when he first switches to the otherworld, or when he notices that the roads in Silent Hill seem to terminate in infinite chasms. He comes off as totally disconnected or really, really tough, which was probably not the developer's intent. Still, this is an extremely minor gripe; almost everything about the game so far has been pretty great.

I'm impressed that Climax was able to reproduce the Silent Hill formula so throughly. The camera movement, room layout, flashlight, user interface, and sound effects are all spot on. I hope that Silent Hill 5, which is also being developed outside of Konami, will come out this good.

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.

Playstation Museum has a nice summary of Resident Evil 1.5, the unreleased precursor to Resident Evil 2. The YouTube video is already offline, but the overview and screenshots are very nice.

On a more personal note, I became a father this past Sunday! I don't really use this space to talk about myself very much, but the birth of my daughter is probably the most important thing that has ever happened to me. I'm confident that she'll grow up with a strong interest in zombies and killer nurses.

Speaking of Dementium: The Ward, here's some game play footage. Doesn't look half-bad!

I posted a little bit about Dementium: The Ward before, and since then the Horror FPS for DS has been mostly off my radar. The game is on schedule for release at the end of October (hooray for Halloween), and I am very interested to see if horror in a portable format will work.

But in the mean time, Dementium's publisher Gamecock has been publishing their communications with the ESRB in an IGN "director's diary." I'm sure everybody knows that game developers get their games rated by the ESRB voluntarily (though no console maker will allow an un-rated game to be published for their system), but were you aware that ESRB certification also requires approval for video game ads and trailers!? The commentary over at IGN (beware, IGN) is sort of fascinating: the publisher made a pretty gross trailer for their game and the ESRB has forced them to censor it. Of course, thanks to the magic of the internet, we can watch the uncensored trailer over at Eurogamer.

The interesting thing to me is that the trailer is actually pretty terrible; it's really not worth the effort it must have taken them to get everything censored. As with the Rule of Rose controversy, censorship is having the opposite of its intended effect: it has increased attention on work in question.

ESRB, your existence is useful because game developers need a third-party organization to rate their games. Games are a medium that span all age groups, and having a rating is a very easy way to raise awareness about the kinds of games that exist and curb offense from sensitive non-gamers without necessitating litigation. However, your usefulness ends there: you are not our mothers and we don't need you to tell us what we can or cannot watch. If you want to issue ratings for trailers or whatever, be our guest. But don't tell developers what they can and can not publish--that's stepping across the boundary from classification to censorship. And come on, this is the internet--an infinite supply of offensive media far worse than any game commercial is waiting right behind that little Google search box. Any attempt to protect the user is moot; one mis-click and they can have goatse all over their screen. Give us the benefit of the doubt: if we have the internet, we can deal with video game trailers without your approval.

If you like PC adventure games and you like H.P. Lovecraft, you might be interested in Darkness Within. Predictably, it's a PC adventure game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Via Kotaku.

If the player fires at this exact instant, he'll probably miss. Every couple of months I pull out a game that I've started but never completed. I play these games for a while, make some progress, then put them down again, sometimes for months. Usually these are games that just never grabbed me (like Extermination), or games that I was playing before I got interrupted by something else, and this way I eventually am able to complete them. But there are a few titles that keep coming up in the rotation over and over again that I'm never able to make any progress on whatsoever. Right now the worst two offenders are Rule of Rose and Cold Fear. Both of these are terrible games, and actually, they both have similar problems: the game play is so broken that progression is either extremely frustrating or downright impossible. I recently complained about Rule of Rose, so now it's Cold Fear's turn. OK, developers, here's the deal: any time you have a source of infinite damage, you need to match it with a source of infinite health. For example, Cold Fear contains enemies that respawn every time you enter certain rooms. Respawning in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means that the player can be exposed to a potentially unlimited source of damage. If you do not pair respawning enemies with respawning health and ammo, the player can eventually get into a situation where they have no means to defend or heal themselves and yet are required to progress. At this point the player has little recourse other than starting the game over from scratch, as there is really no way to play any sort of game that only punishes and never rewards. Now, I know that in Cold Fear, you guys at Darkworks made it so that some enemies drop ammo and health, especially if it looks like the player needs it. But it's not enough; if I've run out of ammo shooting the same goddamn respawning monster for the nth time, there's very little chance that I'll survive my next encounter long enough to actually kill the thing and search it for more ammo. And the problem is compounded by the rocking of the boat (which makes it harder to aim than in any other game in this genre), the need to shoot guys in the head, and the lack of a map; you might know where the rear deck storage hold is, but I sure the fuck don't, and every time I backtrack through certain rooms looking for the one unlocked door, you spawn another zombie. Do you see where I am going with this? The game play has me wondering around a ship, trying not to run out of ammo or health against an infinite number of zombies, who by the way can kill me from off the screen before I realize they are there. I got to a point in Rule of Rose where my options are to a) start over from scratch, or b) never play the game again. Progression is impossible given the amount of life I have left and where I managed to save. I'm not quite at that point in Cold Fear yet, but I am close: I played the same section over and over again about 15 times this evening, sometimes dying after 10 minutes of play, sometimes in the first 30 seconds. It's not that the game is hard that frustrates me, it's that it is unfair and arbitrary. Everything else about the game is actually sort of all right, but the whole experience is utterly ruined by a few fatal flaws in its design.

Japanese game magazine Famitsu recently published an article called "The Heart of Horror Games" (part of their regular "The Heart of..." series). I'll post a bit more about the article itself later, but first I wanted to relate the list of horror games that they came up with. You'll notice a lot of similarities to my list, except that Famitsu counts "novel games," while I do not. There are a lot of titles in here that I've never heard of before (though most are not the type of game I am looking for), so I've included the Romanization of each name as well as the original Japanese and a clunky translation for most tiles. I skipped doing this for games that are well known or have been released in the West.

While many of the entries sound interesting, I think it is also interesting that some titles were omitted. Games like Nanatsu no Hikan and The Note seem like they would fit right into this list, yet they are nowhere to be found.

The list is sorted in order of release (oldest games to newest games), and contains only games that were released in Japan (and apparently only console games). I've noted games that are novel games, as well as 3D Exploration games (MYST-style). When I was unable to find any information about a game, I've marked it as "??? Game."

A note about my translations: I'm not a great translator, so while I've made an attempt to translate the names of these games correctly, you'll notice that the results are often pretty weird. In fact, there may already be better translations of some of these names out there; in only a few cases was I able to find any existing documentation in English. So take my translations with a grain of salt.

Title Platform Japanese Notes Sweet Home Famicom Splatterhouse TurboGrafx-16 Otogiriso Super Famicom 弟切草 Sound Novel, "St. John's Wort" Splatterhouse 2 Genesis Splatterhouse 3 Genesis Mansion of the Hidden Souls SegaCD 夢見館の物語 Alone in the Dark 3DO Kamaitachi No Yoru Super Famicom かまいたちの夜 Novel Game, "Night of the Kamaitachi" New Mansion of the Hidden Souls - Somebody's Behind That Door... Saturn 真説・夢見館 扉の奥に誰かが… I think this is the same game as before. D 3DO Yakouchuu Super Famicom 夜光虫 Novel Game, "Noctiluca scintillans" Darkseed Saturn Gakkou no Kaidan Saturn 学校の怪談 ??? Game, "School Ghost Stories" Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi Super Famicom 学校であった怖い話 Sound Novel, "Scary Stories from School" Clock Tower Super Famicom QUANTUM GATE 1 ~Akumu No Jyosyou~ Saturn Quantum Gate ～悪夢の序章～ ??? Game, "Quantum Gate 1 - Preface to a Nightmare" Majyotachi no Nemuri Super Famicom 魔女たちの眠り Novel Game, "Witches' Sleep" Yaku ~Yujyou Dangi~ PS1 厄　〜友情談義〜 Novel Game, "Misfortune ~Discussing Friends~" Alone in the Dark 2: One Eyed Jack's Revenge Saturn Twilight Syndrome ~Investigative Report~ PS1 トワイライトシンドローム 探索編 Novel Game, some exploration Tsukikomori Super Famicom 晦-つきこもり Novel Game Resident Evil PS1 HORROR TOUR Saturn 3D Exploring Game Gekka Kiri Maboroshi Dan - TORICO Saturn 月下霧幻譚-TORICO ??? Game, "Illusion in the Moonlit Fog" Gakko de Atta Kowai Hanashi S PS1 学校であった怖い話S Sound Novel, "Scary Stories from School S" Twilight Syndrome ~Completed Investigation~ PS1 トワイライトシンドローム 究明編 Novel game, some exploration Enemy Zero Saturn Clock Tower 2 PS1 This is "Clock Tower 1" in the US. Kyofu Shinbun PS1 恐怖新聞 Sound Novel, "Fear Newspaper" Yaku Tsu ~Noroi no Gemu~ PS1 厄痛～呪いのゲーム Sound Novel, "Misfortune 2 ~The Cursed Game~" The "2" part of the title is a dumb play on words with the word for pain. Darkseed Saturn I don't understand why Darkseed is listed twice, once in 1995 and once in 1997, by different companies. Is it a typo, or are there actually two different Darkseed games? Moonlight Syndrome PS1 ムーンライトシンドローム Novel Game, some exploration. R?MJ - THE MYSTERY HOSPITAL PS1 3D Exploring Game Prisoner of Ice ~Demon's Descent~ PS1 プリズナーオブアイス〜邪神降臨〜 Adventure Game Resident Evil 2 PS1 Clock Tower - Ghost Head PS1 This is "Clock Tower 2" in the US. ...Iru! PS1 ・・・いる！ ??? Game, "It's here!" This title is impossible to search for because the name is a common word. Daiyuurei Yashiki ~Hamamura Jun no Jitsuwa Kaidan PS1 大幽霊屋敷 浜村淳の実話怪談 Novel Game, "Huge Ghost Mansion - Jun Hamamura's Real Ghost Stories" Yasoukyoku PS1 夜想曲 Sound Novel, "Nocturne" Echo Night PS1 Juggernaut PS1 Juggernaut 〜戦慄の扉〜 3D Exploring Game, "Juggernaut - The Horrible Door" Silent Hill PS1 WEB MYSTERY ~Yochimu wo Miru Neko~ DC WEB MYSTERY 予知夢ヲ見ル猫 FMV Game, "WEB MYSTERY - The Cat with Precognitive Dreams" Inagawa Junji no Kyoufu no Yashiki PS1 稲川淳二の恐怖の屋敷 FMV Game, "Junji Inagawa's Mansion of Fear" Echo Night 2< - Nemuri no Shihaisha/a> PS1 エコーナイト#2 眠りの支配者 "Echo Night #2 - The Sleeping Leader" Resident Evil 3 PS1 Yuuyami Doori Tankentai PS1 夕闇通り探検隊 FMV Novel Game, "Twilight Street Explorers" AKA "Season of Twilight" Yakouchuu 2 - Satsujin Kouro N64 夜光虫2　殺人航路 Novel Game, "Noctiluca scintillans 2 - Murderer's Sea Route" D2 DC Shisya no Yobu Yakata PS1 死者の呼ぶ館 Novel Game, "The House that Calls the Dead" Resident Evil: Code Veronica DC The Ring DC Inagawa Junji no Mayonaka no Takushi PS1 稲川淳二 真夜中のタクシー FMV Game, "Junji Inagawa's Midnight Taxi" Twilight Syndrom Saikai PS1 トワイライトシンドローム 再会 Novel Game, some exploration, "Twilight Syndrome Reunion" Oumagatoki PS1 逢魔が時 Novel Game, "Dangerous Dusk" Yasoukyoku 2 PS1 夜想曲2 Sound Novel, "Nocturne 2" the FEAR PS2 FMV Game Oumagatoki 2 PS1 逢魔が時2 Novel Game, "Dangerous Dusk 2" Silent Hill 2 PS2 Fatal Frame PS2 零　〜ZERO〜 "Rei Zero", a play on words because "rei" can mean "ghost" or (with the character they used) it can mean zero. Kamaitachi No Yoru 2 - Kangoku Jima no Warabu Uta PS2 かまいたちの夜2 監獄島のわらべ唄 Novel Game, "Night of the Kamaitachi 2: Prison Island's Folk Song" Resident Evil 0 GC Clock Tower 3 PS2 Silent Hill 3 PS2 Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File PS2 Siren PS2 Fatal Frame 2 PS2 Resident Evil Outbreak PS2 Echo Night: Beyond PS2 Kuon PS2 Silent Hill 4 PS2 Hayarigami Keishichou Kaii Jiken Fairu PS2 流行り神 警視庁怪異事件ファイル Novel Game, "Fashionable God: The Strange Incident at Police Headquarters Case File" Michigan PS2 Resident Evil Outbreak 2 PS2 Akai Ito PS2 アカイイト Novel Game, "The Red String" Resident Evil 4 GC Haunting Ground PS2 Constantine Xbox Higanjima PSP 彼岸島 Novel Game Fatal Frame 3 PS2 THE Noroi no Ge-mu PS2 THE 呪いのゲーム Novel Game, "THE Cursed Game" Rule of Rose PS2 Resident Evil Deadly Silence DS Indigo Prophecy PS2 AKA "Fahrenheit" I wrote some notes about this game. Jyui Dr. Toumajyou Tarou PSP 呪医 Dr.杜馬丈太郎 Novel Game, "Dr. Tarou Toumajyou: Cursed Physician" Siren 2 PS2 Dead Rising Xbox360 Kamaitachi No Yoru x3 Mikadukijima Jiken no Shinsou PS2 かまいたちの夜×3 三日月島事件の真相 Novel Game, "Night of the Kamaitachi Triple: The True Events of the Crescent Moon Island Incident" Condemned Xbox360 Escape from Bug Island Wii Vampire Rain Xbox360 Hikurashi no Naku Koro ni Matsuri PS2 ひぐらしのなく頃に　祭 Sound Novel, "When They Cry - Festival" (literal translation is "When Cicadas Cry").

