This has nothing to do with horror games, but since a few of you asked about it I thought I'd mention Replica Island. My day job involves working on Android, and for the past year I've been putting all of my free time into this little side-scroller starring the green Android robot. In fact, work on the game took so much of my free time that my regular posting schedule on this blog degraded (and I played fewer horror games last year than in the last five or six years). Now the game is complete and I can go back to wasting my life away playing horror games!

If you're interested, here's a short video I made of the game. There's more details (and source code) on replicaisland.net. If you have an Android phone, try it out and let me know what you think (it's free!).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About a year ago I was lucky enough to be quoted in German Game magazine Gee in an article about horror games. Apparently I didn't come off like some crazy lunatic, as another magazine from Deutschland has seen fit to put my opinions to print. This time around editor Christian Schöenlein of play3 has written an interesting article about how horror games work, a topic close to my heart. Schöenlein expertly covers the psychology, thematic traits, game design, and audio design elements that are at work in horror games, and his article is one I am happy to have been able to contribute to. In fact, his article is part of a special issue of play3 that is dedicated to horror games. If you live in Germany you should check it out!

I've been in Japan for a month now. I signed a lease on an apartment at the beginning of November. I won't have an internet connection until the middle of December. I am so behind on the happenings of the world (whoa, we have a new president!), particularly the survival horror world. My games are still in transit and I haven't been playing anything other than Jake Hunter: Detective Chronicles for the DS, which I am enjoying despite its pretty awful metacritic score. Here's some stuff that I managed to hear about lately: there's an interview with Cursed Mountain's developers about the game (thanks forums member suedepup) and an interesting-sounding conference on horror games that's been announced for early next year. I have a blog post about the transition from traditional horror games to action-oriented horror games half-written on my computer, but until I can find a way to connect the damn thing to the rest of the world the post itself will have to wait. super dramatic sigh

As we approach Halloween the horror games begin to land in quick succession. Silent Hill: Homecoming and Dead Space (which is mysteriously missing from my database--gotta fix that) are out and have been met by mediocre and favorable reviews, respectively. Forums member suedepup also passed along this awesome information about leaked videos for a new Wii horror game called Calling. Since this is leaked PR material the game is still officially in rumor status, but the videos of gameplay look really great; sort of like a modern, Japanese horror-themed version of Echo Night: Beyond.

Tomorrow I board a plane with a crapload of bags, and eleven hours later I shall arrive (exhausted) in my new country of residence, Japan. See you on the flip side!

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

That's right, the PC version of The Suffering is free for download right now. Awesome!

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

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

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

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

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

Every six months or so another tiny morsel of information about open world zombie-in-the-tropics game Dead Island shows up. It's been about six month since the last drop, so here's some new screen shots.

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

Recently Sony announced Siren: New Translation, a remake of the original Siren for PS3. Now they are announcing something else called Siren Blood Curse, which sounds like an episodic version of New Translation. Details are scarce but it's hard to tell if Blood Curse is New Translation, or if one region will get one and not the other, or if they are the same game in two different packages, or if they are entirely different products. Huh?

In unsurprising news, Kotaku is reporting that Double Helix (previously known as The Collective) has cancelled vampire staking game Harker in order to finish Silent Hill 5. That's probably a worthy trade off, though it's always a bit sad to see original IP die off for the sake of a sequel (even a Silent Hill sequel). In other news, a new Splatterhouse game is in the works (thanks to forums member Johnny Feldman for the tip). You know, because, who needs new ideas when we can just regurgitate old ones?

Kotaku reports that Silent Hill 5 will be out for PS3 and Xbox360 in September of this year, and that the name on the box will read Silent Hill: Homecoming.

September is pretty soon. I'm looking forward to seeing what The Collective has done with the game.

Sony Japan has a website up that looks an awful lot like a Siren 3 announcement. The red background, rain, grainy and scary soundtrack, and even the clock design are a perfect fit for the series (not to mention the giant "sa" character in the background). Back in 2006 there were some rumblings about a Siren 3 announcement, but this site is a lot more convincing. I have to remember to check it in a few days when the timer has run out.

Update: Well, that was fast. Kotaku has confirmation that a new Siren game is on the way for PS3. It's called Siren New Translation, and apparently it's a "reworking" of the first title. Confirmation came from Famitsu, and a scan of the pages is available (file was removed and replaced with a porn-filled 404 page. note to self: never ever link to 2chan again). The release date is set for July 24th in Japan.

