How can this possibly go wrong? ¥980 is about $10 right now. That is to say, it's not very much money. It's particularly cheap for a DVD containing "over 120 minutes of astonishing horror footage." And yet, that's exactly what 本当にあった 恐怖の心霊・都市伝説DVD BOX ("Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX") offers at that price. I was more than a little skeptical. I mean, the price point was the first warning sign. The second was that I found this cinematic tour de force in my local Family Mart, of all places, stuffed in-between the weekly women's magazines and ¥100 onigiri. Family Mart does not sell horror, you know. They're mostly focused on essentials like potato chips, coke drinks, extra batteries, and umbrellas. A giant box proclaiming to have "real footage so scary you can't shut your eyes" was a bit conspicuous. But, I mean, for ¥980, I figured what the hell. Worst (and most likely) case, it's terrible and I can laugh at it. And maybe, just maybe, there'll be a gem hiding in those 120 minutes. At 8 yen per minute, you can't really go wrong. Heck, if I bought this thing off Amazon I'd have to pay for shipping. So I bought it. This is not the first time I have done this. A couple of years ago I came home with a set of DVDs called Tales of Terror from Tokyo, which sounded terrible and, based on the packaging and box notes, looked like complete schlock. I was pleasantly surprised by Tales of Terror; it turned out that small, 5 minute episodes were a pretty good format and that a couple of the directors involved with the series had produced some pretty neat stuff. I like the idea that a director has a very short amount of time, and probably no budget whatsoever, to find a way to make things scary. Some of the best horror has its roots in simplification by necessity; The Blair-Witch Project is one famous example. The first hilarious thing about Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX is that it really is just a box. "DVD BOX" usually means "box set," here in Japan, but in this case, it's just a giant, empty box. Well, it's not entirely empty: there's some filler cardboard and a single disc. But that's all. No liner notes, no There it is in all of its glory. ¥980 well spent. nothing. At ¥980 these guys are probably making a killing. The first "story" is a collection of shinrei shashin pictures: photos of regular people in which ghosts are supposed to have been inadvertently captured. The first one is clearly a simple photoshop of the vampire's face from Nosferatu, and the rest are similarly lame. The sequence of photos ends with the sound of a woman screaming. Not a good start. Fortunately (and I say "fortunately" because anything is better than watching a video of still photos), the remainder of the DVD contains actual video. The rest of the DVD is a series of "stories" (their word, not mine) about a young woman who ventures into scary, and reportedly haunted, places with her video camera. She carefully climbs a long rock staircase to a supposedly haunted shrine, she ventures into old, abandoned houses looking for certain mirrors that are said to reflect ghosts, and generally freaks herself out. The presentation is more than a little Blair Witch inspired; she keeps a running monologue going and periodically turns the camera to face her (which I found particularly improbable, considering that she's supposed to be in a scary dark place and the camera is her only source of light). This really is horror on a shoe-string budget. The thing is, as simple as it is, it almost works. Japan is chock-full of fantastic places to make scary videos like this. It's got old, moss-covered, dilapidated shrines, there are war-era tunnels and bases to be found, not to mention your standard set of abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. Even with no budget, the producers of these stories have absolutely fantastic sets to work on because Japan is full of scary-looking places. But of course it does not work. There are too many basic problems for the scenes to be involving; the reporter woman can't seem to keep the camera pointed in the way that she is moving so half the footage is a dark view of a floor someplace. And she keeps complaining about how dark it is without once activating the night vision mode on her camera (which the filmmakers make the mistake of introducing to us in the first scene). But the most amazing thing about this series is that nothing actually happens. The reporter ventures into a scary location, gets scared, and then leaves. No ghosts or otherwise scary things ever show up. And then, and then, as if the producers of this set were on some mission to make the most impotent horror film ever, the series gets even more boring! After the initial reporter has ventured I'm so scared, I'm filming myself! into scary-but-ultimately-harmless places several times, a new series starts in which a different girl does mostly the same, but in places that are even less scary (one of the sequences is, I shit you not, about a hill that, according to the DVD, some people think looks like a face). "Oh, I feel something. It's very sad here. I can feel something like an old man, and he's very lonely," the girl drones. Five minutes later the sequence is over and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. And then another starts and again, NOTHING HAPPENS. The last sequence they mix up a bit by having two girls (!!) and a couple of guys venture into some supposedly-cursed area (if people dying in a location is enough to curse it, every square foot of Japan must be cursed), and talk about it for a while, and guess what? NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS AND THEY LEAVE!! This is so far worse, so far, far worse, than I had imagined it could be. At least if they had a guy in a rubber mask I could believe that they were trying. But no, despite the fantastic locales (goddamn face-hill excepted), any potential these sequences might have had for horror is absolutely, completely squandered. They could have made them 10x better without actually spending any more money. Having a guy in a black outfit with a black face mask standing unobtrusively in the corner of one of the scenes, unnoticed by the reporter but obvious to the viewer, would have been enough to push this nonsense into the realm of "potentially watchable." The reporter people don't even get properly scared; they just sort of complain about the spot and leave. I mean, come on, I'm going way out on a limb for you guys here. I purchased a video for ¥980. Throw me a bone! Or at least a plastic skeleton! ANYTHING. I guess that if there is one interesting takeaway from this video, it's that the filmmakers are obviously working under the impression that their target audience already believes in ghosts, curses, evil spirits--the whole package. They believe their audience to be in such a vulnerable state already that they can get away with simply suggesting that maybe, possibly, according to somebody's brother's sister's mailman's uncle, there's a ghost around here somewhere. The whole set operates off this idea that the area is scary because it is potentially haunted; the stories don't give you any reason to believe in them--you have to be a believer already. And maybe that actually describes some people in Japan. In any event, 8 yen per minute was a rip-off for Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX. But at least I got this blog post out of it.