Kotaku has some impressions and a trailer for a new zombie-themed game, Dead Island. Information is still pretty sparse, but the video is kind of neat.

Kotaku has some leaked Silent Hill 0rigins footage up this morning. Looking good Climax, just don't screw it up!

Only one of these scenes is controversial. I've been thinking for a while about how best to address the controversy surrounding the recently-released Resident Evil 5 trailer. The trailer, which depicts Chris Redfield (a white male) shooting black zombies in what appears to be Africa, has raised more than a few eyebrows. Kim Platt is one of many people who find the trailer disgustingly racist, and you can read her thoughts on the matter at her blog Black Looks. Racism is such an inflammatory topic here in America that I've thought pretty long and hard about how best to discuss this matter here without the debate degrading into personal attacks. I think that the problems that this country has with racism and bigotry are extremely important to discuss, but the internet has proven to be full of really offensive people, so I hesitated before posting this. Still, it's such an important topic that I don't think I can really ignore it. Briefly, I want to describe the criticism against the trailer as I understand it. As Platt puts it, the trailer is "problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults." I'm going to set aside the "marketed to children and young adults" part of her complaint for the moment, as it's a common stereotype that many non-gamers hold and doesn't really pertain to the real discussion here. Platt is echoing the reactions that many people have when they see the Resident Evil 5 trailer: a white guy shooting mindless black dudes is not socially acceptable in American society. There are a few things I want to say about this controversy. We have had a pretty interesting discussion about this on the forum, and I want to sort of collapse my rambling posts from that thread into something more coherent here. The first thing I want to talk about is culture clash. When I first moved to Japan in the late 1990s, I slowly experienced the sensation known as culture shock. In my case, it was a feeling of being perpetually off-balance, and it was caused by curious juxtapositions or behaviors of people in Japan that I couldn't quite explain. I made the mistake most people make when they visit a foreign country: I mistook superficial similarities in my own culture and the Japanese culture as proof that the people in Japan operate pretty much the same as people in America. I saw neat buildings and neon lights and people going to work every day and figured that Japan was pretty much like America except that they drive on the other side of the street. Culture shock began to take hold as I realized that while Japanese people do many of the same things Americans do, they don't necessarily do them for the same reasons. The critical mistake I had made was the assumption that I could look upon some superficial Japanese thing or event and somehow divine what the motivation behind it was. I can do this in America, but I eventually realized that I can't do it with any level of reliability in Japan. Since then I've become a lot more conscious about how things I consider to be "common sense" may not actually be all that common outside of my home country. And that is why I don't believe that the people who made the Resident Evil 5 trailer are trying to be racist, even unconsciously. It's true that depicting a white man shooting African villagers is unacceptable in American society, but this video isn't the product of American people. America has a terrible history of racism, slavery, and subjugation, and our continued struggle with these issues as a culture is reflected in this controversy: clearly, the video invokes images that remind people of a not-so-distant past where this sort of thing may have happened not to zombies, but to real, living people. But the people who made the game that this video comes from have none of that history; Japan has its own set of problems with racism and xenophobia, but they are not the same shape as America's. I think that people like Platt find the trailer so disgusting because they assume that anybody with common sense would understand that these sorts of images are bound to offend, and therefore they conclude that the people who made the video must be intentionally trying to offend--it seems like unabashed racism. But I think Platt has made the same mistake I did back in Japan: she assumes to understand Capcom's intent because she assumes that the cultural signals she is receiving are the same ones that were intended to be sent. But this isn't necessarily true; when dealing with a different culture, I don't think you can make any assumptions about what "common sense" is. And if you don't understand the motivation behind the work, I don't think you can justify the extremely serious allegation of racism. Please note that I'm not trying to argue that the RE5 trailer isn't offensive. People take offense at things based on their personal sensibilities, and I'm not about to tell anybody that they are wrong to be offended by anything. It's your personal prerogative to be offended about whatever you want. And frankly, I do understand what Platt is talking about; the trailer does invoke images that make me uncomfortable, but because I don't really know what the creators of the trailer are thinking, I think that discomfort says more about me and my culture than it does about them. I also think it is fair to fault Capcom for not being more sensitive to their target audience. They should have anticipated this sort of response, and while I don't think it's fair to call them racist, I do think that the label of insensitive and clumsy is appropriate. Resident Evil is not their only problem either: they recently removed an Islamic phrase (link requires Gamasutra account) from one of their other games after they received complains from Muslims. But I think that there is a huge difference between racism--the purposeful propagation of a negative or dehumanizing stereotype--and inadvertently offending people because of cultural insensitivity. I also want to talk very briefly about the trailer itself. I want to note that this entire controversy is based on about 30 seconds of footage from a game that we know nothing about and that isn't scheduled for release until 2009. I also think that people too quickly overlook the content of the game itself. While it might seem like shooting zombies is a pretty straight-forward video game premise, it is worth remembering that Night of the Living Dead, the film that spawned the zombie genre as we know it today, is a pretty damning commentary on race relations in America. Given how little we know about Resident Evil 5, I think it's a bit premature to make judgments about it, especially considering the roots of the zombie genre. One last point to make here. After Kim Platt wrote about her reaction to the Resident Evil 5 footage, her blog became the target of angry gamers who left a barrage of extremely offensive comments. To the people who posted those comments: you are the problem with this country. It's not video games that perpetuate racism, it's assholes like you! People like you give the rest of us gamers a bad name, and you are actively contributing to one of the central problems in America today. What century do you think this is? Shame on you.

Here's some white-hot game play footage from Resident Evil 5. It looks a whole lot like Resident Evil 4, which is absolutely fine by me!

As I am sure the regulars of this site are aware, I am way, way behind on my database maintenance. Part of the reason is that adding new games to the list is always controversial, and another part of the reason has to do with the crazy busy schedule I've had lately. But the biggest reason is that adding games to the database takes time. I need to dig up a lot of information about each game before I can add it, and it is not uncommon for the process to take several hours. Recently, fourms member SyberiaWinx wrote me to complain about my failure to add Ronin Blade (aka Soul of the Samurai) to the database. She was kind enough to supply all the information I need to actually add the game, making the process much, much easier on me (though I still need to see more information about this game before I'm convinced it's horror, but that's another issue altogether). So maybe instead of waiting around for me to get my ass in gear and update the database, you guys can help me out. Below I've listed a bunch of games that I know are missing from the database, as well as the information I need to be able to add each game. If you have some free time and want to expedite the game-adding process, it would be super helpful if you could dig up this information and post it here. It will cut down my time-to-add time by close to 90%. Here's the info I need before I can add a game to the database: The name of the title in all regions that it was released The release date in North America. If it didn't come out in North America, the release date in its country of origin. The regions (America, Japan, Europe) that the game was released in. The systems (PC, PS2, Xbox360, etc) that the game was released on. The average score of at least 10 reviews. You can use GameFaqs or MetaCritic as long as they have > 10 reviews, but if those sites do not list the game or do not contain enough reviews, you need to track down more. The world score isn't useful unless there are a minimum of 10 reviews computed in the average. GameFaqs user reviews are unreliable and should only be used as a last resort. Please post links to the reviews you used to calculate the average. Please calculate the actual decimal average of the reviews as X/100. Links to at least five screen shots, ideally at 640x448 resolution or larger for PS1 and PS2 games. Ideally showing game play and not menus or cut scenes. Ideally with no other review site's water mark (IGN, etc) on the image. The name of the developer. Any official web sites that may exist. Here are the games that I know I am missing. Feel free to suggest other games or tell me that some of the items in this list are wrong. Please review the inclusion requirements before posting. F.E.A.R. (added!) Twilight Syndrome Saikai (and perhaps the rest of the Twilight Syndrome series--need more info) Soul of the Samurai (if it is indeed a horror game) The Darkness (added!) Gakkou no Kaidan G (maybe; can't find any info about this game) (discarded!) Silent Hill 5 (added!) Dino Crisis (1, and maybe 2) (Added!) Obscure 2 (added!) Escape from Bug Island (begrudgingly) (added!) Condemned 2 (I guess? Is this series really about horror?) (added!) Vampire Rain (maybe? if it's more than a brawler/shooter with vampires, I'm game) Harker (maybe? again, don't know enough about it) Alan Wake (looks awesome, but is it horror?) (Thanks to various forum members for helping to compile this list) So, what do you think? If you think one of these games, or even some other game that I don't have listed here is quest-worthy, and if you have some spare time on your hands, it would be pretty awesome if you could help me track the requisite information down.

