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

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 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."

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.

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.

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.

"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'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.

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).

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 have to admit that the first information I heard about Square's new handheld DS game, ナナシノゲエム ("Nanashi no Geemu," lit. "Nameless Game" or "Game with No Name"), left me intrigued but skeptical. Now that the official trailer has been posted, I'm in all out excitement mode.

The concept is simple, and quite Japanese: you're playing a game, a NES-era RPG by the look of it, that seems to be affecting, or perhaps reflecting, your real life. What makes this so great to me is the attention to detail that they've put into it: if you watch the shots of the RPG mode closely, you can see garbage tiles flickering around the screen as the player moves, which is a classic side-effect of mismanaged tile memory on NES games. The title screen for the game is all garbled is well (which is why it has no name, I assume), and the garbling looks like the kind of errors you get when on NES games that are corrupted, buggy, incomplete, or even dirty.

The idea is very similar to the mechanic of curse-laden objects that often appears in Japanese horror films. The idea is that a person's emotions may be so dramatic that they can persist after death within an object (this concept is called onnen), and in the post-Ring world of Japanese horror, such possessed objects are often portrayed as slightly broken bits of technology. Instead of a blurry video tape, an untrustworthy TV or phone, or a mysterious message on your pager, Nanashi No Geemu is giving you a corrupted video game that you can actually play. And when the 3D mode shows up, I'm sure the first order of business will be to find out exactly what that corruption is.