You might recall that about a year ago, I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Thinking After Dark conference (my notes: one, two, and three). Now, several of the papers presented at that conference (including, I'm honored to report, my own) are available in the latest issue. Half of the issue is in French, but for those of you who (like me) don't speak that beautiful language, there's still a lot of quality to digest here. I particularly enjoyed William Huber's Catch and Release: Ludological Dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, and Clara Fernàndez-Vara's Dracula Defanged: Empowering the Player in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which, as she clearly points out, is not a horror game). My own paper is about Japanese culture as viewed through the lens of horror games. I've gone ahead and posted the slides (2.4mb pdf) from the talk (though they might make more sense if you read the paper first). My idea is that Japanese horror games, even when trying to appear western, are throughly rooted in their home culture, and by studying Japanese horror game tropes we can actually find clues to the way that Japan works as a whole. I'm also really interested in the idea that culture shock--this unbalanced feeling that we get by seeing works that were developed with motives we do not understand--is a huge affordance to horror because it is so unbalancing. As I've written here before, I'm sure a big part of the draw of Asian horror movies is that they do not follow American cliches, and without the bedrock of comfortable patterns to assist us, we feel out of control and, consequently very scared. Anyway, check out the issue! It's pretty awesome to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, especially alongside such other interesting research.

Japan: Not this (This is an open letter to Tim Rogers in response to his extremely lengthy column Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore, which was posted on Kotaku. I think I'm just about done reading Kotaku, as the signal to noise ratio has really gone south lately, but before I quit I thought I'd respond to Tim's not-really-video-game-related post with a not-horror-game-related post of my own.) Tim, man, how's it going? We've never met, actually, but we both live in Tokyo and we both write about video games and we both have a lot of game industry experience. I've been following your work for a couple of years, back when it was all on insertcredit.com. Dreaming in an Empty Room is one of my favorite examples of honest-to-goodness real, insightful, video game journalism. So, as one white guy in Japan to another, we're cool. You're not the type of guy who avoids the natives at all costs. I can tell you're not the particular type of foreigner to arrives in Japan looking for a girlfriend and a job teaching English and leaves a year later with the comfortable sense that Japanese people are all crazy and your home country is infinitely more enlightened. You don't spend your nights at The Hub and you don't hijack every conversation with comments about how hot the girls are or how stupid the guys are. You speak Japanese; in fact, you put significant effort into learning the language. In short, you're a foreigner in Japan with an open mind, somebody who's here to learn, somebody who has a sense of respect for the locals even when their behavior doesn't make sense. You are, therefore, part of the minority group of foreigners that I refer to as "not assholes." We've never met, but I can tell. So, we're cool. But Tim, man, I gotta talk to you about your article about Japan. Not the article itself; I'm mostly in agreement with your complaints. Smoking really bothers me, I've sworn never to work for a Japanese company, I don't drink alcohol, and the TV is pretty bad (although, if I had to choose, I would have personally taken the people-eating-food shows to task before comedy). No, the problem here is your very thesis: "I haven't changed. Japan hasn't really changed, either. Something else, however, has." Dude. You've changed. Let me restate this thesis for you in a way that, I think, sums up your problem more succinctly than your 15,979 words. "I've slowly come to the realization that my initial understanding of Japan, my corpus of knowledge about the country that brought me here originally, is woefully incomplete and, in some cases, idealistic and naive. And the more I learn about the Japan, the more mundane and flawed it appears. What originally looked like a theme park has proven to be just another country, with all the warts and problems that every country and culture has. I ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and now Eden looks a whole lot more like a highly landscaped pile of moss." It's cool man, everybody goes through this stage. That's right, it's a stage. Some people hit it earlier, some later, but eventually everybody who spends significant time in Japan passes through it. The good news is, it's the second to last stage. The earlier stages, which consist of wide-eyed