Alone in the Dark 5 is Just Like Real Life


See this? It’s reality.

Thanks to forums member RainbowDispair for pointing me to this interview with Nour Polloni about the up-and-coming Alone in the Dark 5. Polloni is the producer on the project, and she reveals a lot of details about what the game play will be like and what players should expect from the game.

From the interview it sounds like it will be an action-oriented game in a large, almost free roaming environment, and by the way they want you to know that they have PHYSICS that are JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Polloni seriously harps on this point several times; the focus of the game, at least according to her, is to be as realistic as possible. That’s certainly a really hard thing to pull off, and precious few games (Half-Life 2 is the only one that comes to mind) have really made it work.

That said, I’m very interested in what they come up with; the move toward action-oriented game play certainly isn’t surprising (le sigh), but on the other hand this game could turn out to be the best Alone in the Dark since Alone in the Dark 2: One Eyed Jack’s Revenge.

Survival Horror Community!

One of the great things about running a site like this is that I get to meet people who have interests similar to my own. One of these people is forums member hellsing, who has been generating quite a bit of online content related to survival horror himself lately. First of all he’s got this pretty neat video review of the GBA version Alone in the Dark 4, not to mention his recent interview with the writer of Silent Hill 5, which by the way is posted on his survival horror-themed blog.

A lot of content here, and all of it pretty interesting to boot. If you have a blog or site that is horror related, why not take this opportunity to post about it? I’m especially interested in sites that, like hellsing’s, are focused on game design, industry, and review as they relate to horror.

Horror Game Evolution: Cameras and Movement (part 3)


The camera system in Fatal Frame 2 is fantastic.

This is the last part of a three-part series of posts about how camera systems and character movement have evolved over the last ten years. In part 1 I discussed the problems that horror game developers faced when transitioning from 2D games to 3D games, and in part 2 I talked about the ways improvements that were made to camera and control systems in the second wave of horror games. In this post I’d like to touch on how these camera and control schemes fair today, and mention a few games that have diverged from the norm.

The primary problem developers face nowadays is how to mix different types of camera systems (fixed cameras, cameras that follow the player, cameras that are tethered to a pre-defined path) in a way that doesn’t make the control scheme impossible to deal with. As I mentioned last time, the Parasite Eve model was popularized by Devil May Cry and remains the approach of choice for most fixed (or mostly-fixed) camera games (think Ninja Gaiden and God of War). Many games have abandoned the fixed camera approach all together and instead focused on smart follow-cams, which usually don’t cut and therefore do not suffer from the problem of “forward” changing definition. The games that do mix follow and fixed cameras need to be careful: you can see the system break down in games like Siren where one mode makes perfect sense and the other is jarring whenever it occurs.

One game that deserves special mention for its intelligent mixing of cameras and controls is Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly. The camera system in Fatal Frame 2 is phenomenal; it includes fixed cameras, cameras that follow a path, and free-roaming follow cameras. In addition, its control system is robust enough to deal with all of these different permutations. In the intro sequence to this game where the protagonist approaches the cursed village, we are treated to some extremely complicated (from a control point of view) camera shots (cameras following a curve, shot from above, and cutting in 180 degrees), and the system is so smooth that most players probably didn’t even notice it. Though Fatal Frame 2 relies on a fairly standard RE-style character-centric system (though it’s perhaps a little more sensitive than most other games), on of the keys to its success is that the run button can be held down to move the character forward without any stick input. This allows the player to move forward in a camera-independent way without relying on difficult character-centric movement. Though the Parasite Eve “sticky” camera-centric control scheme would probably have been a better choice for new players, the addition of the run button-based movement removes much of the pain caused by the tank control model. Once the player realizes that this is possible, movement in Fatal Frame 2 becomes a breeze: the player needs only to hold the run button down and make minor adjustments to the left or right in order to drive the character through the environment. Coupled with the vast array of camera behavior that Fatal Frame exhibits, I think that this is an extremely successful example of how to do controls in a cinematic game.

Fatal Frame 2 isn’t the only game to use a button to move the player forward.


The Resident Evil Remake contains one of the best tank control models ever in its “Type C” control scheme.

The excellent Resident Evil Remake offers the player a couple of alternate control schemes to choose from, and one of them, “Type C”, is by far the best. Under the Type C control scheme, the right trigger button is used to move the player forward, and the analog stick is only necessary for turning left and right. This is fundamentally the same as Fatal Frame 2’s run button movement, but it works even better in this context because the GameCube controller’s trigger buttons are big and analog. Push the button down part way and the character walks forward, but clicking it down completely will cause him to run. The depth of the button on the GameCube controller gives the player far more control over their movement than analog-stick based systems, and since Resident Evil players are used to holding a button down to run anyway, it’s not any more work than normal. In fact, the system works so well that I wish that it were available in every Resident Evil game; the ability to run forward without using the stick and without relying on the direction the camera is looking makes the dreaded tank controls a walk in the park. Unfortunately this control mode didn’t make it into the subsequent Resident Evil game on GameCube, Resident Evil 0, probably because that game required the player to use the analog stick and the C-Stick to move two characters around.