Along with Dementium, Mitewa Ikenai, and Touch the Dead, the DS is starting to be a viable platform for horror-themed games! This one is by far the most interesting to me.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Graph 1: Difficulty over Time A couple of weeks ago I posted a message about how Cold Fear was driving me up the wall with a sudden spike in difficulty. This post proved to be somewhat inflammatory, and a lot of you came out to tell me to stick with it a little longer. I did, and you guys were right--the game fixed itself. But the episode got me thinking about how difficulty and frustration interact as a player plays a game through for the first time. Specifically, a couple of comments about simply stepping up to the challenge and becoming a better player rather than whining about the difficulty got me thinking: I don't mind hard games at all, and usually I'm more than happy to spend some time iterating over the same challenge until I've improved my skills. But occasionally, the difficulty level is high enough that I stop having fun. This is certainly what happened in to me a few hours into Cold Fear, even though that game is still easier than other games that I've completed without becoming frustrated. So I thought about it for a bit and decided to visualize my complaint with Cold Fear in the form of the all-powerful line graph. I have two graphs to show, one tracking the difficulty of several games over time and the other showing the relative frustration I felt with those same games over the same amount of time. The levels here are completely subjective: I don't expect other people to have felt exactly the same way as I did about these games, so before you get bent out of shape about how Siren is totally easy or Halo is amazingly hard and frustrating, realize that these are my impressions alone. Chill, ok? You are probably like, "wait, did he say Halo?" Yeah, it seems a little out of place in this graph, I have to admit. But I am including it here for a good reason: it's an extremely popular, extremely highly-rated game (also I just finished it the other day, so it's fresh in my mind). If you get 97% on Metacritic.com and sell over 6 million copies, you have to be doing something very, very right. So I'm using Halo as a baseline in this graph to show how other games relate in terms of difficulty progression and frustration over time. This first graph shows the level of difficulty I perceived for several games. You can see that Cold Fear started out fairly easy but then spiked really high early on. It was during this spike that I vented my frustration about the game on this blog. After that, the difficulty drops off very quickly and stays pretty shallow after that point (note that I'm not quite done with the game). Siren also started easy and then spiked dramatically. When this happened I ranted about it here. Unlike Cold Fear, Siren doesn't get a whole lot easier over the course of the game--it stays pretty damn difficult until the very end. Silent Hill 4, on the other hand, was a walk in the park for the first half of the game and then suddenly became quite difficult in the second half. Finally, you can see that Halo's difficulty curve is pretty uniform: it gets harder at a predictable rate but never spikes. It also never becomes super-difficult; even at its hardest, it is easier than Siren and Silent Hill 4. Halo has a very well-defined difficulty curve, while these other examples are less regular. The second graph shows how frustrated I was by these games at different points in my play-through. You can see that Cold Fear got super frustrating at the same point that it was super difficult, prompting my rant. Siren was also super frustrating when the difficulty spiked, which is probably why I ranted about it as well. Silent Hill 4 was not very frustrating early on, but after a while the game became difficult and frustrating and stayed that way through the end. Halo has no spikes, and though the frustration level does rise with its difficulty, it manages to stay pretty frustration-free throughout the entire experience. It seems clear that spikes in difficulty are sources of frustration for me, but what I think is interesting about this graph is what happens to Siren after the spike: even though the game remained difficult, I was less frustrated by it the more I played it. So what's going on here? Cold Fear gets super hard and super frustrating and then becomes super easy and less frustrating. Siren gets super hard and super frustrating but then becomes more fun without losing any of its difficulty. If my theory is that hard games are frustrating, or even that dramatic spikes in difficulty are cause for frustration, it should follow that Siren would remain frustrating Graph 2: Frustration over Time throughout its duration. Here is my theory: frustration isn't as much a function of difficulty as it is a function of communication with the player. In fact, unplanned spikes in difficulty are probably caused by poor player communication, which is also the source for frustration; the first graph is not the cause of the second, they are both side-effects of the same problem. As Halo demonstrates, when difficulty increases gradually, the player himself improves and no frustration is evident. Most designers probably intend for their games to become incrementally harder over time, so spikes in difficulty and frustration represent unplanned-for failures to communicate the rules of the game. Let me elaborate by looking at why Cold Fear suddenly became so hard and frustrating for me: I didn't know where to go next, and there is no map to aid me. While searching the ship for the next story event, I kept running into monsters that respawned, causing me to run out of health and ammo. It wasn't clear that the ship's sick bay only had a limited number of health packs. Until the second-to-last pack is used, it appears that the supply is infinite. This mistake led me to be less frugal about health pack use than is required. Many doors are difficult to see because they blend in with the background colors. When I finally found the next story point and saved, I was in too weak a condition to actually address the challenge immediately following the save. Thus I was required to complete that challenge with minimal life and ammo, which was significantly harder than would have otherwise been the case. Normal challenge elements (such as the rocking of the boat) were amplified by the lack of regular resources caused by the problems above. Almost all of these problems are communication issues: the game didn't tell me where to go, didn't tell me when an auto-save was coming up (or how prepared for a fight I should be after the save), didn't tell me that I was quickly using up resources on the ship, and didn't make it easy to find my way around. None of them have much to do with the normal moment-to-moment game play; they are "meta design" problems. Also, I think that these problems occurred early in the game because it takes players a while to get a hang of all the rules. As game play progresses and the player gets the hang of the rule set, these sorts of communication errors are probably less frequent. The problems plaguing Siren were similar. As I posted about later in my Siren experience (and expanded upon in my eventual review of the game), the spike in difficulty and frustration in Siren is caused by insufficient communication with the player about the mechanics of the game. The central mechanic, sneaking, isn't even clear until the player gets to the point where they cannot progress without sneaking extremely carefully. What happened to me in Siren is that I didn't understand how to play and got frustrated with it, but my frustration level dropped through the floor and I started having fun again when I eventually figured out how the developers wanted me to play. The game was still damn difficult, but once I understood the rules the difficulty seemed legitimate rather than arbitrary. In fact, when I think about it, Silent Hill 4 is a similar story. The difficulty level spiked half way through the game because I didn't understand how to take care of the apartment. In the first half of the game the apartment is a source of infinite health (you can return there to heal at any time), but if you fail to light candles this benefit is lost in the second half of the game. I missed the connection between the candles and the quality of the room, which meant I suddenly lost a way to regain health and the game's previously trivial game play suddenly became extremely difficult (this mistake also meant I wasn't able to get the best ending--damn it). So my conclusion is that games that suddenly become frustratingly difficult are probably failing to teach the player what is expected of them and how the game is to be played. If this happens early enough in the game we can just call it a "steep learning curve" (it's obvious within the first hour of Resident Evil that you must aggressively conserve ammo), but if it happens after the player has made significant progress, it makes the game feel like it is punishing the player arbitrarily--it's suddenly a matter of luck rather than one of skill. Games like Halo are probably successful on such a huge scale because they teach the player the rules early on and then gradually increase the level of challenge without ever changing the rule set.

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.

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.

Kotaku.com has some video footage of the upcoming Xbox360/PS3 horror game The Darkness. I've held off talking about this game because it hasn't been clear if it's really a horror game or just another first person shooter with a lot of monsters. The footage seems to clear that up: though you play the antagonist, it seems like it is clearly designed to make the player quiver in their boots. I'll post more about this game once I learn a little more.

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.

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.