Update #2: The site is up now, and it includes a trailer that is pretty neat. Rather than watching it in terrible Windows Media format, why not check it out over at Kotaku, where it actually plays correctly. Apparently the new game involves an American TV crew, but it's not clear if they've been added to the characters in the original Siren, are replacing characters from that game, or if all the characters are going to be new. The architecture in the demo is familiar, and there are a couple of scenes that I remember from the original version; it's hard to tell exactly what this "reworking" is all about.

On a lighter note, Destructoid has a humorous list of 10 Golden Rules for Survival Horror. It's mostly commentary on Resident Evil, but fun nonetheless.

MTV's Multiplayer blog has an excellent series of articles about black professionals in the game industry. The entire series is a really interesting, and I recommend that you read the whole thing. I decided to post about the series because one of the topics that is discussed is the Resident Evil 5 trailer, which, as we've discussed before, ended up offending a lot of people. What's so fantastic about the series is that the diverse opinions that are expressed are coming from people who are authorities on video games. Unlike many other discussions about this topic that popped up on the net, there's no confusion about what games are about or who they are for; the topic is not diluted by general misinformation about video games as a medium. Also, all of the people interviewed for the series explain their perspectives with extreme clarity and articulacy.

I wanted to post a couple of quotes about Resident Evil 5, but if I did that people would probably take them out of context and respond without reading the article as a whole. So instead, I'll just leave you with this quote by Newsweeks' N'Gai Croal that I found really insightful and well-stated:


Go. Read the whole series.

Wii-focused vaporware horror game Sadness is probably never coming out. It probably doesn't even exist, except maybe on paper. But if it does exist, and is actually in development somewhere, then this might be a screenshot from it.

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

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

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

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

There's been a bit of horror game news this week. First of all, there's gameplay footage of Resident Evil 5. While we're on the topic of Resident Evil, there's also a rumor that Resident Evil 4 will ship for PS3 and Xbox360 with some new content, maybe starring Hunk. Finally, there's been a couple of announcements for horror (or at least, zombie-related) games for Nintendo platforms. First there's Last Fight, a Wiiware game about a food critic fighting vampires on a plane. Next is Mitewa Ikenai, a DS game about haunted photos that seems to be 1/2 visual novel and 1/2 puzzles. Finally, there's Zombie BBQ, a shooter that predictably involves zombies. Also, Condemned 2: Bloodshot has been out for about two weeks now, and the reviews are pretty positive. I'm really looking forward to playing this one.

If you read German and have access to magazines from that country, the latest issue of GEE contains an article on horror games with references to yours truly. I spoke with the author at GEE while in Japan last month, and though I've not actually seen the article yet, Michael from frightening tells me that it is now on sale. I wish that I had some German ability so that I can read the article (it sounds fascinating), but perhaps if it is posted online in the future I can read it with the aid of machine translation. Anyway, check it out if you can!

Destructoid is reporting that Fatal Frame 2 and Fatal Frame 3 have been (finally) issued reprints. These games, especially the third one, have been notoriously hard to find. But apparently if you act now you can find copies of both games fairly easily.

Destructoid also has an interesting note about the popularity of Resident Evil on the Wii. Astute readers might recall that I expected the Wii to be the place for horror games, and it appears that customers, at least for the moment and at least in regards to Resident Evil, agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1Up.com has some info on the upcoming issue of EGM, which will contain info on Silent Hill 5. Not a lot of new info here, but interesting nonetheless.

Update: 1up.com has posted a bunch more information, including an interview with the developers and a bunch of videos. It looks like the game is borrowing many of its visual ideas from the Silent Hill movie (otherworld transition sequence, busty nurses), but that may not be a bad thing at all. The videos certainly make it look pretty neat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, it must be summer! My horror game radar has been dormant for the last six months or so, but all of a sudden it has lit up with activity.

First of all, check out a game play video and screenshot gallery for Silent Hill 0rigins. The video makes it clear that while some things have changed (like the camera position), the developers are trying hard to make the game look like a Silent Hill game.

Also, there's some interesting interview videos with a couple of developers at Capcom about Umbrella Chronicles and the Wii version of Resident Evil 4. The developers describe how they are making changes to both games to enable Wii players (mostly involving changes to controls and a decrease in difficulty). Neat stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The MagicBox is reporting that Siren 3 for PS3 has been announced by sony. No details yet, but I think that rules.

