Wind Waker

I've started playing Gamecube games recently, not because I have a hankering for them but because my four year old son likes watching me play video games. I don't have a hell of a lot of appropriate video games to play in front of a four year old. I'm super tired of playing Portal 2 and Little Big Planet 1/2 for him so I'm delving into family friendly territory for a little variety and to check off some supposedly noteworthy games I haven't ever played before. I played nothing on the GameCube when it came out.

Wind Waker is a well known Gamecube game... and a WiiU game now. It’ll probably be released on several future Nintendo consoles as well assuming Nintendo is stupid/lucky enough to continue making home consoles. Seems like over half of Zelda games are infinitely regurgitated re releases. Just look at Twilight Princess. It’s been released on three consecutive consoles now. On top of that, the backwards compatibility of the Wii and WiiU makes you able to play the previous gen’s version of the game making each re release more superfluous than the last. I don’t care what miniscule changes they made, if you wet your pants in excitement and bought that shit again for $40, you’re an idiot but I digress. I just played the Gamecube version of Wind Waker.

Wind Waker takes place long after the events of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which stands as one of my favorite games of all time. Zelda games are actually one of the very few things that Nintendo can pull out of the closet that still gets me at least vaguely interested even though they’ve kind of been on the decline for a while. On my bookshelf I actually have a copy of Hyrule Historia. That being said, I think I already made it clear at some point in a past rant that I hate Toon Link. I know he’s supposed to be ten but he looks like he’s five and the expressions on his face are often so stupid.

I didn’t like Majora’s Mask as much as most people that played it but I do think that the art style was spectacular, particularly Clock Town. I want ALL Zelda games to look like that. I want NO Zelda games to look like Wind Waker. The style is cartoonish and too whimsical which is not what attracted me to Zelda games. Even the early top down titles were significantly more grounded than that. The toon style actually works for the top down 2D ones like Four Swords Adventure because it’s a lot less detailed. The early 3D games which I liked so much were clearly dark and serious with some nice light hearted and whimsical stuff on the peripheries to balance it out. (No, I’m not talking about that cancerous piece of shit, Tingle.) The art style of Wind Waker brings the peripheries on center stage which completely changes the mood of the game. Imagine being a Silent Hill fan and you’re eagerly awaiting the next installment, (haha,) of the series. It comes out and its graphics are CEL shaded and all enemies are just bad people that live in the town. That would kind of ruin the appeal, wouldn’t it? Not only that but now half of the Silent Hill titles will henceforth be modeled after this new shitty archetype. Fifty percent of the titles that come out for your favorite franchise you are now predestined to hate.

The whole world you knew in OoT now exists flooded after a great cataclysm. It's made up of a tiny collection of islands, (the tops of mountains,) which means you have to sail around on your talking dragon boat to get anywhere. If it wasn’t for weather and the day/night cycle, the ocean would qualify as a sensory deprivation device. It’s so fucking boring. The stylized visuals make the sea just an endless solid plane of flat vector graphics and aside from the occasional obnoxious enemy or barrel slalom course, there’s nothing to see and nothing to do. It’s just you waiting to be somewhere like a more colorful version of EVE Online. The world map is divided up into a grid with one insignificant island occupying each square. There is only one real town to go to in the entire game. There are so many pointless/cookie cutter islands. There are three tiny triangle islands solely for the three pearls to sit on, like half a dozen great fairy islands that just have a fairy fountain and don’t forget those six stupid reefs which are all just a box with 1-6 columns standing inside of them and nothing to fucking do except dig up rupees or get a triforce piece. The game story is frontloaded with the interesting and important islands. Then after that you become disappointed when you realize that the whole world doesn’t look like that and it’s just a facade.

You can build up all kinds of loot which enemies drop. You can either sell the loot items or use them in a couple of sidequests or to make various potions. I never used anything in the loot bag. I would have used the feathers in the sidequest but I never got enough of them because A: they are rare and B: they come from flying things that when killed have a propensity to drop their shit into a pit/into the water where I can’t get it. To me the bag was a completely superfluous game mechanic. It added nothing. Does anyone seriously give a shit about potions? Why in the hell do health potions even exist in Zelda games where you can get free fairies in a bottle which auto res and heal you upon death? Hell, why even have stores in Wind Waker? If you need supplies, just cut the grass and you can literally find anything but bait. If you upgrade your storage bags, they’re huge. You will NEVER run out of anything. On a side note I find it odd that the bomb salesman charged an impossible amount for bombs because he was the only one who could make them and then when the formula was stolen from him, bombs just started to spontaneously appear when you cut the grass anywhere.