The last game I’ll mention here is Resident Evil 4, which is noteworthy because it effectively merged character- and camera-centric controls. In Resident Evil 4 “forward” is always defined by the direction that the camera is facing, but at the same time “forward” is always the direction that Leon is facing because the camera and Leon are almost always focused on exactly the same point. Unlike many other camera-centric first person games which feature slightly divergent camera and player facing directions (so required because you usually can’t see through your character’s back), Resident Evil 4 is able to align the two by bringing the camera in very close to the character, and leaving it there for most of the game. This makes Resident Evil 4’s control and camera scheme more like a first-person shooter than like traditional third-person games, but it works very well. The camera is able to move in and out of its normal position to show the floor around Leon, or to convey a sense of claustrophobia, but generally it remains looking along a vector that intersects Leon’s eye direction right in the middle of the screen. This is a very interesting approach, and is clearly the result of a lot of research and development by Capcom.

I’m very interested to see how camera and controls continue to evolve in the future. Games like Gears of War have already appropriated horror game mechanics for other types of games, and I think we’ll see horror games adjusting themselves in the future as well. The recent Silent Hill 5 footage, for example, suggests that the most recent game in that series may use a significantly different approach to cameras and movement than previous games in the series. These two systems, control and camera, are central to the way horror games look and feel, and I think that there is still a lot of ways that existing systems can be improved.

Eyes on the Prize

You can learn something about the American economy by watching horror movies. It’s true: when times are good and Hollywood is less risk-averse, we are treated to subtle, interesting, and original horror movies. When the economy is shitty (I hate the word “downturn,” it’s so saccharin), Hollywood responds by reverting to tried-and-true vehicles for turning a profit from teenage audiences (read: whatever worked before; usually sex and gore). During these times the penny-pinchers are looking for “sure bets,” films that they can count on to make a profit, even if that profit isn’t ultra blockbuster. I think that there is probably enough historical evidence to make a Horror Film Quality economic index at this point.

Where such an index to exist, it would be (correctly) indicating that the American economy is in the toilet right now. Take the up-and-coming release of The Eye, a remake of a Hong Kong film from 2003, this time starring white people speaking English. The thing is, the original film wasn’t all that great (at least, I didn’t think so), and by all accounts the remake is even worse.

The concept for the film is interesting enough (a woman undergoes eye surgery to restore her vision and subsequently can see ghosts), but the reason that Hollywood decided to remake it not because it is a good film but rather because it is safe. All the risk was taken back in 2003 when the film was originally made, so all Hollywood has to do is reshoot it with some white actors, throw in some superfluous CG, and call it a day. The whole endeavor is really cheap, so profit is almost guaranteed.

How does this process anger me? Let me count the ways.

First of all, I’m constantly incensed by Hollywood’s need to “sanitize” foreign films for American audiences by inserting white actors and changing the script into English. God forbid we have a movie with an asian (or Indian, or Middle Eastern, etc) protagonist, who could even (blasphemy of blasphemies) speak a different language. Heaven help us if the details of the plot are not explained to us in such excruciating detail that we actually have to think about the film on our own. And it’s a well known fact that no movie with subtitles could possibly be enjoyed by American audiences (oh how quickly we forget).

Secondly, for all of its cash Hollywood is almost totally unable to innovate in this genre because films are treated as a business rather than an art. There’s nothing wrong with business–you need money to fund art, after all–but good art requires risk, and business is the process of removing risk in order to maintain profitability over the long term. So instead Hollywood remakes like The Eye, The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water (not to mention non-horror films like Shall we Dance) are made on the backs of the people who took the risk and made something interesting for a change. These are usually minor film makers with almost no budget, working without the aid of high-end special effects teams or multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. Once they’ve proven that a new idea might actually be something that viewers want to see, Hollywood can just pluck up the rights, discharge a remake, and take all the credit (and profit) for somebody else’s hard work. That doesn’t help the genre progress, it doesn’t expand the size of the audience, and it certainly doesn’t encourage the propagation of original films. It’s a one-sided business weighted entirely in Hollywood’s favor.