Helloooooo Nurse! Let me take a moment to recommend this facinating article about symbolism in Silent Hill 2. The author picks apart the characters, the locations, and the plot of the story to show how we can interpret each as a manifestation of the protagonist's particular psychological problems. Really well throught out and worth a read. In much less excting Silent Hill news, here's some video of Silent Hill Arcade that I have mentioned before. It appears to be House of the Dead 2 + fog. Hooray.

Every once in a blue moon I write things. And even less frequently, other people agree with me.

Kotaku has some hands-on impressions of Silent Hill: 0rgins for PSP. They seem to like it in their "everything is flawed" sort of way. The good news is that the game doesn't seem to lose its engrossing strength on a handheld system.

In as few words as possible, here's some horror-related news and links from E3. Konami has officially announced (with screen shots) the development of Silent Hill 5, to be completed by Harker-developer The Collective. A new Resident Evil 5 trailer is available (Africa!). Also more information on Left 4 Dead and Condemned 2.

And in some non-E3 news, I've finally tracked down Ghost Vibration and Nanatsu no Hikan: Senritsu no Bishou on a trip to Tokyo this week. These have eluded me for a few years, so I'm glad to add them to the collection.

Nice art, but where's the game? I tried to play Rule of Rose again today after almost a year hiatus. I don't know exactly how to put this, as I know a lot of horror fans enjoyed this game, but I think that it's terrible. There are so many problems with it I don't even know where to begin. The game mechanics are simultaneously trite and poorly implemented; though you spend most of the game running around and investigating, the areas you visit are very similar (boring) and the running mechanics themselves are flawed. Combat is a joke; getting accosted by even the most under-evolved enemy peon is likely to result in your death because the melee mechanics are absolutely terrible, and each enemy hit does about three times more damage than any single health item can restore. The game design seems to be thus: find an item, give it to the dog so that he can use it to find the next item, repeat until you find everything or get really angry and turn the machine off. Finally, the promising premise of adolescent girl cruelty taken to the extreme seems to be wasted on meaningless dialog and repetitive missions. The only thing that Rule of Rose seems to have going for it is its style. The game looks pretty phenomenal, especially the cut scenes (though the game is dark enough that I had to adjust my TV to maximum brightness). The style of 1930's Victorian England works pretty well, and it's backed up by some great art and music. The style is also cohesive across the whole game, from the user interface in the pause menu to the locales. And maybe, for some people, style is enough. I touched on this idea in my review of Kuon, another game that has plenty of nice art and terrible game play. I suspect the people who are enjoying Rule of Rose like the style and the art and the premise enough to give the game play aspects a pass. However, I'm not one of those people. I faulted the Silent Hill movie for being too much style and not enough substance, and I'm going to go ahead and fault Rule of Rose for the same offense. I should note that I've not finished the game yet, so my impression may yet change (it's certainly happened before), but at the moment I'd much rather watch Rule of Rose the movie than try to drudge my way through Rule of Rose the game.

Thanks to Kotaku for this post about Dementium: The Ward, a new horror game for the Nintendo DS. It looks pretty good (especially considering how well other non-horror adventure games have turned out on that system), and I'm really happy to see people exploring horror themes on a handheld. I'll definitely pick this up when it comes out.

In related news, Touch the Dead, another zombie-themed DS game, is really goddamn hard. A good friend got a copy and we've been unable to beat the first level!

Update: Here's a pretty good interview with the developer of The Ward, Renegade Kid. They are confident that survival horror will work on the DS without much trouble. I am looking forward to this game a lot.

I finished Haunting Ground this morning and posted a review. It's an evolutionary step up from Clock Tower 3, both in terms of graphics and game play complexity. While I mostly enjoyed it, there were some things about this title that didn't really click for me, including the way the protagonist is presented and the repetition required by the game. On the other hand, it's sort of nice to play a game so rooted in old-school mechanics that does not suffer from bad controls, bad graphics, or horrible loading times. In short, it's something of a mixed bag. Check out the full review for details.

I haven't posted about actual games on the horizon lately, so here's some quick updates:

• I could have sworn Silent Hill: 0rgins was on the fast-track to cancellation, but this new GameInformer article proves me wrong. It looks like this game might actually ship! Via Kotaku.
• A Wii version of Resident Evil 4 has been announced. There's some videos available, and it looks pretty cool (Wiimote aiming!).
• A new Resident Evil rail-shooter called The Umbrella Chronicles is also headed for Wii. Check out the official site (contains video) to get an idea of what to expect.
• Possession, the RTS-meets-zombie game from Blitz, is apparently on hold. That's usually the mark of death in this industry, but hopefully that game eventually sees the light of day.
• Sadness, another game that I expect to never be published, has switched developers. I wouldn't hold your breath for this one.

Update: Here's some interesting comments by Akira Yamaoka on how Silent Hill 5 will mostly resemble Silent Hill 2, rather than 3, 4, or 0rgins. Whoo-hoo!

Update #2: Whoa, all of a sudden the horror game frequency is abuzz with activity! First, there is a new Alone in the Dark 5 in-engine trailer over at Kotaku. Also, one of you guys posted this link to new Obscure screens. Thanks for the info!

This teddy bear thing is one of the coolest parts of Ghosthunter This evening I finally finished playing Ghost Hunter and posted a review. I expected this game to be a pretty bland shooter and was surprised to find it to be a sometimes-inspired Ghostbusters knock-off. It actually was a lot more fun than I would have given it credit for, but it also suffers from some annoying sections and obfuscated puzzles. I see it as kind of an interesting counterpart to much more serious (but mechanically similar) games like The Suffering.

I have posted a new feature article: The Prehistory of Survival Horror. This article examines some early horror games and how they influenced the genre that we know and love today. Here's an excerpt: Alone in the Dark in particular seems to be the direct parent of the Resident Evil game design: fixed cameras, static backgrounds, a character-centric control scheme, pivot-in-place combat mechanics, Victorian mansions, rationing of ammunition and health, and two playable characters (one male, one female), just to name a few obvious similarities. The direct line of influence on Resident Evil from Sweet Home is also clear: both Capcom games take a hard line approach to item management (though the blow was slightly softened in Resident Evil, as the player was granted more inventory space and inter-connected item boxes). Even Uninvited seems to have left its mark in the way that every area in Resident Evil must be throughly ransacked for items, clues, and notebooks. This article ended up being way more interesting to write than I expected. As I got into looking at the similarities between popular modern games and their predecessors, I realized that the relationship between these games on several game design axes is quite clear. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Thomas over at Frictional Games wrote me this morning about the new demo of their game, Prenumbra: Overture. Prenumbra is an indy horror game, and the team is using physics to create interactions that are pretty different than what we've seen before. They had a teaser demo a while back that was pretty impressive, and I'm looking forward to trying this new release. Though this is a PC game, it's definitely worth checking out.

I'm sorry, I can't not post this. Kotaku.com has a bunch of images from the new Silent Hill arcade game. You read that right. It's a shooter, set in the Silent Hill universe, with lots of fog and film grain. And zombies. That's like Silent Hill, right? Fog + film grain + zombies = winning formula, right? It even has Pyramid Head, whom you can apparently shoot, despite his blatant invulnerability to guns in Silent Hill 2. But hey, it's got the Silent Hill logo on it, so it must be great, right guys? Making a shooter out of a horror game is probably pretty tough. I've not really been impressed with the Resident Evil Gaiden / Dead Aim series (though I should play both more to be fair). But for a game like Silent Hill, where shooting is infrequent and often actively discouraged, this kind of thing seems like quite a stretch. Though it is clearly an attempt to cash in on a popular license, I suppose I'm not as irked by this game as I could be: the arcade scene is a really tough market, and I can actually see that arcade games might not even be made unless they are insulated by some brand or license. Still, this looks pretty terrible. Maybe next time I am in Japan I can try it out.

Here's a pretty interesting (if extremely academic) dissection of horror games from a psychoanalytic perspective. The authors tie Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 4 to a number of psychoanalytic theories with interesting results. It's slightly pedantic (I'm not really one who can lay that criticism to anybody, I guess), but pretty interesting nonetheless.

Not good At least for horror gamers, 2006 was pretty much the worst year in a decade. Excepting games with horror themes but no intent to scare (like Dead Rising), only two games classifiable as horror were released. One of them, Siren 2, was restricted to Europe and Japan. The other, Rule of Rose, got awful reviews. Yes, the year of 2006 was a hard 12 months for us horror gamers. I mean, sure, 2001 was a pretty bad year. That year, the average score for horror games was below 65%. And 1997 wasn't too hot either: games like Nightmare Creatures and Enemy Zero were all that was available. But both 1997 and 2001 saw the release of five games, and while none of them were all that great, horror gamers at least had some selection to tide them over. In 2006, we got one game (or two, if you live in Europe), a catalog more paltry than any other year since 1994. What have we done to deserve this? In 2005, 15 games were released with us horror gamers as the target audience. On top of that, some of those games really good (like Resident Evil 4). How can the well have dried up so fast? The answer? "Next Gen." Those two small words spelled doom not only for horror games, but for all kinds of niche genres. Developers were hunkered down with their new development kits, spending millions on the creation of new titles for the Xbox360, PS3, and Wii. It was time for them to spend more than they have ever spent before on development (as next gen development is much more costly than current gen), but also a time for developers to assume much more risk than usual. The launch of any new console, not to mention consoles retailing at exorbitant prices, can be hard for developers, as the installed base does not yet exist and Relative sales of survival horror games (North America, all platforms) profit projections are difficult. Next gen complaints are frequent on this site, so I'll spare you that particular rant. Suffice to say that in the grand scheme of things, horror games are small potatoes. With the exception of the Resident Evil series, most horror games don't move enough units to really warrant interest from the publishers. I mean, compared to main stream blockbusters, Resident Evil 4 was a pretty successful game. But the sales of Silent Hill 2, 3, and 4 combined can't match it. Games like the Fatal Frame series are way behind that. And Rule of Rose? It has sold so badly that it barely even shows up in my graph. In the context of the video game market as a whole, survival horror is barely a blip on the radar. Horror games are released when niche genres can still do well. That is to say, they are an indicator that risk (and cost) is low. The absolute absence of horror games in 2006 indicates that they are just too risky for publishers to pursue at the moment, especially as the next generation consoles have yet to fall into an obvious ranking. That's not to say that the genre is dead, just that it's too small to rate with most publishers. When every release must be a mega-hit to make money, genres like this aren't even worthy of consideration. But when the market sways back into balance (as it will when the next gen consoles begin to reach a larger and larger audience), we'll see them return. And the big guns, the Capcoms and Konamis, sell well enough that they can assume the risk presented by next gen. But we may have to wait a little while until the little guys, the games with new ideas and crazy new game mechanics, are able to return to the market place.

