Settling Down

The Wife is mostly back to normal, still a little weak and prone to near narcoleptic fits of suddenly needing a power nap, but it looks like the fever is gone, and aside from some lingering flu-ish aches and pains, she can now think about food without getting nauseous. This is good.

And I’m back to playing to Rogue Galaxy again…

Ho. Ly. CRAP.

Man, what can you say about the Japanese? Of the various notions of horror that exist as a genre, it is the Japanese who have perhaps the most unique take on the topic of making people wet their pants.

Having just put Fatal Frame II away (once and for all, I hope) I am once again reminded that the Japanese have an innate understanding of what it is to afraid; a two major components of their perception are The Unknown and Helplessness.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the series, Fatal Frame is a series of loosely connected horror games that have a common element of a device known as the Camera Obscura. In this case, it’s a camera with a special property; it can take photos of things spiritual and otherwise invisible to the living, and can exorcise hostile spirits. Unfortunately, for the camera to work at its best, this usually means having to let said hostile spirits get reeeeeeeeally close to you before taking a shot, which, when viewed through the viewer of the camera, makes for an extremely nerve wracking experience.

There are currently three games in the series, all of them using their own physically unimpressive (though cute) main female protagonist. The real star of the show however, has to be the amazing design work of the environments. In full lighting, the various period Japanese buildings would just look run down and in need of a major renovation, but put it in the dark, feebly lit by only a single flashlight, or dim candles, throw in some curtains, and add in the occasional baby cry, weeping or insane girlish laughter and suddenly these rundown spaces become an exorcise in horror so acute that many gamers cannot play these games alone, in the dark, for more than a few minutes before the stress becomes too much to bear.

It’s this lethal combination of having a likable though essentially helpless girl, and dark, shadowy places that ooze of menace from beyond the grave that make the series so effective, and quite possibly the single scariest experience legally available for purchase to consumers. I will admit that certain writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker have managed to scare me. And certain movies, The Exorcist and Poltergeist creeped me out beyond all reason, but games bring something quite special to the table that these other media cannot. They put you IN THERE, right in the middle of the action, virtually speaking, and that extra layer of involvement, that knowing–in a weird sense–that it’s not a character in the story, it’s YOU, adds an extra degree of fear, especially when you play these things in surround sound and those whispers start calling out in all directions. Suddenly, you are the person in charge, and if you know there’s something bad behind the door, you don’t have to open it, but there’s no guarantee that walking down the hall and turning the corner won’t reveal something worse, that also wants to kill you, because you are alive and it is not anymore.

I have played quite a few games that have an element of fear, but my opinion is that the Fatal Frame series shines above the rest because it doesn’t resort as often as other games to that cheapest of scares; the jump scare. Resident Evil is a perfect example of this. I’m going to spoil it now to some degree for complete unknowns, but the RE series, in its very first game, created one of the greatest scares in gaming, when, while walking through a quiet hallway, a dog bursts through the window and starts attacking you. For the most part, RE and many other games constantly resort to this easy tactic of just having something suddenly come out of nowhere, with appropriate shrieking sound effects and music. It’s a jolt, and it works, but only once.

Where Fatal Frame and to a somewhat lesser degree the excellent Silent Hill series excel is not in surprising you, or even grossing you out with gore (neither series is particularly excessive in terms of graphic depictions of bloodshed), so much as creeping you out. They don’t provide that jolt of fear that comes from reacting to something sudden or excessive, but slowly build up a sense of dread; you know you are surrounded by evil, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The Silent Hill series does this by literally bringing you into a nightmarish, rusted, hellish insanity rooted in psychology and fetish. Fatal Frame does it by giving you only one weapon, your camera, and then throwing you into what–for westerners–is pretty unfamiliar territory; abandoned, haunted, period Japanese buildings. This all complemented by some amazing sound design, which, it’s no exaggeration to say, probably constitutes half the effectiveness of the fear. It’s only after a few replays and some measure of calm that you begin to understand exactly what the developers have done, combining extremely high-pitched tones, clattering of metal, the sounds of animals, pain, sadness and others for a truly unsettling effect. Then you tack on the ghosts themselves; these are not gored victims with their guts hanging out of their eviscerated body cavities. In one example, you fight a woman who has fallen and broken her neck. As a result, she stumbles towards you with her head lolling loosely on the base of her shoulders as she tries to look at you. In another example, I watched in horrified fascination as a pale hand pushed up the lid of an old trunk, and, very slowly a scarred, broken woman painfully, slowly, crawled up and out of the box, taking her time to fall to the floor and get up again, before trying to kill you. In each instance, there is no sudden jump and shrieking of violins; the game lets you see exactly what’s going on, painfully slowly, and then almost seems to ask you “What are ya’ gonna’ do NOW?”