The worst part of the game is collecting the eight pieces of the triforce of courage. First you have to get the main map which tells you where all of the maps to the pieces are located. Then you have to go hunt down each one of those maps across the world. Each one of those maps also has to be taken to Tingle where you pay an obscene amount of rupees to have each one deciphered. Then you have to read each one of those maps to go hunt down each triforce piece, essentially doing the exact same thing over again but getting Triforce pieces instead of maps. Holy shit, this is so much fun and it doesn’t feel at all like padding or busywork. If you’ve never played the game, you might be thinking this is just a typical Zelda premise where you go on an adventure across the world and through several dungeons to collect some important items to open something so you can defeat Ganon or whatever. That is not the case. I assure you that this is about as stripped down as it gets. It’s like having to go back to the grocery store a dozen times because you forgot something a dozen times. There are no proper dungeons or really even puzzles here. You pretty much go and fetch things from a location as you would any common sunken treasure in the water. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It feels like something invented to drag out the game longer to compensate for a lack of content. In general they took the tiny bit of substance they had, ripped it up into confetti and sprinkled it across a big ocean to obfuscate the fact that there really isn’t much there.

On to the plot… The first order of business after trying to rescue your sister who was kidnapped by a giant bird, is to collect these three pearls from the typical beginner’s dungeons. These aren’t too bad. I liked the little woodland sprites in the forest but the Deku Tree looks like total shit. There are three pearls but only two dungeons. The last one you just go get from a big fish which felt like a pretty big cop out. The big fish was previously guarding it at another island but the island got destroyed. It’s like “Sorry, I just moved and haven’t set up the dungeon yet. Um… If you want I could eat the pearl and you could go inside me to get it back. You don’t want to do that? Okay.” The pearls, when placed on three islands, open the way to the Tower of the Gods which I guess you could count as the missing third dungeon but the bottom line is that the game is lacking in dungeons.

There are a couple of mini dungeons where you just pop in for a few minutes to grab a tool/weapon and then leave. I’m not even kidding. You are timed and must complete the dungeon in under about 4 minutes. The Ice dungeon in Oot which I always thought of as a mini dungeon is easily more of a thing than both of the WW mini dungeons put together. This doesn’t feel like a finished game.

The three other dungeons, particularly earth and wind, are extremely tedious thanks to being centered around the Command Melody. In these dungeons, you either get a statue friend or a real friend like Medli or Makar who you possess and control by playing the song with the baton or “Wind Waker” as it’s called. Practically every two minutes you get out the fucking baton, play the song, switch and do whatever puzzle is needed, switch back. Do it again in two minutes. It gets old REAL fast. Hell, I hated just getting out the baton to change the direction of the wind after a while. I’d rather coast along at a snail’s pace than play the song again. There are only like five songs in all but two of them you play so damn much you just get sick of the Wind Waker. This is not even mentioning the fact that I shouldn’t have to physically possess sentient allies in order to get them to do shit. Needing to assume control of their bodies implies that they are completely incompetent. If I want some chips from the grocery store, I ask my wife to pick up some chips at the grocery store. I DON’T play a magical fucking tune to astral project into her brain and do it myself. And while I’m aware that your allies solving puzzles themselves is not as fun as doing it yourself, you should just be able to switch characters with a single button and control them as if they WERE doing it themselves because you told them you needed help. It’s just one more instance of Nintendo contrivedly catering to a gimmick at the expense of logic and fun.


Speaking of, Nintendo also have this problem with putting meta Nintendo references/gimmicks in its games. Wind Waker is pretty bad on this. Not sure if it's as bad as Paper Mario:TTYD but it's bad. According to my Hyrule Historia, they scrapped an idea for "Gamecube Island." That's good I guess but "Dee Ess Island" still made it into the next game. This image is funny because if you replace the word "lack" with the word "fetish" and phrase "the coolest" with the word "dead" you have a Faustian prophecy made public before the Wii even came out.

