Michigan

Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2005-08-05
Regions: Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Suda51 makes crazy games, and sometimes they are brilliant. Other times, as with Michigan, they are terrible.

I’ve been trying to come up with something positive to say about Michigan to open this review with. I could say that it’s not buggy, but actually there are kind of a lot of animation and collision bugs. I could say that it’s got good graphics, but actually the quality of the art varies pretty dramatically throughout the game. I could say that it’s fun, but that would be a lie, because Michigan is a terrible game.

I guess what I can say about Michigan is that I respect the developer for trying to do something new. Grasshopper, the developer, also made Killer7, a crazy, highly stylized political-thriller-shooter-insanity game. I loved Killer7, and I had high hopes for Michigan, especially since it was designed by Suda 51, the brains behind Killer7. So yeah, I’ll give them some points for trying out new mechanics, trying out new types of gameplay, and having the guts to push in new directions. I’ve commented before (such as in my Siren review) that innovation is a hard thing to do. But unlike Siren, the result of Grasshopper’s experiment is pretty much an utter and complete failure.

In Michigan, you are the camera man in a three-person team of reporters. Also on your team is a reporter and Brisco, the boom mic operator. Everything is played from a first person perspective, complete with a camera HUD that has a record light and tape counter. Your job is to move around filming “scoops,” exciting things for the viewers back home. In fact, you aren’t really able to do much in the game other than look around: your only abilities are “move,” “examine,” and “kick.” Because you are holding the camera the whole time, you can’t perform even the simplest of interactions on your own. Even opening a door requires the reporter to be there to turn the knob for you. Your only job is to move around and examine stuff… technically the kick move is not needed to complete the game.

The story in Michigan is straight-forward: a weird mist has settled over the city, and everybody has evacuated because the arrival of the mist has coincided with the arrival of giant, flesh-eating monsters. You and your team are sticking around despite the danger in hopes of filming some crazy stories for your employer, ZaKa TV. Throughout the game you keep running into other employees of the ZaKa group, and you start to wonder if maybe there is some sort of conspiracy going on related to the mist.

Your first hint that something is amiss in Michigan is that the game actually takes place in Chicago, not Michigan. Then you might start to wonder why the reporter carries around a hand held microphone when Brisco is there with his stupid boom mic all the time. Maybe the small mic is just for show? You might also find it odd that levels seem to end extremely abruptly, with artificial TV snow appearing right in the middle of gameplay. However, it’s not until they explain the point system to you that you realize that Michigan’s design is off the deep end.

Since you can’t really do anything in this game, point collection becomes the only motivation to play. There are three types of points you can collect in Michigan: suspense, immoral, and erotic points. I’m not even kidding. Suspense points are accumulated by looking at things. You might think that you need to look at, you know, suspenseful things to get these points, but in reality you can look at pretty much any object in the game to increase your suspense score. Sometimes you’ll see something that is supposed to be freaky (but invariably is not, despite the super dramatic music), but even looking at something mundane seems count as suspense. Immoral points make a little more sense, if you accept the idea that you can be rewarded by doing immoral things. Basically, if you kick stuff you will get immoral points. There is no use for the kick move other than to open a door or two in the game and to accrue immoral points. You get points from kicking your team members, as well as just kicking the walls. Occasionally you’ll also have the opportunity to save a person or hold out for a scoop, and if you hold out and the person dies you can get some pretty killer immoral points. Finally, we have the erotic points. We might as well get this out of the way right now: nothing in Michigan is remotely erotic. You gain erotic points by focusing the camera on the (invariably female) reporter’s ass, or trying to film up her skirt. You can also get erotic points by finding porn that is lying in improbable locations around the levels. This is in no way actually erotic, but it does make you feel fairly uncomfortable for the game developers who thought this would be a good idea.