I picked up Siren 2 on an excursion to Japan last month. I really should finish Ghost Hunter first (which is actually a much better game than I was expecting, though it's not perfect), but got hooked on Siren 2 almost immediately and haven't put it down yet.

If you followed my Siren odyssey, you might remember that my chief complaint with the game was that it really failed to communicate its crazy ideas to the player, which made the game far more difficult than it needed to be. Still, for those few players willing to endure the initially punishing experience, Siren really paid off.

For Siren 2, it's clear that the developers have taken this sort of feedback to heart. They are trying really hard to fix their game without compromising the original aspects of its design. Each level now starts with a series of hints explaining the unique features of that level. The game also opens with a set of tutorial levels that are far more extensive than its predecessor. Further steps have been taken to keep the player from getting frustrated, including a new alarm system that warns you when enemies are close.

But all of these changes haven't decreased the difficulty level significantly. The game is still tough and pretty unforgiving, and each level is still home to a lot of interesting design ideas. Fortunately, the difficulty comes from the game design rather a lack of information. The game is much better about guiding the player through each level, but it doesn't let that interfere with its core challenge format. I think it's another great example of challenging the player to perform a task rather than challenging them to decipher the correct task to perform.

I've not yet completed Siren 2, but so far I am really enjoying it. I'm also really enjoying Hotel Dusk and the new Phoenix Wright. Damn, the DS is the place for adventure games lately.

I guess the standard issue school girl uniform doesn't come with insecticide. Thanks to Kotaku for pointing me to a preview of Tairyou Jigoku (lit. "The Overwhelming Hell"), a game apparently about making a school girl run away from giant insects. As you might have guessed, this title is by D3, publisher of ultra-budget titles like THE Zombie VS Ambulance. Now, normally I would just sort of laugh and continue the daily trek I make through the underbelly of video game news sites, but this entry caught my eye. As you might have read, I started this site to learn about games that are designed to provoke an emotional response in the player. Though it may be trite, this title is clearly designed to make the player feel as uncomfortable as possible, and for that reason only it looks sort of interesting. At its best, it might succeed in making some skin crawl. At its worst, it may be that the bugs involved are simply another iteration of Generic Antagonist X (that certainly seemed to be the case with the somewhat similar Necro Nesia). I guess we'll have to wait and see; D3 certainly does not have a reputation for making fun games.

There's something behind you and it doesn't need air! I've just posed a review of Echo Night: Beyond, a pretty great game about a haunted (and throughly deserted) lunar space station. I wasn't expecting it to be all that great, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and competence with which the game was executed. I think it got a pretty bad rap from reviewers; there's really nothing wrong with the title at all other than it's rather old-school game mechanics. Not everything can be Resident Evil 4, people! Anyway, I'm quite glad to have played Beyond. I was a bit worried that it would not make sense unless I played the earlier games in the series, but actually it seems to be completely independent of the earlier titles. Next I may try to tackle Rule of Rose again, or maybe I'll play something a little older, like Deep Fear.

Rule of Rose is a game with some pretty disturbing scenes. Kotaku has a story about the game causing controversy in Europe. It looks like the debate stems from the game's use of children as antagonists, as well as some misinformation about scenes depicted in the game (one news agency erroneously reported that the game rewards players for burying a girl alive). Now, censorship in general bugs me. I can sort of understand how some information, especially information that pertains to national security, can't be allowed to flow freely. I have a much harder time understanding censorship that is targeted at works deemed obscene or offensive, as those terms are neither objective nor universal. Censorship aimed to suppress work that a particular group finds morally offensive forces one viewpoint upon all consumers, removing choice. I think that you can take almost any work and find somebody somewhere who is offended by it, so such subjective classifications are not very useful when creating rules for an entire country. For example, my wife and I once chanced upon an exhibit of Picasso's sexually explicit paintings while visiting Montreal. Picasso is universally considered one of the great artists of the 20th century, yet this particular collection of his work was never shown in America because it was about sex. We thought the exhibit was wonderful, but due to objections of one group or another, Americans never even had the chance to see it in their own country. One particular group's perspective removed the opportunity to even choose to view Picasso's work. But censorship regarding video games bugs me even more. What is it about games that causes them to attract the ire of would-be arbiters of morality? Films like Natural Born Killers and Saw came out in Italy (where a ban of Rule of Rose has been proposed), and are far more violent, disturbing, and mainstream than anything in this obscure Japanese horror title. What is it about video games that makes them a target for censorship when other media is not? I think that there are several factors involved. First, many people who did not grow up playing video games often associate games with children, as children were the target market twenty years ago when the Nintendo Entertainment System was released. While this impression is understandable, it is also fallacious and easily dispensed with cursory research about the contemporary game market. The second issue that plays a role here is that the older generation did not grow up with video games in their household. As with comic books and rock and roll before it, games continue to suffer from a certain degree of foreignness to many adults over the age of 30. It seems that most detractors of games do not play games regularly themselves. That's not to say that the opinion of non-gamers is invalid, just that such people cannot claim to have an informed opinion of the medium. But what bothers me the most about this particular story is that those calling for a ban on Rule of Rose obviously haven't played the game. There's a burial scene in the first five minutes of game play, but it's a non-interactive cutscene. The character being buried does not die, nor does the player win when this event occurs; it's just a scene in the story. Since this event occurs early on in the game, even a few minutes of play would have dispelled any misunderstanding about how the game works. Clearly, the people arguing this particular point about Rule of Rose have not played at all. And finally, any sort of controversy over Rule of Rose requires giving it a little more credit than it is worth. Though I haven't finished it, I don't think the game is all that great, and I am sure that had this particular debate not erupted, the game would have vanished quietly into obscurity.

There is a debate among game industry pundits about what games as a medium are about. If you roll with the groups that like to argue academics about video game design, you've probably heard of ludology. Ludology (from the Latin ludus, meaning "game") is the study of video games (and other types, such as board games) in terms of functional mechanics. Ludologists argue that video games are fun because they provide an interface for play within a fixed set of rules. A ludologist might argue that Mario can jump a certain height and break bricks because jumping and breaking bricks are fun actions to perform. Ludology seeks to describe the entertainment provided by video games in terms of the way the player interacts with the game. In the opposite corner we have the Narratologists. This group believes that video games are most powerful as a story-telling medium, and feel that games provide entertainment because they allow the player to step directly into a fantastical role. Narratology considers games a framework for interactive stories, and in sharp contrast to the ludologists, feel that the method of interaction is secondary to the role provided by the game. Both of these awkwardly-named groups despise each other with a passion, and each have written reams and reams of arguments defending their position. They seem to flaunt each other with "more academic than thou" arguments, and many of them seem convinced that all 'good' video games conform to their perspective. For all their research and analysis, it seems to me that these groups are very easily defined: ludologists like action games and platformers, while narratoligists prefer adventure games and RPGs. Of course, if they stated their position that way they wouldn't sound so intelligent and academic, so I think they tend to stick to the silly names. I think that the distinction between interface mechanics and story telling elements is false. I do not believe that these concepts are mutually exclusive, nor do I believe that all video games conform to one method over the other. I've come to this conclusion with the help of this Quest; horror games have been my escort out of the mire of confusion that both sides in this argument suffer from. I think that where the ludologists and the narratologists go astray is in assuming that one method of game design is intrinsically superior to the other. I argue that plenty of games fall evenly in both categories: ICO, for example, is built upon mechanics that are extremely enjoyable and yet the title also manages to present one of the most powerful narratives in a game ever. Another example is the Shenmue series, especially the under-appreciated Shenmue 2. This game has a complex and well-written story that is central to the experience, but it also features a remarkably mature fighting system and more mini-games and reflex challenges than you can shake a stick at. I also assert that there are games that are neither mechanics- nor narrative-based: Electroplankton and Nintendogs are excellent examples. Rather than divide all games into "mostly about mechanics" or "mostly about story", I think it is better to define the primary form of challenge that games can provide. I've written before about cognitive challenges ("Type 1") versus mechanical challenges ("Type 2"), and it has also occurred to me more recently that there are several other, less common forms of challenge used in video games (World of Warcraft, for example, features raw player endurance as a form of challenge, as progression seems to be primarily a function of the total amount of time a player spends online). What I like about the challenge-based definition is that it's easy to describe games as a mix of challenges. Resident Evil, for example, is an almost even mix of cognitive and mechanical challenges. Earlier adventure games, such as The Secret of Monkey Island are almost entirely cognitive, while action games like Resident Evil 4 are heavily based on mechanical challenges. Electroplankton provides almost no challenge at all, proving that challenge is not a pre-requisite for fun. The other thing I like about categorizing games in terms of challenge format is that challenges have absolutely nothing to do with narrative. Whether the player is asked to make decisions about what to do next (cognitive) or challenged by actually doing the next thing (mechanical), I don't see any reason that the narrative presented by the game must be affected. Silent Hill 2, for example, has a pretty even split between mechanical and cognitive challenges (both forms are pretty easy throughout the game), but the game also hosts a strong and interesting narrative. The idea that the player only wants to mash buttons or only wants to read pages of dialog is fallacious and fairly naive. The idea that different players will enjoy different types of challenges, on the other hand, seems to me to be much more straight forward. I even think that different players will experience different forms of challenge when playing the same game! I started this Quest to improve my understanding of game design by examining horror games specifically. I feel like this research is starting to really pay off, as some of the things I've learned from horror games are starting to make sense in completely different genres. I might be totally off-base here, but it certainly feels like this project is producing the results that I am looking for. As I have more thoughts about this subject I'll post them, though I must warn you that in all likelihood I am completely wrong.

