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

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

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

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

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

I finished Heavy Rain last week. Despite director David Cage's insistence to the contrary, Heavy Rain isn't really a horror game. It's a thriller, or maybe mystery-suspense; if it were a film, it would live in an adjacent, but clearly separate section from the horror flicks. So, being a not-horror game, I'm not going to include it in the database here. It is, however, quite good, and like Quantic Dream's earlier effort, Indigo Prophesy, readers of this site will probably find a lot to enjoy.

Heavy Rain is a pretty high-profile game, so I'm going to skip the paragraph where I tell you what the game is about and how it works. You already know that it's a cinematic narrative that plays out from multiple perspectives and features a branching story line and a whole crapload of endings. And I'm sure that you're aware that the control scheme is a mixture of Type C controls and Quick Timer Events. And the plot is about a guy trying to save his son from a serial killer called the Origami Killer. You know all this already, so consider this paragraph skipped.

I really enjoyed Heavy Rain, but I was also somewhat disappointed with it. It's everything that I expected it to be, and yet, somehow, it felt a tad flat. I mean, the game itself really works: the art and graphics are phenomenal, the acting is good (I played in French with English subtitles, which was neat), the story is interesting, the branching gives the game decisions real weight, and the quick timer events actually work pretty well. There are some problems (some of the QTEs are pretty much impossible to pull off with a time limit, the movement controls lack a lot of precision, and the plot has some major gaping holes), but none of them really damage the experience. I think my problem with the game is that it represents such a huge effort to create an interactive story, and while it succeeds in so many ways, the actual story itself was somewhat predictable. It's like the game graduated from all the pedestrian implementation flaws that drag other games down and ran instead into the much more complex problem of actually having competent plot.

I think that where Heavy Rain is most successful is in its use of camera work and character development to make game play decisions feel like they really matter. Knowing that if I mess up a branch I cannot go back, and also getting to know the characters enough that I want to play them in character had a huge impact on the value of the plot. This is also something that other genres have a really hard time with because they have to balance "story parts" with "game parts." In Heavy Rain, it's all the same mode.

So really, I have nothing too negative to say about this game. The few missteps are more than forgivable; this game design takes so much risk and pulls it off so well that a few misses here and there are hardly important. You should go run out and get this game right now.

Though the game itself is interesting, I also find it fascinating to see how other gamers respond to it. A lot of folks I know had a very negative response to the early part of the game, in which nothing particularly exciting happens. This section exists to define the main character and make his motivations for the later parts of the game seem plausible, and I personally had no problem with it at all, but some people I've spoken feel that any time spent playing a game in which exciting, extraordinary things are not happening is time wasted. They see the game as an action game waiting to happen, a constant tease that leads you on, promising to become a thrilling, button-mashing experience, and then just never does. "And when they get to the combat," one friend laments, "it's all goddamn QTEs!"

Me, I see this game as the ultimate evolution of the Adventure genre. Back when it was the Text Adventure genre, we had paragraphs of text to explain the situation, and then a passive blinking cursor to input commands. The major game play mode was exploration; look at this, examine that, try going over here. The genre graduated into the Graphic Adventure sometime in the late 1980s, and in those games there was still a lot of text, and still a lot of exploration, though mostly performed though point and click. We dropped the prefixes sometime in the '90s, and Adventure games split into a couple of different groups (including a branch that eventually became Survival Horror), but the common traits have remained the same: heavy focus on plot and exploration of the environment. In Heavy Rain, plot is communicated via cinematography and spoken dialog. Exploration is still a major part of the experience, though the method involves hot spots littered throughout the environment and some QTEs. So to me, this is sort of a mid-90's Adventure game with all the dials turned to 11 and cinematography and branching content sort of grafted on the top. And as Adventure games go, this one is one of the most action-packed I've ever played.

Part of the reason people are drawn to horror games, I think, is that they require some sort of narrative focus to effectively build tension. I think a lot of horror gamers, myself included, might be more interested in games with good, well-told stories than games that happen to feature ghosts and demons and flesh bag monsters. If you feel like you're in that camp, give Heavy Rain a try.

I finally finished Silent Hill Homecoming this evening and posted a review. It's not a bad game, and it's more like classic Silent Hill than anything released since 2003, but a few key derivations from the formula damaged the experience for me. Still, it's a positive sign that the series is moving forward (evidenced more dramatically, I suppose, by Silent Hill: Shattered Memories).

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

Thanks Casey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last year my network of horror-aficionado friends started talking about a hard-to-find Spanish film called REC. The few reviews available were stellar, and I was intrigued with the idea of a Blair Witch-style film about zombies (as I mentioned in my Cloverfield review, the handicam approach to horror seems to be pretty viable). But, as far as I know, REC isn't available in the US. It was remade this year (one year after the original release; predictably, the remake staring English-speakers is inferior to the original), so maybe now it will come out on DVD, but at the moment it's a hard film to find in the States. But not so in Japan! This weekend I sat down with a friend and watched the film, and while it didn't totally blow me away, I found it to be an extremely capable zombie flick. There's an immediacy about the movie, partially because it's all handheld photography but also because events occur in succession faster than the characters are able to respond. A TV crew doing a show about how firefighters spend their evenings find themselves trapped in a small apartment building when the government blocks all of the exits and declares a quarantine. The crew, along with a couple of firefighters and the residents of the building, have no idea why they've been sealed off or when they'll be able to leave. And the old woman upstairs seems to be having some problems; she keeps screaming at the top of her lungs. Based on this fairly simple premise, REC takes off like a bolt and doesn't really ever slow down. It's one revelation after another, and though a few moments are pretty predictable for the most part the characters and the audience figure things out at the same pace. The end is a mixed bag; on the one hand it is one of the most tension-filled scenes in the film, but on the other it veers dangerously close to the trap of trying to explain everything. This is how horror films should be made. Not that they all have to be shaky handicam productions, just that the formula is simple and the execution excellent. All extraneous bits (monsters, gore, sex scenes) have been removed in service to the central focus of the film: scaring the viewers. Though REC isn't a perfect horror film, and though it's not the type of movie that leaves you pondering the plot after the credits roll, I was pretty happy with it. Skip the remake (and even the trailer for the remake--they reveal some key scenes) and find yourself a copy of the DVD.

