Zombie VS Ambulance!!

 I was reading the latest issue of Famitsu (which, by the way, has a pretty awesome preview of Siren 2) when I ran across a crazy game called The Zombie VS Ambulance (THEVS). This is SIMPLE2000 game, which means its a budget title by D3 publishing (retail in Japan is about $18, which is ultra cheap considering most new games are in the $70 range). D3 has made horror-themed games in the past, including the awful-looking Onechannbara (a stupid play on “onechan,” meaning “young girl” and “chanbara,” meaning “sword fight”) and The Noroi Game (lit. “The Cursed Game”).

So I did a little research on The Zombie VS Ambulance, because I just couldn’t get over the idea that somebody made a game about zombies fighting ambulances. There’s an official site for the game which has some tiny screen shots, but the most interesting information comes from this guy’s blog about the SIMPLE series (man, and I thought my blog was niche). I translated a couple of snippets from his review:

…

The basic formula is leave the hospital -> run over some zombies and help some people -> return to the hospital, repeated over and over. But the need to run zombies over to win keeps the tension level high, so I think the system works pretty well.

First of all, there’s a “hospital health gauge.” As you drive around the gauge is slowly depleted, and if it ever goes to zero it means the hospital has succumbed to the zombies and it’s game over. It’s basically a life bar for the hospital. In order to fill the gauge back up, you have two options:

  • You can run over a lot of zombies and get combos, or
  • You can save police and military personnel.

This mechanic keeps you on your toes.

…

The ambulance upgrades are cool. You can get mechanics that you save to upgrade your ambulance, but they’ll require you to complete their weird requests (like, “run over 40 zombies to finish this upgrade”) first. This is another reason to keep running over zombies, and combined with the hospital’s health gauge, there’s a nice balance that keeps the game from getting dull. It’s a good combination.

…

If you don’t get survivors that you’ve picked up back to the hospital before the time runs out, they’ll turn into zombies inside the ambulance. This makes the ambulance harder to drive. How are you supposed to solve this problem? By driving full speed into a wall, which causes the zombies to fly out of the vehicle! WTF.

This guy also talks about the things he doesn’t like (no D-Pad support, and you have to drive carefully when you have people in the back). Basically, this game sounds like a combination of Crazy Taxi and Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick: pick up people and take them somewhere, and on the way drive over zombies and send buckets of blood and gore everywhere.

So yeah, they really made an ambulance vs zombie game. Is it Survival Horror? Probably not, but since I’m including Evil Dead, it’s a tough call.

Silent Hill PSP Announced… sort of

Thanks to Kotaku for posting a note about Konami’s announcement of a Silent Hill game for PSP.

Only, it turns out it’s not really a game so much as a bunch of media related to the series. Sounds like basically a fan site on UMD. What a let down.

Silent Hill Experience (working title)

Release date: Spring 2006

Genre: Multimedia

Platform: PSP system

Unique among all PSP system products available on the market, The Silent Hill Experience combines a variety of media comics, music and movies to deliver a complete behind-the-scenes look at the popular Silent Hill franchise. Using an intuitive 3D interface, Silent Hill fans will be able to view all-new digital interactive comics, listen to music from the long-running series of Silent Hill video games, and watch exclusive video content, including an interview with the director of the highly-anticipated Silent Hill motion picture.

“Kuon” apparently means “The same goddamn thing nine times”

 I finished Kuon this weekend, and I’ve posted a review. Despite some good graphics, creepy atmosphere, and neat character design, I thought Kuon was pretty weak. The game play is extremely simple and there’s only about four hours of unique content (which you are required to traverse several times). I was hoping to like this game more than the critics, but it actually turned out pretty bad.

My Eyes! What did you do to my eyes!?

A while back I watched The Eye, a Chinese movie directed by brothers Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, about a woman who has surgery to restore her eyesight and also ends up with the ability to see ghosts. Despite its promising first half, The Eye pretty much fell apart at the end, which was really too bad. But since the first part was pretty good, I was willing to give the Pang brothers a second chance.

After watching The Eye 10 (it’s actually only the third in the series), I have to say that the Pang brothers are now completely out of chances. They’ve blown it more completely than I could have imagined. The Eye 10 isn’t just a bad movie, it’s an absolutely atrocious movie. It’s so bad that I don’t even want to talk about it (not that the story makes any goddamn sense, mind you). It’s probably in the top five worst films I have ever seen, edging out the likes of Boa vs Python and I Come in Peace. Ok, so Alone in the Dark (which I saw last year) and Ju-Rei (which I also reviewed) were probably worse, but it’s pretty close. I’d say this movie gives St. John’s Wart a run for it’s money on the “what were they thinking?” index.

Don’t see The Eye. But if you do, DO NOT see The Eye 10. Never again, Pang brothers!

History of Japanese Horror Cinema

My recent article on Japanese horror attempted to explain horror in Japan by examining some details of the Japanese culture. Nicholas Rucka takes a different approach in his fascinating article The Death of J-Horror?: he describes in some detail the history of Japanese horror cinema and why the current boom isn’t likely to survive indefinitely. Rucka has quite a few obscure films under his belt; I was particularly interested in some of the connections he draws (Woman in the Dunes to Tetsuo The Iron Man? interesting). He also clearly shares my disdain for the term “J-Horror.” Check his article out.