So you can collect points, but point collection doesn’t really get you anything. I mean, depending on which points you get in which categories, you can unlock different things at the end of the game, but the points in no way influence the game itself. It’s an artificial reason to keep you playing the game, but I’m glad they included it anyway because without some sort of motivation to complete the levels, Michigan would been even more boring than it already is.

I guess there are a couple of good things about the points. Accumulating immoral points is probably the only actively fun thing to do in this game, because it involves kicking your team mates down stairs, through collision, and into monsters whenever possible. Their knockdown animation (which is a little stiff, to put it mildly) is pretty hilarious, and the effect is amplified by the painful-sounding gurgling noises they make when you kick them in the stomach. But you can be sure that the designers of Michigan didn’t intend this mechanic to be as funny as it is; we’re laughing at the game’s expense. The erotic points are a pretty complete failure, but they are not as insulting as they could have been: the women in the game do not appreciate you being a pervert, and pretty much no attempt has been made to actually model anything under their dresses. But just because the game isn’t as offensive as it could be doesn’t make it any better… it’s still a shitty idea.

There are some interesting ideas going on in here, they just don’t produce a fun game in the end. For example, there are only two points in the game (as far as I can tell) where your character can actually die. There are, however, many points where your reporter can die. If this happens, you are automatically warped to the next level and you get a new girl as the reporter. Presumably the game is over if you run out of reporters. Warping to the next level immediately is very weird, because it means you could speed through this game in nothing flat. But if you assume the goal is point collection, then keeping the reporter alive is advantageous only because it gives you more time to explore the levels. It’s also interesting that you rely on another character to interact, because it gives the developers a chance to force interaction with a non-player character. This mechanic could have been used to build tension (like, if you are worried about the safety of the other character, you might have to make a tough decision about whether or not you should ask them to interact with something dangerous), which would be great in a horror game, but the value is entirely squandered.

There’s not much more to really say about Michigan. I guess the music is pretty good, though it only seems to play in between levels during the horrifically long narration sequences (white text upon a black background do not a cool storytelling mechanic make). The game is not challenging in the slightest, it’s not scary at all (in fact, it’s often inversely hilarious), and pretty much nothing in the game is really fun. The story, to put it bluntly, is godawful. To tell you the truth, the only reason I finished the game was because I wanted to see what else the developers would fuck up by the end. Oh, and speaking of the end of the game, the story is wrapped up in pretty much the worst way possible. It would have been better if you woke up and everything was a dream or some shit like that.

In summary, Michigan is not the worst game I have ever played, but it’s probably in the top 10. Avoid at all costs.

Darkwatch: Curse of the West

Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: 2005-08-16
Regions: USA
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
Repetitive level design and enemies overcome an interesting theme and excellent technical execution in this Halo-inspired Old West horror title.

Darkwatch is a first-person shooter developed by High Moon Studios and published by Capcom. During the development of Darkwatch, High Moon transitioned from being a subsidiary of Sammy to an independent studio, and I think that it is rather amazing that the transition didn’t doom this game. The game that shipped is not perfect, but the developers got a lot of things right.

Darkwatch is best described as Old West Horror. You play as Jericho Cross, an outlaw who picks the wrong train to hijack and ends up turning into a vampire. You must join a secret underground organization, the Darkwatch, to destroy the evil you have unwittingly unleashed and try to become human again. The game is filled with old west towns, trains getting hijacked, horseback riding, and gunfights in the desert. The thing is, your enemies are always supernatural: skeletons with hatchets, floating banshees, etc. It’s an odd mix of Western themes and horror elements, but for the most part it works. Though the story is pretty trite and predictable, I have to give High Moon props for picking a setting that is all but nonexistent in games.