I finished Condemned 2: Bloodshot yesterday evening and I've just posted a review. It's a pretty good game, and at some points it's absolutely brilliant, but I found the story and level progression to be a bit random and unfocused. Still, the Condemned series represents an example of how horror games can diverge from the formulas defined by Resident Evil and Silent Hill and still be very high quality. I enjoyed Condemned 2, though I think that the original had a better story.

Aha! I've found the script! I finished Obscure 2 last night. It was not good. You should not play this game. I wrote a review with details if you are interested. OK, ok, I'll provide a little more context. Obscure 2 is a game that cuts its own throat with a terrible plot and asinine characters. It's got the right elements to make a good game, but in the end it was really quite bad. It's too bad because I enjoyed the first game more than I expected to.

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

I recently purchased The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, a collection of horror comics spanning the era before and after the Comics Code Authority was instated in 1954. Though I enjoy comics (as a kid I had a pretty good collection), I've kind of fallen out of sync with the comics world. I have friends and family who occasionally direct something fantastic my way, and I'm really interested in the medium, but this collection was the first comic material that I've purchased in about ten years (although I recently enjoyed and can highly recommend Jason Shiga's online stuff, particularly Meanwhile, Fleep, and Bookhunter). I decided to pick up the Mammoth Book because I also just bought The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America and I wanted to do some brushing up on the works that caused the Comics Code Authority to be created in the first place. I think that the fear and uncomfortableness that the older generation sometimes feels about video games today very much mirrors the way that horror comics were viewed in the 1950s, so in the interest in understanding the present better, this stuff seems like pertinent knowledge. I guess some people on Amazon were disappointed that The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics isn't a full-color reproduction, but for $12 I can't complain. The collection is filled with mostly obscure horror comics--48 in all--published between 1944 and 2004. About half of the comics are from the '40s and '50s, which is good because frankly, many of the later works are pretty dull. Nothing in the Mammoth Book is famous; there are no prints of well-known EC comics like Tales from the Crypt. I think that the book is a collection of whatever random works that the publishers were able to obtain the rights to for little or no cost; those looking for a collection of the most famous (and most controversial) horror comics from the last half-century will be disappointed. Each comic is introduced by the book's editor, Peter Normanton, and describes the authors of the comic and the era in which it was published. Though Normanton clearly knows his stuff, his command of the English language is tenuous at best; after a couple of really annoyingly bad introductions, I skipped the rest and just stuck to the comics. Despite its faults, the Mammoth Book does contain some really good comics. It's fascinating to see the dramatic change in style and approach before and after the Comics Code; in some cases, the censorship seems to have actually improved the writing because authors were forced to use suggestion rather than all-out gore. The Monster of Dead End, which was published in 1962, is an excellent example of effective comic horror that doesn't rely on melting faces or decapitations to get its point across. I also found it interesting that the tone of the earlier comics is much more depressing; though evil-doers often get what is coming to them, the endings of many of the 1950s era works are not uplifting or satisfying. The later books tend to play up the "you will reap what you have sown" approach to storytelling, where everything works itself out because all of the bad people have died and all of the good people have triumphed, but before the Comics Code Authority things didn't always end quite so neatly. Though more recent tales like Over His Head (1983) began to experiment again with rather unpredictable stories, the dramatic difference between the 1950s and 1960s comics is really interesting. So, while this is hardly a collection of the "best" horror comics, or even the most well-known horror comics, I enjoyed most of The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics. If you skip the introductions and stick to the comics and I think that collection is a really interesting example of how the medium progressed in terms of story telling technique and art style in the face of cultural fear and censorship. It's hardly a definitive work, but as a (rather random) sampling of horror comics from the last fifty years, it's not half-bad.

I went to see Cloverfield with a friend the other night. The trailer doesn't show you very much, and I'm not about to spoil the movie for you here, but if you are already planning on seeing this movie and would appreciate the full effect, stop reading now. Oh, wait, before you go: I was advised to sit at the way back of the theater for this one, and that advice was sound enough for me to relate it now to you with some conviction.

Still with me? Ok, so from the trailer it should be pretty clear that Cloverfield is about something attacking New York City the same way Godzilla has ravaged Tokyo so many times in the last fifty years. In case you couldn't tell, the whole film is shot as if being held by a consumer-grade handicam, Blair Witch style. The result of the constantly moving scene is at first disorienting and difficult to watch, but eventually, as with Blair Witch, I got used to it and forgot that it was even there.