Finally, films like The Eye are hardly worth remaking! If they enjoyed the original, why not just re-release it here with English subtitles and a small marketing blitz? That’d be far cheaper than reshooting the whole thing, and they have a chance of creating an instant cult classic. Besides, the critics prefer the original versions of these films almost every single time–it’s not like improvements are being made by Hollywood. The original Eye isn’t such a great film, but it’s better than the American rendition.

Hollywood remakes are like Bizarro versions of real films: flakey and nonsensical. The industry and its audience would be far better off if the original films were just released verbatim in this country. Maybe when the economy corrects itself there will be a return to interesting American films (or even better, a surge of foreign imports), but for the moment the pickings are pretty slim.

Wii to be Fatally Framed

Thanks to forums member Feighnt for pointing out this announcement over at Destructoid about Fatal Frame 4. In addition to the news that such a game exists (not to mention some creepy screenshots), the announcement also notes that the game is coming to the Wii (hello Wiimote camera!) and that crazy awesome game designer extraordinaire Suda51 is somehow involved. The only thing that could make this announcement better is a release date, but sadly none is yet available. Still: awesome!

In much, much less exciting horror game news, Kotaku is reporting that a game based on the movie Saw will land around Halloween of this year. In other news, Fatal Frame 4 is coming out on the Wii! AWESOME.

Horror Game Evolution: Cameras and Movement (part 2)


Most 3D games at the time avoided shots like this and kept the camera behind the player.

In part 1 of this series* I discussed how horror games differed in approach compared to most other third person genres in the transition from 2D to 3D graphics. When we left off, I was describing how the scheme used by games like Resident Evil allowed developers to use dramatically composed shots by making movement relative to the protagonist’s facing direction rather than relative to the camera’s view. After Resident Evil shipped a huge number of copycat games flooded the market, and most of them simply copied the control scheme and camera system from the seminal horror game verbatim. Even with the release of the DualShock in 1997 in Japan and 1998 in the US, the in-game controls for 3rd person horror games stayed constant for a number of years (with one notable exception). However, two games in particular bucked this trend and showed that the concepts proven by Resident Evil could be applied to other game formats.

In 1999 the release of Silent Hill ushered in change on many game design fronts. In addition to being one of the first console games to use complex streaming and lighting systems, Silent Hill also showed that character-centric controls could be used with moving cameras in fully 3D worlds. Like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, the protagonist in Silent Hill moves independently of the camera: left and right rotate the character in place, while up causes him to run in the direction that he is currently facing. Unlike Resident Evil, however, Silent Hill uses a combination of fixed and moving cameras: the camera is able to cut to dramatic angles as well as follow the player through the foggy streets of the deserted resort town for which the game is named. In fact, the decoupling of movement and camera position made Silent Hill’s camera model considerably more complex than other fully 3D third person games at the time; games like Tomb Raider kept the camera locked behind the player, while Silent Hill was able to move the view in far more interesting ways.

Silent Hill showed that the power of shot composition and dramatic lighting proven by Resident Evil could be applied to games without pre-rendered backgrounds. The game was a technological showcase at the time, but it also proved an important point: that camera movement, not just camera placement, is one of the key elements to building tension in games. Silent Hill also showed that the Resident Evil control scheme could work in true 3D, though it was no easier to learn for new users than before. In fact, the “tank controls” system would remain a popular choice for developers for a few more years, even though a better alternative had been invented a year before Silent Hill’s release.

The first major game that I am aware of to make significant improvements to the Resident Evil / Alone in the Dark


Parasite Eve had dramatic camera shots while maintaining camera-centric character controls.

control scheme is Parasite Eve, released in 1998. Parasite Eve used the same basic control setup as Resident Evil: fixed cameras that may cut at any time without interrupting the player’s movement. But despite the similar camera design, the developers at Square USA came up with a key innovation that allowed them to employ a much more user-friendly control system. Though this change would go unnoticed for several years, it eventually became the standard way to make third person controls with camera cuts work, and remains a standard to this day.

Unlike Resident Evil, Parasite Eve uses camera-centric controls. That means that it works similarly to Tomb Raider and Mario 64 in that the definition of “forward” is defined by the camera rather than by the character. But wait, you exclaim, in the last post you said that camera-centric controls are incompatible with fixed camera systems and never the twain shall meet! I’m glad you’ve been paying attention, but what Square USA did with Parasite Eve effectively solved the quandary of mixing camera-based controls into a system where the camera moves unpredictably. The key change that Square made is simply to only allow the definition of “forward” to change when the player is not pressing a button on the controller. That is, if the player runs to the edge of an area and causes a camera cut, the direction they are currently holding will still move them forward as long as they hold it down. When they let go of the D-Pad or analog stick, the definition of forward is reset to match the current camera view. This way the player can continue to run forward through any number of camera cuts without having to suffer through the brain damage caused by character-centric controls.