This room isn't pitch black, but it's dark enough for us to be worried. Though I didn't think it was a great film, one of the things I dug about Juon 2 was the way the director used lighting to suggest some sort of abstract malice. Unlike many traditional horror movies, Juon 2 doesn't rely on pitch-black locales to build tension; instead, it suggests that the characters in the film could be attacked anywhere where there is the slightest degree of shadow. It also seems to be necessary that the victims be alone, but the director makes it clear that well-lit rooms are no defense against the film's traveling curse. I think that director Takashi Shimizu's goal here is to keep the audience on the edge of their seat by suggesting that nowhere is safe. The antagonist of the film isn't contained by a dilapidated mansion or haunted graveyard; she can strike anywhere, even during the day or in a brightly lit room. The protagonists have nowhere to hide, and unlike many lesser horror films, the audience has no chance to relax. Once the director has communicated this idea to the audience (as he did so effectively with a particular apartment scene in the first Juon), we begin to scrutinize every shot for possible danger. The power of a small shadow or slightly dark corner is dramatically increased, as we know that it might be the source of immediate danger. Even a little bit of shadow in the corner can be suggestive. This puts Shimizu in an incredibly powerful position over the audience; if he wants to create tension, all he needs to do is put his characters in a room by themselves and include the mere suggestion of darkness. Juon 2 shows that this method can produce high-tension scenes without relying on music, tricky camera work, or any sort of special effects. Any further suggestion of malice (such as the tendency in Juon for common appliances to reveal impending danger) only increases the suggestion of danger produced by his approach to lighting. The result, I think, is a rather relentless pressure on the viewer that increases as the film slowly unveils the horror at hand. Unfortunately, Shimizu damages his own tension with a terrible script and a few completely out-of-place scenes. But there are a few moments in the film where his ability to use light suggestively makes an otherwise predictable scene pretty scary stuff. I think that there are several video games that are already taking advantage of this sort of approach. The Silent Hill series, especially Silent Hill 2, have used suggestive lighting to dramatically increase the level of tension inflicted on the player. Unlike Resident Evil, which gives the player Silent Hill switches between ambient light and the flashlight to produce different moods. easy-to-identify safe rooms, the Silent Hill series has often employed varying levels of ambient light to suggest the relative danger of its various otherworldly locales. These games also switch between areas with some ambient light and areas that are are only visible through the tight beam of the flashlight. Here the message is the same but the effect is a little more direct: nowhere is safe because danger lurks everywhere. The radio in Silent Hill serves the same purpose as the rogue appliances in Juon: to incrementally increase the tension already created by the rest of the scene. Though horror movies have traditionally relied on scenes that are pitch-black to sell the idea that danger may be lurking in the darkness, movies like Juon 2 show that the same effect can be achieved without turning out all the lights. Once the audience has been lead to believe that any shadow may harbor danger, everyday locations can easily host tension-filled scenes. Though it seems like the same sorts of techniques are applicable to video games as well, very few developers actually take advantage of this sort of iterative creation of tension. Sorry if this is all sort of a stream-of-consciousness. In the future I have some other random thoughts about techniques that games developers could learn from modern horror film, but this post is already long enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is totally off-topic for a horror blog, but I'm going to post it anyway. Resident Evil 4 was clearly game of the year for me until last month when I started playing Shadow of the Colossus. Colossus isn't a horror game; if anything, it's probably closest to a platformer. Created by the team behind ICO (Fumito Ueda et al), Colossus demonstrates that even simple platforming mechanics can become an emotionally substantive experience when put in the correct context. I started this site because I find horror games to be the only genre of video game to consistently focus on emotional manipulation of the player, but Ueda and his team have shown (twice now!) that gripping and emotionally relevant games can come in any package. Tycho from Penny Arcade explained the core of the game's power extremely well:            ... Shadow of the Colossus feels like an indictment of gaming as usual in many ways. There are elements of the story that are ambiguous from the outset, not because the story is being told poorly but because the situation you find yourself in and the powers you come into contact with are not drawn with absolute clarity. So while you go through the ordinary motions that we associate with videogames - discern objective, eradicate opposition, return for reward - you're engaged in a series of acts whose moral virtue is by no means assured. The supposed hero is assaulting majestic, sometimes docile, sometimes curious, sometimes sleeping creatures. They're almost all portrayed in a sympathetic light at some point, and it's hard not to feel disgusted at times for iterating Hollow Game Mechanic X by rote without any sense of the moral spectrum the acts inhabit. The game needs to be seen by every conscious organism on planet Earth. (source) The game is epic, unique, and thought provoking. I'm highly recommending it to you, despite it being in no way, shape, or form a horror game.