In return for sustaining the frenetic camera, the hand-held look lends a huge amount of credibility to the events occurring within the film. Though the actions of the main characters are somewhat unbelievable, the cinematography does an excellent job of making the events unfolding throughout the film plausible. The CG work is also excellently done; the absolutely destroyed New York City that the protagonists find themselves in cannot possibly exist, and yet as they move from block to block the visuals are stark and convincing. The camera work, combined with the convincing visuals is more than enough to make this film fun. And thankfully, when the big bad threat to the city is shown, the filmmakers don't overdo it.

What I thought was most interesting about Cloverfield is that it is so clearly a modern Giant Monster movie, and yet at the same time it is also clearly a reaction to the events of September 11th. Just as the Godzilla films reflected cultural fear about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cloverfield's depiction of Manhattan's demise is quite obviously based on the terrorist attacks seven years ago. This makes Cloverfield more thoroughly a member of the Japanese Giant Monster genre than any other Western film that I know of.

I'm not generally a huge fan of Giant Monster movies, but I had a lot of fun with Cloverfield and I was impressed with the film's ability to display such a convincing environment. The filmmakers clearly know their roots, but have done a good job of innovating within the genre.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. As a filmmaker, he's able to manufacture creepiness with lighting, shot composition, and sets alone. The actors (and ghosts) that populate his scenes are sometimes just icing on the horror cake: Kurosawa knows how to design his films to maximize scares better than any other director in recent memory. Loft is no exception. The film mostly takes place in a couple of desolate buildings and every shot has Kurosawa's prints all over it. The lighting and scene progression were particularly impressive. The plot and characters are almost secondary; the scenery and timing do almost all of the heavy lifting for scares. Kurosawa has the ability to take us through a what's-behind-that-door scene, the kind we've seen in a thousand other films, and still make it dramatic and suspenseful. Loft's plot is a little difficult to describe. The protagonist is a writer struggling to get through a novel in time for a deadline. Having moved out to the country to concentrate, she runs into a university professor who seems to have kidnapped a 1,000 year old mummy. When the protagonist agrees to hold on to the mummy for a bit, things start to get very strange. Eventually, she and the professor must solve a series of seemingly-unrelated problems if either of them ever hope to be comfortable in the dark again. Unlike some of Kurosawa's other films, Loft is actually fairly straight-forward. I was not left scratching my head at the end of it, which is more than I can say for Pulse or Retribution. It's not simple, but on the other hand he spends a lot more time explaining things in this film than in some of his others. I think the goal in this film is simpler: he's got a particular theme in mind but there's no grand message that he's trying to convey. In that sense, and in the way that Kurosawa actually tells his story, I think Loft is most similar to his earlier film Seance. One reviewer I read called the film "uneven," which I think is an insightful description. There are a couple of extremely jarring scenes, scenes that do not fit with the rest of the film to such a degree that you have to wonder if maybe it's a dream sequence or something. There's extremely little dialog, so when the characters start to express any sort of emotion other than fear, it seems a little thin. But those sections of the film are thankfully few and far between, and the rest of the time is spent slowly (the pace is quite glacial) exploring ways to freak the characters (and us) out. In fact, this film seemed quite Western compared to the rest of Kurosawa's catalog (excepting Seance, which is based on an English short story and feels very Western). Of course, the particulars of each individual scare are very Japanese per Kurosawa norm, but the way that information is revealed and the clarity of that information seems more in line with a Western thriller than Japanese horror. Like I said, this film is the easiest of Kurosawa's recent work to comprehend. For me, the amazing cinematography and genuinely scary sequences were more than enough to make up for some of the films flaws. Loft isn't a phenomenal film, but it's extremely well made, it's pretty scary, and if you like Kurosawa's handiwork as much as I do, there's a lot here to enjoy.