Though it may have gone mostly unnoticed at first, the Parasite Eve solution to 3D controls with fixed cameras would eventually become the absolute standard. The system was duplicated and perfected by Capcom’s Devil May Cry in 2001, and has since been used in almost every subsequent horror game utilizing fixed cameras to date. In fact, the only recent games that preserved the pre-Parasite Eve control system are those from the Resident Evil series, notably Resident Evil 0 and the Resident Evil remake. It’s not as if these games have been stuck in the past, however: almost all of the good horror games for the PS2 generation have had something interesting to add to the mix. In the final post in this series, I’ll take a look at how recent games have tried to further improve upon Silent Hill’s camera system and the Parasite Eve control scheme.

*Incidentally, the post ID for part 1 is also the name of an early but highly influential CPU. How apt for a post about technical evolution!

Cloverfield

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.

Horror Game Evolution: Cameras and Movement (part 1)


The Secret of Monkey Island and most other adventure games relied on this kind of landscape shot.

One of the key elements in modern horror games is visual storytelling. I’m not talking about cut scenes or character design, I mean the nitty-gritty details of shot composition: lighting, camera placement, and camera motion. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the horror genre developed the idea of a cinematic camera in video games almost independently of the rest of the industry, and how the need to communicate feeling though the architecture of levels and the placement of cameras had profound effects on the way that these games are actually played.

I’ve touched on this topic before. I talked briefly about Alone in the Dark‘s revolutionary approach to cameras in my article about the history of the modern survival horror game, and I mentioned the relationship between fixed camera systems and character-centric control schemes in a recent provocative post. But it’s such an interesting topic that I thought I’d devote a post or two to it.

To understand how the horror genre was so influential in developing the visual systems now used by a wide variety of genres, it’s important to understand what the state of the art before horror games came along and why change was necessary. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, adventure games ruled the PC game market. Most of them, like the seminal The Secret of Monkey Island, were built upon flat landscapes populated by sprites. This was enough to show off the game world and the people in it, but the technology wasn’t sufficient to frame shots dramatically.

So


In games like Tomb Raider, “forward” is defined by the camera.

along comes Alone in the Dark and changes two important things: the camera system and the control system. Alone in the Dark took the flat 2D perspective of the adventure genre and projected it into proper 3D space. At the same time, the game provided players with direct control; instead of point-and-clicking to move around, players could use the keyboard to drive the protagonists around. A few years later this exact format was popularized on game consoles by Resident Evil, a game that was able to take advantage of the Playstation controller rather than the awkward keyboard.

But in transitioning from 2D scenes to 3D scenes, the developers of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil faced a problem: how best to translate 2D input from the keyboard or controller into 3D space. After all, arrow keys or a D-pad can only represent two axes of movement; the software must pick a heuristic for translating that motion into 3D space. The common heuristic used by most 3D games then and now is to define a vector in 3D space that is “forward.” Tomb Raider, which shipped around the same time Resident Evil was hitting the shelves, used one of the first over-the-shoulder cameras and worked by assuming that the direction the camera was pointing was the direction that Laura Croft would move if the player pressed “up” on their controller. The mapping from 2D controller input to 3D movement was thus a projection along the orientation of the camera. As long as the camera stays generally behind the player’s character, “up” on the control stick will always mean “run forward towards the horizon.” Interestingly, this scheme


In games like Resident Evil, “forward” is defined by the character.

usually causes the player character to run in circles of you hold left or right on the control stick; when the camera is locked behind the player, any motion to one side causes the camera to move as well, redefining “forward” and creating a circle if movement to the side continues. You can see this effect in most third person games even today.

But Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil do not use cameras that are always behind the player. The whole point of Alone in the Dark’s camera system is to provide interesting and affecting points of view for the camera; the system would be moot if the camera were required to simply look in the same direction as the player’s character. So both games opted for the “tank control” model, where player input is mapped to the character’s orientation rather than the camera’s. In this scheme “forward” can be defined independently of the camera–up on the control stick will always cause the player to run in the direction that he is currently facing. By using this system the developers of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil were able to mix 3D motion with dramatic cameras, and though the result was confusing and carried a high learning curve, the effect ended up being worth it to a huge number of gamers.

In the next post I’ll continue this discussion by talking about games in the late 1990s that made incremental improvements on the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil model. I’ll also talk about how the model has changed over time, how more recent games have tried to deal with the need to move in 3D space with an unpredictable view point, and which titles now represent the state of the art.

Loft

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.