The best part of the game was the underwater Hyrule Castle frozen in time. I was however still really disappointed that it looked nothing like the one from OoT. I don’t understand this. It had awesome stained glass windows correctly featuring all of the seven sages. Why does the castle look completely different in both design and surrounding geography? What is the point of claiming it’s the same castle when it looks nothing like it?

Actually the best part of the game was in the Wind Temple once when I picked up Makar to carry him. My son said to Makar, “Don't worry little pickle. We won't forget you.” He also made up words to the beginning of the sailing music which consists of repeating “The more the excitement.” over and over.

The best characters in the game were Makar, Medli, Aryl and that guy who does the cannon minigames who puts on a weird show every time where he plays every role by sticking his head through a different themed board with a hole in it. God, he was funny.

Unfortunately half of the NPCs in the game are incredibly hideous and/or have a very punchable face. I would have liked Tetra more if she didn’t have a stupid vertical pompadour. It’s hard to say if the art style is making this worse but it surely isn’t making it better. Why can’t it have a better style like Professor Layton. Those games had a lot of freaks in them but they were endearing for the most part... Except Belle, eew. I like the art style and even the personality of Link from the LoZ Animated Series better than Wind Waker’s Link. Hell, I even like the art style of the Zelda CDi games better than Wind Waker’s. If you’re going to make everything into a big fucking joke then at least make it look like someone’s terrifying LSD journey. I would actually like to see a GOOD game animated in those hyper expressive, floaty fluid movements. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost like living graffiti art.

The people in Wind Waker look even shittier than One Piece characters and I despise them. 

I hate this shitty little pig-tailed Eskimo fuckface. I try to talk to him at his shop and he pushes me away and tells me to go to the other side of the shop. What the fuck is his problem?

I hate this disco fruit.

I REALLY hate this stupid kid who follows you around with a foot long snot string dangling out his nose. I never talked to him once and avoided him like he was made of stinky antimatter.

These street kids? Fuck ‘em.

Their pig teacher? What the hell is wrong with her eyes?

Tingle? That’s par for the fucking course.

Did this guy pay someone to do this to his hair or was he inspired to do it himself while huffing paint thinner one night?

I’m not really a fan of this kimono wearing Gannon-sama model. It’s just… weird. I did like how in the last part of the final battle, you have to make a triangle or Triforce with Zelda and Ganon to defeat him. I feel like it drove home the symbolism behind it better than in any other game I’ve played.

The enemy designs are also shitty. There are half a dozen different colored blobs. That’s about a third of the whole ensemble. The iteration of poes sucks. The iteration of redeads sucks… but is arguably the most scary. Bokoblins just look weird. Moblins probably look the worst with their bulbous lip flapping around like a fat jowl hanging off of their massively protruding underbite.

I found the camera in the game. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fucking useless. You’re supposed to do these quests which are kind of like riddles where you take pictures of things that this rabbi guy tells you to do but he’s so vague I have no idea how to start and therefor I stop giving a shit pretty quick. This other guy told me to take a picture of something perfectly round and pale. I took a picture of the full moon. He said that wasn’t it. I said well how about this, it’s a picture I took of your mom’s ass last night. I remember Pokemon Snap but I’m still dubious of the game’s ability to evaluate what the fuck is in one of these fake pictures.

Most of the sidequests I found were shitty and/or lead me to dead ends. What is up with that octopus map? I found one of the giant octopuses, the one with the fairy. I never found another one. I looked for them. I go to where it says they are and they’re not there. I have no idea how to make them appear. Give me a clue here. So many things seem too vague and by my guess are not worth my time so I just ignore them.