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

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

The other evening I watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest, a film called Retribution (sakebi, or "Scream," in Japanese). You may remember that I am a pretty big Kurosawa fan; his film Cure is one of my favorite horror films of all time. The others of his that I've seen, Doppelganger, Pulse, Charisma, and Seance, are also excellent, though they are not as absolutely inspired as Cure. Kurosawa is good at using long, wide shots that go on for seemingly forever to convey the emotions of the protagonist (which, in his films, is usually isolation and despair). Kurosawa is a horror film director who actively avoids simple plots and cliche devices in his films; there is a subtly and sense of careful measurement in everything that he makes. Retribution is no exception. The film revolves around a police detective working on a murder case and slowly realizing that the perpetrator is probably himself. It is a fatalistic film, very similar in tone to Kurosawa's earlier Pulse, with a few little details from Cure thrown in as well. Kurosawa has something to say about Japanese society, something about the bleak isolation that Japan's constant development and focus on the future creates. When the protagonist detective (played by Koji Yakusho, just like in every other Kurosawa movie) begins to see the victim of the crime he may have committed in his apartment, the effect is less ghostly than it is desperate. The visions that haunt him seem like pretty standard horror stuff early on, but by the end of the film the dead girl is something other than a run-of-the-mill vengeful spirit. The feeling of desolation and poverty within the world's second richest nation is reinforced by the locales and sets that Kurosawa employes. Everything throughout the film is decrepit, dirty, and old, even locations that we might normally associate with modern society, like the police station. Recurring earthquakes and endless shots on reclaimed land also remind the viewer that the foundations upon which modern Japanese society is built are not necessarily stable. Retribution has its flaws (well described in this extremely detailed, very well thought-out review of the film), and I enjoyed it slightly less than Kurosawa's previous works, but that said I still thought it was pretty great. This kind of film cannot be made in America (not by a major production company, anyway), and I am thankful that we have guys like Kurosawa around to make it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm sure she's just planning to trim those bangs back. This evening I watched Kuchisake Onna, a film made this year about the slit-mouthed antagonist of a Japanese urban legend I've discussed before. Actually, the film is built around the very general idea of a scary woman with a slashed mouth and surgical mask who hunts children--the other details of the legend are completely ignored. But that's ok, because the filmmakers actually did a pretty good job on Kuchisake Onna's design: when she shows up, you know exactly what to expect from her. The story, such as it is, involves a series of children vanishing from the streets in broad daylight. Rumor has it that they are victims of Kuchisake Onna, who has been released from imprisonment by a recent earthquake. Turns out the rumors are right: Kuchisake Onna is on the loose and has a bone to pick with just about everybody under the age of 11 (and any adults who happen to get in her way). The protagonist, a teacher at a local school who's students are among the victims, must track Kuchisake Onna down and stop her from taking any more children. She's aided by another teacher, who helpfully can hear a strange voice whenever Kuchisake Onna is about to strike. Together they must solve the mystery--blah blah, you know the rest. As a movie, Kuchisake Onna is unfortunately pretty bad. It's not cringe-worthy bad, but there's very little to redeem it; the acting is pretty terrible, the script is atrocious, and the plot is both full of holes and entirely predictable. But it's not a total train wreck: some of the photography is pretty good (though there are a few really noticeably bad cuts) and I liked the way the director used color filters to code different locations in the movie. The pacing is pretty weird: the movie just starts, with no introduction, and within the first few minutes we've already seen Kuchisake Onna take her first victim; there's no build-up and consequently very little arc to the overall story. The ending, unfortunately, is pretty lame, as is the application of some not-so-tricky wordplay late in the film to connect the story with the legend upon which Minetaro Mochizuki's Zashiki Onna it is based. One thing I did like about the film is the way the antagonist, Kuchisake Onna herself, is portrayed. She shows up whenever she pleases, even in the middle of the day on a sunny street. There's no need to wait for darkness or to explore the haunted mansion with flashlights at night (though that happens too--sigh), Kuchisake Onna is bad-ass enough to appear right in the middle of the day to grab children. I also like the way the Kuchisake Onna looks: she is tall, has long hair, a surgical mask, and carries around some incredibly large shears. Actually, now that I think about it, I think her design was taken pretty much directly from the antagonist of Minetaro Mochizuki's excellent horror comic Zashiki Onna. I've thought many times about translating Zashiki Onna ("Tatami Room Woman") into English, as it's such an awesome and well-written horror comic. At any rate, the design of Kuchisake Onna matches Mochizuki's antagonist almost perfectly. That's cool though--the design works, and it's one of the best things about the movie. The other, somewhat interesting (for aficionados, anyway) thing about the film is that it follows the modern Japanese horror film tradition of being about broken families. In this film, the subject is child abuse. As David Kalat points out in his fascinating book, non-nuclear family relationships are one of the core themes of modern (post-Ring) Japanese horror films. The thing is, nothing else about Kuchisake Onna really aligns to "J-Horror" (a term I abhor) conventions; it's much more like a formulaic Hollywood slasher flick, with a heavy emphasis on body count and gore and no attempt at the subtlety favored by the recent classics of the genre. I wonder if the broken home theme was chosen because it fit the story (which it actually does) or simply to be like other modern Japanese horror films. In any case, Kuchisake Onna is a pretty mediocre horror film that I think you are probably better off avoiding.

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

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

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

In preparation for the American version of The Grudge 2, I decided to watch the original sequel to Juon, which was itself a remake of a TV movie. In total, I think there are at least six versions of these movies, all directed by the same director and all pretty much the same. To its credit, the latest American remake looks pretty different than the Japanese version, so maybe that iteration will change things up a bit. Juon 2, however, is pretty much a perfect-to-form sequel to Juon. The director, Takashi Shimizu, has making this movie down to a science; it almost seems as if each scene can be described by an equation with slightly different variables. All the neat things from the first film return in the sequel: backwards, Memento-style storytelling, a curse that jumps from one person to the next like a virus, modern-day appliances behaving maliciously, and a female antagonist with long, face-obscuring hair. The first Juon also experimented a with a sort of time warp effect for one of its characters, which felt out of place because it did not match the rest of the film. Juon 2, on the other hand, takes that idea and makes it central to the presentation, with pretty great results. Shimizu has also progressed as a cinematographer: the shots, sets, and lighting are pretty high quality, and seem to be a distinct improvement over the original film. That said, Juon 2 also has some fatal flaws. First of all, the story is sort of pointless. The main resolution of the first film explained to us why Kayako, the antagonist, likes to kill people in interesting ways. Having answered that question, the second film doesn't really have anywhere else to go. We have a cast of characters that are assaulted by Kayako one after the other, but there's no overall tension or drama to the story itself: it's just a collection of scary scenes. I guess there is an attempt to tie the story together with a single, reoccurring character, but this just leads to a really dumb ending. While Shimizu is an expert at creating a five-minute scene that is full of tension, he seems to lose focus when considering the film as a while. I thought another of his films, Marebito, had the same problem. As in the first film, Shimizu also shoots himself in the foot a couple of times with some really, really poorly done special effects. While not as egregious as the original Juon, Juon 2 has a scene or two where I was just unable to suspend my disbelief any longer. These scenes are minor and they don't ruin the film, but they do sort of pull you out of the scary mood. So, in summary, Juon 2 is almost exactly the same as Juon, only with less overall plot focus. If you liked the first movie, you'll probably enjoy the second. If you hated the first movie, there's nothing here that you'll find any better. If you are looking for Japanese ghosts killing girls, you can do far worse than this film, but if you care about plot or script, you may be disappointed. While Juon 2 perfectly replicates the good parts of its predecessor, it also suffers from a lot of the same flaws.