Now if we can just get them to release Siren 2 here in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This totally made my morning. Capcom has posted a gameplay video of Resident Evil DS, and it looks awesome. They've added moves, bosses, rooms, mini-games, and touch screen-based combat, plus a network mode. This is now officially at the top of my most wanted DS games list.

The MagicBox has images of the three main characters available in the upcoming Siren 2. I cannot wait for this game to come out!

1up.com has a story about a contest to design the upcoming Silent Hill movie by Christopher Gains. From their article:

The full contest details are available at www.welcometosilenthill.com, but here's what you need to know: design a poster in JPG or GIF format no larger than 300K using assets provided on the website itself (art from the games are off limits) and submit it by January 3. Staring the next day, the website will start tallying votes for best poster design.

Sounds like a lot of fun! Time to bust out Photoshop!

Insert Credit has some interesting new information on Rule of Rose. Here's an excerpt:

You take the role of a young girl in england in the 1930s, who is lured to a specific house by a boy who only she can see. He gives her a book of disturbing fairly tales, which by degrees come to a sort of life in this house. The house is occupied by other young girls who simply want to be loved, but through their naive innocence create a rather horrid lord of the flies-like environment, from which the heroine wishes to escape. ... The game may not hit the states, given the rather disturbing, and sometimes psuedo-erotic content.

Sounds interesting! There's also an official site.

Thanks to forum member Grace Saunders for the heads up about Sony's upcoming adventure title Rule of Rose. The official trailer (horrible Windows Media format, beware) certainly makes it look like horror, but since there is absolutely no other information available about this game, it's hard to say for certain. Keep an eye on this one.

Resident Evil 4 is out on Playstation 2 today, and it's been garnering some pretty high praise. Here's what IGN has to say: It's easily one of the top 10 PlayStation 2 games you can lay your hands on. For me, it's probably one of my top 10 games of all-time. There's so much to enjoy, and even though PS2's visuals aren't quite as good as they were on GCN, my jaw still drops at the art design and how immersive the worlds are. one day I might even update my RE4 screenshots. maybe.

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

Evil Dead Regeneration was released on the 13th of this month, and somehow I missed it. It's been mostly panned by critics so far, but really, a game using the Evil Dead license can be a mediocre hack and slash and still be fun. Another upcoming release this month is The Suffering: Ties That Bind, which is due out next week.

Despite a year-long delay and some major business changes to the developer, Darkwatch: Curse of the West actually shipped last week. Even more surprising is the high ratings this game has been getting (~80% at the moment). Considering the developer went from being a wholly-owned Sammy office to an independent studio and switched publishers in the space of a year, I'm frankly surprised that this game ever saw the light of day. Kudos the the dev team! The game looked awesome at E3 this year, and it's the first FPS I've been interested in playing on a console.

Resident Evil 5 has been announced by Capcom. The game will be released for the PS3 and Xbox360. There are no details yet, just a collection of screens (now hosted here). I've seen some scans from Famitsu or some similar magazine, but I can't find versions large enough to actually read. If I can get my hands on them, I'll translate the pages. Thanks to forums user Gary Oak for the tip off and image link! Update: Somebody else went ahead and translated the text from the article already.

Still Life was released on the PC and Xbox on the 5th of this month. There's some question as to whether or not this game qualifies as horror, but either way it looks pretty damn cool.

Haunting Ground was released in North America yesterday. So far the reviews have been mixed, but there's already been a positive response on the user boards here. I'll wait until a few more reviewers weigh in before assigning it a world score.

Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2 is out today. So far the reviews have been mixed, but I'll wait until a few more journalists have weighed in before updating the database.

It appears that Alone in the Dark 5 is in development. I was tipped off by a news brief at Gamasutra, and I found some confirmation at Boomtown (babelfish translation from French) that is a year old. Eden is a French developer Kya, a third-person Jak & Daxter style platformer, as well as V-Rally 3. This means that their parent company, Atari, has moved the project away from the previous developer, Darkworks (who recently finished Cold Fear. Hopefully there will be something to see at E3 about ALOD5.

Thanks to Insert Credit for linking to an article on Gamespot abut From Software's upcoming PSP title, Adventure Player. Adventure Player will run adventure games that user can create themselves on a PC with software called Adventure Player Studio. Several sample Adventure Player games will ship from From, the first of which appears to be Echo Night. Sounds pretty cool!