Next gen consoles allow for up to 24% more vampire staking Thanks to forums member alz for the heads up on The Collective's new horror-action game Harker. 1Up.com has a fairly detailed preview, including some videos. It appears to be a horror themed beat-em-up with vampires as the main antagonists (hence the title). It's unclear if this is really survival horror material or a good candidate for the close calls list (I can't tell from the preview if horror is the primary game play mechanic; most other horror beat-em-ups are 90% beating and 10% horror, but this may be an exception), but the art is nice and the videos make the game play look promising. This is one I'll be keeping an eye on in the future. Meanwhile, my Rule of Rose progress has been completely stopped by the absolutely awesome God Hand.

There's a pretty good article over at Next-Gen.biz about the creation of fear through media like film and games. It's all rather general and doesn't really get into any specifics with regards to games or movies, but the author makes a lot of valid points. If you are interested in the mechanics of building tension, it's a pretty good read. Thanks to forums member vajra for the link.

A pretty good selection, but no list is complete without Siren.

As we approach Halloween, the number of sites running stories about horror game seems to steadily increase. Here's a couple of interesting links I saw today:

• Rumor Mongering: Silent Hill Origins appears to be in serious trouble. It's all rumor at the moment (and it should be noted that employees who've recently been laid off sometimes try to start rumors about their former employers out of spite), but if the story proves true then I think the chances of this game coming out are pretty slim.
• Here's a nice retrospective of the Resident Evil series.
• Lastly, Strategy Informer has picked a fairly awful list of Halloween-themed games. The stars are in there, but it's sort of sad to see some of the lesser known gems of this genre lose to games like Theme Park World.

I followed a link from Slashdot Games to this interesting post about the difference between horror games and horror movies over at the hilariously titled GamersWithJobs.com. The author admits to being absolutely terrified by horror games despite having no trouble with horror movies. The point he makes, which is a big part of the reason I am running this site, is that the level of emotional involvement that a video game can produce can be much higher than passive media like film. Playing the roll of the main character means that we are unable to use common cliches as a defense against fear. I think that this type of involvement is possible for other types of games as well, but the horror game genre seem to be where the best of the best currently reside.

I was all set to give Fatal Frame III the highest score of the series, something around an 8.5. I gave the second game an 8.3 for being well executed but sort of lacking in focus, and at first it seemed like Fatal Frame III was a distinct improvement. Sure, the third sequel in this ghosts-vs-girls-with-cameras series isn't by any means revolutionary, but it seems to correct a lot of the problems with the previous games without trading away any of its freaky atmosphere or amazing production values. For most of my 15 hour play session, I was really digging the game's oppressive, claustrophobic environments and reasonably well executed story line. All that changed when I finally got to the end boss. In my review for Fatal Frame 2, I lamented the design of the end boss: not only was the fight placed an extreme distance away from the last save point, but the boss can kill you in a single hit, even if you have a stone mirror (the series' charm for avoiding death). I found the end boss extremely frustrating, and it ended up lowering my overall impression of the game. With Fatal Frame III, Temco went and made a bad situation worse. I guess that's not really fair. To their credit, they placed the last save much closer to the end boss, and they made it so that stone mirrors can still save you from the boss' mega attack. But they didn't remove the one-hit-kill problem--they actually made it worse. The end boss in Fatal Frame 3 isn't hard to fight, but at certain times the environment will change and the boss will go into one-hit-kill mode. During this time you must pick a direction to run and hope that the boss doesn't appear right in front of you, as she is likely to do. There's no skill involved in surviving this section; you can only make it back to the normal combat mode if you happen to pick a direction where the boss isn't waiting. And since she appears out of thin air and tries to grab you, there's about a 50/50 chance that the random direction you picked will lead you straight into her. This is one of the worst boss fights I've ever played. It took me longer to kill this boss than it did for me to complete the entire rest of the game. This is the type of fight you can play for 15 minutes flawlessly, only to have the one-hit-kill mode take you out. Since the Fatal Frame series has no check points and no continues, dying means you have to go all the way back to the main menu, reload from a save, and then run over to the boss area again. Gah! When I finally defeated the game, it was by luck as much as anything else. The one-hit-kill mode activates pretty much every time you hit her, and it took six or seven strong hits to win, so I won just by randomly picking the right direction to run in seven times. No other portion of the game approaches this level of difficulty (or randomness). In fact, the rest of the game is pretty much a breeze. Anyhow, now that it is finally over, I'm glad I finished the game. I wrote a full full review for you to check out. Other than the infuriating final boss, the game is very well done, and gives Crimson Butterfly a run for its money for the best of the series.

I've been playing Fatal Frame 3 lately, and I'm enjoying it quite a lot. It's not a big departure from the previous games in the series, but it does offer the ability to play as multiple characters and the progression is made more interesting by the addition of dream sequences. Most of the "regular" Fatal Frame gameplay (running around in an old Japanese mansion fighting ghosts with an old camera) takes place in the dreams of the main character. During the day, you can control this character in her home as she tries to piece clues from her dreams together from actual research her late boyfriend was performing. I like the switching between day and night because it gives the player a chance to progress the story and save without complicating the design of the haunted mansion. I can also see how the scariness of the game may be increased if the ghosts start to appear to the protagonist when she is awake.

One thing that is interesting about Fatal Frame 3 is that it is very obviously influenced by recent Japanese horror film. There is imagery and entire scenes that have been lifted almost verbatim from films like Juon and Pulse. It's interesting to see the influence so strongly in this game, and I take it as a sign that the developers are trying very hard to create a game that is scary.

Fortunately, they've been pretty successful. The dilapidated Japanese mansion setting continues to be extremely unsettling, and as in the previous Fatal Frame games, the visuals are astounding. Also deserving note is the audio, which is still among the best in the genre as far as I am concerned. The guys at Tecmo have tried very hard to make the experience as complete and as unrelenting as possible.

The game still has the same sorts of flaws that its predecessors had. The control scheme is a little dated, the enemy movement can be annoying, and there are occasional spikes in difficulty. One thing I don't like is that the camera--which you must spend points to power up--is different for each character. Even though you have to share your points amongst the three characters that you can play, powering the camera up for one character doesn't seem to affect the others. Another thing that bothers me is that the ghost AI seem to have reverted to the original Fatal Frame tactic of "being very annoying." They'll often disappear and then reappear right behind you, something that they avoided in Fatal Frame 2. The other thing that is annoying is that sometimes the enemies will not attack, which means you can't actually hurt them. The Fatal Frame combat system requires that enemies get close and attack before you can really hurt them, so if a ghost decides to just hang out and make creepy sounds at you from afar, you just have to wait for a while. The other thing that struck me as different about this game compared to the other two is that after five or six hours of play, I've suddenly run out of film. I'm completely out, which has never happened to me before, and without film I seem to be completely screwed. Not only can I not fight guys or take shots of non-violent ghosts for points, I can't even shoot the clue areas to progress.

But overall I am having a good time with this game. It's a solid entry from Tecmo and the series remains one of the best in the genre.

The official site for the American version of Rule of Rose has been launched. I am really looking forward to this game--so far it's been a slow year for horror games. The game hits the stores September 12th.

I finished Illbleed last night. It's an interesting game for sure: the content is weird, the premise is unique, and its approach to horror is straight out of campy 1980s classics like Creepshow. It's also a pretty good example of bad game design: it's too complicated, the rules keep changing, and there are some points that rate very high on the frustration meter. You should check this review out, because I even went to the trouble of making a graph to describe one of the principle design failures of this game.

Thanks to forums member ghostsarecool for letting me know about a new horror game for the Nintendo Wii called Sadness. Developed by Polish developer NIBRIS, Sadness is apparently a "gothic horror game." There's really no details yet, but the NIBRIS site does have a couple of live-action movies to demonstrate how they expect the control scheme to work (no real details, though). IGN (warning: link goes to IGN) has some more concept art. Hopefully we'll get more details about this title soon.

Last week I decided to pick up Fatal Frame 3, since I really enjoyed the previous two games in the series. My local game store chain had never heard of it, and I couldn't find it at the local big box store either. But it wasn't until I found that even Amazon.com doesn't carry new copies of this game that I realized that it has become incredibly hard to find. There are a few used copies on ebay, a few copies available through Amazon Marketplace, and you can buy a copy direct from the official site (for $57, ugh), but otherwise it's nowhere to be found. Ebgames.com has a pretty neat feature that allows you to see which stores carry a specific game, and according to them, there's only about three copies left in the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

Since the game has been out for almost a year, I was hoping that it would have dropped in price. Instead, it seems like Tecmo decided not to press any more copies of the game after its original run. I guess this means that it must have sold terribly, because I think it is pretty rare for a company to only make a single run.

In the end, I found a store about 45 minutes away from home that was selling it for full price, so I picked it up there. Since it was so hard to find, I really hope it's a good game.

This is apparently a UK ad for Siren. It's one of the greatest ads I've ever seen, despite containing absolutely no footage from the game. There's a higher-res Quicktime version available over at GamePressure.

Manhunt is the type of game that I'm not really interested in. Gritty realism, with gangs and torture and an emphasis on ultra-violence, performed by none other than the player-controlled protagonist? Not really my cup of tea. I mean, violence in context can be extremely interesting (see A Clockwork Orange, or better yet, read the book), but from all the hype I got the impression that Manhunt selected violence as a means to stick out from the crowd--a way to sell more units. I can sympathize with the Blue Sky in Games campaign.

But on the other hand, a lot of people praised the game for being extremely emotionally disturbing. I read a couple of reviews where the reviewers wanted to enjoy Manhunt, but found themselves feeling a little queasy because of the game's combination of intensely difficult sneaking gameplay and the brutally violent gang kills. This site is all about games that elicit emotions from the player, so "makes you feel queasy" sounds like something that I should be interested in.

Torn between the trite-sounding premise and the promise of emotionally disturbing gameplay, I decided to rent Manhunt a few weeks back and give it a shot. I generally enjoy sneaking games (the ones that don't suck, of course), and I also happen to be one of the five people in North America who bought the PS2 headset (I got it for Lifeline, of course), so I was ready to experience everything the game had to offer. I also needed to determine if the game was correct for the Quest given my new-and-improved Quest requirements.

Manhunt is a pretty hardcore sneaking game. It follows the regular sneaking game rules: sneaking is a requirement because if you are seen, you'll have to fight somebody, and fighting is very hard. Like many other sneaking games, it also allows you to hide in the shadows and obscure yourself from your enemies' view. The developers at Rockstar did a really good job with this mechanic: they made it clear when you were hidden (via a HUD element), they made hiding places plentiful, and they made it so that you can move at your default speed without making any noise (you don't have to crawl around on your belly to get behind guys you want to take out). An interesting difference between this game and most other sneaking games (like the Metal Gear Solid series, for example), is that the enemies do not follow predictable patrol patterns. They move might visit the same areas after a while, but they are not on a well-defined path like the bad guys in most other sneaking games, which makes predicting their movement a lot more difficult. The goal, of course, is to sneak up behind each guy in the level and take them out as violently as possible. The kill mechanic only requires a single button, so as long as you get up behind the guy without him noticing, you will kill him every time.