awe, then short-lived self confidence, then utter confusion, and finally anger, are all behind you. Now you're in reconciliation, which is a rough point to be, but like I said, it's second to last. The next step, which is the last step, is acceptance. Japan is a culture with a lot of history, but just like any culture in the world it has positive and negative aspects to it. If you choose to live here, you get positive and negative input in equal doses, just like in any other culture in the world. If I can just throw this out there with no context and we're cool, right? Nerd cred represent. you return to America now, after living here for so long, you'll find a whole lot of negative things about American culture that might have forgotten about. A whole lot of positive things too. Not more or less than Japan, just different things. I don't mean to get all zen on you here man, but reconciliation is about changing from within. You can either adjust your perspective or you can leave (or, option three, stay and be miserable and complain all the time and move out of the "not asshole" group). Adjusting your perspective doesn't mean you have to like all the things that bug you about Japan, it just means that you accept some of those things as normal operating behavior and not some aberration of common sense. My suggestion, dude, is to separate your complaints into two categories: stuff that bugs you because it makes no sense, and stuff that bugs you because it makes it hard for you to live your life the way you want to. The latter category is probably things like "it's hard to be a vegetarian here," or "working late every night for no reason is a horrible way to live," or "I cannot afford to live here." These issues could be deal-breakers, and if you can't satisfy them somehow, you should probably consider moving to a different country. The former category, however, doesn't really have all that much to do with you; businessmen screaming drunkenly at night is weird, but only because your definition of "normal" doesn't include it (and, I imagine that many of the locals would agree with you on this point). Common sense is not, in any way, shape or form, common. Letting that former category go and realizing that It's Ok Even If I Wouldn't Do It That Way is the first step to the acceptance stage. That's not to say that anything goes, or that you have to like everything you see. Au contraire, when you reach acceptance it's easier to separate the real problems with the society from the flamboyant-but-non-representative actions of vocal minorities. Personally, I live in Japan because it requires me to learn constantly. The volume of information that I do not understand about the language, the culture, the history, and the people is infinitely vast. There's lots of stuff I don't like about Japan, but I live here because it requires me to keep thinking, to keep learning. There was a time when I didn't know why I wanted to live in Japan, and another time when I thought I wanted to live in Japan for the wrong reasons. So I know how this feels, man. When I leave, it'll either be because a better opportunity comes along or because one of those lifestyle deal-breakers rears its ugly head. So Tim, dude, I gotta wrap this up before it turns into my own little novella, but please, take this to heart: it's you who is changing, and the change isn't random. It's a natural progression and it's the direct result from living and learning about a foreign culture. Love it or leave it, but don't blame the locals for odd behavior that doesn't conform to your internal correctness barometer. If you're going to take Japan to task about something, make it a real issue, like the treatment of women in the workplace or the status of Japanese people with Korean heritage. Figure this out and move on or drop out and find something less challenging to do with your life. Seriously, that's the junction that you're at right now. Alright, I'm getting off my high horse now. London Hearts is on in 5. I've got some Deadly Premonition to catch up on, too. Talk to you later, Chris PS: If you haven't done it yet, try getting out of Tokyo for a while. Out of Kanto, I mean. In my limited experience, every other part of Japan is very different than Tokyo. People are jerks in Tokyo. PPS: If you want to hang out some time and swap game industry war stories, drop me a line. I know a good tan-tan men place in Shibuya. Oh, right, you don't eat meat. Do you eat fish? How do you survive here, man?

Though this is technically my second Halloween in Japan, it is my first in a decade and my first in Tokyo. Halloween is not a big holiday here--it is probably better known as a day when foreign students get drunk and cause trouble than as a day related to pumpkins, trick or treating, or things lurking under the stairs. This year there is actually quite a bit of Halloween cheer (paper pumpkins in store windows and black and orange color themes are abundant), which I am told is a recent development, but otherwise October 31 is pretty much the same as October 30.

