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.

The Problem With the PSP

Sony’s Playstation Portable is not a bad machine. Though the screen can blur a bit it otherwise looks very nice, and the UI for the main system is well done. I’m not a huge fan of the analog nub but it’s not a deal breaker for me, and while the battery life may be pretty bad it’s not so terrible that the device itself is made useless. While there are legitimate problems, the issues are all fairly minor; as a whole, the PSP is a pretty good handheld gaming device.

And yet, the system has failed to excite customers. There are extremely few really good games for the platform, and while every once and a while something new and good comes out, often PSP owners are left with scaled-down versions of last year’s PS2 games. Plus, for all of the processing power, despite the beautiful display, and even though the PSP is a sleek bit of electronics, it’s losing to the not-so-sleek, not-so-powerful, inferior-screened Nintendo DS.

So what’s the problem with the PSP? Why hasn’t it done better in the marketplace? Here’s my theory.

I worked (briefly) on a PSP launch title. In connection with that title I met a number of folks from Sony America who communicated to my company what they had envisioned for the PSP. They wanted to sell it as a handheld PS2, and they wanted PS2-quality games on the PSP. They didn’t want the same games that were already available on PS2, they said, but they expected developers to be able to port existing PS2 tech to the PSP in order to make new games. This was a fine theory, but when the platform came out it was buried under a huge number of straight ports and knock-off games (one or two of which I worked on myself). For all of Sony’s intentions, the platform quickly became a place to deposit a major franchise port in-between PS2 releases. Even now, three years after the platform was released, there are no games for it that score 90% or greater in aggregate. And the top two games for the platform, Lumines and Wipeout, were launch titles.

Here’s where I think Sony screwed up. By marketing the machine as a handheld PS2, they raised the bar significantly for developers. By raising that bar they also raised cost of development; I remember that the first PSP games I worked on ended up costing three times what they were initially expected to cost when the platform was announced. Writing a high-quality PSP game isn’t all that much cheaper than making a PS2 game, mostly because the level of expectation for the platform was inflated by Sony early on.

This level of hype might have been OK, but then Sony went and priced the system at $250, which is way too expensive for most consumers. As a result the installed base for the PSP has grown incredibly slowly compared to other platforms.

So you have a platform that not very many people bought that costs a lot to develop for. The result is of course ports: they are the only way that a developer could deliver a title with strong graphics without assuming too much risk. And on top of that, the PSP is not a handheld PS2–it’s considerably slower than the PS2, and it also has less RAM than its big brother (Sony reserves 8 of the PSP’s 32 MB of RAM for the PSP OS). So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for developers to go making new games specifically for the PSP; the size of the audience can’t sustain the cost of development.

Now, over the last three years the size of the PSP installed base has grown, and as it increases we’ve seen a small trickle of original games on the platform. If the platform continues to sell it might become commercially viable sometime in the next couple of years. But it’s already too late, really; instead of making a PSP game, a developer can make a DS game for less money and sell it to a much, much larger audience. While I think the PSP still has some life left in it, it’s already missed its prime and is on the down swing.

The reason that I’m spending all this time talking about the PSP is that I think it’s a pretty good example of what has happened to the PS3 so far. The PS3 is too expensive, and therefore the installed base is too small, and yet developing competitive games for it is incredibly expensive. The PS3 still has a lot more life in it than its handheld sibling, and if they can get the cost down and secure some very good games the platform may still have a chance. But at the moment it’s looking increasingly similar to the PSP story: too expensive to develop for given the size of the audience, which itself cannot grow because the device is too expensive. For the second time in a row, I think that Sony has been so interested in shipping fancy hardware that they’ve missed the balance between price point and performance expectation.

Why should you care about all of this? Well, the short answer is Japan. Of the games listed on this site, more than 60% of them originated in the Land of the Rising Sun. The thing about Japan is, they don’t want Xboxes. Barring some miracle marketing by Microsoft, the fight in Japan is between the PS3 and the Wii. And just like everywhere else, the Wii is winning big time. If the PS3 ends up losing enough market share (or even if its market share remains constant in the face of Wii growth), Japanese developers will likely abandon the platform. It’s already happening to some extent, but it remains to be seen if the Wii boom will sustain itself or if the Sony brand can pull itself out of its slump. If I were a betting man considering the best way to play horror games in the next three or four years, I’d probably make damn sure I had a Wii in the house.

My Quest to Find Affordable Wireless Headphones

The height of cool.

