Halloween 2015

My jack-o-lantern creations for this year include Cheshire Cat from American McGee's Alice (on half craft pumpkin) and the Dead Hand miniboss from Zelda: Ocarina of Time (traditional pumpkin.)

Ju-On The Grudge: Haunted House Simulator

Ju-on on the Wii is as you would expect, a game based on the J-horror movie Ju-on, or better known in the US, “The Grudge.” Not sure why both the original Japanese title and its English translation made it into the game title. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what it was. Anyway, it’s a first person “haunted house simulator” divided up into five short episodes making it a pretty damn short game. In each episode, you take on the role of a different person, (all in the same family being tormented by Ju-on,) who has to solve simple puzzles in an environment where the lights don’t work even though the elevator does. Meanwhile, creepy phenomena happen around you.

Sometimes you’ll have a face to face encounter with the grudge. Typically when this happens, it takes the form of a quick time event with arrows prompting you to wave the wiimote different directions. If you fail a single prompt, you die and have to start over from the begining of the episode. There’s also ones where you hide and have to keep the wiimote cursor within a shrinking/moving ring. The most difficult QTE’s are always toward the end of the episode which is just great in a one shot no checkpoints game when the complicated deadly thing is at the end. Oh boy, I know that the more times I have to go through a gauntlet of the same exact scripted events that I’ve already seen, the more scary and entertaining it gets.

When I first started this game, I automatically connected the nunchuck, expecting to be using the joystick for moving but no. The only thing you use is the wiimote, waving it around to steer, (aim the flashlight,) and the directional pad to move. Goody, directional pad in a 3D game. My fave. It works okay. Not great. Still doesn’t have shit on a conventional controller with dual sticks and you’ll still occasionally find yourself spinning around and looking at the floor for no apparent reason. The character walks excruciatingly slow. I guess this is to control the pacing of the episodes but it’s so annoying. Sometimes a noise will happen or something presumably appears out of my field of vision with a sting and I’ll just keep plodding along like nothing happened because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to turn around and look. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway.

At the end of a chapter, or when you die, you get a rating of how you did. There are two meters, the fear meter and the sissy meter. The completely optional objective is to keep them as low as possible. I don’t think you get anything for doing good but the game berates you if you do bad. This is an interesting idea. Too bad the way it’s implemented makes it completely dumbfuck inaccurate. The sissy meter as far as I can discern just measures time spent in the episode. I guess the idea is that a sissy goes through a haunted house slowly. But in practice in the game it mostly means that if you explore or get stuck for a while, it translates to you’re a sissy. That’s not even taking into account how incredibly slow your character moves to begin with. I like exploring. I want to be able to see all of the scares and find all of the secret items. Was that not more or less the point of it all? If that means a jaded horrorphile like me is a sissy, then fine. The scare meter has to do with your reactions to quick time events. I don’t panic during these. I’m always as accurate to the best of my ability, unaffected by anything happening on screen unless it’s visually interfering with the prompts. I do it quickly and precisely but with exaggerated gestures. I do this because there is a lot of prompts on screen and/or I don’t have faith in the functionality of the wiimote. If I appear panicky, it’s because I don’t want to do the level over again, you know, just like in every single other QTE that exists regardless of horror elements. So the game gives you a low score for taking too long when they made your character walk super slow and it gives you a low score when you flail around with a controller that is designed to be used by flailing around. Fucking brilliant, guys! The scientific community needs to be alerted of this new method of fear analysis! We’re on the cusp of a fucking paradigm shift here!

Oh and nice mirrored/reused textures too you lazy bastards.

I did get a good score once. It works like this: knowing exactly where to go and what to do essentially gives you a low sissy score. Being apathetic toward failure and death during QTE’s gives you a low scare score. If that sounds like the perfect storm of fun, this is the game for you.

Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.

Finding batteries around in the levels is necessary to progress. Think of it as life support. If you run out, you die. Typically the hardest thing is finding that second battery in the short time you get before your first one runs out. After that it’s usually not an issue if you keep your eyes open.

