In the April 2010 issue of Edge Magazine, at the bottom-right hand corner of a page about Alan Wake, there's a little sidebar about this site. It's been chosen as "Website of the Month," and to my pleasant surprise the author sums up this site succinctly and accurately. It's clear that whomever wrote that sidebar actually spent some time here, looked through the database, and noticed funny things about how I've structured the Quest (they even mention Dino Crisis--ha!). Anyway, if you live in an area where Edge is sold (and if this issue is still on the stands), check it out! The magazine was also nice enough to send me a copy of this issue when I couldn't find it here in Japan.

Holy crap, this site has been up for five years! My first post was on August 6, 2003, which on Wednesday of this week will have been exactly 5 years ago. Damn, it doesn't feel like that much time has passed, but the blog archive proves it. It also shows that I've managed to post on average two items a week for the last five years (487 posts total), which I think is a pretty good rate considering the duration and the slowness with which I am actually able to progress on games for the Quest. Speaking of the Quest, my stats page shows that I'm close to 50% complete, which will be a big milestone; for the longest time I wasn't able to get past 35% because horror games were being released so fast that I could barely keep up, but now that the releases have slowed down a little I'm gaining a little ground. This site began as a simple spreadsheet which I printed out and posted on my bulletin board. My original intent had been to just catalog all of the horror games available so that I could have a convenient shopping list when I went to the game store. There couldn't be that many of them, I figured. Once I started to research the genre I realized how wrong I was. This was in late 2002, and I was writing GBA games from home after a short stint on the East Coast. That summer I had completed Silent Hill 2, and my budding interest in horror games blossomed into an acute obsession. I pretty quickly realized that a simple spreadsheet wasn't going to cut it if I really wanted to catalog all of the obscure games in this genre, and being a programmer the most logical solution seemed to be to write some code. The first page titled Chris' Survival Horror Quest was the search page. Actually, it looks pretty much the same now as it did then--pretty crappy. But back then I had this awful powder blue color scheme and no images of any kind (I'm a programmer, so the laws of the universe require me to be bad at art). I built up the info and screenshot pages, but I realized that having the ability to comment on games would be great, so I made myself a comments system. Once I had a way for people to leave comments, I realized that I had enough infrastructure for a blog (although in 2003 that word wasn't yet in wide circulation, and I remember calling my front page the "news page"). Though the site has changed a lot since then (it's been through two major layout changes, I eventually had to kill the comments system on game info pages, and the database content itself has changed a couple of times), the basic format is the same: front page musings on horror game design and developments, a section for more in-depth features, a forum for community discussion, and a database of horror game information and reviews. In celebration of this anniversary, I've made a bunch of minor improvements to the site. The most obvious is the new right bar, but I've also tried to clean up and make improvements to lots of the other pages on this site. One of the things I've added is the ability to quote other people in comments and to wrap spoilers in special spoiler tags. I hope that these changes will make the site more fun, easier to navigate, and more informative. Thanks for reading, especially those of you who've been here since the beginning. Horror games are fun, but it's you guys, the people who read my stuff and give me feedback, that drives me to maintain this site. Hope to see you here for another half-decade!

Another year, another fake front page. I spent some time on this one; all of the text in the "Did you know..". and "In the news" sections is real. The page will be archived here for posterity.

If you are new to the site, you might also be interested in fake front pages from previous years.

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

It seems that I've been discovered by reddit.com. Hi there, reddit folks, thanks for stopping by! You might also be interested in my guide to Japanese horror, my article on the prehistory of the survival horror genre, the games I've reviewed, or maybe my assorted blog posts about game design. Apologies if the site seems a little sluggish--there are a great many of you at the moment.

Update: Well, the reddit,com traffic has died off and been replaced with many visitors from spiegel.de. Hi there, German friends! The article from GEE is now being hosted at Spiegel, and if you are like me and don't speak any German, you can read it (slightly mangled) via machine translation.