A buddy of mine and I have been playing through Kuon lately. It seems like it will be pretty short, so hopefully I'll have a review up by the end of the week.

If you're not familiar with Kuon, it's basically a Resident Evil game set in Heian (794-1192) period of Japan. You can play as Utsuki, a woman who lives a sheltered life in a mountain shrine, or Sakuya, an exorcist. I'm playing as Sakuya, and I think that you probably get a third playable character if you beat both. Anyway, the game takes place in medieval Japan, so there's lots of kimono-wearing, giant hats, etc.

So far, the game's been a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, they've got a pretty good style going for the environments and characters. Utsuki and her sister in particular are really well done. The game is dark, but what little you can see looks pretty good. It's similar to Fatal Frame in that it relies on Japanese history for a lot of its environments, but the execution isn't as good as Tecmo's game. The mechanics are mostly passible: the combat system is a little weird (no auto-aim for projectile attacks...??) and the game punishes you for running (which is frustrating, as there is plenty of backtracking), but otherwise the game controls well.

I guess that my biggest complaint is that there doesn't really seem to be much going on in Kuon. I'm running around, fighting some guys, solving some puzzles, reading some documents, but nothing is really happening. Maybe the story setup is the problem--there's almost no back story or impetus for the plot provided.

So, so far, I give them points for style, points for setting their game in an unusual time period, and I think the moment-to-moment mechanics are good enough. But there's not a lot of story or interaction variety to keep me interested. Hopefully by the time I finish the game my impressions will have changed.

I made it out of E3 alive after only a single day this year, which is a feat. Better yet, both my feet and my sanity remain intact! I've posted my impressions of the event in the features section.

Here's a brief followup to my pre-E3 rant. Nothing at E3 2005 did much to encourage me that the game industry isn't totally screwing itself right now. There were a few really stand-out, innovative titles, but almost everything on display was pretty meh. It costs too much to make games, and the audience for games is still too small, so what we are going to see is fewer games taking fewer risks. If anything saves us, it will either be risk-taking publishers or audience-widening games like Nintendogs. Here's hoping.

This week a friend and I played through most (about 3/4ths) of Obscure. I was away from home on a business trip, so it was a good excuse to take a break from Silent Hill 4 and check out the two-player action in Obscure. Though I must reserve final judgment until the game is complete, my impression of Obscure is quite good. The two-player mode in particular is awesome, as is the party system and light mechanic. The graphics are pretty good, and there are a few legitimate scares packed away in the game's depths. The problem with Obscure is mostly that while it has some really innovative elements, it's also based on rather bland puzzles and combat. The plot is run-of-the-mill, the characters are only mildly interesting, and the monsters are (with a few exceptions) pretty standard. The game's innovations seem to be enough to keep it afloat, and there are very few execution problems, but some of standard survival horror game elements feel a little flat. The game is also quite dark and there seem to be a few dramatic spikes in difficulty. But in general, Obscure is a solid survival horror game with some really cool elements going for it. It's not quite revolutionary, but like The Suffering, it gets enough of the equation right that the experience is fresh and enjoyable.

Obscure is now out in the US, and I found it brand new for $20. I also tracked down Echo Night Beyond brand new for a mere $7 over the weekend, which seems like a pretty good deal. Doom 3 is now out for Xbox too.

Lately I've been playing through Silent Hill 4, which is quite weird. The game itself is enjoyable, but the pacing is very strange: there are (apparently) no bosses, nor have there really been any climactic points in the story yet. The game has just recently gone from being very easy to being very hard, which is frustrating. It seems like the source of this frustration are a few types of enemies that cannot be killed. They are a source of infinite damage, but of course only limited health items are available. My life bar has been at about 10% for the last two hours of play, and dying all the time is really starting to get annoying. The game is fun and the story is interesting, but the progression is very strange.

So I'm still only an hour or so into Resident Evil 4, but I thought I'd post my initial impressions anyway.

With all the hype surrounding this game, I wasn't really sure if I was going to like it or not. I mean, the graphical quality is amazing (I thought it was the best-looking game at E3 2004), but I wasn't sure if the game play was going to match it.

What you need to know about Resident Evil 4 is that it is still very clearly a Resident Evil game. Capcom has attempted to revitalize the series by dramatically increasing the quality of some aspects of the game, while downplaying areas that have become clumsy or outdated.