Darkwatch definitely comes from the Halo school of FPS design. Some of its mechanics are so similar to Halo that you might even call it a knock-off. For example, you have a shield that automatically regenerates when you are not taking damage; in the middle of the game, you’ll be asked to drive around on a physics-controlled dune buggy thing that drives exactly like the Halo Warthog; you can only hold two weapons at once, and picking up a weapon causes you to drop your current one on the ground; weapons include a crossbow, which sticks into enemies and then explodes, just like the Halo splinter gun; all of the guns can be used as clubs for close-range melee attacks. It’s very clear that the designers of Darkwatch really liked Halo, but since the context of the game is so different, the places that were obviously copied didn’t really bother me. Actually, they’ve done a good enough job of copying Halo that the mechanics remain pretty fun within Darkwatch. As with most console FPS games, you control with both analog sticks and use the triggers to shoot. Darkwatch doesn’t seem to do a lot of lock-on assistance for you, but I found the controls smooth and intuitive.

The best thing I can say about Darkwatch is that it has really nice art and sound. The levels and enemies all look fantastic, and the animations are really well done. Though most of the game takes place at night, the environments are lit well and diverse, and the art is stylized without looking cartoony. Some of the cutscenes are also extremely well composed. Though the game is not scary at all, the environments set the tone very well: there are a lot of really nice moonlit scenes in the game, complete with shafts of light and wisps of smoke. The sound design is pretty good too: as you move you can hear the subtle clinking of your spurs as well as the gurgling and groaning of approaching enemies.

So we have all the right elements here: great art, good sound, and well-implemented (if somewhat unoriginal) controls and mechanics. Unfortunately, Darkwatch falls short of being a really fun game and ends up alternating between boring and frustrating. One of the main problems, I think, is that enemies can attack you from any side. As with all FPS games, you have almost zero spatial awareness: you can see what is right in front of you but nothing on the periphery. In this game you will die many, many times for no apparent reason… you’ll just be running along in the middle of a fire fight with close to full health and a full shield and then BAM! you’ll be dead. Chances are that an exploding enemy ran up behind you, or that the stick of dynamite you threw bounced off of something close and blew you up. You won’t have any idea, though, because you were not able to see your attacker. It’s extremely frustrating to get into a good rhythm in the middle of a fire fight and then suddenly die for no obvious reason, and it happens all the time in Darkwatch.

Another annoying thing about the combat is the way that the game heavily promotes head shots. There is a pretty cool feature where you can blow off an enemies limbs, but it is ultimately annoying because some enemies take 10 times more ammo to kill if you can’t quite target their head. The primary example of this is the banshee, an extremely annoying enemy that appears in pretty much every level of this game. This enemy shoots bolts out of her head that will stop bullets, so shooting her in the face is pretty hard. Sometimes she’ll swing in close and let you get an easy head shot, but otherwise you’re stuck trying to shoot her in other places. Even worse, this enemy can fly, so dynamite isn’t effective and you have to constantly move your view up into the air to target her, which means you can’t see where you are going.

This brings me to my last frustration about combat: since you have zero spatial awareness, it is trivially easy for enemies to sneak up on you. You’ll be pointing your view in the direction of one bad guy and then suddenly begin taking hits from a guy who somehow has shown up right next to you. This problem is aggravated by the fact that enemies warp in, and there may be warp points that are not within your field of view. A radar would have fixed this problem.

So the combat can be frustrating, especially towards the end of the game. There is a section towards the end of the game that took me something like 30 tries to complete, which is sort of ridiculous. This section was far more difficult than the end bosses because it occurs in an area where guys can be attacking you from any direction. You can’t stand your ground or you’ll be hit by seeking projectiles, but you can’t move backwards or to the sides reliably because you’re likely to hit a wall or another enemy who is trying to chop you. Charging enemies doesn’t work, because in this section the main enemy type as a devastating close-range melee attack. This section was like an example of all the problems with combat in this game, and I was exasperated by the end of it.