Somebody set up us the skull Ever since I started thinking about what game scores really mean, I've been bothered by the warped scale that the game review industry seems to use. If you follow sites like metacritic.com or gamerankings.com, you have probably noticed that most games fall into a very small range of scores. There's no difference, for example, between a score of 30% and a score of 40%; both mean that the game is terrible and you shouldn't buy it. On the other hand, there is a huge difference between 70% and 80%; one means that the game is so-so and the other means that it's very good. Even the delta between 79% and 80% is enormous. And finally, ratings over 90% are just fodder for angry fanboys; is a 96% game really perceptibly better than a 95% game? In short, the ratings curve for video games is extremely warped. Interestingly, aggregate review systems for other types of media don't seem to have this problem; a review of 50% on rottentomatoes.com means what you would expect: that the film is throughly average. Anyway, I had been thinking of changing my scoring system on this site to better reflect what I think reviewers mean when they select scores. I wanted to get away from actual numbers (too granular) and compress the range of possible scores down into a smaller set. While I was thinking about how best to do this, 1up.com switched from using numbers to letter grades. Letter grades seem like a pretty good system, but I've decided to go for something even less granular. As of now, all games on this site are rated with a system that I ripped off from Leonard Maltin: 4 stars or a skull. I've detailed the individual ratings in the FAQ, but generally, four stars means "awesome," one star means "just ok," and a skull means the game is terrible. I think that this system will better communicate the value of individual games without getting too specific about how many percentage points better one game is vs another. And, in following with 1Up's policy, the internal table for converting between my star rating and the warped scale used by the rest of the world will not be published. I've changed the Horror Games and Reviews pages (and some others) to reflect the rating system changes. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Special thanks goes out to Matthew, who recently donated his extra copy of Evil Dead Regeneration to the Quest! I'm looking forward to trying this one out, as I had a pretty good time with an earlier Evil Dead game.

Thanks Matthew, you're awesome!

Yeah, yeah, took long enough, I know Thanks to you guys, I got my ass in gear today and added a bunch of games to the database. Here's what's gone in today: Quest Games: Condemned 2: Bloodshot Dino Crisis Escape from Bug Island (ouch, 33%!) F.E.A.R. Obscure 2 Silent Hill 5 The Darkness Close Call Games: Dino Crisis 2 Dino Crisis 3 Still pending (need more info): Soul of the Samurai Twilight Syndrome Saikai and the rest of the series Harker Vampire Rain Alan Wake Jericho (a nice woman at Codemasters sent me a bunch of info, but I haven't looked at it yet). So the database is a little bit more up-to-date now. In the near future I want to split off a classification for cancelled games, as there are a few in the list that should be removed but not forgotten. Thanks to all of you who supplied information for the games, it made my life much easier!

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

Holy crap this has been a crazy month! First a bunch of stuff happened at work, then I got on some planes and flew around the country, then I came back and got in my car and drove all over Northern California, then I moved all of my belongings to a new place, and now I am getting ready for a trip to Japan. All of this has occurred within a 3 week span, and I'm exhausted!

Not exhausted enough to stop thinking about horror games, however. It seems that the database is in dire need of attention. It is missing a crapload of new games like F.E.A.R. and The Darkness, as well as old standards that really should be added (yeah, yeah, Dino Crisis, I know). It also contains a bunch of games that have been cancelled or otherwise changed since I added them. I hope to revamp the contents of the database again soon to bring it up to date.

This site has also been the target of a couple of very annoying spam bots. I've made it a little more difficult to post on this site: you now need to prove that you are not a robot by entering some text in the post dialog. It's a simple solution and seems pretty effective.

