Ju-Rei: The Conventional

I watched Ju-Rei last night (Japanese title is actually kuro jurei (), lit. “black vengeful ghost”), which is a Japanese horror film by Koji Shiraishi. This movie is only interesting because it is like a catalog of Japanese horror movie elements, mostly ripped from much better films like Ring and Juon. The movie unfolds in ten chapters, and each chapter is like a study of a visual effect or horror mechanic used in some other popular Japanese horror film. It’s like an amalgam, but it’s mostly nonsensical and underwhelming. Features blatantly ripped off from other movies include (minor spoilers, beware):

  • Out-of-order story telling (Juon)
  • Ghosts as people with white faces, black eye shadow, and blackened mouths (Juon)
  • A cyclical curse that moves like a virus from one person to the next (Ring)
  • A Predator-like back-of-the-throat frog vocalization made by the bad things (Juon)
  • High-school girls home alone, investigating odd sounds in their house. (Ring)
  • Old women who can see the bad things even though the young people can’t. (Juon)
  • The blurry TV grain effect when baddies show up (Ring)
  • Female ghost things crawling on their hands towards their victims (Ring and Juon)
  • Reflections in mirrors that reveal people who, when you turn around, are not there (Ring, Juon)
  • Hands coming out of nowhere to grab a frightened girl (Juon)

The film’s one “innovation” is the interesting use of blur over the ghosts to make them look… well, ghostly. But the effect is fairly trite and it gets old very quickly. In all, I’d say the film is interesting if you enjoy catching “homages” to other Japanese horror movies, but on its own it’s pretty weak.

What I Learned About China

  • Beijing is one big motherfucking city.
  • My stomach is not entirely capable of parsing the language of Chinese food (though it all tastes very good).
  • People who drive in Beijing, with few exceptions, are certifiably insane.
  • What they don’t tell you about the Great Wall is that it is freaking steep at places. It basically goes up the sides of mountains at 35 degree angles. It’s also an amazing sight to behold.
  • There is a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, and this disparity creates almost incomprehensible differences in cost of goods. An espresso at Starbucks = 50 yuan = ~$6.00. Our all-you-can-eat Dim Sum breakfast at our hotel = 2 yuan = ~$0.24 per person.
  • Speaking of Starbucks, there is one in the middle of the Forbidden City. That’s some hardcore marketing right there.
  • Peking Duck is quite a treat.
  • I would like to go back.

Thanks much to Mush, Jenny, and Josh at the IGDEA for such a wonderful opportunity.

Off the Map

I’m headed for Beijing this week to give a lecture about game design and programming. I’ll try to update while I’m there, but my access to internet may be sketchy. Updates shall resume when I return next Saturday.

In the mean time, why don’t you guys let me know what you’d like to see change on this site. I’m going to try to add some new features this summer, and I’d love to hear what you guys think.

Site Updates

This weekend I had some free time, so I decided to do something about the rather horrific quality of some of the user posts on my site. I’ve gone through every single game listed here and erased hundreds of posts. From now on, I’ll be quite a bit more strict about which posts I allow; one-liners, posts in other languages, “I have this game” messages, posts about games other than the info page, etc will be erased. I’ve added a brief FAQ page describing this policy.

And in a “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” moment, I wrote some grammar-sanitizing code that tries to clean up common grammatical mistakes and leet speak. It’s not perfect, but maybe it will keep some posts here a little more legible. The forum is unaffected.

I’m thinking about removing the visitor comments section from the info pages. The problem with them is that the signal to noise ratio is very low (the amount of useful opinion and information about each game is small compared to the amount of messages asking for game help or arguing with other posters), and I don’t think they really add much to the site. It’d be better to centralize discussion in the forum, I think.

What do you guys think? Please leave a comment about how you feel about the info page message boards.