However, even with all the annoyances, combat can still be pretty fun in Darkwatch. The second major problem I had with the game was that after a while, it’s pretty boring. I think this is the fault of the level an enemy design: the levels are amazingly linear, and they follow a predictable pattern. You’ll enter an area and a bunch of guys will spawn. You’ll shoot them all, then go to the next area and repeat. There’s very little diversity in the types of challenge presented (as opposed to games like Half-Life, where the challenge changes dramatically with every section), and after a while it all feels the same. A related problem is that there isn’t much diversity in the enemy designs. Enemies come in three flavors: guys who run up to you and try to hack you, guys who move around at a distance and shoot at you, and sniper guys who don’t move much and shoot at you. There are a number of enemy types (skeletons, banshees, undead cowboys, snipers, undead indians, skeletons carrying TNT, big fat guys with shotguns, bigger fat guys with knives, and teleporting lizard men), but most of the levels use the same types over and over. You’ll kill craploads of skeletons, banshees, and snipers throughout the game, but you’ll barely see any undead cowboys. The lack of diversity (excepting a few levels that take place during the day) really eats into the fun factor of this game, because every level is the same except for the background level art.

Given these problems, I can’t decide if Darkwatch is too short or too long. As games go, it’s pretty short; I was able to complete it in about 5 hours, even though I continued a couple hundred times. On the other hand, the mechanics probably cannot sustain a longer game… it felt a little overlong as it is. So I guess the duration is about right, but the pacing of the game is all wrong. There are no bosses until the end of the game, the story itself is pretty boring and predictable, and the game mechanics really don’t give you a reason to continue playing. I wish I could say that I was “hooked” on this game, but actually I got bored of it pretty quickly and just plowed on through so I could say I finished it.

Darkwatch is not a terrible game. It has great graphics, a cool art style, and a really unique theme. The controls are smooth and responsive, and the rules of the game make a lot of sense. But the game content itself is lacking, and even though the technical execution is spot on, I didn’t find it very fun. If you are ready for some old west action or really like first person shooters, you’ll probably enjoy Darkwatch. If you’re interested in horror games, Darkwatch may leave you a little bored.

Silent Hill 4

Also known as: Silent Hill 4: The Room
Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC
Release Date: 2004-09-07
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
It looks like a Silent Hill game, and it sounds like a Silent Hill game, and it plays like a Silent Hill game, but somehow Silent Hill 4 feels less like a sequel and more like a strange mutation.

Silent Hill 4: The Room is an odd game. While it retains many of the themes and ideas of the previous three Silent Hill titles, much of it is so dramatically different that the game feels almost out of place in the Silent Hill series. The game isn’t bad at all, but I found it perplexing. All the right pieces are there, so why did I find the game sort of run-of-the-mill?

Henry Townsend is trapped in his apartment. The door has been chained shut and he’s unable to use the TV, the telephone, or even the windows. Then one day he discovers a large hole in his bathroom, and crawling through it leads him to a strange and dangerous underworld. Moving between his apartment and this twisted nether realm, Henry must discover what is going on and how he can stop it.

Silent Hill 4 deviates dramatically from the first three games in the series: there is no flashlight, no radio, and for most of the game, no town of Silent Hill. When in the apartment, players control Henry in the first person, a perspective that is a new addition to the series. Combat in the game has remained mostly unchanged, but the level and monster designs have been altered to prevent the player from avoiding fights. In previous Silent Hill games, it has always been quite easy to run passed monsters and avoid a battle, but in The Room combat is often very difficult to avoid. The game does rely on the same basic combat system, with heavy emphasis on melee weapons over guns. The inventory has changed from being an infinite-storage pause menu system to a real time limited storage system, which alters the game fairly dramatically. Henry can only hold a few items, and must use a hole to return to his apartment if he wishes to drop things off.