So, in leu of any real horror game material at the moment, I'm going to instead recommend to you a few books that I have enjoyed recently. 999 is one of the best horror short-story collections I have ever read. I particularly liked the Gene Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oats stories, but there are a large number of other gems as well. I am also right in the middle of The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, which has served as a great introduction to this author. I've not read Lovecraft much before, and reading his works now is interesting because it is clear that he has had a significant influence on modern American horror. The stories all follow a similar pattern and the mechanics of each tale seem almost cliché, but I think that they feel that way because his works have been copied so much since they were written, not because they were cliché when they were written. Finally, though not strictly a horror film, Paprika is the best animated movie I have seen in a very long time. It is sort of an anime version of postmodern Japanese surrealism--think Haruki Murakami.

What have you been reading/playing/watching?

Ah, April Fools. What better way to get back into the habit of regular updates? My work life has just gone back to semi-normal, I\'ve got some vacation coming up, and a bunch of updates to the site planned. A new feature is in the works, plus I have a lot of info to report on recent horror games. Sorry for being away for so long, but I think updates should be much more regular starting now.

Update: Now that the day is done, I've archived this year's fake page.

I finally killed off the awful gray "color" scheme I've had going for this site since 2003. Hopefully this new design is a little easier to read, a little more interesting, and doesn't horribly break under Internet Explorer. If everything looks broken to you, try forcing your browser to reload in order to clear the cache of stuff from the old site.

I've wanted to fix the design of this site for a while, but it's a time consuming process that I've never really had the schedule to complete. This weekend I just sat down and did it, almost in a single sitting, which is pretty cool. I also cleaned up a bunch of the scripts that run this site, so future modifications should be easier than this one was.

Anyway, let me know what you think. As far as horror games go, I've been banging my head against the end boss in Fatal Frame 3 for the last two weeks. I swear to God, Tecmo, you had better not make another game with a one-hit-kill boss.

Today I made a lot of updates to this site. You'll notice that the navigation bar on the left has changed, as has the content of the games list. The omissions page has been altered to reflect a new set of criteria for including games in the quest (I removed the requirement for supernatural things and added a requirement about intention to scare the player), and I've moved all games that didn't meet these new criteria into the close calls list. I'll be continuing to move games between the quest list and the close call list, and I'll be adding games to the quest list that now pass my quest requirements. I'm not going to do much with the close call list: it's there for reference, but I'm not going to spend much time maintaining it. After this I promise to shut up about the site for a while and post more about horror games!

I've started a thread in the forums about the criteria I use to select games for inclusion in this site. Actually, this is the latest of many threads on this subject. I posted another one a while back detailing my frustration with the current inclusion criteria. My goal is to collect use (or attempt to use) horror to manipulate the way the player feels, but purely thematic definition is too vague. So let me know what you think about the new plan.

I've made a bunch of updates to the various game info pages. After moderating the comments on those pages for almost three years, I've decided to remove comments from the game pages and focus users on the forums. The forum software is better anyway (it's threaded, you can have a name and an avatar, etc), and I was getting really tired of the hoards of people who decided to leave a message along the lines of "this game is teh gay it suxors i h4t3 it."

On the other hand, I do want people to be able to express their opinions about games, so I've created a better user rating system. Now you can rate games based on many different factors, and there's a nice bar graph on each page showing how users feel about various aspects of each game. I think that this system is a lot more informative and a lot less mind-numbing than the comments. Of course, you can still post on the front page and in the features.

Please let me know what you think of this change. Also, I may have introduced some bugs, so let me know if you find problems.

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

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

This morning I decided to browse some of the entries for the Silent Hill Poster Contest, but I found that a gallery isn't provided on Sony's site. So I wrote a very simple script to display the entries. There appear to be around 2000 entries at the moment, though I think it's safe to assume that more will come online.

Note that this script won't aid you in voting for an actual entry. That can only be done by receiving a special link from the person who created the entry (many have been posted on forums around the net). But this script is pretty good for browsing. I wrote about this contest a few weeks ago.