The cannon on your ship has the same problem that FLUDD in Mario Sunshine has; you can not engage it while moving. If you want to shoot at something like a mounted canon or an enemy ship, you have to take down your sail and park your stupid ass right there in the line of fire and take your beatings while you try to dish some out. The Gamecube controller has TWO FUCKING CONTROL STICKS. (Okay, one and a half.) One could be used for steering the boat, the other for aiming the cannon. Phantom Hourglass did it and all it used was a damn stylus. Phantom Hourglass did EVERYTHING better except graphics, on foot combat and not featuring the Temple of the Ocean King. That’s fucking embarrassing. Sitting there stationary is lame as shit and makes me feel like an idiot. If you’re battling another ship, you’ll both be shooting with terrible accuracy on a rolling sea while they get to move and you don’t. That brings me to another thing, the cannon desperately needs some kind of cursor to help out with aiming because it’s mostly guesswork. Maybe having to guess makes it more realistic but you know what else would make it more realistic? Being able to take evasive action while you fucking shoot.

Other than if someone actually liked the art style of this game I can’t see the appeal at all. There is just nothing there. Its main content just alternates between vapid and tedious. If you like this game, there is a good chance that you're looking back through rose-tinted glasses at something that made an impression on you when you were younger. This phenomena is never more apparent than when you’re playing in front of a four-year-old. My son’s interests in games at this point in time run as deep as bright colors, silly characters and weird enemies. If that’s all you care about, the game delivers… but so does an episode of Octonauts.

Super Mario Sunshine

Mario Sunshine for the Nintendo Gamecube is the predecessor 3D platformer following in the footsteps of the incredibly successful Super Mario 64. The two games have a lot of similarities but also significant diversion and certainly their own identities. Mario’s moves are more or less the same although I’m pissed that long jump and backflip are gone. But in addition he now has the sentient water tank called FLUDD on his back which allows him to shoot things with water and also serves as a jet pack. Well nothing can’t be improved by adding a jet pack so that was a good move. It is still bizarre that even with a jetpack the fastest way to get around is to spam dive to make Mario skip across the ground on his stomach like a stone on water. That doesn’t make sense on so many levels.

I’ve played many Mario games before, (unless you’re counting as a percentage from overall Mario games,) but none of the more recent ones on consoles like the Galaxy games. This was the first time I’d heard many of these characters speak in full sentences. It was weird. So that’s what Bowser sounds like… I don’t know. I guess I was expecting to hear King Koopa from the shitty TV show.

The HUD is overly designed. I hate that text box… or boxes… or curved slots? For individual text lines? Seriously, I’ve never seen anyone exercise such flagrant disregard for graphic design in such a critical feature of a video game. It makes overbearing sounds as the text types out too. Oh, well while we’re at it, could we also have fireworks that go off every time it completes a new word and then a little trumpet fanfare sound every time it moves down a line too? Every time you stop for two seconds these stats comes up to suffocate your view. Look, if I want to see all that shit I’ll pause the game and look at it. Right now I’m trying to either figure something out or enjoy the scenery. In Delfino Plaza there’s this stupid message text crawl at the bottom which I have never read. A lot of stuff should have been simplified here.

I actually like the setting of the tropical island a lot and the fact that you can actually see the other levels off in the distance like you’re in a legitimate geographical location that has relevance to the other locations is really cool. But when I look closer, some of the set pieces and even some of the levels in general are really hit and miss. I liked the resort level just because the sun is perpetually setting there and the shadows are long. It’s just an odd time of the day that you rarely see highlighted in videogames. The splitting manta ray boss was a bit excessive though. And then I realize that every other chapter in the level takes place inside the hotel which just feels really confining for Mario. It is a different take on things which I appreciate to some degree but why so much of it?

I like Pinna Park I love the rollercoaster. But at the same time I hate how many of the rides don’t look real and useable. On the ferris wheel at the top of the hill, there’s no dock or ramp where the gondolas go through to indicate where people could board. No one ever rides it. The wheel doesn’t stop. You can’t get inside the gondolas. The only one that can use the fucking ferris wheel is Mario and that’s only if he executes a perfectly timed misty flip with a shitty camera angle onto the roof of a gondola. Amusement park patrons aren’t going to jump over a death defying gap to ride on the goddamn roof of the ferris wheel gondola. Same thing for the inverted ship rides. There are no seats. You can’t go inside of them. You can only stand on the deck until it swings so high, you fall off of it. What is even the point of this? Mario can’t even ride it. Everything feels like a facade or a decoration.