For example, combat has come to the fore in Resident Evil 4. In previous games, shooting zombies was a mechanic used mostly for slowing the player down as he attempted to solve a larger maze puzzle. Shooting zombies never helped the player in previous RE games: it cost time, it cost bullets, and every encounter was potentially fatal. This mechanic wore itself out, especially in more recent games like Resident Evil Zero, where the enemies were so powerful that they significantly altered the strategy of the game. But in RE 4, the developers have made combat an ends in and of itself. Shooting the villagers (not quite zombies, but not quite human either; think Siren) requires a bit of strategy, as the enemies are vulnerable in different areas and the correct spots (like the neck!) must be targeted to quickly dispose of them. Killing the enemies also provides a reward, in the form of dropped ammo, health, or gold. In fact, the first level of the game (the area that we've all seen in the screenshots and movies) requires you to kill a certain number of enemies before you can progress. This reflects a very different focus from previous RE titles.

Complementing the focus on combat is the move away from item-based puzzles. The traditional Resident Evil formula has called for giant maze puzzles, where the player traverses the same areas over and over and slowly unlocks new areas by collecting items and solving puzzles. Zombies get in the way of solving the maze, but getting out of the mansion/police station/town/island/underground base has always been the goal. This time around, there are almost no explicit item puzzles (at least, I haven't collected items that can be "used" other than health an ammo in the first hour). There are areas that are locked that I will clearly return to, but unlike previous RE games, I know that the progression is linear. I'll return to an area only when I have completed all the requirements to open the next section, as opposed to previous RE games where the player must continually search and re-search areas already traversed for new things.

Ammo conservation, at least in the early stages, appears to be a non-issue. There is incentive to shoot everything that moves (and some stationary objects!), and ammo is plentiful. You can even purchase ammo if you run out with the gold you collect. Item management may still be an issue (you have limited inventory space), but it appears that almost all items will be combat related rather than puzzle related.

What I find most interesting is that these fundamental changes in focus don't change the pace of the game very much. Leon is certainly moving from area to area faster than he has in previous games (perhaps due to the lack of backtracking that I've already mentioned), but the time he spends in each area and the pace of the combat feels right at home with the series. You still can't move and shoot at the same time, shooting, running, re-aiming, and shooting again is still a viable strategy. You still have a knife and it still sucks for combat (though you can now conveniently access it any time you like without going through the inventory screen). The combat strategy has changed a bit (Leon can now kick enemies that are close and stunned), but the overall progression of the game from area to area and from monster to monster feels, well, natural. In fact, the rate of progression is very similar to Resident Evil 3, perhaps because both games take place primarily outside.

I don't like reviewers who just gush about games, and I don't want to give you the impression that RE 4 is perfect. It's harder than you are expecting, and some of the mechanics you are used to might not be there. The entire game is letter boxed, which is weird but necessary for the camera angle they've selected to work. The follow cam is nice and also feels very natural, as do the context-sensitive events. The game play is further mixed up with some Shenmue-style quick time events and button mash challenges.

So far I have very, very few complaints. I'll report back when I've progressed a little further.

I'm almost all the way through Fatal Frame 2. The game's been pretty easy, and after 9 hours I've reached what I believe to be the final save before the end boss.

Before I get into ranting about the design of the end boss, I need to briefly cover some Fatal Frame mechanics for those of you who didn't play the game. In the Fatal Frame series your only weapon is a camera. To fight ghosts, you take pictures of them with the camera at a key time. Taking pictures any old time doesn't do much damage, so the strategy is to wait for a special moment (the "fatal frame") and take the picture then. You know when this moment occurs because the lens turns red and a sound starts playing. The moment is very brief for most ghosts (less than 1/2 a second), and it usually happens just before they hit you, so the game is all about timing these super shots right. In FF2, you can power your camera up by collecting points. You get points by doing super shots. Powering up your camera can make it more damaging, give it a larger range, etc. You can also add features to the camera that allow you to do special shots that do more damage or affect the enemy in some other way, but you need points to "buy" these features. Also, you can save yourself from death by carrying around a Stone Mirror, which will refill your life to 100% if you die, but it only works once. It's sort of like the Aku Aku mask in Crash Bandicoot: it gives you the ability to survive a fatal hit one time. You can only carry one stone mirror around at a time.

So I'm not going to spoil the end boss battle for you, but I do want to talk about why the game designers had to make it so annoying. I think this is a case of the designers designing themselves into a corner. The boss doesn't follow any of the regular rules of the game: she can kill you in a single hit, even if you have a stone mirror. What's worse, you can't damage her with regular shots; she's only damageable during the fatal frame moment (which is approximately 0.001 seconds before she hits and kills you). Finally, her life regenerates as she moves around, so you have to keep hitting her over and over to kill her (a goal which I have not yet completed).