Forums member 16bitman knows a lot about importing games, and he's graciously written up a complete guide. He's included a how-to section for finding and playing import games, reviews of his favorite horror and non-horror obscure titles, links to useful import-related sites, and even a few save files for some of his favorite titles. Check out 16bitman's Guide to Obscure Games!

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is finally out, and the reviewers seem to like what they see. Fatal Frame 3 is also out, but is so far fairing a little worse (though there are still very few reviews--I'll update the world score here when there are at least 10). Both look like awesome games to me.

I'm struggling to come up with the motivation to finish Kuon. Forcing you to play as two people is fine, but what is the point if the game is exactly the same the second time around?

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

My computer has either been taken by the dreaded Astwihad or it has suffered a hard disk failure. At any rate, I'm behind on a backlog of news and database updates. Everything should be in the right by next week. Here's some quick news: Siren is becoming a movie! Here's some info and pictures of the cast in Japanese and English updates from GameSpot. It stars Yui Ichikawa, who was the protagonist in Juon. Alone in the Dark 5 has been confirmed for Xbox360. Here are some screenshots. Thanks to forum zombies spookycreepy and Grace Saunders.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind came out late last month and the reviewers have pretty much agreed that it's a little weaker than its predecessor. I'm still looking forward to this title because the original Suffering is one of the very few American horror games that actually worked pretty well without being campy.

This weekend I added Keywords to my site. Now every post should contain a keyword (like the link that says "Site" on this post), and you can browse the posts by specific keyword. This is a pretty standard feature of other blogs, and now I've added it to my software. Hopefully it will make the site a little easier to navigate.

I've been itching to write a few more articles for the site, in the vein of the feature on character design that I posted a few months back. Like the previous article, I'd like to focus on one aspect of horror games and sort of write a stream-of-consciousness about how they help induce fear in the player. I could write about level design, or maybe weapon design, or I could go off on some (possibly boring) analysis of control systems in horror games, or I could expound on the history of the genre. But maybe there's a better topic out there.

What do you guys think? Give me a topic and I'll think real hard about it for a while and then write something up!

So I just noticed that my page has been broken under Windows Internet Explorer for who knows how long. Every other browser--Safari, Firefox, Opera, Mac OS IE--renders the page correctly, but IE under Windows XP fails horribly. Specifically, all the text on this page was mysteriously centered. I've fixed the problem, but the real solution is to STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. In addition to being an insecure hunk of garbage, it can't render pages right, it doesn't follow the HTML standard, and it's slow. If you are on Windows, download FireFox now!. If you are on a Mac, use FireFox or Safari. Linux users--I already know what you are using.

Seriously, switch away from IE. Every other browser on the planet can block popups, filter ads, and prevent spyware from getting onto your machine.

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.

This weekend I had some free time, so I decided to do something about the rather horrific quality of some of the user posts on my site. I've gone through every single game listed here and erased hundreds of posts. From now on, I'll be quite a bit more strict about which posts I allow; one-liners, posts in other languages, "I have this game" messages, posts about games other than the info page, etc will be erased. I've added a brief FAQ page describing this policy.

And in a "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" moment, I wrote some grammar-sanitizing code that tries to clean up common grammatical mistakes and leet speak. It's not perfect, but maybe it will keep some posts here a little more legible. The forum is unaffected.

I'm thinking about removing the visitor comments section from the info pages. The problem with them is that the signal to noise ratio is very low (the amount of useful opinion and information about each game is small compared to the amount of messages asking for game help or arguing with other posters), and I don't think they really add much to the site. It'd be better to centralize discussion in the forum, I think.

What do you guys think? Please leave a comment about how you feel about the info page message boards.

Dead Rising is officially the first next-gen game I am excited about. Rather than remake the same game with OMG BUMPMAPS LOL, Capcom is actually putting that extra CPU power to work to create game situations that have been next to impossible until now (the closest analog is probably Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick. They only had a trailer going at E3, but it was, as we'd say in the '80s, "pretty rad."