The oddest thing about Silent Hill 4 is the pacing. Typically, Silent Hill games have been constructed in simple stages: the player reaches an area to explore, fights some enemies, and solves some puzzles. Tension builds, and at its height the world switches to become the nether-world version of reality. More fights and puzzles occur, and tension begins building again, culminating in a boss battle and finally escape from the area and the nether-world. This approach creates a predictable pace to the game, with dramatic buildup and payoff. Silent Hill 4 does nothing like this. It ambles along at slow pace for the first half of the game, then switches to a slightly slower pace for the second half. There are no boss battles at all in the game, excepting the final boss at the very end. And though some of the areas visited end in a brief combat challenge, many do not. There’s no predictable rise and fall of tension in the game, and no dramatic buildup or payoff. The story is interesting, but the presentation seems so placid that it’s really hard to maintain excitement throughout the game. The pacing makes it hard to know when to save; by the time I was finished, I’d saved 38 times (by comparison, all three of the last games took about 12 saves for me), and many of these saves were superfluous.

In fact, the whole concept of Silent Hill 4 is pretty different than the series standard. All Silent Hill games feature dual worlds: normal reality and a hellish nether-world that shares a similar topology. Typically, the nether-world is the creation of the protagonist, or the creation of somebody close to the protagonist. In Silent Hill 4, however, the nether-world is the only world. Other than the apartment, there is no concept of reality–everything is always messed up all the time. Perhaps to compensate, the nether-world doesn’t look nearly as horrific as it has in previous Silent Hill games, so instead of presenting two diametrically opposed universes, The Room settles for a single world that is somewhere in the middle.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty going on in Silent Hill 4 that is amazingly high quality. As usual, the graphics are unparalleled. The characters and animations are amazingly well done, and the environments are detailed and convincing. The sound is also on par with the rest of the series, which is to say that the soundtrack is among the best ever. The voice acting is great and the story is quite interesting, and I actually enjoyed moving around the apartment in first person. Looking through the peephole at the hallway outside was particularly well done. Some of the nether-world environments are connected by spiral sections of street that simply float out in space, and these segments are really high quality. The hole mechanic is pretty interesting as well, as the holes must be used to bring items back and forth between worlds and to save. The player handling is tight, and the new attack system (an attack can be held down to “charge up” a powerful hit) is nice. There’s plenty of really weird stuff going on, and the presentation of horror elements is, as usual, quite classy. I really, really liked the ghost that appears to be synced to a time loop.

But there are also some features that I was fairly ambivalent about. I don’t really like the new inventory system very much because it severely limits the amount of items Henry can carry. Each item is takes up a slot, regardless of logical size, so 10 handgun bullets are just as space-consuming as a giant pick-axe. This system seemed old and outdated, as did some of the quirks that came with it. For example, if your inventory is full you can’t pick up a health item. Come on Konami, that problem has been fixed in horror games since Resident Evil 2! The monster design was pretty hit-and-miss for me too; some of the creatures are really cool looking (like the ghosts), while others a just stupid (like the hospital mannequin things–WTF?). The Room is the first Silent Hill game to feature some serious backtracking, though it’s presented in a format that’s admittedly more original than most other horror titles. The combat system is pretty good, but since it relies on an auto-targeting model (Henry automatically faces the closest enemy), it can be hard to accurately select a target when several enemies are on the screen. There are very few puzzles, and most of them are simply collect-and-assemble or item space puzzles. Meh.

Then there were the things that really, really bothered me. Most of my complaints revolve around unkillable enemies. Silent Hill 4 has a few enemy types (mostly ghosts) that simply cannot be killed. Knocking them down does little, as they get right back up again. Even worse, these ghosts don’t even have to hit you to hurt you, they just have to be in your general vicinity. The game does eventually give you a means of immobilizing particular ghosts, but this resource is finite and hard to come by. During the first half of the game, returning to the apartment will heal Henry slowly, but in the later half of the game that luxury goes away. Unkillable enemies represent a source of infinite damage to the player, but in the second half of the game there is no source of infinite health. Thus it is very easy to get into a situation where you’ve run out of health packs and yet still can’t avoid taking damage. Segueing into my next gripe, the difficulty in Silent Hill 4 spikes dramatically about half way through the game. Health packs are few and far between, and while most of the monsters are easy to kill, the ghosts really eat into your finite health supply. I found myself actually dying a lot in this game, which is pretty rare for this sort of title. Needless to say, dying a lot isn’t very fun. This problem is also compounded by the changes that occur in the apartment over time. I don’t want to say too much, but the apartment becomes progressively less and less of a safe haven for Henry. You shouldn’t have to risk your life just to save!

