It's our monthly BIG SHOW, so you may want to use our timeline guide below. We have an interview with horror expert Rob Lowzak, exclusive Australian impressions of Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut and we talk about our recent and favorite horror games.
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Horror Special
2:53 Apology to the Japanese People.
3:25 Mrs Fogg Buys Some Games
10:00 Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut Impressions.
22:45 Left 4 Dead 2 Impressions (with lots of Half-Life 2 discussion)
48:40 Cursed Mountain Impressions
Feature 1
1:08:15 What is it about horror that translates so well to video games?
Interview with Rob Lowzak
1:11:00 Horror Expert Takes Us Through the History of Horror Gaming
2:21:15 Alan Wake Impressions
2:27:15 Alan Wake: American Nightmare Impressions
Feature 2
2:31:30 Our Favorite Horror Games
2:32:00 Condemned
2:38:30 Rule of Rose
Outro
2:48:10 Vocal Performance by John (@aarny91) (These Owls Can't See Me)
Transcript:
Phil: This month on The Game Under Podcast, we have a horror special for you, including exclusive embargo-breaking Australian impressions of Deadly Premonition Director's Cut for the PlayStation
Tom: And who knows what sort of horrors are going to happen to us for breaking the embargo?
Phil: I don't care because we don't get free games.
Phil: And we also have an interview with a horror game expert.
Phil: I mean, we actually went to the effort of tracking down a horror game expert and interviewing him, and we recorded it, and we're going to put it on the show.
Tom: It would have been a bit pointless if we didn't record it.
Phil: And we're also going to have our own takes of what makes horror games so compelling.
Tom: And that was Arnie.
Tom: And I'm not sure if you could entirely call it his song, though I don't know if I want to be associated with it, but I made the music and he did the vocals.
Tom: And well, yep.
Phil: They've only heard seconds of it.
Phil: So they don't have anything wrong with it.
Phil: I mean, at this point, it sounds pretty good actually.
Phil: It's like a vocal history of video gaming set to music.
Phil: Music is great, Colin.
Tom: In that case, I'd like to say I did make the music.
Tom: Not only did I make the music, I also basically directed the song.
Tom: Even though he does the vocals, I'm pretty much the entire creative force behind it.
Phil: Well, they're not just left with that second segment.
Phil: We have the full version of the song at the end of this show.
Tom: I would just like to point out when you do get to it at the end, do remember that it was Arnie doing the vocals.
Tom: And I mean, as we all know, generally the person singing is the Towers man for any musical endeavour.
Tom: So blame him.
Phil: I'm Phil Fogg, L, Gs.
Tom: I'm Tom Towers, Ts, S, R, E, Os, W and N.
Phil: And an S.
Tom: I said that already.
Phil: Oh, sorry.
Phil: And this is episode of The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: First of all, thanks to everyone who's listening.
Phil: We've really been overwhelmed with the support that we've gotten so far.
Phil: So thank you very much, Intellifriend.
Tom: Yeah, and I just would like to clarify, last week, I may have come across a little harsh to the poor Hebrew boy who commented on Tom Curtis.
Tom: I just like to point out, we do appreciate comments.
Phil: Oh, absolutely.
Phil: And I also want to apologize for the generally negative Japanese sentiments that I've expressed over the prior four episodes.
Tom: You were raped as a young boy by a Japanese man.
Phil: While that may or may not be true, I'm actually a Japanophile.
Phil: I love Japan.
Phil: I think they are superior in every way.
Phil: And I am not being forced to say this by the Australian Embassy or any other outside...
Tom: The Japanese Embassy that will be forcing you to say that.
Phil: Well, this is a horror special.
Phil: And I have a horrific anecdote to tell you.
Phil: You know, as we've talked privately, Tom, Mrs.
Phil: Fogg has been in the United States for the last two weeks.
Phil: And basically...
Tom: So we've been having a lot of fun together in her absence.
Phil: Well, we've been recording tons of podcasts, that's for sure.
Tom: Yeah, if that's what you want to call it.
Phil: So, in any case, I emailed Velvet.