The setup: I have a newborn who sleeps every evening by 9 PM. I enjoy horror games and films, but my wife isn’t such a fan. I have one of those TVs where the volume goes from “inaudibly quiet” to “loud enough to wake the house up” in a single click. I’d like to stay up late and indulge in my games and movies after my family has gone to sleep, but so far I’ve had to either turn the sound off entirely or sit about two feet away from the TV.

I need a pair of headphones. But not regular headphones; my TV is large enough that I need to sit several feet back to enjoy it. No, I need wireless headphones. I bought a pair of wireless headphones a couple of years ago in Japan, and while they were super-cheap and rarely worked correctly, they sold me on the idea that slightly better technology could make wireless horror viewing a reality.

So I started to shop around. It turns out that there are four types of wireless headphones available: radio frequency headphones (the worst; you get interference from the local hip hop station), 900mhz frequency headphones (probably fine if you don’t have a lot of 900mhz interference; I do), infrared headphones (sound is good but they require line-of-sight to a base station), and Bluetooth headphones (sound is good but they are super expensive). The price range for these things goes from about $15 for the radio headphones to $200+ for Bluetooth, which also requires you to buy a Bluetooth transmitter if you want to use your ‘phones with the TV.

None of these things sound like very good options to me. I don’t want to spend $200 for some headphones that I’m only going to use once a week, but on the other hand I can’t abide by lousy sound quality. The cheapest Bluetooth setup is slightly more affordable but doesn’t come with big ear pads, which I also desire.

So I decided to go with the IR headphones. Line-of-sight isn’t a problem for me, as I’m just going to wear them in front of the TV. They are pretty cheap and the reviews on Amazon suggest that the sound quality is pretty good. I went with a pair of Sony headphones that retail at a very-affordable $50. The way these things work is that the base is connected to the TV, and it beams the audio via infrared to receivers on the headphones themselves. I have to push my hair back when I wear them to make sure that it doesn’t obscure the receivers, but otherwise they feel pretty good on my head. They rest on the base station when not in use and automatically recharge, which is nice. And actually, the sound quality isn’t half-bad.

That is, unfortunately, until I turn on the TV. A key miscalculation on my part is that I have a plasma TV, which emits infrared light. I knew this to be the case before I bought the headphones, but I didn’t make the connection between an IR-producing TV and IR-receiving headphones. The result is a significant amount of background static, which annoyingly changes depending on what’s currently displayed on the screen (scenes with lots of white are louder). It’s acceptable, I guess, but the sound quality is degraded so much that I might have just been better off with a 900mhz model. It sounds better for games than for films, probably because the games I play are generally darker. But my plan to enjoy horror wirelessly was fatally flawed by my brand of television.

As an aside, last night I used my new headphones to sit through Exte, a Japanese horror flick about, well, hair extensions. Mostly this movie operates on the idea that other people’s hair is pretty icky to touch when it’s not attached to their head; we get hair coming out of people’s mouthes, out of their eyes, and even out of cuts in their skin. But the premise is terrible and the film can’t decide if it wants to be funny-and-campy or serious-and-scary. In the end it’s a pretty complete failure in every department. Also, it sounded bad through my stupid headphones.

Creature Feature: Tsuchinoko

It’s been a while since the last Creature Feature, so I think it’s high time for a new one. This time around the creature in question is the tsuchinoko, a mythical snake from Japan. Unlike previous Creature Feature entries, the tsuchinoko is hardly a monster or supernatural entity; though some versions of the story suggest that they enjoy drinking and are capable of speech (but should not be trusted), most accounts paint the tsuchinoko as just an extremely rare species of snake.

Tsuchinoko are said to have short, wide bodies and triangular faces. They are sometimes described as being able to jump long distances or form a rolling wheel by biting their tail. Apparently, some people in Japan actually believe that the tsuchinoko exist and have simply managed to elude scientific categorization. Several cities in Japan have offered rewards for the capture of a live tsuchinoko (up to $200,000), but so far the creature has not been caught. The Phantom Tsuchinoko is a pretty comprehensive page (in Japanese) about the creature.

For whatever reason, tsuchinoko show up in a lot of video games, often as secret items. There’s actually a whole section in Siren about the tsuchinoko. For some reason this creature continues to interest many Japanese, perhaps because it’s difficult to be sure if it is an actual species or simply legend.