Today I had some free time for the first time in two weeks, so I updated a bunch of stuff in the database. With E3 coming up next week, I am now prepared for the flood of information that occurs every year. I'll be at E3 again this year, so expect a full report when I return. Tons of games added: George Romero's City of the Dead. Thanks to the forum guys (and gals!) for turning me on to this game. With actual in-game screenshots available now, it looks like it might even come out some day. Demonik is the second Xbox360/PS3 horror-related game to be announced. It's being developed by Terminal Reality, the guys behind Bloodrayne, Nocturne, and a Blair Witch game (Rustin Parr). No screenshots yet, but a trailer is available. Luigi's Mansion came out a really long time ago and I've been meaning to add it for years. I'm quite interested in which aspects of "traditional" horror games are applicable to horror-themed games aimed at a younger audience. In the same vein, The Haunted Mansion is also in the database. Also, new Siren 2 information is available at the official Siren 2 site. Check out the promotional video, it looks really, really cool. Fingers super crossed that it's playable at E3. Also, thanks again to the forums members for pointing me to new gameplay footage from Condemned. I'm not sure about this game yet--it's certainly dark, but it looks pretty much like every other shooter ever so far. We'll see if it lives up the hype.

After promising to do this ages ago in the forums, I've finally added several games to the database: Alien Resurrection Darkseed Darkseed 2 Thanks much to forums members Endaso, Townsend, ijm000, and Crave for the links, info, and nagging!

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

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

Many, many thanks to forums user 16bitman for donating more games to the quest! This time he's contributed Countdown Vampires, Galerians, and Juggernaut. Dude, I am totally, totally in your debt.

I've been making some modifications to the back-end of this site in order to try to prevent people from stealing my bandwidth. I realized that I am spending a lot of hits on people who find an image hosted here via google image search and then display it on some message board. The changes I've made should prevent that from happening, but it's possible that it may also affect regular users like you. If all the screenshots on this site seem to be magically replaced by a single image, please let me know immediately. Make sure to tell me what browser and OS you are using.

My site was hit (along with a whole bunch of others) by a worm last night. I've restored everything from backups except the forum, which is how the worm was able to spread. Hopefully the forum should be up soon as well. Update 9:55 PST: Everything seems to be up and running smoothly now, including the forum.

I've been super busy at work lately, which has made me slack off on database updates. Here's a bunch of updates that I made today based on information I got from fine users of the forum. Thanks to Crave! Still Life has been added to the database. This may turn out to be more of a mystery game than a horror game, but at the moment it sounds somewhat similar to D, so I've gone ahead and added it to the database. I've also added The Suffering: Ties That Bind, though there is no information or screenshots yet. Constantine has also been added. This game is based on a movie coming out in a few months, and if you are interested you can view the trailer.

Many thanks to David, who generiously donated his extra copy of Illbleed to the Quest! In exchange for the game, I've agreed to post David's message, which is below. Thanks again, David!

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.

Thanks to forums member Crave for turning me on to Deadlight, an aliens-invade-sinking-ship FPS for PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. Currently in development at UK developer Blue52, Deadlight looks a whole lot like a cross between Carrier and Doom 3. Impressively, Blue52 appears to be using stencil shadows on the PS2, which is quite difficult. No release date has been released yet.

I've finally gotten around to making a bunch of modifications to the database. Silent Hill 4 has been updated with release data and world score information. Friday the 13th has been broken up into two entries, one for the C64 version and one for the NES version (turns out they are different games). I've added Ghost Master to the database, which looks like a weird combonation of The Sims and ghosts. I've also added Nanatsu no Hikan, a Dreamcast-era horror game from Koei (name roughly translates as "Seven Hidden Houses"). Thanks to forums members Crave and visuatrox for the tips!