This increased difficulty and frustration level, coupled with the oddly slow pace of the game makes some parts of Silent Hill 4 a bit of a chore to complete. Finally, the game just isn’t very scary. It’s weird for sure, and there are a few sections with really excellent imagery, but the tension induced by the game pales in comparison to its predecessors.

Silent Hill 4 was an interesting experience for me. It took a while to get into, then was really fun for a bit, then became tedious, then picked up again right at the end. I’m happy that Konami tried something new–it’s very hard for developers to break out of their shells, especially when it comes to a popular game franchise. But in the case of Silent Hill 4, I think the experiment mostly resulted in a game that is less cohesive and less interesting than its predecessors. I’ve read that Silent Hill 4 began its life as a totally different (non-Silent Hill related) title, and if this is true it explains a lot.

Silent Hill 4 isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. It’s got some great ideas and the technical execution is spot on. But somehow, it didn’t end up really being any more than the sum of its parts.

Curse: The Eye of Isis

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC
Release Date: 2003-12-08
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
A poor game with a couple of oddball, but ultimately ineffective, ideas.

One of the best ways to learn about game design is to play games that aren’t fun. While parsing a good game can be difficult, it is much easier to figure out why a bad game doesn’t work. Some games with good ideas get killed by bugs and other execution problems, and those aren’t very interesting. But sometimes I find a game that is functional and full of ideas, but isn’t fun. Those are the games where design lessons often lurk.

Curse: The Eye of Isis is an good target for study because it is technically competent but completely banal to play. Unlike some other terrible horror games, Curse’s software isn’t broken. All the parts needed for a proper Resident Evil: Code Veronica-style game are present and accounted for. There are some bugs and minor implementation problems, but for the most part we can ignore technical failures. This lets us focus on the real problem: the design.

Of course, some of the most annoying design problems are mundane. Curse is the kind of game that makes you open your inventory to select a key to unlock a door, even though you only ever have one key at a time. Its camera cuts between shots that point in opposite directions, which is disorienting. It is a fantastically easy game that I completed using only the default club weapon. There’s a boss that hurts itself with its own area attack. The design limits inventory space for no good reason, which makes completing the game a chore. And the story is, of course, nonsensical and rambling.

More interesting, I think, are the problems with the new designs that Curse brings to the table. You might not notice at first, but Curse has some odd ideas.

One oddity is that felled enemies emit a dangerous yellow curse smoke, which can reanimate other dead bodies in the area. There are bodies all over the levels of Curse, and I’m sure that the intent was for these corpses to come to life and attack the player. This happens once or twice in the game in controlled scenarios, but never during normal play. Perhaps the developers dropped the idea because combat isn’t fun and they needed to keep encounters short. I’m not sure, but the mechanic comes off as interesting but impotent.

Another idea involves using people instead of hot spots in the level to supply health and ammunition. Rather than finding ammo hidden in drawers or cupboards, you get it from corpses of gangsters that litter the area. Even a few keys and other items come from dead bodies. The idea, I guess, is that it’s more believable to find these items on a body than hidden in some alcove. This design is certainly one made in the name of “realism,” but the interesting implication is that items can move around.

It gets more interesting when we examine the save system. Instead of save points or auto-saves, you save by talking to a stereotypical Middle Eastern man named Abdul. As the player progresses, Abdul moves to meet him along the way, so it’s usually possible to save without traveling far. Abdul can even store items and weapons; he’s a mobile, all-in-one Resident Evil save room, complete with item box.