That feeling of drea
d and helplessness is something that nearly all Western games have completely failed to capture. For example the scariest game on Western shores right now, dubbed F.E.A.R (which stands for First Encounter Assault Recon) is a first person shooter. Yup, you’re a big tough guy, with guns, grenades and all manner of destructive weapons at your disposal. The game then throws this Asian style of ghost at you, but more liberal amounts of blood and–yep, you guessed it–a lot things suddenly jumping out at you.

It’s a shame too, because it’s an enormous waste of potential. Games, more than other medium, have a capacity to get an adrenaline surge out of the player, whether it’s fear from failing/dying a segment of the game, or the more ambitious goal of making a player afraid to sleep with the lights off. The Japanese have found a way to take small amounts of the supernatural and tease it just enough into a more realistic setting (most importantly, with more realistic people) that even when you turn the game off, the experience lingers. In the West, for the most part, once the excitement of shooting and having things jump out at you wears off, it’s easy to walk away from the experience with only a vague recollection of the excitement that was had, as opposed to the irrational terror You Are Not Safe Anywhere that games like the Fatal Frame and Silent Hill series manage to convey.

No Major Post

Because the Wife is down with the flu, meaning lots of bed rest, fluids, vegetable soup, movies and games.

It Is HOT

And since the apartment is air condition-less, this makes for a much better understanding of “lazy days of summer” since it’s hard to do anything even remotely productive.

Well, that and Fatal Frame II (pictured yesterday and with this delightful shot left) is making it so that I don’t really want to go to bed until the sun rises, for fear of murderous ghost children throttling me, the Wife and the cats to death.

Did I mention that I’m a total wuss with these kinds of games? Well, I am.

Holy Crap I’m Scared

I don’t care what anyone says, the scariest fictional experience I’ve ever had to date was not with a book, a campfire story or even a movie, it’s these damn video games.

I’ve had this game for a while now but have been extremely hesitant to play it through to the finish. Now that I’m actually going ahead and doing it, I now realize why.

It makes you wet your pants.

The only thing worse than a ghost trying to kill you is when it’s a child ghost. But I’ll talk about that more once I’m done.

For All The Best Friends Out There

I was having a talk with the neighbor downstairs where we kind of touched in the idea of the support role that many earnest, male best friends play for fabulous women they know who wish they could date someone like said Best Friend but will have absolutely nothing to do with the factory original model sitting right in front of them that seem to bring them the solace and healing their lousy boyfriends don’t. So here’s one from Rick Ocasek for all those poor bastards out there. I feel for ya’ man, and believe me, for many years, I was so there…

You Know You’re A Cityslicker Snob

When you actually take the step of owning a coffee bean grinder and instant just don’t cut it anymore.

Yup, I now officially suck.

Friday For Dull People

Wrote more of a GameAxis article, had dinner with the neighbors in the backyard and, in a fit of supreme boringness, actually played through Tomb Raider: Legend again, just because I’m really enjoying this style of gameplay right now.

More Dullness

Did laundry, wrote article for GameAxis, and that’s about it, really. Oh, and Time Trials for Tomb Raider: Anniversary are nearly done. Only Greece left now…

Quiet Wednesday

A small run for groceries, some time in the backyard with the neighbors and some time trying out Time Trials in Tomb Raider: Anniversary were all that was done today. On the other hand, poor Rockstar Games got hit with a double whammy. Not only did their new game Manhunt II get banned in England, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in America slapped it with an Adults Only rating, a rating that both Sony and Nintendo refuse to allow for publication on their systems. Seeing as the game has only been developed for the Wii, the PSP and PS2, this spells trouble and, unless Rockstar goes back and hacks out the objectionable bits, they just wasted several million dollars. Ouch, man…