Phil: She said, look, if there's anything that you want in the United States, just send me an email, that way I have it, I can access it.
Phil: So I'm going to quote you an email I sent to her.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Not in order.
Phil: Quote, games, any and all.
Phil: Lost Odyssey would be nice.
Phil: If you want to check for duplicates, see my backloggery profile.
Phil: And I included a link, right?
Phil: Because I have games.
Phil: And the reason why I told you to get any and all games is because the is region locked.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So it's like basically at this point, if you see an Xbox game we don't own, just buy it.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Right?
Tom: Of course.
Phil: I also asked her for hoodies from Walmart because there's a particular brand I like from there.
Phil: And some Converse high top size because I've worn them for the last years and they're pretty expensive over here.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And any Disgaea games from Portables.
Phil: So about six days into her vacation, I got a text back from her at work that said the following, don't have internet, Borderlands Knight's Contract, Syndicate, Space Marine, Testament of Sherlock Holmes, Inversion, Survival, Shadows of Kitami, Child of Eden, Blood Drive, Dragon Age
Tom: So she really knocked out your request out of the park there.
Phil: Except for Borderlands there's not a single game on there I want or don't already have.
Phil: Knight's Contract, I don't care about.
Phil: Syndicate, no.
Phil: I mean, I know everyone loves it, but it's not my style of game.
Phil: Space Marine, I already have.
Phil: Testament of Sherlock Holmes.
Tom: Now, do you actually know which Sherlock Holmes game this is?
Phil: Oh, it's a PC.
Phil: I know the PC game.
Tom: Yeah, but are you familiar with why this is so famous?
Phil: Yes, it's big over in Europe.
Phil: It's like Frogwares or whatever is the developer, and Atlas publishes it, and it's crazy.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: And I actually would have enjoyed it on a intellectual level.
Tom: If I was just randomly given Testament of Sherlock Holmes, I would be excited.
Phil: Oh, I would be too, but it's just not what I was thinking.
Tom: You know, I've literally been, I was following whatever the distributor was, I can't remember who it was, for like two years, waiting for the next Sherlock Holmes game to try and get a review copy from, and it's clearly just dead.
Tom: It's been delayed literally for like two years.
Tom: So...
Phil: Giant Bomb has featured over the last couple of years because it's always at Lipsig or, you know, whatever the European Gamescom type thing is.
Phil: I think it's Gamescom now.
Phil: And they've always made fun of how you go up to the publisher and you're like, okay, so what have you got this year for Sherlock Holmes?
Phil: And they're like, in the first English sentence, they give them, they spoil the game immediately, right?
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Which is pretty funny.
Phil: But I'm always suspicious, and I'm sorry to our European listeners, I'm always suspicious of games that are popular in Europe that aren't popular elsewhere in the Western world, like Buzz or SingStar, right?
Phil: I don't know what it is, but it's just basically like, well, you know, I mean, if it's popular in Europe, it's not popular in the rest of the world.
Phil: I don't know, it just puts me off.
Phil: Shadows of Katami or Survivor Shadows of Katami, I don't even know what that is.
Phil: Child of Eden, I have for the PSand is garbage.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Blood Drive is a vehicular combat game from Activision.
Phil: This is back when Activision actually made individual one-off games.
Phil: So God knows what that is.
Tom: That's an amazing title if it's literally some sort of racing game.
Tom: Blood Drive.
Phil: Blood Drive, I know.
Phil: It's like what the Red Cross does, right?
Phil: They give you a cookie and blood.
Phil: And Dragon Age the game that literally killed off BioWare's credibility prior to Mass Effect
Phil: So I'm going, okay, there's no way for me to get back to it because this is a text she sent like nine hours into the past.
Phil: So she gets home today and she hands me some games.
Phil: And so I was expecting that, right?
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: But this is what I actually got, in order of succotude.
Phil: Are you ready?
Phil: Blood Drive.
Phil: So I did get Blood Drive.
Tom: Yep, thank God.
Phil: A game called Bakugan Battle Brawlers.
Tom: I think I've heard of that.
Phil: Also from Activision, which means this must be popular with children, it must be a popular anime, Bakugan, B-A-K-U-G-A-N.