Thanks to forums member Innominatus for the heads up about Condemned, a survival horror game slated for release on next generation (PS3 and Xbox2) consoles. Innominatus also provided a cool translation from the Jeux-France page: Sega unveils the first pictures of his next horror game entitled Condemned and developed by Monolith on the new generation of parlor consoles Xbox 2 and PlayStation 3 as well as on PERCENT. This game announces to be itself of a new kind since it is a matter of a mixture innovating between a FPS and a survival horror, a unique experience of the fear in an alarming atmosphere and realistic extremist. In this psychological thriller, the player will embody Ethan Thomas, an agent of the FBI that will have to investigate on several committed murders by Serial Killers in a dark universe and disturbing inspired film Seven. Thanks to the technical capacities of the future consoles, the editor announces us already a degree of realism never attains with notably graphic components of a very high quality such as the textures of the game. Looks pretty cool! Other than some Silent Hill 5 rumors, this is the first survival horror game to be announced for next gen consoles.

Kuon was apparently released on December 7th. I asked around at a few game stores in the area and nobody had it, but some people have posted that they've been able to find a copy so I guess it must be out.

In case you missed it, Fatal Frame 2 (Director's Cut) was released for Xbox a few days back. Among other changes, it features the ability to play the entire game from a first person perspective.

Capcom announced today that the previously GameCube-exclusive Resident Evil 4 will be released for Playstation 2 by the end of 2005. The January 2005 release date for the GameCube version is still on track, according to the news brief. Whoa!

Asyper Media e-mailed me about a new game from Wideload (founded by Bungie cofounder Alexander Seropian) called STUBBS THE ZOMBIE in "REBEL WITHOUT A PULSE". The game looks to me like a cross between Possession and Shiny's Messiah. From the press release:

In this game, players take on the role of the rebel himself Stubbs, a wisecracking Zombie who takes on an ultra-modern city of the future using nothing but his own carcass and the weapons of his possessed enemies. The game's tongue-in-cheek humor, innovative combat and strong storyline keep Stubbs the Zombie's gameplay as bizarre and unpredictable as its namesake.

...

As Stubbs, you can:

• Play as a Zombie and give those unpleasant, violent humans a piece of your mind...by eating theirs
• Destroy an entire city built with Bungie's Halo Engine
• Use Zombie Strength to smash down doors and maul a wide variety of citizens and armed defenders
• Spread Zombie Love by eating the brains of your enemies and adding them to your own personal zombie horde
• Possess unsuspecting humans and use their weapons against their friends
• Use Your Body as a Weapon in the deadliest offense ever: explosive gut grenades, zombie sputum, a severed hand that can crawl through tight spaces and possess the living, a head that doubles as an unholy bowling ball, and flatulence beyond the ken of mortal men.

Rebel Without a Pulse uses Bungie's Halo engine, so it will be available for Mac, PC, and Xbox. The official site has some cool-looking screenshots.

The MagicBox has the following tidbit today:

Capcom announced they will release Biohazard 4 / Resident Evil 4 for GameCube in Japan on January 27, 2005.

Thanks to forums member ZombieEater for posting about UbiSoft's announcement of Cold Fear, an action-horror game slated for release in March 2005. From UbiSoft's press release: Cold Fear renews the horror genre by combining the popular elements of both action and horror releases, delivering an action-packed, fear-filled gaming experience. Were excited to make our debut in the horror genre with a unique title like Cold Fear, said Tony Kee, Vice-President of Marketing for Ubisoft. It falls into a previously un-tapped category of realistic action-horror gameplay including vast environments and a disturbingly plausible storyline. Players step into the role of Tom Hansen, a U.S. Coast Guard who is sent to board a drifting Russian whaling ship in the middle of a howling storm on the Bering Sea. He arrives only to discover that terrifying surprises await him on the bloodstained decks of the constantly rocking, shifting vessel. Set in a volatile, dynamic environment, players will find themselves overwhelmed by fear as they engage in intense combat with intelligent enemies.

Capcom's recently announced horror game Demento has apparently been renamed to Haunting Ground, according to Total Video Games. The article also includes new details about the game play.

Players take the role of the games female protagonist, Fiona, who wakes to find herself in the dark and dank cellar of a mysterious castle. Confused and frightened, Fiona begins to investigate other rooms, along with menacingly dark corridors and grounds to seek answers. The more secrets the castle reveals, the more Fiona learns about her past and more importantly, her future.