I did the minimum number of chapters on Ricco Harbor because just looking at it makes me angry. The platforming design is just so bad. It’s like they just tossed a bunch of mesh partitions together at random and said here, go apeshit. There doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined sensible path through it. They just saw that it was possible to get to the top of it and called it good. Oh and don’t forget to add a ton of shit to knock the player off so that they can have even more fun climbing up it again. A lot of stuff is like that. You stop and look at it for a long time and go, “Is this what I do?” I feel like most of the platforming sections that I solved, I solved because I found an exploit somehow with the jetpack, not because I mastered a well crafted puzzle.  

In SM64 probably 80% of the stars you could get without having to enter the specific chapter at the beginning of the level. You could select Boil the Bully going into Lethal Lava Land and end up going exploring instead and get the star for Red Hot Log Rolling or Hot Foot Into the Volcano. You didn’t have to commit to doing a single specific star which was good because It fostered a sense of adventure in the player and didn’t stifle them finding their own fun or objective. In Sunshine not only do you have to commit to a single scenario and a single achievable shine sprite but you have to do each one of them in order. If you get stuck on one, you can’t even access the ones after it until you beat it and there are ALWAYS going to be ones you don’t like and have no interest in doing. Why make us do them? It’s like if you went to Disneyland but had to adhere to a strict sequential regimen of a single attraction per hour and everything else was boarded up and inaccessible. Can’t do Space Mountain until you suffer through Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Easily the worst part of this game is the isolated floating platform segments where they take away your FLUDD and stick you in some unincorporated bottomless pit room with a linear course that leads to a star. It often ends up being an extremely tedious gauntlet of trial and error that is entirely devoid of fun. The only reason I try to do them is so I can do something else which is an awful paradox to be trapped in. Why am I here? What does this have to do with anything? It doesn’t fit into the layout of the levels at all. They aren’t even in the levels. It’s like the designers had no more ideas on how to incorporate puzzles or games into the levels so they had to resort to just throwing in these arbitrary segments as filler. This looks like something someone made fucking around in Gary's Mod for half an hour. They feel like some kind of bonus stage or challenge mode which I would never bother with especially when they're all about as terrible as Rainbow Ride. Sometimes these segments are tied directly to the chapter select at the beginning of the level so you just go directly to them at the start without even entering the true level. Other times you find them in warp pipes or caves or whatever hole or doorway you come across and that is just the absolute fucking worst. Not only did you have to get to that spot which in itself can sometimes be a hassle but instead of being rewarded with a boss or cool sub area to explore, you get this nonsensical garbage.

Most of the time it’s not even a coherent platforming course. It’s just random shit that’s hard to jump on suspended in space. Do you remember where you went when you entered the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land in SM64? You went inside a MOTHERFUCKING PYRAMID, that’s where. The inside of a pyramid which had enemies, interesting, thematic, dynamic platforming and hazards. It even had a boss in there. You know where you didn’t go? Some lazy-ass abstract purgatory occupied primarily by levitating square watermelons and enormous sugarcubes. Every time I go in one of these places, I’m fooled into having a short burst of anticipation for new exploration, adventure, creativity and FUN. I expect it to be like the pyramid or the sunken ship or the volcano. Where will this hole lead? What will be in there? Oh, nevermind, it’s one of these… again. It’s like if you opened a buried treasure chest and inside was just a piece of shit. I can recall only one time where going in a hole gave a good payoff in Sunshine and it was the underwater cave with the ruins in Noki Bay.

So actually getting to the premise, there’s an evil Mario going around vandalizing the island and Mario who happens to stop by the island because… food, gets a community service court order to clean things up. Just plead guilty, Mario. We know it was you. You looked exactly like a satanic T-1000 and went around painting shit with a giant paintbrush. That was you, right? Well it turns out Shadow Mario is actually Bowser Jr. who has apparently mastered the art of shapeshifting somehow. Then the princess gets kidnapped. I’d complain about this story being played out but I like Castlevania so... Anyway, there’s a little simily I like to use to explain Bowser Jr’s role in the Mario universe. Bowser Jr. is like shit… That’s all. I don’t know why the Mario team feels demonically compelled to create a baby/kid version of every single Mario character. The games can be childlike but they don’t need to be made infantile by turning them into the fucking Muppet Babies. You know where I don’t want to see babies ever? In a video game that I’m playing. It’s like Nintendo’s target age demographic is aging inversely to the age of their actual fans.