This Just In: Asinine Topics Prove Popular

I should probably apologize for the previous post. My New Years resolution is to stop reading internet forums (except the one here, of course) because I realized that I was spending a huge amount of my valuable free time reading and participating in arguments about topics that have absolutely no value whatsoever. I really enjoy online discussion when it’s interesting and informative; there’s nothing better than reading a really insightful post by some anonymous internet guy and feeling like you’ve actually just learned something. But I quit forums because 99% of the posts seemed to be argument for the sake of argument, with almost zero actual interesting discussion. So I just went cold turkey a few weeks back and I have to say that the effect has been like quitting smoking–all of a sudden I have much more free time and energy than I had before.

But I’m sort of interested in what it is about the internet that causes people to defend some meaningless, trivial point as if it is a matter of life and death. I mean, look at Wikipedia’s list of Lamest Edit Wars Ever for an excruciating number of examples of people getting into intense verbal battles over the spelling of a word, the heritage of some long-dead aristocrat, or whether or not a particular comic is really the first appearance of a particular character. So much energy spent for so little return! These discussions are, as I said in the previous post, asinine because they are not constructive. You can debate whether Resident Evil 4 is horror, action-horror, survival horror, or whatever until the cows come home and neither side will have actually learned anything.

So the previous post was something of an experiment, and it was a little underhanded, which is why I apologize. I deliberately constructed that post to first complain about asinine arguments and then proceed to make such an argument myself (though I did try to actually include some interesting stuff). I was interested in which point would garner the most responses: the point about opinion wars of trivial topics being stupid, or the point about whether Resident Evil 4 is a horror game or not.

Well, it’s been about 48 hours since that post, and I’m not sure whether to call the experiment a success or a failure. On the one hand, the post worked as designed: it prompted a huge amount of discussion about one of the points and very little about the other. On the other hand, the level of “discussion” was much more intense than I was expecting. The test wasn’t exactly fair because once people started to respond, I sort of egged the discussion on by reiterating my arguments from the post. As of this writing there are 29 comments (including a few of my own) to the previous post, which I think makes it the most commented-on piece I’ve ever written. That’s right, the post about whether or not Resident Evil 4 is horror or not got more responses than the post on racism in Resident Evil 5, more responses than the article on Japanese horror that I spent months writing, and even more responses than my controversial decrying of Cold Fear. While a couple of people got my poorly-communicated point, a lot of other people took the proposed argument far too seriously. To tell you the truth, it’s pretty depressing that some asinine (if inflammatory) post can generate this level of response while the much more constructive and informative posts hardly garner a comment.

So, in light of the rather scary result of this experiment, I have a request and a proposal. First, I would like to humbly request that we spend our time on this site at least attempting to have constructive discourse. I don’t mind arguments of opinion, but if you are going to post something about how you feel, please go into detail about why you feel that way; even if we don’t agree with you, it’s much more interesting to learn about your perspective than if you just say “No, wrong, here’s how it is.” The previous post was an experiment that I’m not excited to repeat. I know it’s like this all over the internet, but my request is that we at least try to rise above squabbling about truly trivial topics.

In addition, I’d like to propose some topics that, while related to the argument put forth in my previous post, are infinitely more interesting. Maybe we can spend some time talking the following things:

  • What about Resident Evil 4 is different than previous games in the series. What is similar? Why do you think Capcom changed the formula the way they did?
  • What design aspects of Resident Evil 4 improve the game’s ability to scare the player? Which aspects damage that ability?
  • If you enjoyed Resident Evil 4, what did you like about it (be specific!). If you hated it, what was the problem (again, specificity is key here–ranting usually has a very low signal to noise ratio).

Or we can talk about some other topic; we don’t have to stick to these prompts. I hope that future discussions will be more like conversations and reflections rather than opinion wars.

Asinine Topic: Resident Evil 4’s “Horror-ness”


This picture is not out of date, I swear.

If you run a site about video games, or read message boards about video games, or even give Wikipedia articles on video games a passing glance, you are sure to find people arguing about asinine details of unimportant topics. I’m sure this is true for all kinds of subjects, especially those that have to do with popular culture, but since most of my internet surfing time is devoted to video game related sites, I’ve noticed it most dramatically in relation to video games. This site is no exception, of course, and today I am going to present an argument for an asinine detail of an unimportant topic that I’ve seen come up a few times: whether Resident Evil 4 should be considered a horror game or not.

There are a few arguments in particular on this topic that I want to address, and I’ve enumerated them below. My real message here is that classification of media is an inexact science, and therefore it is pointless to argue the particulars of any particular classification. That’s a little academic and esoteric-sounding, though, so I’m going to use RE4 as a way to ground that assertion.