I think the sneaking mode in Manhunt is flawed in two ways. First of all, the radar isn't just useless, it is deceptive. The radar in Manhunt only displays enemies that the player can see or hear. Now, if you can see the enemy the radar itself is useless, so you mostly use it for enemies that you can hear. In order to make the radar less useless, the developers have made all the bad guys make all kinds of noise (they talk to themselves, whistle, etc). But there is no guarantee that all the enemies in the area will be making noise, so you cannot rely on the radar to tell you when it is safe to move. I think the reasoning behind this decision was to increase tension: you may be able to conceal yourself easily in shadows, but since there is always some ambiguity about when it is safe to move, leaving the shadows is supposed to be a more traumatic experience. But in practice, I just found this approach frustrating. I'd wait in an area for several minutes while a whistling guy walked around, then I'd pop out at the last moment to kill him only to be noticed by his silent friend who happens to be standing a few feet away. Often the radar will suggest that nobody is around when that isn't the case, and I found that relying on it actually worked against me. I think the game would have been a lot more fun with a motion detector (guys light up only when they move), or with no radar at all.

The other flaw I had with the sneaking in Manhunt is the enemy perception model. Most sneaking games follow the Tenchu awareness system: an enemy can be unaware of the player, can be aware of something but unsure what to do, can be aware of something and begin to investigate the area, or they can be fully aware of the player and move to attack. Metal Gear Solid follows this formula, as does Siren. But in Manhunt, the enemies only have three states: they are entirely oblivious, they heard a sound and move to investigate, or they saw you and are now moving to attack. The enemies have perfect vision, and can see and identify you from very far away. This, combined with the useless radar, makes it very easy to be spotted. Every time you leave the shadows, you risk being seen by a guy several hundred feet away, which will automatically alert all the other guys in the area. Even worse, if one guy sees you move into the shadows, all the other guys magically know where you are as well (this really sucks when they start carrying around guns). I think the game would have worked a lot better if there was some more fuzziness to the enemy's perception.

But the real problem I had with Manhunt was that despite the fairly solid sneaking mechanics and the interesting instant kill system, I found it horrifically boring. The moment-to-moment game play is always the same: approach the new area, discern the best hiding spot, then take enemies out one-by-one. The levels are very linear and there is little room for elaboration on this theme, and the only real reward is the animated kill sequences. Compared to Tenchu or Siren or Metal Gear Solid, there is almost zero variety from one room to the next, and the entire game hinges on the idea that killing guys is a fun thing to do.

Unfortunately, I didn't really find killing guys brutally very fun. Sure, there's a couple of different animations for each weapon, and it's sort of fun to see the over-the-top violence once or twice, but really, there's nothing very compelling here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing Manhunt for being violent; I'm criticizing the game for relying upon that violence as the single source of entertainment. I got bored with killing guys pretty quickly, and the sneaking wasn't interesting enough to hold the game on its own, so I lost interest.

I didn't think that it did a particularly good job of scaring or disturbing me, either. Maybe I'm just too desensitized to violence, but the shock value wore off pretty quick. The sneaking mechanics were well implemented but not nearly as tension-inducing as those in other sneaking games. Basically, the whole thing felt like a well-implemented but ultimately shallow vehicle for violent scenes, which is not what I'd call "emotionally substantive."

So, next time I get around to it, I'll add Manhunt to the Close Calls list. I think that it is weak in both of the categories I require: it does not try to be very scary and it does not have any real horror themes other than brutal violence. Too bad, because though the content was lacking, the implementation seemed to be pretty top-notch.

Jane over at GameGirl Advance is thinking about games as emotionally disturbing experiences. Her conclusion is that perhaps we need games that do not endeavor to be "fun" in the usual sense of the word.

If games are to be taken as art, the next step has to be for some game developers to abandon the concept of "fun" - or at least, to rework it and to challenge it.

An interesting thought. I am of the firm belief that video games cannot progress into the mainstream as a legitimate form of art until they can be emotionally relevant to players, but I hadn't considered the idea that emotional relevancy might come at the expense of fun. Perhaps that's a trade off we should be willing to make.

Lately I've been trying my hand at Illbleed. It's an exceedingly strange game, both in terms of its premise and its game mechanics. I don't really like it so far--the ideas seem good but I've found the execution to be very frustrating. There's a lot of interesting things here, like the trap disarming mechanic, but the possibility for failure is so high and the checkpoints are so few and far between that I hardly have time to appreciate the finer points of the design. I'm too busy trying to maintain all the different stats I have, and trying not to let any of them kill me.

The thing about Illbleed is that there is only one way to win but there are tons of ways to die. Your health can drop to zero. Your bleeding meter can go too high. You can run out of adrenaline and are then unable to avoid traps. Your heart rate can get too high, causing you to faint. There are too many values to manage and not enough ways to manage them. If you want to decrease your heart rate or bleeding speed you can stop moving, but then you'll be dinged for not completing the level in time. And often the game will put you in situations where you must take a hit (or increase your heart rate, or lose some adrenaline) no matter what.

Basically, Illbleed seems to give you zero margin for error. If you don't do everything perfectly (and knowing what to do is a problem in and of itself), you'll fall victim to one of the many ways you can fail. And since there are no checkpoints and only one or two save points per level, failure usually means losing a significant amount of work. It seems like there are a lot of cool things going on with the design, but the frustration level has been way too high so far.

I haven't finished the game yet, so maybe my opinion will change. At the moment, however, it's not looking all that hot.

Thanks to forums member RainbowDespair for posting a link to this insightful interview with the developers of Rule of Rose. This game looks like it has the potential to be extremely interesting, and the interview doesn't have any spoilers. The game comes out in the US on September 12.

I finished up The Suffering: Ties that Bind yesterday. Overall I thought it was a pretty good successor to the original Suffering, though I thought it had a few play balancing problems. Check out my review.

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!

Kotaku.com has some new screens from the PS3 version of Alone in the Dark 5. Pretty nifty stuff!

I've just finished Darkwatch and posted a review. I liked the style and the setting for the game, and I thought that the controls were easy and smooth, but I wasn't very impressed with the game overall. Check out my full review.

Thanks to Kotaku for the link.

I've written up a more detailed report on E3 2006. It was a really good show, I think, probably the best I've been to since 2003. Check it out.

Yesterday I got up at 4:30 AM, got in my car, and drove to the airport. I managed to park my car in the wrong lot, and had to trek on foot between terminals. Despite having left so early, I ended up just barely making my flight. I arrived at LAX at about 8:00 AM, jumped in a taxi, and headed for E3.

E3 is pretty much as close as you can get to sensory overload without going into a testing room at some secret government facility. There is no place to sit down, there are thousands of people milling around, and the conference is spread out over a giant convention center. Though looking at the games is fun, after a few hours my feet and back began to ache from standing for so long. Add to this the incessant flashing lights, the 110 decibel sound, and the throngs of people trying to push by you to get in line for a free T-shirt, and E3 becomes an extremely exhausting experience. At 8:00 PM I dragged myself to a taxi, drove back to the airport, and caught a flight home at 10. I got home around midnight and crashed immediately without even brushing my teeth.

Exhausting as it was, I am glad I went to E3. This year was a very good year, especially compared to last year, which was absolutely horrible. I wanted to drop some news points that are related to this site before talking about the conference.

• A Resident Evil game is coming out for the Nintendo Wii. No other information is available yet.
• Rule of Rose is confirmed for US release "by Christmas."
• A new Silent Hill game, Silent Hill Origins, has been announced for the PSP. Looks cool.
• Dead Rising, Capcom's zombie beat-em-up for the Xbox360, is really fun to play. It was the only game I saw that really interested me last year, and I'm happy to report that it plays just as good as it looks in the video.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find out anything about games like Siren 2 or Possession. There was a lot going on, but the real reason is that I spent a huge block of my time in the Nintendo Wii booth.

Nintendo is, hands down, the absolute winner of the show this year. Last year their showing was a little weak; they had good DS games on display and a couple of GameCube titles but that was all. This year they amassed a huge crowed (you had to wait in line for 2+ hours just to get in) and pretty much stunned everyone with the number of playable (and extremely fun) Wii titles. Here's what I can tell you about the controller: you need to stand at least three feet away from the TV or the pointer doesn't work, the resolution on the pointer is extremely high (meaning that the controller is ultra accurate, and you can easily cover the entire TV screen by barely moving your wrist), the nunchuck controller is smooth and intuitive, and the games they are making for this system are really, really fun. I played about eight Wii titles (the lines were so long that each game required waiting for 30 - 45 minutes), including Super Mario Galaxy (amazingly great), Excite Truck (very simple and also very fun), Necro-Nesia (the only un-fun Wii game I played), Wario Ware (awesome awesome awesome), as well as table tennis, Duck Hunt, and a couple of other demos. What's interesting is that there was such a wide range of usage for the controller: some games used it as a pointers, others did not. Some required the nunchuck, others did not. Some relied on buttons, others simply used motion. Even with this small sampling of games, the controller is clearly versatile. Nintendo was also showing some killer DS titles, including a new Mario Bros. game, and a new Starfox, which were both pretty awesome.

After Nintendo's booth, everything else on the floor seemed really tired and heavy-handed. Heavily Sword on PS3 looked pretty fun, as did God of War 2 and Okami. The second generation Xbox360 titles looked pretty nice, especially Dead Rising and Viva Pinata. Other than Silent Hill Origins, and yet another Ratchet and Clank, the PSP showing was pretty weak. The rest of the industry seems to still be suffering from the generic protagonist shoots generic enemy in generic third person view problem.

Anyway, it was a pretty successful trip, but I'm really glad that I only went for one day. I'll write a slightly longer report sometime this week.

I'm off to E3 tomorrow. Though the conference runs for three days, this year I have decided to visit for only a single day. After six or seven hours in the Los Angeles Convention Center I find myself almost unable to stand and mostly deaf.

Last year I posted a lengthy rant about the direction the industry is moving. The gist of this rant is as follows:
This year I have pretty much the same beef with the industry, though I am invigorated by the idea of a cheap console with an innovative control scheme, even if it is called the Wii. And with Sony's recent and amazingly unsurprising announcement that the PS3 will cost $600, I am even more convinced that the next generation consoles are not good for gaming. Innovation is a function of cost, and the new hardware increases cost by a huge amount.

But anyway, maybe there will be something cool this year. Last year was really terrible. This year I am interested in checking out Alone in the Dark 5, Siren 2, new Silent Hill information, Resident Evil 5, Rule of Rose, and Possession.