The core idea is that the level architecture doesn’t need to accommodate game play actions like saving. These actions fall to people instead of objects, perhaps because the developers felt it would make more sense. I mean, how many typewriters would you reasonably expect to find lying around a mansion like the one in Resident Evil? By moving ammo to bodies and saves to Abdul, the designers do not need to contort the environment to support these elements. In theory, this might produce a more believable game.

In practice, the environment is repetitive, hard to navigate, and quite boring. There’s no particular improvement in believability because other absurd game-isms persist. Save opportunities and ammo are both plentiful, so we never get a chance to judge the real potential of this system. Still, the idea to use people instead of the environment for item interactions is interesting.

This train of thought is evident in another design idea: character switching. As with just about every grandchild of Alone in the Dark, Curse allows you to play as two characters, a man and a woman. But unlike most other games, Curse allows you to switch characters in the middle of the game. In fact, the player switches characters several times throughout the story. Like Abdul, these characters show up periodically and can even exchange weapons and items.

But unlike the interesting-if-questionable save system, item swapping between playable characters has significant consequences. It throws a huge wrench into one of the core design constructs of this type of game: the puzzle dependency chart.

If you’re new to puzzle dependency charts, go read this fantastic article by the guy who invented them. In short, many Adventure designers organize their games as a series of locked gates. Unlocking a gate requires collecting a key item, which itself may be behind another gate. A good designer can force a player to access parts of the game in a pre-defined sequence without imposing a linear level map on him. By using a puzzle dependency chart, the designer can control exactly what the player has in his inventory at each gate point.

Curse follows a pretty simple (and linear, which is bad) puzzle dependency chain. Find the one locked door, get the one key, go to the next door, repeat. Every once in a while you will carry an item through several locked doors until you finally use it to unlock another door. As far as Adventure games go, it’s pretty primordial.

But the entire system is just chucked straight out the window with the character switching system. The two characters, Victoria and Darien, can swap items whenever they are in the same room. This feature robs designer of any certainty about whether the player is carrying the items that he needs to progress. Sometimes, if you end up with the wrong items, you can backtrack to the other character and swap. But often, Curse will cause the characters to switch and then immediately take one of them away in a cutscene. If you had the wrong items going into that cutscene, too bad! Your only recourse is to reload from a save.

It’s even worse with ammunition and weapons. At one point, neither of my characters were able reload their weapons because they held each other’s ammo. Sometimes you can predict that this will happen and stash weapons and ammo in Abdul. But even then there are times when Curse will strand items you need in an inaccessible character without warning.

The developers try to hack around this by putting items that you might need in Abdul’s inventory, but it’s a lost cause. They’ve spilled ink all over their dependency chart and are now trying to draw little lines around the stain. Limited inventory space compounds the issue. Late in the game I had to discard ammo for a powerful weapon held by Darien so that I could collect a key item for Victoria. Good thing it is trivial to beat every enemy with the club.

The biggest problem with this isn’t just that the player can screw himself. That happened to me once or twice, but it wasn’t a persistent issue. Usually the swapping of items was just an annoyance, a contrivance that wasted time. The design does break the game in various ways, but that’s not the most offensive thing about it.

The worst part about all this item swapping nonsense is that it makes the player think about the game as a system. Systematic thinking is exactly the opposite of what you want in a horror game. It reduces the simulation to a logic problem, albeit an annoying one, that the player just needs to solve. There is no hope of getting him to believe in the events that are occurring on the screen. And a logic puzzle puts the player is in complete control. If the game is just a pattern, any player that has figured it out is never going to feel frightened.

Curse: The Eye of Isis is a technically competent game marred by poor design decisions. Though boring, it’s not as frustrating as other mediocre titles, and that makes it good fodder for research. There’s no mistaking Curse for a good horror game, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach us.

Dark Tales – From the Lost Soul

Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 1999-10-28
Regions: Japan

A obscure Japanese horror game, Dark Tales allows the player to experience three separate stories. Little is known about the actual game play, and details on the official site are scarce.

