Playing Lately

One thing about having a kid is that you don’t sleep very much. But for me, that means that I’ve had some time to play some video games in between cuddling my daughter, feeding her, and generally trying to let her Mom get some sleep in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason […]

The Fight Against Mediocrity

Every couple of months I pull out a game that I’ve started but never completed. I play these games for a while, make some progress, then put them down again, sometimes for months. Usually these are games that just never grabbed me (like Extermination), or games that I was playing before I got interrupted by […]

Rule of Rose Impressions

I tried to play Rule of Rose again today after almost a year hiatus. I don’t know exactly how to put this, as I know a lot of horror fans enjoyed this game, but I think that it’s terrible. There are so many problems with it I don’t even know where to begin. The game […]

The Darkness

Kotaku.com has some video footage of the upcoming Xbox360/PS3 horror game The Darkness. I’ve held off talking about this game because it hasn’t been clear if it’s really a horror game or just another first person shooter with a lot of monsters. The footage seems to clear that up: though you play the antagonist, it […]

Silent Hill Arcade Shooter

I’m sorry, I can’t not post this. Kotaku.com has a bunch of images from the new Silent Hill arcade game. You read that right. It’s a shooter, set in the Silent Hill universe, with lots of fog and film grain. And zombies. That’s like Silent Hill, right? Fog + film grain + zombies = winning […]

Siren 2 Impressions

I picked up Siren 2 on an excursion to Japan last month. I really should finish Ghost Hunter first (which is actually a much better game than I was expecting, though it’s not perfect), but got hooked on Siren 2 almost immediately and haven’t put it down yet. If you followed my Siren odyssey, you […]

The Role of Lighting

Though I didn’t think it was a great film, one of the things I dug about Juon 2 was the way the director used lighting to suggest some sort of abstract malice. Unlike many traditional horror movies, Juon 2 doesn’t rely on pitch-black locales to build tension; instead, it suggests that the characters in the […]

Fatal Frame Three Thoughts

I’ve been playing Fatal Frame 3 lately, and I’m enjoying it quite a lot. It’s not a big departure from the previous games in the series, but it does offer the ability to play as multiple characters and the progression is made more interesting by the addition of dream sequences. Most of the “regular” Fatal […]

The Problem With Manhunt

Manhunt is the type of game that I’m not really interested in. Gritty realism, with gangs and torture and an emphasis on ultra-violence, performed by none other than the player-controlled protagonist? Not really my cup of tea. I mean, violence in context can be extremely interesting (see A Clockwork Orange, or better yet, read the […]