Episode four is the hardest. It has you play as a security guard at a mannequin research facility where scientists are making strides in the field of creepy mannequin placement in dark buildings. The power got shut off by something weird on the security monitor. You’re supposed to go to the breaker room and switch it back on but you can’t get in without the three number door code which you have to find in three pieces scattered around the building. Why the hell do I not just know the code? If one person in the building is going to know the code for the door, it’s the damn security guard. I was also disappointed that I wasn’t able to put in the code manually. If you have two out of three numbers and you know the order, you can easily guess the third by trial and error… if you can do it manually. The final QTE is just nuts and I failed it several times. Even after I passed it, I still wasn’t sure how I did it because it was not an effort of the conscious mind. Something else took over.

Everyone dies at the end of their episode but you are required to pass the final QTE just so you can live another five seconds and accomplish nothing further. Why do I have to start over if I die? What is the ultimate difference if I die now versus five seconds from now? Or hell, why not just die at the beginning of the stage? Then you should get a game over screen and the next episode is unlocked. Nothing matters. It makes no difference except maybe in the final episode.

In order to unlock episode five, (the final episode,) you must collect all of the torn pieces to all of the secret paper documents scattered throughout the levels. What did I say before? I want to collect all of the pieces? Well not now that I have to do it to finish the game. Now it’s tedious and boring.

I got stuck on episode five during the cat event. (Think Neo dodging bullets from agents but instead of shooting bullets, they’re throwing cats.) I couldn’t figure out the final gesture so I kept failing it. For the longest time, I thought it was just up but it’s actually thrust as in thrust the controller at the screen. Oh, sorry. I was confused because the arrow wasn’t three-dimensionally pointing through the screen. My first question is why is the arrow placed near the top of the screen where up always goes instead of in the middle where it could carve out it’s own niche? My second question is why don’t you establish what the gestures are before hand so that people can recognize them on screen? Up to this point in the game, I had gotten by with just the four movements on a two dimensional plane, up, down, left and right and those didn’t need explanations but when you pull this shit out of thin air, it’s confusing. It makes no sense to introduce two new gestures at the very end of the game.

Anyone else think Grudge Girl looks cute, like in some of the parts where she just grabs your arm? No? Okay…

It’s hard not to compare Ju-on to Calling since they have many similarities. I can say without a doubt though that Ju-on succeeds in being better than Calling. That’s not saying much since Calling holds the distinction of being the worst game I’ve ever played released on a major console. Ju-on can beat Calling simply by virtue of being a shorter game.

Shadow Man

Shadow Man is odd. It’s a 3D platformer that has a Voodoo motif so it at least gets originality points. Actually it’s based on the comic book series of the same name but it’s still different from anything you’ve played. The plot is that the antagonist, Legion is creating an enormous facility in hell called Asylum. In it he plans to house the most vile souls all in one place to feed off of their energy and use it to bring about the apocalypse. At the center of the whole thing is Legion and five serial killers including Jack the Ripper and someone called the Lizard King… not Jim Morrison.

The vast majority of the game takes place in Deadside which is basically hell. The landscape is barren and flowing with blood and lava. Everything is a shade of brown or grey. Some of the doors look like assholes. If you’re lucky, you’ll see something with an extremely muted monochromatic pallet. All and all, it looks pretty fucking boring, (especially the overworld,) but isn’t that pretty much representative of most Playstation games from that era, (even though this game was on all major platforms of the day.) Playstation had better sound and visual capabilities than the N64 but N64 games in general were more interesting to look at because Nintendo dared to use fucking colors. The lack of color is one thing but then there’s also the areas within Asylum that have all this machinery and just an incessant racket and droning of infernal mechanisms and hissing steam and pistons. This shit is making my brain go numb.

So you go around collecting dark souls which, at specific amounts, increase your voodoo power and allow you to open doors to new items and areas. There are 120 dark souls all together. So how many do you need to get to beat the game? I swear if you say 120, I will fucking cut you. There is nothing worse than a mandatory collectathon. Just ask Jet Force Gemini. Luckily no, you do not need to embark on a completionist’s journey to beat the game. You only need about 90 but there are still places in the game you can’t go until you get all 120 of them which leaves me to speculate if maybe you get to go up on top of Asylum and meet zombie Yoshi if you do it.

