Nanashi No Geemu

I have to admit that the first information I heard about Square’s new handheld DS game, ナナシノゲエム (“Nanashi no Geemu,” lit. “Nameless Game” or “Game with No Name”), left me intrigued but skeptical. Now that the official trailer has been posted, I’m in all out excitement mode.

The concept is simple, and quite Japanese: you’re playing a game, a NES-era RPG by the look of it, that seems to be affecting, or perhaps reflecting, your real life. What makes this so great to me is the attention to detail that they’ve put into it: if you watch the shots of the RPG mode closely, you can see garbage tiles flickering around the screen as the player moves, which is a classic side-effect of mismanaged tile memory on NES games. The title screen for the game is all garbled is well (which is why it has no name, I assume), and the garbling looks like the kind of errors you get when on NES games that are corrupted, buggy, incomplete, or even dirty.

The idea is very similar to the mechanic of curse-laden objects that often appears in Japanese horror films. The idea is that a person’s emotions may be so dramatic that they can persist after death within an object (this concept is called onnen), and in the post-Ring world of Japanese horror, such possessed objects are often portrayed as slightly broken bits of technology. Instead of a blurry video tape, an untrustworthy TV or phone, or a mysterious message on your pager, Nanashi No Geemu is giving you a corrupted video game that you can actually play. And when the 3D mode shows up, I’m sure the first order of business will be to find out exactly what that corruption is.

Along with Dementium, Mitewa Ikenai, and Touch the Dead, the DS is starting to be a viable platform for horror-themed games! This one is by far the most interesting to me.

Fatal Frame 4 Arriving Shortly


I need a smaller screenshot of this game.

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

Obscure 2 First Hour Impressions

I picked up Obscure 2 for the Wii a while back and am just now getting around to playing it. I enjoyed the first Obscure, mostly because playing with another person made the otherwise mediocre horror game a lot more fun. This time around I’m playing on my own (so far–maybe I can convince my friend to reprise his role as my backup monster smasher), and so far I am enjoying the experience a whole lot less. I’ve only played for an hour or so, and it’s far too early to pass judgement on the game at this point, but I thought I’d post a few of my thoughts anyway.

The graphics and art style in Obscure 2 is pretty nice. Ok, I should qualify that statement; the cutscenes look terrible, but the actual in-game graphics are very good (I dig the slightly-cartoonish art style too). The monsters are sort of your run-of-the-mill fleshbags and zombie velociraptors, but they look alright. The actual character design for the protagonists seems a bit naff (they’re all cliched stereotypes), but the models are well done and the animation is fine. The background art in particular is very good; I’ve only witnessed a few scenes so far, but the environments are really solid.

There seem to be some odd control choices, though. First of all, the camera is controllable with the Wii pointer (you point at the edge of the screen to rotate the view in that direction), which has so far been really disorienting to me (the camera spends a lot of time spinning in place). There have been a couple of nice fixed cameras (good composition, too), but I’m not used to the pointer-based method at all yet. The character control itself is alright (though movement is aggravated by the camera), but shooting monsters seems incredibly complicated. To shoot a monster you must go into aim mode (button #1), point at the monster, lock on to the monster (button #2), and then finally shoot (button #3). I’m getting used to this but it’s taking a long time. The melee attacks are done using Wii remote gestures, which seem to work ok.

The dialog in Obscure 2 is terrible. The characters are paper-thin, and their jokes and one-liners have already gotten super old. The game has a lot of dialog about the environment, which is good (it makes it feel like these characters are actually experiencing the events portrayed by the game), but sometimes the delivery of the lines is so stoic that it renders them useless (“there’s blood on the floor” isn’t a tension-inducing line when it’s performed in the same tone as one might describe a planned trip to the laundry mat). So far, the characters and their asinine dialog is by far the worst part of the game for me.

I want to talk about an early puzzle, so if you want to avoid minor SPOILERS, skip this paragraph. The puzzles seem to be either really easy or really obtuse. So far most of the puzzles have involved collecting items or just moving boxes around. The one sort of terrible one so far was the first hacking puzzle, in which you must input the name of a “famous person, like an artist” given a limited set of letters in order to unlock a door. Now, right next to this door is a statue by an artist whose name we can learn by examining it. And this artist’s last name is in all caps, and the letters necessary to spell that name are available in the hacking puzzle. So, I thought, no-brainer; they want me to use the name that I found on that statue as password key. But no, entering that name does nothing. I tried different combinations but eventually had to resort to a faq. What do you know, the password is “mozart.” What the hell, game designers? I hope that the rest of the game isn’t like this. SPOILERS END HERE.