Forum member CronoLuminaire provides us with the following info:

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The background of the game seems to be a sort of “Tales from the crypt” or “Alfred Hitchcock presents” show sort of thing. There are three “episodes” to choose from, and when you select one you are given a five minute or so introduction by a live action narrator person. ( I do not really know if it is five minutes or longer as it was in Japanese, which meant my friend and I could not understand it, which meant he wanted me to skip it… which I did )

I played through the entirety of one episode, whose title I do not remember.

It was about a lone detective hot on the trail of a serial killer. The most you see of this killer is a clownish mask and a hook type weapon . You see even less of the detective, mainly you just see his gun, held out in front as if you were holding it. I thought it was rather well done for what must have been a rather early release. You must follow the killer through an abandoned amusement park, perhaps the choice of location and “clothing” on the killer’s part are linked?

Now, the gameplay. Every so often you are presented with a choice. Before you make this choice a “chilling” voice says ( in english ) “DECIDE” ( That was one of my favorite parts of the game ^_^; ). Some of the decisions are simple choices of whether to go left or right at a fork, but this chapter has a couple of nifty action sequences in which you must dodge attacks from the killer, and also shoot back to try to bring the killer down. I thought it was pretty exciting. Especially considering you get 6 bullets through the entire chapter, and that is it. No reloads.

As I said, I played through to the end on this one, but I am certain that there are multiple endings because there were some pretty big choices that were made, choices that determined where I ultimately ended up.

The other “episode” I played was entitled “Ghost Writer” and seemed to be about a novelist or something who was not doing so well in the inspiration department… until he installed a new Word Processing program… It really is too bad that everything was in Japanese because this episode was much more story intensive… But I think I got the gist… he was getting calls from what I presume to be his publisher and assured said publisher that things would be fine. Meanwhile, the actual gameplay took place in crazy dream sequences. One interesting “DECIDE” I was faced with was pulling a book out of one of those claw games… interesting way to be inspired huh? ”

Thanks, CronoLuminaire!

Halloween

Platforms: Atari 2600
Release Date: 1983-01-01
Regions: USA
Chris’s Rating: ★☆☆☆
Interesting only for its historical significance as an extremely early horror game.

Based on the movie of the same name, Halloween is a very early survival horror game. Players must run through a large (and apparently unfurnished) house rescuing children from the evil knife-wielding Michael Myers. Collected children follow the main character, and they must be deposited at one end of the house for points. Certain rooms have lights that flicker on and off, making them more dangerous to pass through.

Halloween may be the first horror game to feature beheadings and child murders, complete with a few pixels sprinkled in for blood. It may also be the first horror game (though unfortunately not the last) to use annoying music whenever the enemy appears. Actually, the music is quite well done, especially in the “title screen” (in quotes because there is no title ever displayed). However, the in-game music consists of a single bar from the main theme looping endlessly as long as Myers is near.

Interestingly enough, Halloween feels a lot like the original Clock Tower, though it is much more primitive.

Check out tons of information on this game at AtariAge: http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=229. Notice that nowhere on the official game documents (manual, box, cart label) is Michael Myers’ name mentioned, suggesting that this game may have been developed without access to full rights to the Halloween license.

Chaos Break

Also known as: Chaos Break: Episode from CHAOS HEAT
Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 2000-01-27
Regions: Japan Europe

Based on Taito’s “Chaos Heat” arcade game.

Koukai Sarena Katta Shuki: The Note

Also known as: The Note
Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 1997-01-17
Regions: Japan Europe

Another ultra-obscure Japanese horror game that never made it to America. Gameplay is first person, but the game apparently revolves around real-time lighting effects. The player can open blinds, draw curtains, and light candles to illuminate rooms, and lit rooms apparently keep monsters away.

It is quite difficult to find screenshots for this game, so if you have access to any, please post links to them in the forum