All of these changes would be acceptable, except that the designers have made a fatal error: they have failed to place a save point just before the boss battle. The last save point before the boss is pretty far away, and you are required to fight seven or eight spirits before you actually reach the boss. These spirits are easy to kill (they move in straight lines and have a predictable fatal frame moment), but they have a lot of life and are pretty annoying the sixth or seventh time you face them. It takes me a good 15 minutes to get from the save position to the boss, so it's quite frustrating to miss the boss's minuscule fatal frame moment and die instantly.

Why would the developers do something like that? The rest of the game doesn't have similar balancing problems. In fact, the rest of the game has excellent pacing.

The reason is that it is possible to get to the boss without powering your camera up much. You could conceivably play through the entire game without every upgrading your camera, if you were good enough at hitting fatal frame moments and had some patience (in my case, I didn't start upgrading the camera until about an hour before the end boss). It's also possible that you may have upgraded your camera in ways that are not going to help you against the end boss (like, maybe you purchased the "See" powerup, which lets you see spirits that disappear, which is something the end boss doesn't do).

So what the developers have been forced to do is give such players room for experimentation. They've made this long section with easily-killable-yet-high-points spirits so that you can power your camera up in different ways and try different combinations against the boss. They don't let you save before the boss because they don't want you to overwrite the previous save and lock in a single camera configuration. I suspect that the original did not contain the pre-boss spirits, and that they were added after they realized that play testers could get themselves locked into a useless camera scheme.

The problem with this "solution" is that it penalizes players who have powered up their camera correctly. The formula necessary to beat the boss is pretty clear and simple (most powerful lens + most powerful film, duh!), and you can easily max out the necessary attributes long before you reach the boss. The lack of save is a safeguard for players who haven't done this, but players who are "following the rules" are at a disadvantage because they have to waste a lot of time killing superfluous enemies.

A better solution would have been to put a check point just before the boss. That way you could attempt a given camera configuration several times and simply reload if you wanted to go back to the setup you had when you saved (as it is the game has no checkpoints, and you must reload upon dying). Also, many games feature bosses that don't follow the regular rules of the game, but giving the Fatal Frame 2 end boss have a one-hit-kill attack (and consequently breaking the earlier stone mirror mechanic) seems like a formula for frustration.

I'm trying to take more time to use this site as a place to write my thoughts about games down instead of just reporting survival horror news.

Some of you may remember a post I wrote a few months back where I complained that Siren is too frustrating and difficult. Four months later I am still playing Siren, but my opinion of it has increased. The game is hard, yes, and every level takes multiple tries to complete, but these flaws are forgivable because the rest of the game is so awesome.

Siren's biggest problem is that it has tons of new ideas and it doesn't communicate all of them very well to the player. It takes a while to realize that Siren requires you to leave your preconceived notions of how games work at the door and actually try to think critically about the problems it throws at you. Example: in most games, bushes are made using a couple of flat polygons with leaf textures on them in a plus shape. Typically games that allow you to walk through these bushes treat them as eye-candy only; they never have any affect on the game. However, even though the bushes in Siren look similar to most game bushes, they actually have an in-game function: you can hide behind them. When you hide behind a bush or other object, the zombies ("shibito") will not see you if you are sufficiently obscured. The definition of "sufficiently obscured" is a little vague, however, and this is where Siren runs into problems. The game designers have gone to great lengths to make their world as realistic as possible, but in doing so they have traded a degree of game mechanic clarity.

Siren gets away with these flaws because it does everything else so well. However, since the game is fairly vague about the perception of the zombies, a lot of playing is required before you are able to have a good sense of where to hide and how to move. Of course, this vagueness also increases the tension in the game by several orders of magnitude, as you can't always be sure that your hiding spot is sufficient or that the shibito is far enough away for you to walk quietly without being heard. I'm willing to put it in writing right here: Siren is by far the scariest game I have ever played.

The problem of vagueness extends to the game play as a whole. There are many, many cool mechanics going on in Siren, but they are not communicated to you clearly by the game and you are required to learn them on your own. My previous post was right in the middle of that learning phase, a time that can be quite frustrating because one feels like they do not understand the correct way to play.