I'll be sure to write a report upon my return.

Joystiq.com has an interesting tidbit about the next Alone in the Dark game. Apparently it will be split into a series of TV-like episodes, with an entire "season" coming on the disk. I guess the idea is to break the narrative up into short 45 minute segments, which is an interesting approach. Hopefully I'll get a chance to learn more about this game at E3 next week.

I went and saw Silent Hill today. I'll try to write a spoiler-free review that describes how I feel about it.

As you might expect, the Silent Hill movie has a lot of elements of the Silent Hill games. In fact, it is not difficult to classify the movie as a collection of such elements. Here's a few that I thought they did really well:

• Locale. Silent Hill looks exactly like it should. The otherworld looks the way it should. The sets and locations are extremely close to the game, and I liked them a lot. The first 45 minutes or so in particular will really please people who have played the original Silent Hill.
• Pyramid Head. He's awesome, and they don't overdo him.
• The soundtrack. They mostly used music from Silent Hill 3, but the industrial booming works just as well in the movie as it does in the games.
• The fog and darkness. With the exception of a couple of extraordinarily bad shots, the fog and darkness are spot on. They really help to convey the "Silent Hill Feeling."
• The body bag monsters. You don't see much of them, but they look perfect.
• The sirens. Again, perfect.
• The nurses. A little different than the variations of nurses in Silent Hill (probably closest to 3's), but they were still very cool.

There were also some elements that I think they could have done a lot better.

• The radio. They used the siren well but totally missed out on the importance of the radio.
• Dahlia Gillespie. They split her character into two, and I don't think it was really a good move.
• The pacing. This is a difficult problem for any movie based on a game, but Silent Hill breaks down around the middle. It's too long and it meanders in the middle.
• The story. It's very similar to Silent Hill 1, but it's far more explicit and far less interesting. The elements are there but the presentation is not as good. I especially didn't like the last half.

The reviewers aren't big fans of this movie, but I understand why: the film is built to please people who've played the games, and I think it would seem even less interesting and have even more pacing problems if you do not recognize some of the content. So, if you didn't play the Silent Hill games, you probably won't like this movie very much.

However, if you are like me and have played these games to death, there's a lot to enjoy. As I mentioned before, the first 45 minutes or so are expertly lifted from the games, right down to some of the cinematography used in the games. The otherworld looks excellent and conforms to the regular Silent Hill otherworld rules, and the characters in the game are suitably close to their game counterparts. If you like the game I think you'll get a lot more out of the film.

Silent Hill was surprisingly the most gory movie I've seen in quite a while. Most of the gore is well done and it's only used in a few key scenes, but it was a bit of a departure from the games' usually understated and implicit violence. The main failure of the movie, in my mind, is the trap that so many horror movies fall into: explaining everything to the viewer. There are a couple of scenes where the movie just stops so they can go back and explain everything in excruciating detail. The Silent Hill games are very careful to never give too much away; they drop many hints, but putting the story together has always been a job for the player. The movie, however, fell apart for me towards the end because they insist on making everything as brutally clear as possible. There are also some major changes to the story that I thought were bad, and the ending was sort of annoying. Still, the movie was by far the best video game translation I've seen, but on the other hand, there's not a lot of competition in that category.

In short: Silent Hill is enjoyable if you've played the games, but probably not if you haven't. As a film translation of various game elements, it works pretty well. As a horror movie, it's not all that great.

You might not know that in between creating Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2, Capcom actually developed another RE game. The game, now referred to as Resident Evil 1.5, was scrapped due to problems with the direction, and Capcom produced RE2 instead. Anyway, there's a pretty cool video of RE 1.5 that you can watch. Thanks to Kotaku for the link.

Warning: long, sort of pointless rant that has very little to do with horror game follows.

If you read this site often you might have noticed a recurring theme in my rants: I'm of the opinion that the video game industry is shooting itself in the foot with its death march towards computational perfection. Every time we increase the power of video game machines, we also increase the cost to create games, but this cost increase is not accompanied by a similar increase in game players. The result is higher risk to game publishers (they need to sell more units to make the same profit as before), fewer games on the market, less overall innovation (it's too risky), and greater reliance on licenses and other tie-ins to artificially improve the size of the audience. This ground is well trodden on this web site, I think.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about the few developers who actually have the ability to try something new. Now, I'm not talking about the huge self-publishing companies like Capcom or Konami--these guys are large enough that they can absorb a lot of risk, and their products are pretty consistently innovative. No, I'm talking about second- and third-party developers like Surreal (The Suffering series), High Moon Studios (Darkwatch), Headfirst (Call of Cthulhu), and the now-defunct Computer Artworks (The Thing). These guys are in an odd spot: they are paid by some publisher to make games (and often must relinquish some degree of creative control to their publisher), but they are also small teams who can maintain an innovative vision and execute on it. At big publishers like EA, teams are shuffled around for every game, and the long term fiscal outlook of the company as a whole is the deciding factor when selecting games to produce. But these smaller studios have, to some degree at least, the ability to choose their destiny and (assuming they can secure funding) work on innovative products.

Take The Thing, for example. There is a crapload of new game design ideas in this game. It's got a fear/trust system that has never been done before, where you need to convince your team mates that you are not an alien (and thus stave off their irrational fear) by giving them weapons and ammunition. The level design is intelligent, and the way the game uses the license from John Carpenter's 1980 film is excellent. This should have been a revolutionary horror game, but instead, it fell apart because of a few design flaws.

The alien test system is broken. You are supposed to be able to administer a blood test to people you meet and see if they are aliens or not, but in practice the test tells you nothing because it might return a false result 30 seconds before they change into an alien in a cutscene. The Thing's designers had a cool idea about having team members with different roles (you can't turn on the lights unless you have an engineer with you), but this falls apart when you realize that any of your team members can be killed at any time (so it ends up being that you can't turn on lights yourself if your engineer is alive, but you can do it yourself if he's died... dumb). These are probably the result of the schedule for this game being compressed, or of a lead designer leaving in mid-development. These few flaws pretty much ruin the whole game, and they were probably the result of having too little time to finish the game.

Which brings me to my point, if I have one. Innovation is a hard thing to do. It takes a LONG time to get new things right. If you look at games that are known for their innovative content, you'll see that they invariably have extremely long development cycles. Companies like EA don't have time to waste on the sort of iteration necessary to make an innovative game, but smaller studios like Computer Artworks do not have the funds to set their own schedules. The result is that innovative games don't get made, or they get made poorly because they were crammed into insufficient development cycles. The Thing should have been an awesome game, but Computer Artworks also needs to pay its employees which means that its publisher (in this case, Vivendi-Universal) set the schedule based on when products will be most profitable for them. Basically, it's a sucky model that does not link innovation to profit.

Sorry for the rambling rant. This came out way longer than I intended. Oh well, it was cathartic to write.

When I initially posted about THE Zombie VS Ambulance, I knew in the back of my mind that it was only a matter of time before I purchased the game. This kind of thing is like crack-cocaine to me: it's horror-themed and it looks absolutely awful, a deadly combination that feeds my insatiable appetite for horror games gone wrong. So in a particularly masochistic move, I imported THE Zombie VS Ambulance from Japan and started playing it.

THE Zombie VS Ambulance is not a good game. However, it's not nearly as bad as you might think. There's actually some risk and reward involved in the game design, and while the graphics are not pretty, the game delivers on it's basic drive-over-zombies-in-an-ambulance premise. The game actually starts out really boring, because the default ambulance is extremely slow and usually can't kill zombies in a single hit. This sucks particularly hard because you can only get Hospital Health Points back by killing a number of zombies within a short period of time, so if you have to stop and reverse to actually kill the putrified cop you just sideswiped, your chances of getting a combo are zilch. Fortunately, about 30 minutes into the game you can unlock the second ambulance, which is a lot faster and consequently a lot more fun.

As you drive around running over zombies, you have three basic goals that you need to strategize for:

• Maintaining Hospital Health Points. The hospital health slowly decreases over time, and the only way you can get it to increase is to run over lots of zombies in succession to get combos. My current high combo is 90 zombies.
• Find engineers and the crazy mayor dude. You need to save people, but the more engineers you save the faster you can upgrade your ambulance. Upgrading your ambulance is awesome, because you can install giant blades onto the front of your car and attack rocket boosters to the back. I don't know who the crazy mayor dude is (I don't think he's really a mayor, I just made that up), but when you find three of him a new section opens up. The rest of the people are pretty worthless, though collecting cops and military people makes the hospital health points go down slower.
• Figure out the fastest route back to the hospital. After you get out of the main area and into the surrounding sections (which all have a theme, like city, or forest, or desert), it actually becomes difficult to get people you've picked up back to the hospital before they turn into zombies. It becomes imperative to figure out what the fastest route to the hospital is from anywhere in the main city. It's also important to know when you are on a long road, because you only have a limited number of boosts and it sucks to boost into a wall, and the draw distance only allows you to see about 15 feet ahead of your vehicle.

Basically, THE Zombie VS Ambulance is like an extravagant mini game. The mechanics are too simple to really compare with modern games, but on the other hand they've put far too much time into the design (especially the upgrade system) for this to be a regular GTA-style mini game. It's not a terrible game, but it is extremely simple and repetitive. I am actually fairly surprised that this game isn't a steaming pile, but I can't really say it's extraordinary in any way either. Shallow as it may be, it's still a bit more fun than many of the other games listed on this site.

Thanks very much to forums member ijm000 for his generous donation of Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness. This is a game that I know absolutely nothing about, but based on the box and ijm000's review, it is probably an excellent match for the forums. Thanks ijm000!

Also, I'm still alive, but I'm heading out on vacation for a week, so updates may be a bit slow. Changes are coming to the site though.

I just got back from a tiring week at GDC. Actually it was quite a bit of fun, but standing around all day for three days straight can make the soles of your feet hurt a lot.

This year I didn't really get to any sessions that are related to this site. I really wanted to see the talk about building fear in the player in Darkwatch (the slides are available), but I had other business obligations. I also missed a talk on cinematic game design by Richard Rouse, the brains behind The Suffering series, because it was also at the same time (slides).

I did see several technical talks, including a pretty interesting one about the AI in F.E.A.R, but the content wasn't about the game itself. Most of the rest of the talks I went to were development related (tool chain, engineering, AI, game design). They were mostly pretty good this year... I only got stuck in one or two yawners.

I should mention that the Nintendo keynote was really quite uplifting (the message: Nintendo knows what they are doing, and they're doing the right thing), and Will Wright's game design keynote was extremely interesting and hilarious (the message: astrobiology is cool, spore will rule, Wright thinks about 2000 things at once). The PS3 keynote was quite depressing: they showed some graphics demos and that was about it. PS1 games on PSP sounds cool, and God of War 2 looked cool, but otherwise there was nothing to be learned.