But that does not mean that there is a lack of horror media for us to enjoy. With seven titles released so far 2008 has been great year for horror games. Here's hoping that you are enjoying this year's celebration of ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night.

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 just got back from a month-long trip to Japan. Though I lived in Japan a number of years ago when I was in school, and though my wife and I go back at least once a year, this was the first trip in about eight years that lasted more than two weeks. Normally I haven't been able to take enough time off of work to really stay long enough to overcome jet lag, but the new job I started last year happens to have an office in Tokyo, which is extremely convenient. It snowed off and on last month, which was actually quite nice; living in California, it's not often that I get to see snow, let alone trudge through it in the middle of a megacity.

While I was there I tried to find the Silent Hill arcade game, and while I was able to locate the machine, I didn't get a chance to play because there was actually a line. Not a long line, mind you, just one sort of suspicious-looking middle-aged man, but the arcade was smokey and I couldn't hear my friend over the Guitar Freaks racket, so I left. I was surprised to find anybody playing the thing, let alone people waiting to play it. I looked around for another machine but wasn't able to find one. Oh well, maybe next time.

I also picked up THE Tairyou Jigoku, which is pretty much as terrible as it looks. Still, it's probably quest-worthy for the same reasons that (equally terrible-looking) Escape from Bug Island is included. I also tracked down a copy of Dino Crisis for $1, which was a deal I could not pass up.

The month in Japan was a month without video games (except for the highly, highly excellent Phoenix Wright: Justice For All), so I'm behind on my Quest progress. But bear with me, we'll return to regularly scheduled industry rants, game design ramblings, and random horror media reviews shortly.

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

My recent article on Japanese horror attempted to explain horror in Japan by examining some details of the Japanese culture. Nicholas Rucka takes a different approach in his fascinating article The Death of J-Horror?: he describes in some detail the history of Japanese horror cinema and why the current boom isn't likely to survive indefinitely. Rucka has quite a few obscure films under his belt; I was particularly interested in some of the connections he draws (Woman in the Dunes to Tetsuo The Iron Man? interesting). He also clearly shares my disdain for the term "J-Horror." Check his article out.

I've finally posted a new feature, Chris' Guide to Understanding Japanese Horror. This article is a detailed look at Japanese horror within the context of Japanese culture. I attempt to explain how horror from Japan works on a very general level, and how the mechanics of Japanese and American horror differ. Here's an excerpt: The underlying concept behind Japanese yuurei is onnen (), the idea that some emotions are so strong that their power can extend from beyond the grave. Almost all classic and contemporary ghost stories from Japan operate on onnen: in addition to the obvious case of Okiku, witness Sadako's character in The Ring, the antagonist in Juon, or even the explanations given for Hanako's origin in the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. Onnen is the central concept behind yuurei, and as we will see, it differentiates Japanese horror from works in the West pretty dramatically. I spent quite a while on this one, so please check it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm headed to Japan for New Years, so updates may be a little slow. I've got a pretty good feature update in the works though, so stay tuned for that. On my trip my shopping list includes Nanatsu no Hikan, Hungry Ghosts, and Gregory Horror Show, among other obscure titles. I'll report back from the field as often as I can. See you in the new year!

I am in Japan this week. Walking around the local supermarket/random supplies store, I came across a PS2 game I did not recognize called The Fear. I did a little digging and apparently this game is a 0 Story (remember all those live-action movie games? those guys.) horror game. It comes on 4 DVDs (!!), so it costs about $70, but I'll pick it up if I can find it used. The game was published by Enix in 2001.

Here are some links about the game:

• The official site
• A preview at IGN
• Some screenshots from GameKult

What do you guys think?

There is an interesting thread going on over at GameGirlAdvance right now about the nature of horror in the West and in Japan. Specifically, the article compares Manhunt to Fatal Frame 2 as examples of horror from two different cultures. A delightful discussion has ensued. Check it out.

I am knocking around Japan with my wife this week. I picked up a bunch of games for the Quest today at our local Book Off. I swear Japan is the place for cheap used games.

I managed to pick up

• D no Shokutaku 2
• Echo Night and Echo Night 2
• Clock Tower 1 and Clock Tower 2
• Koudelka
• Overblood

The database has been updated to reflect the purchases.

I am only here long enough to get over the jet lag. I had some excellent yakiniku this evening, and I am wishing that I could stay here longer.

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.