One of the main features of Haunting Ground is the ability for the player to feel Fionas state of mind as she explores the castle. When Fiona encounters the inhabitants of the Castle, she naturally becomes frightened and the control pad mimics the pounding of her heart through vibrations on the pad. If she becomes even more scared then players will find controlling her more difficult, whilst she stumbles and falls.

To add to the effect, as Fionas fear increases then the colour of the screen fades away and is replaced by a stark monochrome effect. Naturally by running away or hiding, Fionas heart-rate and actions will return to normal and the colour of the screen will be replenished.

As TVG previously revealed, Fiona is assisted throughout her adventure by Hewie, an Alsatian dog, which she befriends once she has rescued him from a trap. Much like real life, Hewie wont obey all of Fionas commands at first, but as his loyalty and trust increases so does his willingness to do as she bids, including fetching items and attacking assailants. Were told that the partnership between Fiona and Hewie is crucial if Fiona wants to solve the mysteries of the castle and stay alive.

The MagicBox has the following tantalizingly-short-on-details brief:

Capcom announced a new horror adventure game for PlayStation 2 called Demento, in which you play as a girl named Fiona.

There are also two very small and almost indecipherable images. I'll see if I can find more information.

In other Capcom news, check out yet more Resident Evil 4 screen shots from the Tokyo Game Show at Game Watch.

Gameindustry.biz is reporting that Resident Evil Outbreak File 2 is at the top of the Japanese sales charts this week.

The game sold some 91,000 units in its first week on sale, which is a fairly decent number, but compares unfavourably with the 227,000 units sold in the same timeframe by its predecessor - suggesting that the online version of the game may not have legs as a franchise after all.

... but when you consider that the game was probably little more than an art swap for Capcom, 91k units in a week doesn't sound too bad at all.

The MagicBox is reporting that Sony has confirmed earlier rumors that a sequel to Siren is in development.

Sony confirmed that they will release the survival horror adventure game SIREN 2 for PS2 in Japan in 2005.

The MagicBox is today reporting:

Konami announced that Silent Hill 5 will be coming to the next generation consoles, Silent Hill 4 is the last title for the current generation consoles.

The MagicBox is carrying the following UNCONFIRMED RUMOR about Siren:

UNCONFIRMED: Sony is working on a sequel to its popular horror adventure game Forbidden Siren.
We can only hope that it turns out to be true.

1up.com has confirmed suspicions that Silent Hill 4: The Room will ship with the soundtrack included on a separate disc. Hurray for Akira Yamaoka fans!

IGN is reporting that the release date for Resident Evil 4 has finally been confirmed: January 11, 2005.

Thanks to forums member Sadako for pointing out that Echo Night: Beyond (also known as Nebula: Echo Night) was released in the US for PS2 a few days ago. She's also posted her initial impressions. Check out the forum for her thoughts.

Yesterday GameSpot confirmed the rumor that Treyarch's survival horror/driving game Dead Rush has been canceled. The official Dead Rush website is also down. Quite disappointing news, as this game actually looked like it had the potential to inject a new style of game play into the horror genre. I'll be removing the Dead Rush page from the database shortly.

From The MagicBox: Sony will release SIREN Special Edition for PS2 in Japan on October 7, exact details of the game is not yet known. I wonder what will be special about it.

The rumor mill is saying that Dead Rush has been canceled, due to a change of management over at Treyarch. Hopefully this rumor will prove to be unfounded. If the game has been canceled, I'll remove it from the list as soon as I have official confirmation.

Thanks to Josh for pointing me toward the new Echo Night: Beyond Official English Site. Echo Night: Beyond is the American title for the horror-on-the-moon title Nebula: Echo Night, and the third game in the Echo Night series. According to the site, the game will be released in North America on June 27th.

Insert Credit has the scoop on Silent Hill 4 additions:

A different sort of audio CD is being included with the japanese release of Silent Hill 4: The Room. This time it's to be a series of horror stories by Ryuzai Sadamizu (?), set to original music by the creator of the OST. Sadamizu is, according to the itmedia report, a living national treasure. This CD is not currently planned for release outside of japan.

Hopefully the Western versions will include something similar.

Slashdot is reporting that the action-horror title The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, long thought to have died with 3DO, is actually still in active development. IGN has the scoop while GameSpy has preview information from the last time the game was sighted.