Tom: That sounds very familiar to me, so you may be onto something there.
Phil: It's probably a really bad Super Smash Brothers.
Phil: Sniper Ghost Warrior.
Tom: That's actually meant to be pretty good.
Phil: I know, it's another one of those games that is popular in Europe and nowhere else.
Phil: So I'm worried about that.
Tom: So your true prejudices are coming through here.
Tom: You're not actually anti-Japan, you're anti-Europe.
Phil: I'm not anti-Europe or anti-Japan.
Phil: Read between the lines.
Phil: Duke Nukem Forever.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: Which...
Tom: Well, that's gotta be at least an interesting curiosity.
Phil: That's what I thought.
Phil: It's a historical thing that's good for the collection, but at this point, it's the time.
Phil: I've got so many games I wanna beat.
Phil: Table which is still on the border, bordering on Succitude, right?
Phil: So you can see where we're getting better, right?
Tom: Yeah, that's at least a game.
Phil: Then Succitude is, she did get Warhammer K Space Marine, and the only reason that sucks is cause I already have it.
Phil: And then I guess from there, it's all good.
Phil: Red Dead Redemption, Undead Nightmare.
Tom: Not bad.
Phil: On the PlayStation
Phil: MLB the show, cause I'm a huge baseball fan.
Phil: We're clearly in the goodness here.
Phil: She did in fact get me an NTSC copy of Lost Odyssey.
Tom: Excellent.
Phil: And I love Blue Dragon, so I wanna see what Mistwalker's other game's about.
Phil: Borderlands and you know how much I love the first one.
Phil: I mean, this is great.
Tom: So she came through the end.
Phil: And then finally, in my hands, I'm probably one of probably, I'm gonna guess people in Australia that has one of these.
Tom: I would say even because as far as I can see, even Deep Silver has no review copies to give away.
Phil: So you think there's probably less than people who have this game-
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: That I have not revealed in my hands.
Tom: Correct.
Tom: Just let it out.
Tom: Let us know.
Phil: Deadly Premonition, The Director's Cut.
Tom: Hell yes.
Phil: Hell yes.
Phil: And not only do I, am I held it, I played an hour and a half of it this afternoon, and this game is not a-
Tom: So, so, can you, by that, without one and a half hours, I assume you can answer the most important question is whether the alternate ending or the change ending is as good as the original ending.
Phil: Well, one can impugn from the amount of, yeah, I can extrapolate that.
Phil: But basically, like, I've already beaten Deadly Premonition on the
Phil: It's a game that I love.
Phil: I gave it a out of
Phil: I think it's a brilliant, perfect game.
Phil: And there's been a Director's Cut release for it.
Phil: It's only $in North America.
Phil: So, you know, and it's...
Tom: So it's only $here then?
Phil: It's probably going to be probably $here, yeah, because it's going to be limited release and all the rest of it.
Phil: Yep.
Phil: This is a game that's pretty hard to get a hold of.
Phil: Velvet had to go to three Game Stops, and it wasn't at Best Buy, it wasn't at Fry's.
Phil: And then they had to call around to find it.
Phil: So, they said it's been selling extremely well.
Phil: And I can imagine that because it was a exclusive.
Phil: I don't think it's a sweeping generalization to say that Sony exclusive console owners are a little bit more interested in the arty kind of stuff.
Tom: Yep, I'd say that's probably the case.
Phil: That's a fair statement.
Phil: So, for them to have available to them a game that has prior only been available to owners, it'd probably be a good seller.
Tom: Yeah, it's not as if they're going to be releasing a huge amount of copies, though.
Phil: No, no, no, no, no.
Phil: I wonder why they're releasing it at all.
Phil: I've got to think that Sony was helping with this in some sense, because the initial game didn't really make that much money either.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: So, basically, I mean, if you haven't played Deadly Premonition before, it's a, think about the TV show Twin Peaks.
Phil: Yep.
Phil: Right?
Phil: It's set in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Phil: You're playing a David Duchovny, X-Files type FBI investigator.
