I don’t really accept donations anymore–I haven’t for the past few years. Though I’ve been too lazy to remove the link, my collection of horror games has reached the point that the things I do not own are obscure or brand new, and either way I can buy them myself. But a few weeks ago […]
I finally finished Nanashi no Geemu: Me, the sequel to the original Nameless Game, a series which sets the standard for horror on handheld platforms. This sequel gets a lot of things right–my main complaint with the first game was a general lack of gameplay, and that has been mostly addressed in Me. But some […]
For the first time in four years I’ve written a new feature for this site. This one is called Recursive Unlocking: Analyzing Resident Evil’s Map Design with Data Visualization, and it’s about analyzing the layout of Resident Evil‘s map in order to understand better how it was designed. This analysis is based on a data […]
One of the most distinctive traits of the Silent Hill series is its use of the Otherworld, a bleak industrial version of reality where night persists indefinitely and rusted metal and barbed wire are core components of most architecture. The Otherworld (sometimes referred to as nowhere) often reflects the layout and geometry of reality, but […]
By Rob Potter The only thing you can do is To run away and keep running Is it life? Is it death? An unimaginable horror is about to begin. Table of Contents Chris’ Introduction Notes and Tips Controls Characters Part 1: Hell Night 1.1 Maintenance Room 1.2 Underground Sewer Part 2: TokyoMesh 1F 2.1 Northwest […]
In the May 2004 issue of Game Developer magazine, Richard Rouse III comments that his goal when designing The Suffering was to produce an “action horror” title, rather than a “survival horror” title (Rouse’s article is available online at Gamasutra, registration required). To Rouse, the difference between the two types of game design boils down […]
The West has been awash in Japanese popular culture every since manga and anime began to take root with young people in the early 1990s. Within a decade, the import of Japanese media has gone from a tiny niche market to a full-blown pop culture phenomenon. Japanese comics are now available in translation at major […]
My parents purchased a computer when I was 11 years old. It was our first computer, a Macintosh SE, and it came with an amazingly noisy ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. The Mac SE had an 8-inch screen, 2 mb of RAM, and ran Mac OS System 6.0.8 at a blistering 8 mhz. Its crisp black […]
If you keep up on the gaming press, you’ve probably read about various industry figures arguing about next gen costs and quality. There’s Midway marketing guy Steve Allison arguing that 93% of new IP games fail (followed by this retort), Blast Entertainment CEO Sean Brennan decrying next gen console development costs, and industry analysts divided […]
Resident Evil is often credited with inventing the survival horror genre. While that particular accolade may not be entirely factual, the game is worthy of recognition for cementing horror as a viable, mass-market console genre. Critics are quick to point out that Resident Evil’s basic game system, consisting of static backgrounds, 3D characters, and character-centric […]