Silent Hill Poster Viewer

This morning I decided to browse some of the entries for the Silent Hill Poster Contest, but I found that a gallery isn’t provided on Sony’s site. So I wrote a very simple script to display the entries. There appear to be around 2000 entries at the moment, though I think it’s safe to assume that more will come online.

Note that this script won’t aid you in voting for an actual entry. That can only be done by receiving a special link from the person who created the entry (many have been posted on forums around the net). But this script is pretty good for browsing. I wrote about this contest a few weeks ago.

NEW FEATURE: Chris’ Guide to Understanding Japanese Horror

 I’ve finally posted a new feature, Chris’ Guide to Understanding Japanese Horror. This article is a detailed look at Japanese horror within the context of Japanese culture. I attempt to explain how horror from Japan works on a very general level, and how the mechanics of Japanese and American horror differ. Here’s an excerpt:

The underlying concept behind Japanese yuurei is onnen (), the idea that some emotions are so strong that their power can extend from beyond the grave. Almost all classic and contemporary ghost stories from Japan operate on onnen: in addition to the obvious case of Okiku, witness Sadako’s character in The Ring, the antagonist in Juon, or even the explanations given for Hanako’s origin in the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. Onnen is the central concept behind yuurei, and as we will see, it differentiates Japanese horror from works in the West pretty dramatically.

I spent quite a while on this one, so please check it out.

Stateside

I’m back in the U.S. this evening, struggling to stay awake long enough to negate horrific jet lag. To that end, I spent much of the afternoon trying out the rather obscure (mostly Japan-only) games I picked up last week. Here are some quick impressions:

  • Michigan is a strange game told from a first person perspective, through the eyes of a camera man. Something is very wrong in the city of Chicago, and you and two other employees of a local TV network must travel from location to location, looking for scoops. The game is basically a first-person adventure game, but what makes it odd is that the developers (Grasshopper, the guys behind Killer7) have thrown this weird voyeurism element from way out in the left field. Each level gives you the opportunity to collect points of three types: “suspense,” (you find something scary, or, as it appears, find just about anything), “erotic” (you take advantage of the camera to film women in compromising positions, etc), and “immoral” (you allow tragedies to occur for the sake of the story). The suspense and immoral parts are sort of interesting, but the erotic points make the game very weird and uncomfortable.
  • The Fear is a strange game told from a first person perspective, through the eyes of a camera man. The interface is very similar to Michigan (though The Fear predates Grasshopper’s game by several years), and the game play actually isn’t all that different either. The major difference (besides the lack of erotic points) is that The Fear is entirely live-action. However, it’s a lot more interactive than I was expecting; it reminds me of a really well-done CD-ROM game from 1993, when everybody went ape over the idea that video could be played back in real time. The Fear is 4 discs long (!!) because there is a crapload of content; every character has lots to say in every situation, and it’s all recorded (no text). So far, the story looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill horror movie shlock, but the acting isn’t as horrendous as I was expecting and there might actually be things to do. Since there’s no text, I’ll probably add this game to The Quest. So far the only real problems I have with it are that moving around takes forever and that it still has the potential to turn into a horrible dating game scenario.
  • Hungry Ghosts is a strange game told from a first person perspective. I think I’ve detected a pattern here; I didn’t set out to buy tons of first person horror games, but that’s what I seem to have ended up with. Perhaps there is a correlation between these games being first person and them not coming out in the States; I suspect that the American market has little interest in first person games that are not shooters. Anyway, Hungry Ghosts looks like it might be a really good game if I can just figure it out. The game pounds into your skull the point that every action you take may change the course of your destiny (there’s even a voice over at the beginning of the game to warn you of this feature). Basically, you are a dead guy in a sort of purgatory, and at the beginning of the game you are on the fast track to eternal damnation. However, by doing certain, mysterious things, it is apparently possible to change your destiny and avoid hell. The Japanese in this game is pretty difficult, so I can see it taking me a while to complete.
  • I don’t know what to say about Kyoufu Shimbun Heiseiban Kaiki! Shinrei File, except that the intro sucks. At least, I hope it was the intro–I “played” the game for a solid 15 minutes before giving up in disgust because the entire time was spent, I kid you not, reading text. Now, according to the manual there’s a 3D 3rd person mode hiding in here somewhere, but after 15 minutes of text (with no interactivity, just reading!!) I gave up. I’ll have to come back to this one. In the best case, I think this game may turn out to be like Twilight Syndrome Sakai, which is another game I need to get around to adding to the Quest.
  • Gregory Horror Show is so far the best game I bought in my latest foray into the East. It’s got loads of style, the mechanics look fun, and it doesn’t hand out points for looking up women’s skirts. The only thing I’m worried about is that some of the puzzles may be difficult for a non-Japanese person like myself.

That’s all I have to report right now. Once I get back into this hemisphere’s time zone, I’ll have more info for you guys.