Resonance is a survival-horror action RPG set for PS2/Xbox/GameCube release this year. I've added it to the database, and you can find more information about the game at Nintendo Insider and IGN. Here's an excerpt of the Nintendo Insider post:

The developer of the game hopes to keep Resonance as fresh and original as possible. And by doing so, the developer has gotten rid of the generic fixed camera angles brought to us by titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. In place of the traditional fixed camera angles is a third-person camera. Developer Neocell Factor has, furthermore, mixed RPG elements with the survival-horror atmosphere, hoping to create an entirely unique experience.

Thanks to forums member Crave for the tip and links.

I've added Doom 3 to the database. Though the Xbox version hasn't been released yet, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and go ahead with a database update. I've played the first several hours of this game so far, but when I am finished I'll be sure to post a full report. Please note that the opinions expressed on this site are my own, and in no way represent the opinions of position of my employer. This has always been the case, but I feel it necessary to make the point particularly clear in regards to this game.

Many thanks to Misty, who recently donated her extra copy of The Suffering to the Quest! Thanks Misty, I am in your debt.

I've added an XML RSS Feed to the site. You should now be able to subscribe to the Quest with your favorite news aggregator. This code is beta, so please let me know if you run into problems.

To support this change, I've also modified the way comments store the time of posting. You may notice that all comments up until now have the correct date but the wrong time. However, all posts from now on should carry the correct time stamp.

This week I'll be adding Doom 3 (and my thoughts on this game, I'm about 1/2 way through) to the database. Stay tuned!

Thanks very much to Steve, who recently donated his extra copy of Martian Gothic to the Quest! I'm looking forward to checking it out. Thanks again, Steve!

This evening I've made some changes to the database. I've removed a few games and added a new one. Here's what's changed:

Games Removed:

• Dead Rush. The game has been canceled, sadly enough.
• Kamaitachi No Yoru and Kamaitachi No Yoru 2. I've decided to exclude text-adventure games from the quest.
• Shadow of Destiny. This is an excellent game (I just finished it this evening), but it isn't survival horror.

Game Added:

• Zombies, a survival horror first-person shooter from French company Krysalide. Think Resident Evil as an FPS.

I've added a new graph to the statistics page. This one shows the breakdown of horror games across platforms. Check it out!

I've decided to announce my feelings about the public boards I maintain on this site. I am absolutely against censorship, and I will not erase messages on the basis of profanity alone. However, I will erase messages that have no constructive value. The boards are intended for discussion and opinion, but I won't tolerate messages along the lines of "user x sucks!" If someone posts an opinion about a game that you do not agree with, please respond in a clear manner. Simply calling them names is a useless practice, and is a good way to get your message erased. Anyone making racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted comments will be permanently banned.

If you want to get into a fight, use the forums and contain it to its own thread. Don't waste the rest of the world's time with flames.

If you have questions about this policy, please drop me a line.

The holiday has allowed me to work on the site a little bit. First of all, I've added Possession and Dead Rush to the database. Both games are a little odd: there aren't any good screenshots for Rush and Possession is supposed to come out on some sort of console, but we don't yet know which one. I've also made a cool site upgrades. You can now search the News Archives, and each game has links to search for news realted to the title. Bigger site changes are coming soon.

I am pleased to announce that Nick, a regular on this site, has been generous enough to donate his extra copy of Hell Night. Nick went out of his way to provide other information for the site as well, including a whole CD full of screenshots, sound tracks, and information about horror games. Thanks Nick!

If you have extra horror games sitting around, consider donating them to the Quest.

I finally got around to adding a bunch of games to the database today. Thanks to everyone who pointed out that these titles were missing. Mansion of the Hidden Souls The complete Splatterhouse series, including Splatterhouse Splatterhouse 2 Splatterhouse 3 Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti If you notice a game that meets the About page requirements and is missing from the database, please let me know in the forums!

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.

Thanks to Michael at frightening for pointing out that Obscure - Learn About Fear is still in development. I've added it to the database and posted a bunch of screenshots. Looks pretty awesome--check it out!