Phil: And what this game is, is it has linear REstyle action levels, right?
Phil: Where you're going through it slowly, solving various simple puzzles and fighting off enemies, right?
Phil: Yep.
Phil: And so, I mean, everyone's familiar with that.
Phil: That's the basic linear style game.
Phil: You solve these puzzles, and as you solve the puzzles, you collect three visions.
Phil: So you're a FBI profiler, right?
Phil: So you're good at profiling psychos.
Phil: And basically, as you collect these pieces of evidence through solving puzzles, it gives you a revelatory cut scene at the end of the level.
Phil: So you basically go through these linear levels, solving puzzles, you see clue by clue, and they slightly unveil it, and then at the end, they show you a revelatory cut scene, which helps you solve the mystery more.
Phil: And so it has a very strong-
Tom: So is the revelation his completed psychological profile?
Phil: Yes, because he's piecing together this evidence, and he also has this paranormal supernatural ability to see things that aren't in the physical realm.
Phil: So he's not only doing the analytical stuff that you get to be a part of, but he's also doing some other kind of supernatural type thing.
Phil: And it's kind of neat because you'd like to think that there are aspects of the FBI that, they hire these people that can kind of see things that other people can't see.
Phil: I mean, at least it's an interesting concept.
Phil: But beyond these linear levels, these usually then funnel out into really great cut scenes where they have these quirky character interactions that are just amazing.
Phil: You really lock into and love the characters that are in this game and feel close to them, which as you go through the game, and obviously it's a horror game, that's the theme of our show, terrible things happen to them, which just makes the impact even more difficult or rewarding as it would be.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: So you have these linear levels, great revelatory cut scene, usually followed by a dramatic cut scene and then you have an open world game where you can drive wherever you want, go into whatever store you want, talk to whomever you want, go fishing, collect flowers, shave, buy suits, wear suits, buy food and then when you're ready...
Tom: What do these things affect?
Tom: Do they affect anything within the normal levels or are they just random stuff?
Phil: Well, for example, you can unlock cars, right?
Phil: And you can unlock suits.
Phil: And so if you don't shower for long periods of time, you'll get different responses from people.
Phil: If you don't shave, you get different responses from people.
Phil: I mean, it does impact the linear parts of the game slightly.
Tom: Okay, yeah.
Phil: And also, this is the part where all the side stories unlock.
Phil: There are side mysteries you can do, like you can be a peeping Tom that goes around looking into people's houses.
Phil: And all of this is done in a very straight up style.
Phil: It's not done in a jokey style at all.
Phil: It's developed by Swerywho is a Japanese developer.
Phil: So he's not playing for laps at all.
Phil: He's like dead serious about every aspect of this game.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: So then it's nothing like Twin Feaks.
Phil: No, not at all.
Phil: It's not contrived at all.
Phil: It's very earnest and it's basically like this character, York, is just a fun, interesting guy as are most of the characters, so interesting.
Phil: So it has this great mix of these linear horror levels combined with the open world levels.
Phil: And the open world levels are so, not mundane, but so typical American lifey that when you go back in, not to sound too much like Sarah Palin, but when you go back into the linear aspect of the game, it amps up the horror because you've been talking to these people about the price of gasoline or this or that or local fishing spots.
Phil: And then when you get back into the linear mode, it just makes it all the more creepy because it is that mix of the normal and the exceptionally abnormal, which makes many horror games so good.
Phil: So unless you have more questions about the gameplay.
Tom: I've got one question.
Tom: Is it possible to go along and complete the game well enough if you grow a ridiculous beard?
Phil: Yes.
Tom: Okay, good.
Phil: Yes.
Tom: Because otherwise I would not play it.
Phil: And you can wear the same suit throughout the entire game.
Phil: You unlock cars, as I said.
Phil: And then in the original game, the car is handled fairly poorly.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So what's different in the Director's Cut?
Phil: So far from the first minutes, it has a special section, which is unlocked after beating the game.
Phil: So I can't get into that yet.
Phil: It has extra introductory cut scenes, which don't show the face of the person speaking.
Phil: So it's this old man talking to a young child about tales that he knows.