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

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

I went to see The Descent last week despite knowing absolutely nothing about the film. I'd never seen a trailer or even a poster, but strong critical response convinced me to go.

The Descent is about a group of thrill-seeking women who decide to go spelunking in a remote cave. They get pretty deep into the cave before they realize how dangerous their situation is. The tension is high and unrelenting, and then the monsters come out.

What's nice about this film is that it doesn't waste any time whatsoever on superfluous scenes. The script is concise and direct: only the necessary scenes are included. This is a "pop out of the dark" movie, and after a while there is a definite rhythm to each scare event, but the film never becomes trite and it never really loses its ability to startle you. The characters are developed just enough to make the interactions between them important, and the monsters are not dwelt upon for longer than necessary.

It's been a long time since I've seen a pop-out movie that is this effective. Though there are a huge number of films in this genre, very few are successful (Alien is probably the best of the bunch). The Descent is tight, simple, and expertly constructed, and I found it much more effective than I was expecting.

I watched a couple of horror movies lately, but I haven't had a lot of time to write proper reviews for them. I've got quite a few films I want to see in my queue, but thanks to work I've not really had enough time to watch many of them. For the few I've seen in the last couple of months, here's a few mini-mini-reviews. Marebito (A Stranger from Afar) is a 2004 film by Takashi Shimizu (director of Ju-On) starring none other than whacko director and actor Shinya Tsukamoto (director of Tetsuo The Iron Man, among others). It's an intensely strange film about a man who is either losing his mind or has become one of the few who realize that there are many horrible things dwelling below the surface of Tokyo. Depending on what you believe, he either brings a strange naked girl back from the depths below the city or he's a lunatic who is is treating his own daughter like an animal. Either way, the film is interesting but sort of nonsensical. It leaves plenty of little clues around for you to think about, but it never really reaches a meaningful conclusion. I'd say watch it if you are a fan of movies that might have some hidden inner meaning or might just be really poorly told. Picnic at Hanging Rock is another cryptic film. Directed by Peter Weir in 1975, this film is about the disappearance of several girls and one of their teachers at a vaguely threatening volcanic rock in Australia. The girls are part of a much larger group, and they seem to vanish without a trace among the boulders and rubble. The circumstance of their disappearance is made even more confusing by a few eye witness reports. But even though the film is centered around the site of the rock, the bulk of the content concerns how the remaining classmates and teachers react to the disappearance. It's complicated and doesn't really ever reveal its hand, but I enjoyed it quite a bit for the shear creepiness factor that the film is able to impart to a bunch of rocks. Equinox (or The Equinox, depending on which version you see) is a 1970 horror classic. By today's standards it is simplistic and campy to the extreme, but it's an important film in the modern history of American horror cinema. It was created entirely by high school students, including a young Dennis Muren, who went on to be the special effects wizard behind Star Wars, The Abyss, and pretty much every other great effects movie. Though it is sort of hilarious to watch now, you can see elements of the film that clearly influenced later movies like Evil Dead. Imprint is a film created by Takashi Miike (director of approximately 3 - 5 films a year, including Ichi the Killer and Audition) as part of Showtime's Masters of Horror series. As the story goes, Miike was asked by Showtime to make a movie and to go all out, since Showtime can run its own films without any censorship. Miike was probably the wrong person for them to go to, because Imprint plays out like a gauntlet of gore, with each scene doing its very best to one-up the previous in depravity and suffering. It was far too much for the Showtime execs, and was never shown in America. I don't know why they were surprised, however, as it's pretty true-to-form for Miike. The problem with it is, despite all the gore and bloodshed, the movie still isn't very good. There you have it. What have you guys been watching?

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

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

Last night I watched Wolf Creek. I didn't know anything about this film going in, but I'd heard a few people recommend it so I gave it a shot.

The film centers around three young vacationers who are traveling through the Australian outback on their way to Sydney. On the way they stop at Wolfe Creek crater for a hike. When they return they find that their car has died, and they're stranded alone in the outback. Their circumstance gets progressively worse, but in the end being lost in the middle of nowhere seems like heaven compared to the situation that they end up in.

Though it's not a ground breaking movie, I enjoyed Wolf Creek. It's a teen slasher flick with all of the cruft and nonsense that plagues the genre removed. The violence is calculated and intense, but most of it is implicit; with a few exceptions, the movie does not rely on gore for its scares. The movie also avoids most teen slasher cliches, and it manages to keep you wondering about which of the protagonists will actually survive their ordeal. And though the characters make bad decisions throughout the film, most of their actions are believable. Finally, there are some extremely beautiful shots of the Australian wilderness.