I've added the first Michigan screens to the database. It appears that the game will actually be played from the film crew's camera perspective, which is something we haven't seen before. The official site has some video to watch, though it is unclear if this is what the entire game will look like. Zombieeater has also found some more images, and posted them in the forums.

Polygon has added some more information about Spike's upcoming horror game Michigan. According to the brief, the game is about 50% complete.

The story of Michigan will be set on Lake Michigan and will focus on a television news crew documenting a series of recent murders. The game will unfold through the perspective of a camera man, although players must work together with other members of their television crew including a reporter and sound technician to survive. Expect more details and the first screens from Michigan in the coming weeks.

When more information arrives I'll post it here.

I've added Darkwatch: Curse of the West to the database. Darkwatch is apparently a first person shooter with a vampire/old west theme. A few images are floating around and it looks pretty cool. Sammy Studios is the developer, and the game has been announced for a Q4 2004 release on PS2 and Xbox.

I've made some minor updates to the database, mostly marking games that came out in December as "out" and finding scores for some Japanese games that are not out in North America yet. Interestingly, the changes have done little to affect the Statistics page.

I've added Curse: Eye of Isis to the database, bringing the total number of games listed to 73. Forums user ZombieEater mentioned the game, which I'd previously never heard of. It looks interesting. I recently completed Clock Tower 2. I am inching closer to the 40% completion mark, but new games seem to come out so fast that I am perpetually stuck around 35%. Argh!

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to some prodding by Endaso over in the forums, I've added two more games to the database: Enemy Zero and Martian Gothic: Unification. There are 71 games now listed.

I've added a system to track game series (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc). I've been thinking about this system for a while, and I think it will be useful. What do you think? Are there any other systems you would like to see?

I've made a few changes today. First of all, I've added some more links to the side bar, including The MagicBox, which is where I get almost all of my news lately. I've also enabled comments in the news archive (they were broken before). Finally, I've noticed that some people were using the new rating system to rate games that have yet to be released, a practice that I must take issue with:

**BEGIN RANT**

Games must be judged on how fun they are, not the license they represent or the graphic engine they employ. Judging a game based on screenshots and movies is not a useful practice: you haven't the slightest idea if a game will be fun or not until you've played it. In fact, I think that part of the reason we get so many crappy games is that people often decide how high quality a game is based on external factors (such as license and graphics style/quality) alone.

Case in point: everyone pretty much agrees that Enter The Matrix is a horrible game, yet it has sold over a million copies. Why? Because people hear the word "Matrix" and suddenly decide that they must own the game. Remember The Bouncer? This game received an extraordinary amount of hype, and featured an incredibly high quality graphics engine. But when the game came out, it was universally panned. It turns out that even having wonderful graphics can't save a bad game.

When you judge a game based on marketing and hype, you are encouraging developers and publishers to make games that are easy to hype. That is, you are telling them "I want the prettiest graphics, or the best license, even at the expense of fun factor." Fun factor should be number one here: if a game isn't fun, then it is a failure, right? By judging games without playing them, you are telling the marketing guys that you don't care about gameplay; you've already made up your mind. This trend only encourages game publishers and developers to make awful games.

Don't judge a game until you've played it. Don't buy into hype... graphics, license, etc do not matter if the core gameplay isn't fun.

***END RANT***

So, the net result is that you may no longer rate games that have not yet been released. Please only use the rating system to rate games you have actually played, otherwise it is useless.

I've added a new User Rating system to the site! You may now vote on the quality of any of the games in the database. User ratings are listed on each game's info page under the World Score and Chris' Score.

I'd like to add more features to keep you guys involved. Is this feature cool? What other features would you all like to see?

I've added Halloween to the database. Created in 1983 for the Atari 2600, Halloween is now the oldest game listed on this site. Check it out!

I got my hands on the Resident Evil Remake. Everything I have heard about this game is good, and the original Resident Evil is one of my favorites of all time.