Point 1: Resident Evil 4 is an action game, which means it can’t possibly be horror..

This is a very narrow-minded viewpoint that I’ve come across several times. The idea, I guess, is that horror games, particularly survival horror games, are required to scare the player by de-emphasizing combat or making it arduous. Previous Resident Evil games have rationed ammo and health, the Silent Hill series prefers bludgeons to guns, and games like Siren make combat extremely difficult on purpose. As I’ve written about in the past, many horror games seek to make the protagonist more vulnerable by weakening them in combat in order to increase tension.

The problem with the idea that action and horror are incompatible is that to believe it you must assume that there is only one right way to make a scary video game. Consider horror film: we have no problem lumping Child’s Play, Jacob’s Ladder, and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu into the same “horror” category even though all three of those films are very different. I think the key requirement for a horror game is that it must attempt to be scary any way it can; whether that is achieved by making the player vulnerable or rationing save items or using excessive darkness is just a detail.

I also think that Resident Evil 4 is very clearly designed to scare the player. The key difference between it and previous Resident Evil games is that the protagonist is much more deft at combat and ammo rationing has been removed from the equation. But think about how the Los Ganados swarm Leon from every side; consider the unkillable Chainsaw Man; recall the tension that is induced by those goddamn Regenerators; remember how the first encounter with a Verdugo made you dread the second. These are all classic Resident Evil-isms: they are the developers using over-the-top monsters to put the otherwise tough-looking protagonist in a weak position to induce fear. Making Ashley’s life the player’s responsibility has a similar effect, as does the extremely personal camera perspective. The fact that Leon cannot move and shoot at the same time should be a clear indication that the developers didn’t want to make him so competent that he is never in danger. Compare their approach to the one used in Gears of War, which takes many of its stylistic cues from Resident Evil 4 but fails to induce tension in the same way.

Point 2: The controls in Resident Evil 4 are too easy. Other Resident Evil games made controls difficult in order to increase tension.

I am constantly astounded by this perspective. Perhaps it’s my experience as a games developer that makes me feel this way, but Point 2 is so wrong in


Holding up to run towards the camera can’t be done in a lot of games.

so many ways. It’s true that the earlier Resident Evil games were known for their difficult control scheme, but the idea that such a scheme was intentionally used in order to make the player feel even more vulnerable is nonsense.

Here is why the original Resident Evil control scheme was made the way it was. When it came out, the Dual Shock controller with its analog sticks had yet to be released; the controller that came with the PS1 only had a simple D-Pad. Most 3rd-person 3D games then (and now) employed a camera that followed behind the player, rotating with the player’s movement; when the player pressed “up” on the D-Pad, that translated into “forward” in the world, where forward is whichever direction the camera is facing. Resident Evil, on the other hand, used fixed cameras, cameras that never rotated or moved from their position. This style of camera was a requirement, as Resident Evil used pre-rendered backgrounds (the fixed perspective also helped Resident Evil be so scary). The problem with that approach is that the definition of “forward” changes with every camera cut, and the player has no idea when that is going to happen. If you are holding up to run forward down a hall and then suddenly the camera cuts to an angle perpendicular to the previous view, your character would rotate 90 degrees and run straight into the wall. To compensate for this, the developers at Capcom made the control scheme local to the player rather than related to the camera. Thus “up” on the D-Pad moves the player in the direction that their character is facing. This way the player can run forward across any number of camera cuts without worrying about their character accidentally changing direction.

The problem with a character-centric control scheme is that it makes no sense to people at first. The camera-centric scheme that most other games employ makes a lot of sense, and so to play Resident Evil people needed to train themselves to be able to drive their character around like a tank. A few years later Parasite Eve would mostly solve this problem by allowing the player’s movement direction to persist across camera cuts; this approach was eventually polished and made standard by Devil May Cry. But in 1996 when Resident Evil shipped, the only reference for this type of game was Alone in the Dark, which used the same sort of control scheme to solve the same problem.

Resident Evil’s awkward controls were designed out of necessity, not because they served another purpose. If the developers had really wanted to make the control scheme difficult, they wouldn’t have included the auto-aim functionality when shooting. More recent Resident Evil games (such as the GameCube remake) have featured other, better control schemes (Type C is awesome) without damaging the horror elements of the game at all.

Point 3: Resident Evil 4 isn’t horror because it is missing < insert favorite feature from previous games in the series >.