There are puzzles that keep reappearing throughout the game like the eight red coins. I never minded that one because it was flexible enough that it could be integrated into any level in an interesting way and still feel fresh and fun. (e.g. the Red Coin Fish (but not the bird)) But how many times do I have to see that stupid giant squid with the cork in it’s mouth. You are also obligated to hunt down Shadow Mario once per level which is actually what progresses the story. This is simple in concept but annoying. You just chase him around the level, trying to hit him with enough water to stop him. This would have been a lot more fun if they actually designed some way to run, aim and shoot simultaneously. Instead you have to either stop to shoot which is only useful in the short moments that Shadow Mario stops when you fall behind which is lame or you shoot in short bursts while jumping which is lame and highly inaccurate. A couple of times I lost track of Shadow Mario and didn’t know where he was. Needless to say, I lost interest. Gee, it sure would be cool if there was some other objective I could work on right now instead. I guess I could collect a hundred coins for a star. Wonder which will take longer...

I’ve never been a fan of Mario’s vocalizations. They’re just stupid. No one sounds like that. I guess they weren't that annoying in SM64 save for the incessant hooting he does when he has low energy. Unfortunately they got worse in Sunshine. Not only does he hoot with low energy, he also does his yah wah hoo’s (etcetera) in a listless monotone like he’s Ben Stein which unfortunately is not as funny as it sounds. It’s like he’s contractually obligated to do it even when it’s exhausting or contrary to how he truly feels. It’s weird. Then there’s the gratuitous fast paced grunting when he carries anything and the constant Woowoowoowoowoowoowoo when he does hand over hand monkeybars like he’s Jabberjaw or Curly from the Three Stooges. Why?

In one chapter there’s a contest to find the largest watermelon on the beach and roll it to the competition official. On the way there is all manner of enemies and obstacles that can break the watermelon and make you have to start over. So I find a watermelon that’s bigger than everyone else’s and successfully bring it in and the guy says this.

Says the guy hiding his blind lazy eyes behind sunglasses. I assume his hand is clutching an invisible cane. Complete, bold faced, weapons grade horseshit. Just come out and say it. Say “I want the one way up on top of the hill because it’s the biggest pain in the ass to get.” You don’t need to be coy with me. I’ve played video games before. I’ve seen this trite phenomena many a time now.

Yoshi, (yoshies?) are in the game and rideable though I don’t really know why. Instances where they appear are so few and they don’t have much of a purpose. They basically only exist to remove undulating gelatin zig-zags, that block all of maybe five things in the whole game. Any time you have to use Yoshi to do something, the challenge is centered around the fact that Yoshi controls like complete ass compared to Mario with a jetpack. This whole thing has a similar feel to many of the characters and game mechanics in Banjo Tooie. It’s just one of those things that the developers clearly wanted in and were grasping for any excuses to include regardless of whether it made sense or added anything worthwhile. Each time you have to find a yoshi egg somewhere but you can only hatch it if you bring it the correct kind of fruit. And here is mostly the only reason to include fruits in the game. Instead of making and shooting eggs, the yoshi piss a stream of colorful juice out of their mouths to simulate FLUDD mechanics. In place of the water gauge you have a stomach full of juice. This is both the yoshi’s life and ammo gauge. It also drains slowly over time. if you don’t keep feeding your yoshi with fruit, they evaporate. They also evaporate if they touch water. They also have a three light years long tongue. This must be some different kind of yoshi breed because it pretty much flies in the face of everything I’ve learned as a yoshi biologist up to this point. Also why have they not died out from natural selection if they can’t go without eating every two minutes and can’t fucking touch water?

In closing here are some arbitrary gripes. It’s great how coins that pop out of something last all of half a millisecond before disappearing. What the hell? Did that bird just try to take a shit on me? That damn Delfino Plaza song sounds like a sped up version of the Motel Six song and is going to drive me insane if I hear it one more time. Who is this racing dumb fuck? Let’s all give him a round of applause for winning the Delfino Ugliest Stupid-Ass Motherfucker Competition out of a whole island of mutant goo monsters and a princess who looks like a sentient inflatable sex doll.

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.