So all in all, I'd say that Wolf Creek is not bad. I like that it avoids most of the problems we associate with this brand of horror movie, and I didn't have any problems with the acting or pacing. The movie isn't brilliant or anything, but as a teen slasher movie it's pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This evening I watched Don't Look Now, a horror flick starring a young Donald Sutherland circa 1973. The story centers around an American couple living in Venice who have recently lost their daughter. It's hard to describe exactly the events that unfold in this film, but the tension level is pretty high throughout the whole thing and the ending is seriously insane. What I really liked about the movie, however, is that it is able to build suspense without showing you anything at all. The director, Nicolas Roeg, plants an idea in your mind and lets your imagination run rampant, but he's careful to give absolutely nothing away until the very end of the film. If you were to look at this film out of context, it would seem like nothing is really happening. But coupled with Roeg's excellent cinematography of highly creepy Venice alleyways and a pretty excellent orchestral score, Don't Look Now kept me on the edge of my seat. This is high-calibre horror: the film is so well structured that nothing but the mere suggestion of deceit is necessary to build suspense. I throughly enjoyed it.

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

Wow, an update after several weeks of radio silence. Sorry everybody, work has been increasingly demanding lately. Also, I've been playing through Michigan, which has not proven very post-worthy.

Anyway, I thought I'd tell you guys about some horror movies I watched recently.

• Pulse (Kairo) finally came out in the US. I guess they are remaking this movie, but I have no idea why--its themes of isolation and loneliness are so amazingly Japanese that I can't see the movie translating to white, American, English-speaking actors well at all. Anyway, like everything from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), I can easily and without hesitation recommend this film. Be warned that the movie is sort of social commentary wrapped in a horror context, and the narrative is convoluted to say the least.
• Session 9 is an American horror film that somebody recommended to me because of its Silent Hill-like atmosphere. I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised to find it a mature, subtle, psychological horror movie in the vein of The Shining. It's not nearly as competent as Kubrick's seminal film, but it hits a lot of the right notes and is very careful not to spoil the horror with too much information. The ending sort of misses a beat here or there, but generally I think it's one of the best American-made horror movies that has come out in a long time.
• Testuo II: Body Hammer and A Snake of June are both weirdo films by weirdo director Shinya Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto's claim to fame is the original Tetsuo the Iron Man (and also he was the ultra-buff old guy in Ichi the Killer), but unfortunately Tetsuo 2 isn't as good. Actually, it's incredibly similar to the first movie, but the story is a little more clear and it's in color. I rather enjoyed Snake of June, though it isn't really horror: it's about a stalker forcing a woman to act upon some of her fantasies that are too racy for her husband, and the film only contains one giant animatronic penis scene, which is a record low for Tsukamoto.

Anyway, that's what I've had the chance to see lately. What have you guys been watching?

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

A while back I watched The Eye, a Chinese movie directed by brothers Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, about a woman who has surgery to restore her eyesight and also ends up with the ability to see ghosts. Despite its promising first half, The Eye pretty much fell apart at the end, which was really too bad. But since the first part was pretty good, I was willing to give the Pang brothers a second chance.

After watching The Eye 10 (it's actually only the third in the series), I have to say that the Pang brothers are now completely out of chances. They've blown it more completely than I could have imagined. The Eye 10 isn't just a bad movie, it's an absolutely atrocious movie. It's so bad that I don't even want to talk about it (not that the story makes any goddamn sense, mind you). It's probably in the top five worst films I have ever seen, edging out the likes of Boa vs Python and I Come in Peace. Ok, so Alone in the Dark (which I saw last year) and Ju-Rei (which I also reviewed) were probably worse, but it's pretty close. I'd say this movie gives St. John's Wart a run for it's money on the "what were they thinking?" index.

Don't see The Eye. But if you do, DO NOT see The Eye 10. Never again, Pang brothers!

I've just finished Indigo Prophecy (also known as Fahrenheit, which I think is a cooler name), a cinematic action-adventure game by French developer Quantic Dream. I'm posting about it here because it is probably of interest to readers of this site: though it's not really a proper horror game, the creepy factor is pretty high in a couple of key scenes. The game takes notable influence from a range of films, including one very obvious reference to Silence of the Lambs. But even if horror isn't the central theme, I'm recommending Indigo Prophecy to you because it's a pretty awesome game. I think the closest analog to Indigo Prophecy is the Shenmue series: a compelling storyline unfolds with the use of adventure game mechanics, quick time events (also employed to good effect in Resident Evil 4), and conversation trees. The presentation is incredibly cinematic, and the developers often employ a Steven Soderbergh-esque effect where the view is split between several different camera angles simultaneously. The quick time events are all analog stick based, which ends up being less frustrating than Shenmue 2's D-Pad/Button system without becoming any less challenging. Though the game sort of falls apart at the very end, the story is, for the most part, extremely interesting, especially because it is told from the viewpoints of a variety of different characters. There's something extremely compelling about playing a man who finds himself at the scene of a murder as well as the police who must try to track him down. Though it isn't perfect, Indigo Prophecy is an extremely well-done game, and I think that it's something that anybody who is a fan of the horror or adventure genre will enjoy.

