Kuon Impressions

A buddy of mine and I have been playing through Kuon lately. It seems like it will be pretty short, so hopefully I’ll have a review up by the end of the week.

If you’re not familiar with Kuon, it’s basically a Resident Evil game set in Heian (794-1192) period of Japan. You can play as Utsuki, a woman who lives a sheltered life in a mountain shrine, or Sakuya, an exorcist. I’m playing as Sakuya, and I think that you probably get a third playable character if you beat both. Anyway, the game takes place in medieval Japan, so there’s lots of kimono-wearing, giant hats, etc.

So far, the game’s been a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, they’ve got a pretty good style going for the environments and characters. Utsuki and her sister in particular are really well done. The game is dark, but what little you can see looks pretty good. It’s similar to Fatal Frame in that it relies on Japanese history for a lot of its environments, but the execution isn’t as good as Tecmo’s game. The mechanics are mostly passible: the combat system is a little weird (no auto-aim for projectile attacks…??) and the game punishes you for running (which is frustrating, as there is plenty of backtracking), but otherwise the game controls well.

I guess that my biggest complaint is that there doesn’t really seem to be much going on in Kuon. I’m running around, fighting some guys, solving some puzzles, reading some documents, but nothing is really happening. Maybe the story setup is the problem–there’s almost no back story or impetus for the plot provided.

So, so far, I give them points for style, points for setting their game in an unusual time period, and I think the moment-to-moment mechanics are good enough. But there’s not a lot of story or interaction variety to keep me interested. Hopefully by the time I finish the game my impressions will have changed.

3 Million Years of Being Scared of Things

I highly recommend that everybody check out this very interesting article about women in gaming by Chris Crawford. It’s not directly related to horror, but I think Crawford’s line of reasoning may help explain why horror games seem to be more adept than other genres at reaching casual female gamers. His premise is pretty interesting, and though he is careful to point out that he’s speaking in terms of generalizations, I think his conclusions are fairly convincing. The game industry is shooting itself in the foot by not courting the female audience, and as Crawford points out, most attempts at marketing games at women seem to simply consist of making everything pink.

Update: A long time has passed since I posted this article, and since then I’ve met a lot of people, including several women, who found Crawford’s ideas and conclusions sexist and offensive. I didn’t take his article that way–I thought that he was calling for more understanding of women as a target audience of game players so that the industry might make better games for them. A lot of other people, however, believe him to be saying that women like specific things thanks to evolution and that is that. Upon re-reading the article, I can see where they are coming from: he jumps too quickly from some interesting ideas on evolutionary psychology to some theory of his own about how that might apply to games. I think it’s fair to say that he sounds as narrow-minded as the people he complains about earlier in the article.

So if you are just reading this for the first time, I’d like to reword my recommendation of his article. I think that the idea that women and men might enjoy different things in video games is worthy of discussion, and I think that the evolutionary psychology approach is an interesting perspective. I’m not sure that it proves that the industry should all go out and make games about social manipulation, and frankly, the research he presents is much more interesting than his conclusions. I do think that he has a point about the industry not “getting it” when it comes to targeting women gamers, but I think that he may also have a bit to learn himself.

RE4 -> PS2

 Resident Evil 4 is out on Playstation 2 today, and it’s been garnering some pretty high praise. Here’s what IGN has to say:

It’s easily one of the top 10 PlayStation 2 games you can lay your hands on. For me, it’s probably one of my top 10 games of all-time. There’s so much to enjoy, and even though PS2’s visuals aren’t quite as good as they were on GCN, my jaw still drops at the art design and how immersive the worlds are.

one day I might even update my RE4 screenshots. maybe.

Holy Zombie Games, Batman

I’m still way behind because my computer is in the shop, but here’s some recent updates. For some reason they all involve zombie games.

The Shape of Anger at Bad Movies

Since my thoughts on movies are so amazingly popular, I thought I’d post a few more.

  • The Brood is a pretty great horror film by David Cronenberg. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with demon children, and Cronenberg does an excellent job with suggestion and understatement. The demon kids all wear similar winter coats, you never really get to see them up close, and the movie wastes very little time trying to explain everything away. The climax of the film is pretty shocking too. Also, the movie is old enough (1979) that everybody’s clothing has gone back to being cool again after losing its vogue for twenty years.
  • … and on the other side of the quality coin, we have Versus, a horrifically long movie about, well, people fighting in the woods. There are zombies or some shit too, I don’t know. The whole movie is nonsensical, the acting is horrible, and it is about an hour longer than it needs to be. You know how some manga and anime series have this problem where they spend like 50 books/episodes on a single, never ending fight? This is the cinemagraphic embodiment of that failure. Seriously, the film was so bad that by the end we were watching the DVD time display and hoping that the 118 minutes listed on the back of the box included the credits, or if we were really lucky, the trailers. Avoid at all costs.

Backlog

 My computer has either been taken by the dreaded Astwihad or it has suffered a hard disk failure. At any rate, I’m behind on a backlog of news and database updates. Everything should be in the right by next week. Here’s some quick news:

New Site Feature

This weekend I added Keywords to my site. Now every post should contain a keyword (like the link that says “Site” on this post), and you can browse the posts by specific keyword. This is a pretty standard feature of other blogs, and now I’ve added it to my software. Hopefully it will make the site a little easier to navigate.

Expository Horror

I’ve been itching to write a few more articles for the site, in the vein of the feature on character design that I posted a few months back. Like the previous article, I’d like to focus on one aspect of horror games and sort of write a stream-of-consciousness about how they help induce fear in the player. I could write about level design, or maybe weapon design, or I could go off on some (possibly boring) analysis of control systems in horror games, or I could expound on the history of the genre. But maybe there’s a better topic out there.

What do you guys think? Give me a topic and I’ll think real hard about it for a while and then write something up!