However, after 4 months of playing this game (about 4 or 5 hours a week), I am mostly convinced that the steep ramp up time is worth it. The developers of Siren are innovating, and they are innovating in all sorts of crazy areas. Siren might look like a cheap knockoff of Silent Hill, but in fact it plays like no other game on the market. The closest analog I can think of is Hell Night, which employs some of the same mechanics. In the end, I don't mind learning new ways to play horror video games if the effort is rewarded. Though I have yet to complete Siren, I already feel like the debt has been paid in full.

We need more games that try new things, even if they are not entirely successful. It is very hard to deviate from the beaten path when it comes to game design, and I have nothing but respect for developers who are able to work new ideas into their games. I'm looking forward to the Siren sequel, and I hope that the developers are able to correct some of the issues with their initial design while continuing to push this genre in new directions.

Lately I've been battling my way through Siren. I haven't had a lot of time to play games lately, but a couple of times a week I am sitting down and trying to make some progress.

Siren is an interesting game. It seems to be universally loved or hated (GameRankings' page shows the reviews of the game divided almost evenly into thirds: 60%, 70% or 80%), and I understand the confusion. While I usually try not to pass judgment on games until I've completed them, I thought I'd post some of my impressions of Siren so far.

The Good
Siren gets a whole lotta things right. The graphics are excellent, both in terms of technical prowess and art style (though the way they use texture maps for facial animation is very strange). The game looks amazingly good, even though it is quite dark. There are a lot of really nice touches to the visuals too, like the bad VHS dub effect they put over the view when sightjacking.

The soundtrack is astoundingly good, perhaps the best of its kind that I've ever heard. The zombies ("shibito" in Siren) make horrible noises, the background sounds are amazing, and the sound effects for in-game events are top-notch. The voice acting is a little weak (a flaw which is compounded by the odd juxtaposition of British accents and Japanese faces), but it's certainly passible.

The controls are great. The buttons are a little difficult to remember sometimes (it's a little odd that the circle button is cancel), but the control and collision detection is easy and smooth. There are some things about the control scheme I don't like, but I'll get to those in a minute. Mostly, the control is perfect for this style of game.

I'm really hip to the design. Siren isn't like any other horror game to date, even though it certainly took some visual cues from Silent Hill 2. The play mechanics are pretty unique, and the focus on sneaking above all else is new to this genre. The sightjacking mechanic in particular is really well done; the use of the analog stick as a tuning device is brilliant.

The Bad
Not everything is perfect, however. The single biggest flaw with Siren is that it's just too damn hard. Siren is a sneaking game, which means that rather than solve puzzles or take out enemies, your ultimate goal is to get past the shibito without being seen. It turns out that not being seen requires a lot of patience and waiting, but it also causes the game to be scary as all hell. However, since such an emphasis has been put on sneaking, it's often the only option you have. If you are seen, your chances of survival are slim. On many levels you have no weapons, and on some you actually have to escort another character through the level. All of these mechanics sound fine in theory, but Siren's implementation seems very poorly balanced. One level will take an hour to complete after 15 tries, while the next will be beatable in 20 minutes on the first try. I am not very far into the game, but one particular level took me twenty-odd tries (over a period of three months) to beat. That's just unreasonable.

This level of difficulty is compounded by the ineffectiveness of the combat system. When you do have a weapon to wield it's still very hard to beat the zombies. Siren uses an odd combination of button pressure and timing to allow you to select how hard you want to hit an opponent, so the harder and longer you hold down the button, the longer your attack takes to complete and the more damaging it becomes. This takes some getting used to, but even now going up against an unarmed zombie can mean death for me at least 60% of the time.

So long, convoluted levels + ineffective combat scheme + ultra high difficulty = frustration. Frustration is the enemy of fun, and Siren really suffers from it. To win, your only choice is to sneak past your enemies perfectly. The margin of error is far too small.

All that said, some levels are better than others. The design of the levels themselves is pretty great. I am looking forward to finishing Siren, and I hope the later levels turn out to be better tuned than some of the first. Even if it doesn't get much better, Siren is a great example of how developers might go about developing horror games that are unique and innovative.

Last weekend I finally posted my E3 2004 impressions. Since I didn't take many pictures, I also recommend you check out Robin Hunicke's photographic coverage of the event.

I just got back from the 2004 Game Developer's Conference. The conference went well, though I was less excited with it as I have been in previous years. I was able to attend a few very good game design talks and one or two interesting technical talks (I am a programmer by trade).