Today I had a few hours to kill, so I watched Uzumaki. Uzumaki is yet another post-Ring Japanese horror flick that probably would not have warranted American release if fanboys like myself were not creating demand for Japanese horror. Adapted from a manga series by the same name, Uzumaki (which means "spiral" or "vortex") is about a town that is becoming increasingly influenced by, well, vortexes. Now, if you are wondering how a shape can exert influence over a town, welcome to the club. Sadly, the movie fails to answer this question; instead of dealing with difficult topics like personal relationships and back-story, the film stumbles through a mediocre introduction and then proceeds with mediocre gore. No explanation of the premise is ever attempted, and even if you accept the events that are occurring in the film, the events themselves are still nonsensical.

Technically, Uzumaki is a mixed bag. The acting is terrible, with a protagonist that seems like she's trying too hard and a boyfriend stuck in empathy-less monotone for the entire film. Surprisingly, some of the editing is pretty well done: the director has tried to wrap the movie with little disconcerting references to spirals (including a few post-processing effects that are interesting), and some of the shots are very well composed. That said, there are also some awful scenes, including one that reminds me of a scene from Vertigo that may have worked in 1958 but looks very lame now. The sound design isn't bad, but after a while everything seems to make the same sticky crackling noise.

The manga that spawned Uzumaki is probably a lot better than the movie. I suspect that the movie is a collection of scenes or short story snippets taken from the manga, which might explain why the movie makes no sense and the story seems to go nowhere. Overall, it's an interesting rental if you are the type of person who likes looking for technical details (see how many spirals you can find in the regular scenes), but otherwise skip it.

Last night my friend and I finally finished Obscure after a four month hiatus. I've posted my thoughts on the info page. Though Obscure is a pretty run-of-the-mill horror game, its slight blandness is completely offset by the two-player cooperative mode. And lurking under the hood of this French horror game are some imaginative and fresh design ideas. Overall, I liked it better than most of the critics.

This evening I finally got around to finishing The X-Files: Resist or Serve. The game is basically a Resident Evil: Code Veronica knock-off, but it manages to mess up some of the basic game play while simultaneously doing a disservice to the X-Files license. I've read that the development of this game was plagued with problems, which might be why half the screenshots in my gallery never appear in the game (including out aquatic friend over there on the left). Anyway, I posted a short review about the game.

Now that I got my features section working for my most recent article, I decided to upload a bunch of other stuff I've written in the last few years. Among other things I've added an in-depth review of D2 and a rant about the weirdest game ever. I'd like to write stuff like this on a more regular basis, I just have to figure out a way to make the time.

I watched Ju-Rei last night (Japanese title is actually kuro jurei (), lit. "black vengeful ghost"), which is a Japanese horror film by Koji Shiraishi. This movie is only interesting because it is like a catalog of Japanese horror movie elements, mostly ripped from much better films like Ring and Juon. The movie unfolds in ten chapters, and each chapter is like a study of a visual effect or horror mechanic used in some other popular Japanese horror film. It's like an amalgam, but it's mostly nonsensical and underwhelming. Features blatantly ripped off from other movies include (minor spoilers, beware):

• Out-of-order story telling (Juon)
• Ghosts as people with white faces, black eye shadow, and blackened mouths (Juon)
• A cyclical curse that moves like a virus from one person to the next (Ring)
• A Predator-like back-of-the-throat frog vocalization made by the bad things (Juon)
• High-school girls home alone, investigating odd sounds in their house. (Ring)
• Old women who can see the bad things even though the young people can't. (Juon)
• The blurry TV grain effect when baddies show up (Ring)
• Female ghost things crawling on their hands towards their victims (Ring and Juon)
• Reflections in mirrors that reveal people who, when you turn around, are not there (Ring, Juon)
• Hands coming out of nowhere to grab a frightened girl (Juon)

The film's one "innovation" is the interesting use of blur over the ghosts to make them look... well, ghostly. But the effect is fairly trite and it gets old very quickly. In all, I'd say the film is interesting if you enjoy catching "homages" to other Japanese horror movies, but on its own it's pretty weak.

This evening I completed Silent Hill 4, and I've posted by thoughts on the info page. I finished the game in 8 hours with 38 (!) saves. I found all the notes and received 13 stars. I don't know if that is good or not. I got the "Mother" ending, which seemed pretty good (it was fairly hard to accomplish). Anyway, check out my thoughts and let me know what you think.

I've finally posted my thoughts on Resident Evil 4. I beat it about a month and a half ago but just now got around to writing up my review. It's not really a traditional review, but I figure that you can get a story summary or similar at places like 1up.com. One of these days I'll get around to updating the screen shots.

I used to watch a lot of horror movies, but I don't have much time for them any more. Just recently I saw a few (a failed attempt to erase Alone in the Dark from my brain), so here's a few impressions.