The gatekeeper at the entrance of hell is Jaunty, a snake with a human skull for a head that wears a hat and speaks with an Irish accent. The hell? Where did they come up with this idea? Is it a voodoo thing? I’m honestly so ignorant about voodoo, they could pull a lounge singing mantis made of Rice Krispies Treats out of their ass and I’d be like, huh… must be a voodoo thing. This was actually one of the largest obstacles for me getting into the game. While I value the novelty of the setting and lore and culture, I’m really at odds not knowing anything about it beforehand. You are dealing with a wide assortment of voodoo items and mythos all with… Creole names, I guess. Not any language I speak anyway. Nothing looks familiar either. You can’t just look at something and guess what it does. There are no in game tutorials but there is an in depth manual. However even the manual is questionable.

Gads are special tattoos that allow you to do things like swim in lava or touch hot things. One of the gads called the poinge gad allows you to climb up bloodfalls. In the manual, it just refers to it as the poigne and shows a picture of a claw-like glove saying that it’s a device used to climb bloodfalls. There is no such item in the game. The thing that allows you to climb the bloodfalls is not a physical tool but merely a magical tattoo which grants you that power. Obviously at some point in the game’s production it was planned to be a device because they made a render of it and described it as such but the developers must have changed it to a gad power late in the development and never conferred with the copywriters and print graphics people. Kind of funny.

There are items you can and can’t use in Liveside versus Deadside. In Deadside, your handgun turns into a soul gun that shoots shrieking wraiths and grows with your power. In Liveside, if you die, you go to Deadside. In Deadside if you die, you go to the entrance of the area you’re in. You’re essentially immortal. In Deadside, you can be under lava and blood without needing to breathe. If you’re in Liveside, you can’t hold your breath for longer than about five fucking seconds and then you die instantly. You’re basically just a normal guy while in Liveside. Not being able to use mystical voodoo shit in Liveside kind of makes sense but why in the hell can’t I go tearing ass through Deadside while dual wielding an Uzi and a shotgun? In fact if my handgun turns into a soulgun, why can't my other weapons do the same?

Personally, I never even use the voodoo items aside from the projectile shield. I don’t really know that they provide much of an advantage over the soul gun and with aiming and hit detection as iffy as they are, I might as well just mindlessly spam everything with the soul gun’s infinite ammo versus running down the voodoo meter until it’s empty when I need it for something.

For voodoo weapons You have the asson which shoots fire, the baton which shoots fire, the flambeau which shoots fire, the calabash which explodes and shoots fire and the marteau which is a jawbone… that shoots fire. Can you say redundant? Most of these things have an alternate purpose to interact with specific things in the environment. The asson, however, is completely pointless. It does nothing that the other things can’t do. One of the many barriers opened with specific items you’ll find around is the bloody sheet which you have to open by burning with the flambeau. Seriously? I have five fucking weapons that make fire and only one of them is acceptable to use to burn something? Not to mention that I could easily get through a sheet with a non voodoo operated pocket knife. Hell, maybe even a stiff breeze would be enough to do it in. The gads, except for the climbing one, all have to do with fire as well, touching hot things with your hands, walking on embers and even swimming in lava. You would think that once you have all of those abilities, fire hazards in general would be pretty much irrelevant but no. I can be submerged in molten rock but a flame the size of a campfire still hurts me. Dumb.

It could be that I’m playing the Playstation version of the game using the backwards compatibility of the PS3 but the engine and animations will shit the bed on a regular basis, leaving me frozen in place while in combat but that’s okay because it probably happens twice as often to enemies. Sometimes I’ll get frozen in a specific pose but will still be able to move or rather slide across the ground. My favorite is the mid stride freeze because it looks like you’re doing Gumby’s one-footed slide when you move.

Enemies without projectiles almost never hurt you. They may come flail at you but rarely do they actually manage to hit you. They pose nearly zero threat. They are basically just there to annoy you. Ninety-five percent of the time you die it’s because you fell in lava… and didn’t have gads.

Ignoring the hub, the levels are divided into three different types, temples, thematic places within Asylum and places in the living world. The temples all supposedly have themes like fire and life but those names would be equally relevant if they were assigned randomly. Hell, the fire temple has less fire in it than virtually any other temple. All of these places are formulaically designed to piss you off. Every one of them has a special spot with a particularly long and tedious platforming segment over instant death lava. If you make one mistake, (or the platforming is just shit,) you die and go back to the beginning of the temple. You will do every segment enough times to perform it flawlessly or quit the game. That’s the deal. There is actually one spot in the Blood Temple where in the middle of platforming, you have to jump and hang on a ledge which is iffy at any time but this particular ledge is the only curved one in the game and I guess was too much for them to figure out how to code because it’s glitched, making you let go or even float off to your death before getting in position to jump off. I figured this out in only two wasted trials but it could potentially ruin someone’s week if they don’t catch it. Luckily, the place you are supposed to jump to next is close enough to circumvent the ledge if you line it up perfectly despite the shitty camera.