A surprisingly large number of people can’t get past the fact that the game says Resident Evil on the box and yet the content is so different from previous games. I don’t really know what to say to these people; just like everything else, video games change and evolve. You don’t have to like the new format, but I think that you are fooling yourself if you believe it to be intrinsically inferior to the previous format. It’s a different design with different goals, but it reuses characters and themes from the rest of the series. That’s not complicated, right?

And there you have it. As promised, this was a lengthy rant on an asinine detail of an extremely unimportant topic. I feel like I’ve done my part to contribute to the internet, and no longer have to worry about getting into some flame war on a forum in order to fill my asinine topic debate quota for this month.

Santa Claws?


Another year, another excuse to use Zombie Santa

Happy Holidays, folks. 2008 is on its way and it should be a pretty good time for us horror gamers, so we have a lot to be thankful for this Christmas season. Hope that you guys are spending the holiday curled up with a scary game. Remember to turn out all the lights (except those on the Christmas tree, if you have one).

One Game I Cannot Condemn

I finished Condemned this week and posted a review. I thought it was excellent; one of the best recent horror games that I’ve played. I went into the game with low expectations (the E3 2005 demo made it look really bad), but by the end boss I was throughly satisfied. Check the review for details about what makes Condemned such a neat entry into the horror genre.

Crawling Up Through the Topsoil Sometime Soon


Bioshock Dead Space

A bunch of horror games have been announced this year, so I thought I’d take a step back and see what we can look forward to in the near future. I think this list is pretty complete, but please post information about upcoming games that I miss. Also, until the titles actually ship it will be pretty hard to tell if these games are really horror games or just some other genre in gothic trappings. With that, here’s what’s on the horizon:

  • Condemned 2: Bloodshot – Q1 2008 – Xbox360, PS3

    The sequel to the CSI-vs-demons Xbox360 launch title. Official site

  • Left 4 Dead – Q2 2008 – Xbox360, PC

    Annoyingly named online horror-themed shooter; this one may not be Quest material, but I’ll keep it on the radar. Here’s the official site.

  • Dead Space – Q3 2008 – Xbox360, PS3

    Dead things in space, with a pretty Bioshocky aesthetic. Official site.

  • Dead Island – 2008 – Xbox360, PC

    Zombies on a tropical island. Sounds like the House of the Dead move, though this game is guaranteed to be better than that film. Official site.

  • Hydrophobia – 2008 – Xbox360

    Mercenaries vs something scary in perpetually flooded environments. I think there is a pretty good chance that this is less of a game and more of a vehicle for water graphics, but we’ll have to wait for it to come out. Official site.

  • Silent Hill: 0rigins – Release Date Unknown – PS2 (already out on PSP)

    The PS2 version of this game was recently announced. I recently reviewed the PSP version.

  • Resident Evil 5 – 2009 – Xbox360, PS3

    Yes, it’s Chris Redfield vs zombie villagers in Africa or maybe Haiti. Official site.

  • Alan Wake – Release Date Unknown – Xbox360, PC

    A fascinating-sounding title that bills itself as a “psychological action thriller.” Details are still sparse on this one, but I have pretty high hopes. Official site.

  • Alone in the Dark 5 – Release Date Unknown – Xbox360, PS3, Wii, PS2

    As I posted about before, Alone in the Dark 5 is now coming to the Wii and PS2 thanks to Hydravision. I think we’ll see this game in 2008, but no firm release date has been announced yet. There’s a sort of official site, but it’s also one of these marketing countdown things and doesn’t actually have any game info. According to the countdown the “truth will be revealed” in a couple of days. Shockingly, I suspect the truth to be that Alone in the Dark 5 takes place in central park.

  • Silent Hill 5 – Release Date Unknown – Xbox360, PS3

    Another title that will probably make it in 2008. The rumor mill says Q3 2008, but that’s not official so I’ve left the date open for now. There doesn’t seem to be an official site, so here’s a pretty complete fan site.

It is interesting to note that all of these games except for Resident Evil 5 are being developed by Western developers. Japanese developers haven’t announced any horror games lately, which might have something to do with the absolute dominance of the Nintendo DS and Wii in Japan (those platforms are dominating here as well). I know for sure that there is another as-yet-unannounced popular Japanese horror franchise headed to the Wii (again, via an American developer). On the other hand, it seems like the Wii is particularly suited to horror gaming, as the Wiimote would make a perfect flashlight and Resident Evil 4 for the Wii kicks ass. I’m hoping that we hear about some new games for those platforms early next year.