So far Obscure 2 seems pretty mediocre. Maybe the addition of another player would help, I’m not sure (sadly there is no online option–this game is a perfect fit for two player online co-op, but on the other hand, finding another person who has this game might be a challenge). I’ll post a full review when I’ve completed the game.

That Which Rocks My Socks


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.

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics

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.

Silent Hill 5 Drives Stake into Harker’s Heart

In unsurprising news, Kotaku is reporting that Double Helix (previously known as The Collective) has cancelled vampire staking game Harker in order to finish Silent Hill 5. That’s probably a worthy trade off, though it’s always a bit sad to see original IP die off for the sake of a sequel (even a Silent Hill sequel).

In other news, a new Splatterhouse game is in the works (thanks to forums member Johnny Feldman for the tip). You know, because, who needs new ideas when we can just regurgitate old ones?

My Quest to Find Affordable Wireless Headphones, Part 2: The Cerulean Molar


Even cooler.

A while back I posted a short and completely off-topic piece about wireless headphones. Basically, good wireless headphones are not cheap, and though there are pretty good alternatives, some of them (like the Sony IR headphones I ended up buying) get interference from plasma TVs (hooray!). Despite the color-induced static, I toughed it out with my IR ‘phones for several months; though many of you suggested that I just get a nice long cable and forget about the whole wireless business, my TV’s lack of headphone port kept that option out of reach. I played through all of Bioshock with the IR headphones, I watched several movies with them, and I used them to improve my Rock Band singing. I was hoping that I’d just get used to the wavering layer of static that my TV caused, but I didn’t. The wireless headphones weren’t totally useless, but I was pretty disappointed with them.

Then yesterday I happened across a Sharper Image store. If you’re not familiar with Sharper Image, it’s a store that sells random gadgets and techie thigamagigs that you didn’t know you needed for exorbitant prices. As the name suggests, Sharper Image is all about techie fashion; it’s a place for people who want a gadget that looks cool go to be relieved of their cash. Actually, I have often enjoyed browsing the random contraptions for sale at Sharper Image, but I’ve never actually considered purchasing anything there.

Anyway, Sharper Image is exactly the kind of place that people stop going when the economy is bad, and so they ran out of money a couple of months ago. Yesterday while tooling around Burlingame looking at expensive baby stores, I noticed that the local Sharper Image was having a going-out-of-business sale. I looked around inside but was unimpressed; I don’t need a $500 pair of nightvision goggles, or a memory card that fits in your phone, or a set of spoons with digital displays in the handles, or any of the other crap they had for sale. Just as I was walking out, however, I noticed that they had wireless headphones! Upon further inspection it turned out that the ‘phones were Blue Tooth, came with a transmitter (which is a non-trivial addition), and were going for about $80, marked down from $199. And to top it all off, these headphones had big, wrap-around ear pads, the kind that I like.

So I bought them. I don’t need two pairs of wireless headphones, but on the other hand the Sony IRs should work better away from the TV, so maybe I can find a use for them. I hooked up the Blue Tooth headphones and am extremely happy to report that they sound phenomenal (at least, compared to the IRs). There’s no static, the sound is crisp and clear, and unlike the infrared headphones they don’t require line-of-sight to work. Ok, so the volume controls are pretty unresponsive and I couldn’t get the damn things to pair with my computer, but who cares: these headphones are exactly what I was looking for. My quest for wireless headphones has, for the moment anyway, come to an end.

Which means, just so you know, that I can get back to playing horror games on a more regular basis. I’m most of the way through Hellnight and I’ve put some serious time into Siren 2. I’ve been temporarily distracted by the hilarious (and very fun) No More Heros, but I’m closing in on the end of that game pretty quickly. Thanks to new (non-sucky) wireless headphones, I hope to retire and review another game or two in the next month.

Siren 3 Teaser?

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

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

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