The hub world and overall layout of the maps in the game is some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It all just seems to be one circuitous path fractally branching out into infinity. The doors which line your path require various amounts of voodoo power to open, (AKA certain amounts of dark souls,) so it’s like advancing in Mario 64 with more stars or Banjo Kazooie with more jiggies. The doors could lead to anything from a level to an important item to just more path. There are no maps at all which means you basically need to memorize all of it but you may not even discover all of it. The first time I went to the Temple of Life, I thought I had cleared it out to the best of my ability. It wasn’t until I went back and really scoured the area that I found a tiny obscure hole which lead to… the temple. Yeah, I hadn’t even been to the damn temple yet. That was just the surrounding area. All levels are like that. You’ll think you’ve explored nearly all of it and then you find a hole after looking for an hour and find out that was just the tip of the iceberg in a confusing labyrinth of a dungeon.        

There is a lot of backtracking to places which you couldn’t open or things that you couldn’t use before which is horrible. Hey, remember that one thing in that one spot in that one area you passed by eight hours ago? No. No, I don’t and you should feel ashamed for even suggesting that someone might. Still not as shitty as Banjo Tooie though. Is it too much to ask that I can just go into an area and do it and then forget about it and move on?

The pacing of the game kind of sucks. The first 80% of the game is just spent running around wherever, amassing dark souls and collecting the three objects for the eclipse ritual which makes the world dark so that you can use your powers in the living world. Then you do what is practically a boss rush of five serial killers before getting to fight Legion. I mentioned that one of these guys is Jack the Ripper but I don’t know any of these other guys who seem to be just contemporary murderers locked up in present day Gardelle Prison. I thought these were supposed to be like supreme dark souls or something. How is it that they all not only all occupy the same time period but the same country and prison? Seems like a huge cop out. You already used one historical figure. Why not use Pol Pot or Caligula or Vlad the Impaler or Dr. Mengele? The Zodiac Killer. He was also a serial killer that was never caught just like Jack. The list of dark souls in the world is not short. Give it more relevance like the boss fights in Clive Barker’s Jericho. That would be a lot more interesting.

Respectively Deadside and Liveside are also the parts where you collect voodoo weapons versus real world guns which only happens at the end of the game. Consolidating everything together in big chunks like this feels unnatural and really burns you out. Imagine playing a Zelda game and doing nothing but running around in between dungeons with no clear or immediate motivation until you reach the end of the game where you fight all the bosses. Also nearly all of the cut scenes of exposition and plot development are dialogue with Jaunty or Nettie which you have to go seek out to see. Some people don’t give a shit about cut scenes but I do, especially when I don’t know what the fuck is going on most of the time but I don’t want to have to continually go visiting characters, hoping they have something new to say. Now that I’m thinking about it, if this game was made today they would likely solve the lack of exposition and the gameplay cluelessness by having Jaunty hide in your pants to go with you or be a voice in your head to explain shit which would essentially make him Atlas from Bioshock. Slashers! Give ‘em the one two paunch! Shoot ‘em and… shoot ‘em some more.

Things that made this game stand out, aside from the setting, were having a black protagonist and his dialogues and monologues. Every time you enter a new area, Shadow Man gives you a personal account of his thoughts and fears whilst reacting to his wretched surroundings and what comes out is as hauntingly visceral as James Earl Jones reading excerpts from Dante’s Inferno. Then there is the flip side where Shadow Man talks shit to every boss he comes across which is equally entertaining.

The creepiest part in the game, (at least for me,) was the reanimated headless bodies of the prisoners in Gardelle. They remind me of the headcrab victims in Half-Life. My biggest gripe is the freezing, which might have everything to do with the PS3's virtual console, but the bland environments is a close second. I guess this game did well enough to spawn a sequel on the PS2. Maybe if it's cheap, I'll get it.