• The Shining (1980) - This movie is famous for a reason. It's got all sorts of stuff going on, yet it manages to be subtle and subdued. The presentation, particularly the music and cinematography, is fantastic. And the story is wonderfully suggestive without being explicit. Highly recommended.
• House of 1000 Corpses ( 2003) - You know how sometimes a movie can have a terrible title but then turn out to be pretty good underneath? This is not one of those movies. Directed by Rob Zombie, House of 1000 Corpses is sort of an amalgam of every slasher flick made in the last 25 years. Unfortunately, it's not constructed in a way that might be interesting. I'd guess that there really are 1000 corpses in this film, and man, do they get boring after the third or fourth. You'd think after watching so many horror movies Rob would have realized that gore and nudity are never good replacements for plot. Moral of the story: if the director is famously related to horror but has never directed before (I'm looking at YOU, 976-EVIL), the movie will not be good. Stick to the music, Rob. The one redeeming quality of this movie is the Captain Spaulding character, who is both well-delivered and hilarious.
• The Ring Two (2005) - So like most everybody else I throughly enjoyed the original Japanese Ring movie. The sequels weren't that hot, but the first movie was inspired. I was unimpressed by the American remake because it added all kinds of superfluous details and yet still failed to meet the subtle horror of the original. So I went to see The Ring Two with cautious optimism, especially after I learned that the director of the original Ring was responsible for the American sequel. I really should have known better. The Ring Two isn't terrible, it's just not very good. It's actually fairly similar in quality to the Japanese Ring 2 (which has a pretty different story), but its somewhat less interesting because it goes in too many directions at once. The worst sin of the film is that it discards the "killer tape" mechanic, which is what made the series interesting to begin with. There are some nice moments (a particular climb up a well was pretty great), but overall there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

In summary: see The Shining, avoid House of 1000 Corpses like the plague, and wait for Ring Two to be a $3 DVD rental.

... don't go see Alone in the Dark. After getting 1% on RottenTomatoes.com and a 9/100 on Metacritic, I knew I had to see this film. $6.50 (matinee showing, thank god) and 90 minutes later, I can say with certainty that Alone in the Dark is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

It's not the worst of all time, though. That honor goes to Manos: Hands of Fate, which is truly, truly awful. But Alone in the Dark might be second. I've seen a lot of movies, including just about every terrible horror flick produced in the '80s and '90s. This is worse than all of them. Remember Tails from the Hood? Or I Come In Peace, starring Dolph Lundgren? Alone in the Dark is worse than those. Thought that video games-into-movies could never stoop below Street Fighter or Super Mario Bros.? You thought wrong.

So yeah, it's terrible. And the worst part is that it is so bad that it's not even so-bad-it's-funny-bad. It's surpassed the funny-bad point and ventured completely into the realm of un-fucking-believably bad. I expected to laugh through the movie, but mostly my mouth was agape. This is a new low for Christian Slater. Come on man, you were in Pump Up the Volume and True Romance! Even your work on Broken Arrow is cinema gold compared to this drivel. How could you accept that script?? And why oh why did you make a movie where Tara Reid is cast as an archeologist?!

In summary, don't go to see Alone in the Dark. The game upon which the concept is loosely based (and the degree of looseness here is extreme) is far better than the movie itself, and it wasn't that great to begin with. Spend your $9.00 on a used PS1 or Dreamcast copy--it'll last longer and you'll get far more enjoyment out of it.

I finished Fatal Frame 2 a few days back, and I've posted by thoughts (rather lengthy--sorry) on the info page. The game was pretty good, but I was disappointed by the ending (though it's nice to see something other than "... and lived happily ever after). Next on the list: probably X-Files.

I've posted my thoughts on The Suffering finally, and I should have something (good) to say about Fatal Frame 2 pretty soon as well.

So I managed to finish The Suffering in 2 days, though I have yet to post my comments. Updates may be a little slow this week as I am visiting relatives in Japan, but I'll get a review up as quickly as I can. What should I play next? I am thinking about finishing up Fatal Frame 2.

I've finally, finally finished Siren. It took a very long time (6 months!) to get everything and complete all the levels, but the game turned out to be pretty amazing. I've posted my thoughts on the Siren page, and hopefully I haven't been too long winded. Next up I need to choose between: Fatal Frame 2, X-Files, The Suffering, or Silent Hill 4. Since the pace of Siren was so slow, I'm currently leaning toward The Suffering, as shooting the crap out of monsters will be a nice change.

I completed Clock Tower 3 today, and I've posted my thoughts on the game info page. I also recently completed Resident Evil 0, and my review of that game has also been posted. With these two down my quest is now 37.7% (23 out of 61 released titles) complete.

I managed to complete Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick yesterday. It was a fun (if somewhat shallow) brawler. The fighting engine is actually quite well done, but the game is hampered by asinine sub-quests and obscure goals. However, Boomstick uses the Evil Dead license excellently, and is one of the best examples of successful movie-to-game conversions that I've seen.

I finally finished Silent Hill 3 this evening. I think it is the best game in this genre (perhaps in any genre) that I've ever played. In addition to looking amazing, it turned out to be literate, complicated, exciting, and extraordinarily scary. This series continues to push survival horror in new directions.

With the completion of SH 3, my Statistics page tells me I am 38% complete with the quest! This is great news... a few more games and I'll be half way there. Of course, the release of games like Fatal Frame 2 later this year will hinder my progress a little, but that certainly isn't a bad thing. Next I am thinking about playing either Evil Dead or the second Clocktower game.

I took a break from Silent Hill 3 this evening to finally finish Carrier. I've posted my impressions on the Carrier information page, but to sum up, it was an incredibly boring Resident Evil rip-off. My clear time ended up being about 8 hours, but the mind numbing effect of the game forced me to play it over a period of four months.

There is actually a second playable character (inexplicably named Jessifer) in Carrier, and the genius game designers have set up her mode such that she progresses through the same levels as Jack (the main character), only backwards. I poked at her mode for about five minutes, but that was all I could take.

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

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

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

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