Thanks again to ZombieEater's posts on the forums, I've found a new game for the quest: Chaos Break

ZombieEater has his own nifty site dedicated to slightly more obsucre survival horror games.
Check it out: http://survivals-horrors.fr.vu/

Thanks to ZombieEater's post in the forums, I've come across a new horror game for the database: Koukai Sarena Katta Shuki: The Note.

The name translates roughly as "The Unpublished Note." It appears to be a first-person mansion romp with similarities to Hell Night

From Software has announced Kuon, which I've added to the database. Here is the rundown from The Magic Box: From Software announced a new PlayStation 2 horror adventure game called Kuon, this is one of the new title From Software will be revealed at Tokyo Game Show. The story takes place in a haunted mansion in the Heiankyo era, 11th century of Japan. You play as a 15 year old girl who enters the mansion with four amateur exorcists, to search for the girl's mission father and sister. The girl must use different kinds of seals to defeat the evil spirits in the mansion.

My kind parents and brother gave me a bunch of neat gifts for my birthday yesterday, among them Alone in the Dark 4 and Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick. I've update the database to reflect the games. Thanks guys!

I played Evil Dead for a few minutes last night and it seems like lots of fun. The game is violent and gory as hell, but the gore fits right in with the Evil Dead movie license. Everyone has wanted a chainsaw hand at least once... now you can have one.

If you are feeling like a generous soul, why not follow my family's lead and donate a game?

I've added Nebula - Echo Night to the database. This is From Software's follow-up to their PSX games Echo Night and Echo Night 2. Like the first two games, the goal is to track down ghosts, this time on a lunar base, and figure out why they are stuck in the human world. IGN has posted a short News Story on the game. News found via The MagicBox.

After 3 full days down we are finally back up and running. My service provider, WestHost, whom I've been with for about three years, decided it would be a good idea to move a big chunk of their clients over to a new system setup over labor day weekend. Suffice to say that the move did not go well, and my server has been down as the result. My request for support was renamed from "Site Down" to "E-mail Problem" by one of the support staff, and consequently the site stayed off line even longer than it should have. When it finally came back up, I found that suddenly all my passwords had changed. Getting the database back up running required finding out what my new user name and password actually were. Argh!

Well, the good thing is that it is all over now and things appear to be working. I am now going to bed. Tomorrow I'll have an update about a new Echo Night game.

I've added Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth to the database.

I've added Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File to the database, along with all the info about the game that I've been able to find.

I've added Operator's Side to the database. This game looks pretty cool because it requires the player to use voice input (similar to Seaman). I am not really sure how this works in the game, but when I get more information I'll be sure to post it.

I've added Vampire Hunter D to the database.

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

I managed to pick up

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

The database has been updated to reflect the purchases.

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

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

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

I've added Galerians to the database.

Sam from SurvivalHorror.info just told me about Agartha, a survival horror game for the Dreamcast that was canned just before it was to be released. The developer, No Cliche, was Sega's first wholly owned European studio (they were French). However, the No Cliche company web site no longer resolves, and I am assuming that they've dissolved. However, Agartha looks pretty cool, so if anyone has any information on it (or perhaps.... a ROM?) please let me know.

I've added an entry for Koudelka to the database.

I've come across a few more games that may or may not be classifiable as survival horror:

• Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File (official site)
• Kowloon Yoma Gakuen-ki
• Asylum. The developer seems to have changed from "DarkBlack Studios" to "HotHead Studios", and the game name appears to have switched to Shadow of the Sun. Some screens available from Jeux Video.
• Obscure. I can't find any info on this game, save these screens.
• Call of Cthulhu
• Tsuki No Hikari("The Light of the Moon")

So if anybody has info on these games (like if they are survival horror and if they should be included in the database), let me know in the forums!

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

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

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

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

Ok, so, with the (long overdue) introduction of a front page I declare this site to be live!
Hot Damn!