The MagicBox has new information and screens on Resident Evil 4. It's been revealed that Ashley, the Presidents daughter whom Leon is trying to save, will be a playable character. When Leon carries Ashley in his arms, he cannot do any attacks but run away. Some of the weapons Leon can access during the game include handgun, rocket launcher, machine gun, grenade and sniper.

Slashdot Games is reporting that a new Evil Dead game is probably in the works, based on a comment by Bruce Cambell. The developer appears to be Cranky Pants, developers of Summoner.

Via The MagicBox:

Spike will release the PS2 horror adventure game Michigan in Japan on July 22, for 6800 yen.

This just in from The MagicBox: Agetec also announced a US version of From Software's survival horror adventure game Kuon, the game will be out in October. Update: 1up.com has more details, though they've mistranslated the English name as "Eternity" instead of "Nine Grudges."

Check out this teaser site for a new horror game to be unveiled at E3, apparently titled Possession.

Apparently, Possession allows you to play as a zombie hunting humans. From the site:
No more creeping about in the shadows.
No more conserving ammo...
Possession finally lets players
take control of the carnage

Rumor has it that the Splatterhouse series is about to get a new installment on PS2. Amazon.co.uk seems to have substantiated the rumor, though absolutely no details are available. Via Insert Credit.

This just in from The MagicBox:

Midway announced they are working on a sequel to its popular horror adventure game The Suffering.

1Up.com is reporting that Ghost Hunter is on its way to the United States. No release date is specified in the 1Up article, but GameFaqs.com shows the game shipping in the States in "September 2004."

Thanks much to forums member ZombieEater for this information: Capcom has released new details on its latest online action adventure game Biohazard Outbreak File 2 (Resident Evil Outbreak File 2). The story takes place in other parts of the Racoon city, where the 8 characters from the first game continue their journey to escape. The first scenario takes place around a zoo, zombies appear during an Elephant show, and the zoo is now deserted. The elephant and other animals were infected by the deadly virus and rampaging in the zoo. Biohazard Outbreak File 2 is scheduled for a Fall 2004 release in Japan, the game will correspond to the PS2 Network Adapter and Broadband Unit. I've added Resident Evil Outbreak 2 to the database, along with the screens I've been able to find. More information is available at Polygon Magazine and The MagicBox.

IGN is reporting that the Siren team is hiring production staff to work on a sequel to their hit horror game.

Siren (known as Forbidden Siren in the US and Europe) is scheduled for release in North America on April 20th.

Lots of news today. This just in via the Magic Box:

Konami announced the release date of Silent Hill 4: The Room for PlayStation 2, the game will be released in Japan on June 17, for 6980 yen. No release date is announced for the Xbox version.

Thanks to Jared for reminding us that LifeLine (also known as Operator's Side) is out today. LifeLine is unique because it requires you to play by issuing voice commands over a microphone to a game character. So far the reviews have been lower than the Japanese version, perhaps due to poor localization or the voice recognition technology not translating well to English. However, the game is obviously an ambitious attempt at using new technologies in games, and I am looking forward to checking it out.

The Suffering, an incredibly bloody-looking horror title developed Surreal Software and published by Midway, is set for release this coming Monday (the 8th). By all indications this game will be a very mature entry into the horror genre. However, the bits I played almost a year ago at E3 were very promising, and I am interested to see if this title will be able to avoid joining the mediocre American horror game club.

First off, I've added a bunch of new screens to the Resident Evil 4 page. You might also be interested in checking out these scans. In a bit of sad news, it looks like the excellent game magazine Polygon is going out of buisness. Polygon was one of the few intellegent and mature magazines left on the market, and I am sorry to see it close down after such a short run.

Polygon Magazine is reporting that Siren will be released in both North America and Europe this spring. Thank the Lord in Heaven! Sony's latest PlayStation 2 horror game entitled "Forbidden Siren" is scheduled for release worldwide. After selling more than 150,000 copies in Japan and South Korea, Sony plans to release the game in Europe and North America later this spring.

We wouldn't want to neglect Silent Hill 4 with all this Resident Evil coverage. Check out the new official web site, complete with some quick movies!

Via The MagicBox...

Capcom confirmed that they will release Resident Evil 4 (Biohazard 4) for GameCube in US in Winter 2004.

Haven't posted any updates lately, thanks to Thanksgiving and a terrible cold. Here is some stuff from the past week:

Forums member Endaso hooked me up with some information on Dark Tales - From The Lost Soul, which I've added to the database. The game appears to be a movie with several decision points. Forum member CronoLuminaire posted some interesting info, which I've put up on the Dark Tails info page.