So I finished Michigan last night, and I've posted a review today. I really don't have anything good to say about this game, except that it was amusing in the same way seeing somebody walk into a pole can be amusing.

If you have a PC and are into point-and-click horror games, you might enjoy Scratches, which just came out. GameRankings doesn't have much to say about the game yet (77% but only 5 reviewers checking in), but the screenshots look pretty neat.

1up.com has a pretty interesting (and fairly lengthy) interview with Christophe Gans and Akira Yamaoka about the upcoming Silent Hill movie. There aren't any real spoilers, they mostly discuss how the game has made the transition to film. Gans is apparently a pretty hardcore gamer. The movie comes out in the US on April 21st.

I was reading the latest issue of Famitsu (which, by the way, has a pretty awesome preview of Siren 2) when I ran across a crazy game called The Zombie VS Ambulance (THEVS). This is SIMPLE2000 game, which means its a budget title by D3 publishing (retail in Japan is about $18, which is ultra cheap considering most new games are in the $70 range). D3 has made horror-themed games in the past, including the awful-looking Onechannbara (a stupid play on "onechan," meaning "young girl" and "chanbara," meaning "sword fight") and The Noroi Game (lit. "The Cursed Game"). So I did a little research on The Zombie VS Ambulance, because I just couldn't get over the idea that somebody made a game about zombies fighting ambulances. There's an official site for the game which has some tiny screen shots, but the most interesting information comes from this guy's blog about the SIMPLE series (man, and I thought my blog was niche). I translated a couple of snippets from his review: ... The basic formula is leave the hospital -> run over some zombies and help some people -> return to the hospital, repeated over and over. But the need to run zombies over to win keeps the tension level high, so I think the system works pretty well. First of all, there's a "hospital health gauge." As you drive around the gauge is slowly depleted, and if it ever goes to zero it means the hospital has succumbed to the zombies and it's game over. It's basically a life bar for the hospital. In order to fill the gauge back up, you have two options: You can run over a lot of zombies and get combos, or You can save police and military personnel. This mechanic keeps you on your toes. ... The ambulance upgrades are cool. You can get mechanics that you save to upgrade your ambulance, but they'll require you to complete their weird requests (like, "run over 40 zombies to finish this upgrade") first. This is another reason to keep running over zombies, and combined with the hospital's health gauge, there's a nice balance that keeps the game from getting dull. It's a good combination. ... If you don't get survivors that you've picked up back to the hospital before the time runs out, they'll turn into zombies inside the ambulance. This makes the ambulance harder to drive. How are you supposed to solve this problem? By driving full speed into a wall, which causes the zombies to fly out of the vehicle! WTF. This guy also talks about the things he doesn't like (no D-Pad support, and you have to drive carefully when you have people in the back). Basically, this game sounds like a combination of Crazy Taxi and Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick: pick up people and take them somewhere, and on the way drive over zombies and send buckets of blood and gore everywhere. So yeah, they really made an ambulance vs zombie game. Is it Survival Horror? Probably not, but since I'm including Evil Dead, it's a tough call.

Thanks to Kotaku.com for this cool interview with Makoto Shibata, the brains behind the Fatal Frame series. Apparently there is a longer version of this interview, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Pretty interesting stuff.

Thanks to Kotaku for posting a note about Konami's announcement of a Silent Hill game for PSP.

Only, it turns out it's not really a game so much as a bunch of media related to the series. Sounds like basically a fan site on UMD. What a let down.

Silent Hill Experience (working title)
Release date: Spring 2006
Genre: Multimedia
Platform: PSP system
Unique among all PSP system products available on the market, The Silent Hill Experience combines a variety of media comics, music and movies to deliver a complete behind-the-scenes look at the popular Silent Hill franchise. Using an intuitive 3D interface, Silent Hill fans will be able to view all-new digital interactive comics, listen to music from the long-running series of Silent Hill video games, and watch exclusive video content, including an interview with the director of the highly-anticipated Silent Hill motion picture.

I finished Kuon this weekend, and I've posted a review. Despite some good graphics, creepy atmosphere, and neat character design, I thought Kuon was pretty weak. The game play is extremely simple and there's only about four hours of unique content (which you are required to traverse several times). I was hoping to like this game more than the critics, but it actually turned out pretty bad.

The MagicBox has more screens from Siren 2. This game is going to rock.

Also, Rule of Rose now has an official site (in Japanese) with some pretty neat gameplay movies. This game has been out in Japan for about a week now, but it's not yet been announced for release in Europe or America.

I'm back in the U.S. this evening, struggling to stay awake long enough to negate horrific jet lag. To that end, I spent much of the afternoon trying out the rather obscure (mostly Japan-only) games I picked up last week. Here are some quick impressions:

• Michigan is a strange game told from a first person perspective, through the eyes of a camera man. Something is very wrong in the city of Chicago, and you and two other employees of a local TV network must travel from location to location, looking for scoops. The game is basically a first-person adventure game, but what makes it odd is that the developers (Grasshopper, the guys behind Killer7) have thrown this weird voyeurism element from way out in the left field. Each level gives you the opportunity to collect points of three types: "suspense," (you find something scary, or, as it appears, find just about anything), "erotic" (you take advantage of the camera to film women in compromising positions, etc), and "immoral" (you allow tragedies to occur for the sake of the story). The suspense and immoral parts are sort of interesting, but the erotic points make the game very weird and uncomfortable.
• The Fear is a strange game told from a first person perspective, through the eyes of a camera man. The interface is very similar to Michigan (though The Fear predates Grasshopper's game by several years), and the game play actually isn't all that different either. The major difference (besides the lack of erotic points) is that The Fear is entirely live-action. However, it's a lot more interactive than I was expecting; it reminds me of a really well-done CD-ROM game from 1993, when everybody went ape over the idea that video could be played back in real time. The Fear is 4 discs long (!!) because there is a crapload of content; every character has lots to say in every situation, and it's all recorded (no text). So far, the story looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill horror movie shlock, but the acting isn't as horrendous as I was expecting and there might actually be things to do. Since there's no text, I'll probably add this game to The Quest. So far the only real problems I have with it are that moving around takes forever and that it still has the potential to turn into a horrible dating game scenario.
• Hungry Ghosts is a strange game told from a first person perspective. I think I've detected a pattern here; I didn't set out to buy tons of first person horror games, but that's what I seem to have ended up with. Perhaps there is a correlation between these games being first person and them not coming out in the States; I suspect that the American market has little interest in first person games that are not shooters. Anyway, Hungry Ghosts looks like it might be a really good game if I can just figure it out. The game pounds into your skull the point that every action you take may change the course of your destiny (there's even a voice over at the beginning of the game to warn you of this feature). Basically, you are a dead guy in a sort of purgatory, and at the beginning of the game you are on the fast track to eternal damnation. However, by doing certain, mysterious things, it is apparently possible to change your destiny and avoid hell. The Japanese in this game is pretty difficult, so I can see it taking me a while to complete.
• I don't know what to say about Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File, except that the intro sucks. At least, I hope it was the intro--I "played" the game for a solid 15 minutes before giving up in disgust because the entire time was spent, I kid you not, reading text. Now, according to the manual there's a 3D 3rd person mode hiding in here somewhere, but after 15 minutes of text (with no interactivity, just reading!!) I gave up. I'll have to come back to this one. In the best case, I think this game may turn out to be like Twilight Syndrome Sakai, which is another game I need to get around to adding to the Quest.
• Gregory Horror Show is so far the best game I bought in my latest foray into the East. It's got loads of style, the mechanics look fun, and it doesn't hand out points for looking up women's skirts. The only thing I'm worried about is that some of the puzzles may be difficult for a non-Japanese person like myself.

That's all I have to report right now. Once I get back into this hemisphere's time zone, I'll have more info for you guys.

Today I found a copy of Clock Tower: The First Fear, the Wonderswan version, at the local toy shop in the mall. It was priced 300 yen, marked down from 4900 yen (a total of about $2.50, down from $40). When I took it to the counter, the woman behind the register looked at me incredulously.

"Are you sure you want this," she asked. "It's for Wonderswan." She ran her finger under the Wonderswan logo to emphasize the decrepitness of the dead handheld system. When she rang it up, the register insisted that the total cost was still 4900 yen. She ended up having to manually key in the discounted prince. I paid by dropping three 100-yen coins into a plastic tray on the counter.

As I left the store, I noticed that a handful of other Wonderswan games were available for sale, and all of them looked like they'd been sitting on the shelf for years. I am probably the first person to buy a Wonderswan game from that place in the last three years. The woman behind the register probably thought I was crazy.

I've been in Japan for about a week now, and so far this trip has been extremely useful for The Quest. I've managed to pick up a bunch of Japan-only titles without destroying my wallet, which is good. I'm not sure that I've managed to buy any games that are actually good, but my goal here is collection, review, and transcription. So far I've managed to find Gregory Horror Show, Hungry Ghosts, Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File, and Michigan. The only games on my shopping list that I haven't been able to locate yet are Nanatsu no Hikan: Senritsu no Bishou (the speed at which Dreamcast games are vanishing from the shelves over here is amazing) and Ghost Vibration.

Last year when I was in Japan, I ran across a game ominously titled The Fear. At the time, I didn't buy it because it was horrifically expensive and looked, well, horrifically bad. I posted about it at the time, and 16bitman tracked down some info about this game. Today I picked the game up for 2900 yen (about $25), which may or may not be a good deal depending on how horrible the game turns out to be. I think I decided last year that this title probably isn't survival horror (as it's probably FMV and text), I'm still looking forward to playing through it. Maybe I'll put together a feature about the game when I am done.

I wouldn't want you guys to think that I flew 5000 miles just to buy potentially-terrible horror games. I've managed to get my shopping done in-between visiting friends in Nagoya and Osaka, chilling with my in-laws, and generally enjoying my time in this awesome country. But hey, this is a horror blog, so you guys get the horror news!

I should be back in the States early next week. Maybe then I can bring myself to finish Kuon once and for all. Ugh. Every time I play that game my opinion of it decreases.

I guess I wasn't paying attention back in October, because Land of the Dead came out and I totally missed it. It's not been doing well with the reviewers, however (a 1.9 from GameSpot, wohoo!), so maybe it's no big loss. At 48%, it clocks in as the 3rd worst survival horror game ever.

Thanks to Insert Credit for pointing out some new images from Rule of Rose over at GameWatch. This game definitely has some style! Check it out.

I've just finished Indigo Prophecy (also known as Fahrenheit, which I think is a cooler name), a cinematic action-adventure game by French developer Quantic Dream. I'm posting about it here because it is probably of interest to readers of this site: though it's not really a proper horror game, the creepy factor is pretty high in a couple of key scenes. The gam