At the expo, Sony had Resident Evil Outbreak and Siren running. Both games were very difficult to see thanks to the angle of the lights on the LCD displays, but I played a bit of them anyway. My initial impression of Siren is good: the mission-based structure is a new addition to this genre, the controls seem solid, and sightjacking is freaking awesome. I also became aware that I need to play this in my home and not next to a bunch of people standing around Taiko no Tetsujin, as the repetitive thumping of the drum controller put a damper on Siren's dark mood.

My biggest surprise with RE: Outbreak was the control scheme. Perhaps I just didn't notice last time I played the game a year ago, but the controls at GDC were camera-centric! Being as used to the RE classic "Tank Control" model as I am, I had a very difficult time moving the characters around. I checked the options screen for alternate control setups, but the only customizations available seemed to be the button mappings. Perhaps a classic control option will be available when the game ships in the US on April 1st. In related Outbreak news, it looks like the game will be shipping without online support in Europe this September. Disappointing for our European friends indeed.

The MagicBox has posted links from the new TGS Biohazard 4 trailer. There are High Quality and Low Quality versions. The interesting thing about the video is that, besides looking amazingly good, it also shows off a new enemy: a shadow man with a giant meat hook attached to a chain. He looks a whole lot scarier than the zombies we've all come to know and love. Plus, it looks like this game will join the flashlight-equals-scariness craze, which I think is probably a good thing.

I've found some info on Siren on the web:

• GameSpot has some interesting impressions and game play details.
• Game Watch has some info, but it is in Japanese.

IGN posted an article a while back with the following details:

Looking like a forgotten chapter in the Silent Hill series, the GC demo of the creepy horror tale featured three playable levels. In one stage, players slip into the role of an old Japanese man named Akira Shimura and had to explore an abandoned, zombie-infested mine and reach the street to the neighboring town of Hirasaki. Another level features a Japanese teacher trying to help a little girl escape from a rundown school. The mood of the game is extremely scary. The latter stage is set at night, with only a flashlight illuminating the dirty and dilapidated corridors of the old school. The developers are employing every trick in the book to make players drop their controllers, such as loud and sudden noises, subliminal flashes, a grainy video filter, and of course plenty of walking bloodied corpses.

The Magic Box has posted new images of Resident Evil Outbreak. I played a four-player version of this game at E3 this year, and despite some minor network problems the demo looked excellent.

I am headed off to Japan for a week. I may make some updates while I am there, but since I am not sure what sort of internet connection I'll have I can't make any promises.

Silent Hill 3 is being well received. I've been pretty busy preparing for my trip, so I haven't gotten much of a chance to play the game yet. What I have played has been very good... the game has yet to disappoint me. It also happens to be the best looking PS2 game I've seen.

I've added Free Radical's Second Sight to the list, even though there is almost no information available about it yet. Apparently it will be a "Resident Evil-inspired" horror action game. Hopefully more information will be released soon.

I wonder if Capcom's Glass Rose (Garasu No Bara, offical site in Japanese) will be survival horror. It's not yet clear from the information available, though the game sounds pretty cool either way.

Another game that may or may not be survival horror is Silicon Knight's Too Human. IGN is reporting that the game may not even ship on the current round of hardware, so perhaps it is best to hold off on speculation until more details are available.

Finally, there have been some rumblings about Rockstar's Manhunt lately. Several sites have called the title survival horror, but after reading the descriptions I remain unconvinced. It seems like an violent action/sneaking game to me. The closed circuit video stuff looks somewhat scary, but it doesn't seem like this will really be a "horror" title.

I completed the original Clock Tower for the SNES this weekend. I had misgivings at first; I mean, who would have thought that a survival horror game could be done as a side scroller? The game was excellent, however, and I am very glad I played through it.

Though completing Clock Tower doesn't take very long, the designers at Human Entertainment did an excellent job in the replay department. The game features 9 unique endings (two of which I managed to see), some of which can only be unlocked by failing to accomplish certain tasks. The game also does tricky things like sealing off certain rooms and moving other rooms around to keep even veteran players on their toes. I was quite impressed.

Unfortunately, the original Clock Tower was never released outside of Japan. If you can find the ROM, an excellent English patch exists that will let you play through the game without knowing any Japanese.

After playing Clock Tower I realized that it is very similar to the GBA version of Disney's Haunted Mansion. Haunted Mansion isn't out yet, but from what I saw at E3 the GBA game looks a whole lot like Clock Tower. As you can probably tell from this Preview at GameSpot however, Haunted Mansion GBA doesn't look like it will be nearly as good. In fact, the version I played at E3 was positively atrocious. However, I suppose I should withhold judgment until the game is released.