The MagicBox is reporting that Japanese game magazine Famitsu has scored Biohazard Outbreak (the new online Resident Evil) very highly: 36/40 (90%). It was promising at E3, and I hope that it really is as good as they say.

The MagicBox also reports that Siren has sold 130,000 units since its release late last month. With luck, strong sales will get this title published in the West.

Finally, I've made a few fixes to the site. Thanks to Bock for pointing out a bug with the Alone in the Dark 2 page.

The MagicBox reports:

Sony mentioned 100,000 copies of their PS2 horror adventure game SIREN was sold in Japan in 2 weeks, which already met their sales prediction.

They also have some new Biohazard: Outbreak movies.

Interesting tidbit from Polygon:

Japanese developer Spike, perhaps best known for their popular wrestling and racing game franchises, has confirmed plans for survival horror game entitled "Michigan" on PlayStation 2. Tentatively scheduled for release in spring 2004, specifics regarding the game, its storyline and associated features remain largely undisclosed. Spike reportedly plans for formally unveil Michigan at a special event in the coming weeks.

As soon as there is some concrete data (like a logo or a screenshot), I'll add this to the database.

From The MagicBox:
Sony has suspended its Japanese TV ad for the PS2 horror adventure game SIREN, the TVCM was said to be too scary, and they have received a number of complaints after children got too scared after watching the ad.
Anyone have a link to the commercial in question?

The Magic Box has a bunch of new info and images from Biohazard: Outbreak (Resident Evil: Outbreak in the States), as well as some preview movies (one and two) in MPEG format. Also of note, the 'Box reports that Famitsu has rated Siren 32/40 (four reviewers: 9, 7, 8, 8), which is very good. Glass no Bara (Glass Rose) also received 29 / 40 (7, 8, 7, 7).

The MagicBox has yet more info and screens on Siren.

They also have this interesting snippet:
Capcom mentioned they will reveal a brand new Biohazard (Resident Evil) title in the next issue of Famitsu in Japan.

A new Resident Evil game?? Lets just hope it isn't another Gun Survivor debacle. Apparently, no further information is available yet.

The MagicBox has some info and screens on Namco's Plague of Darkness. I can't tell from the information available if this title will really be worthy of the list, but it certainly looks promising.

The Magic Box is reporting that Capcom will begin selling vertical stands and memory cards with the Umbrella logo on them when Biohazard Outbreak is released.

This just in from our friends at The Magic Box:

Konami mentioned Silent Hill 4 will be coming to PlayStation 2 by the end of 2004. The lead character will be a male character, and the story will once again take place in the city of Silent Hill.

GameSpy has posted some new information (and some screenshots) about the single player mode in Resident Evil Outbreak.

The MagicBox has released more Fatal Frame 2 images. Between this and the release of Siren, November is going to be a good month for survival horror gamers.

This just in from The Magic Box:
Sony announced they will release the PS2 horror adventure game Siren in Japan on November 6, for 6800 yen.

I can't wait!!

This just in from The Magic Box:

Capcom is considering releasing Resident Evil Outbreak for PS2 in Europe without online support, the game may be presented with only offline modes. The reason is due to technical problems on the difference between the network systems used in Europe and the other two territories.

I am not sure what it is about the Survival Horror genre that attracts film makers. Most horror games are heavily influenced by cinema anyway, which might make people who produce films comfortable.

Regardless, I think it is important to remember that there has never, ever been a good movie made based on a video game license. Resident Evil was bad, Street Fighter was terrible, and Super Mario Bros. was god-awful. I suppose the Mortal Kombat was the most successful: it spawned a series of terrible sequels.

Well my friends, more video game movies are on the way, and they all seem horror oriented.

• Alone In The Dark trailer.
• House of the Dead trailer/site. I shouldn't judge this movie until I see it, but I gotta say.... it looks super lame.
• Silent Hill announcement via IGN.
• Fatal Frame announcement via IGN.
• Onimusha announcement via IGN.
• Devil May Cry announcement via IGN.
• Eternal Darkness announcement via IGN.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what the film makers behind these productions do, but my hopes are pretty amazingly low. I guess I can see some potential for Silent Hill or Fatal Frame turning out well, as those games rely heavily on mood. The fact that the trailer for House of the Dead starts with "teenagers, at a rave, on an island full of zombies!!" pretty much ruins any hopes I might have had for that flick.