Phil: Yep.
Phil: Obviously from his youth.
Phil: It's pretty clear to me, because they have shown his lips for like a microsecond.
Phil: It's pretty clear to me that this is York when he's older.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: The lead protagonist.
Tom: You can pretty much guess that.
Tom: That was my immediate guess when you said we can't see his face.
Tom: So obviously, it's gonna be him.
Phil: Yeah, for reasons that I can't go into because of spoilers, but it's obviously gonna be him.
Phil: And he basically is like saying, at the start of every scene, they've thrown in this extra scene where it's an old man talking to a young child.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: God, this game is creepy.
Phil: Just talking about young children.
Phil: There's twins in this game, by the way.
Phil: There's toddlers.
Phil: And beyond that, he's driving a different car.
Phil: He's driving like a Ford Mustang, whereas before he was driving a traditional FBI government K-car.
Phil: And other people have said that they took out the green filter.
Phil: Me thinks not.
Phil: I mean, the green filter still seems to be there.
Phil: This is supposed to be an HD version of the game.
Phil: It is playable in p and p.
Phil: But in terms of the actual...
Tom: Blessed with decent televisions, not from America.
Phil: Well, who knows, man, because like, this is the US version.
Tom: Oh yeah, that's true.
Tom: That's true.
Phil: Yeah, I'm cutting edge, so.
Phil: But, so, beyond that though, the art assets themselves have not been changed at all.
Phil: So basically what you're seeing is graphics that were old looking to start with, but are now in HD, which is much like hooking up your Wii to an HDTV.
Tom: So does this mean the original Deadly Premonition was not in HD?
Phil: I wish I had the cover in front of me here.
Phil: I really can't say.
Phil: But in terms of the textures and the anti-aliasing and everything, it basically looks worse than the version because now you...
Phil: Like before, you'd be in a suit that was wet and it kind of looked like it had a sheen.
Phil: Now it looks like you're wearing a rubber suit.
Phil: So...
Phil: And other people complained about the frame rate.
Phil: Destructoid did, I know.
Phil: And I don't see any problem whatsoever with the frame rate.
Phil: Now that I have a gaming PC, I'm well accustomed to what good games look like.
Phil: I'm not an idiot.
Phil: This is not a good-looking game, but the look of the game doesn't get in the way of the game.
Tom: The frame rate could easily come along later, though, considering you're only an hour and a half in.
Phil: Oh, yeah.
Phil: Absolutely.
Phil: Absolutely.
Phil: And at this point, I have really done everything that the engine demands.
Phil: And I can't imagine someone making that up.
Phil: I mean, there's no reason why a reviewer would.
Phil: So that's basically it.
Phil: That's your embargo-busting exclusive Australian impressions of Deadly Premonition and the Director's Cut.
Phil: I would say if you're just a little bit deeper than the average gamer, there's absolutely no excuse for not playing this game now.
Phil: I know it's probably pretty expensive on the these days because of the demand of it, the demand for it and the initial low cut.
Phil: Just try and get a hold of a copy if you can.
Phil: It's a really special game if you like open world games or horror games, because this is a bit of both.
Tom: My question would be, just one last question, would you, considering these problems with the PSversion, do you think it would be worth getting the version instead of it if you had both the PSand the ?
Phil: Well, if you had both, basically, frankly, I would sell you to get the game that you can get for the lowest amount of money.
Tom: Okay, so it's not a huge difference then?
Phil: No, I will tell you one thing though, and that is that in the first one, the combat was a little bit frustrating.
Phil: The camera was a little bit frustrating, whereas in the PlayStation version so far, the combat has been pretty easy, which is good, because the combat is the least consequential part of the game.
Phil: The important part of the game is the puzzle, the story.
Phil: It's so far been a much more enjoyable experience just being able to point and shoot a lot easier.
Phil: They have a better reticule.
Phil: So I'm glad you asked that question, because that adds to actually probably the most significant difference between the two games is that the combat has been greatly improved, as has the controls in the PlayStation version.
Phil: So if they're equal price and equal availability, I'd say get the PlayStation version.
Phil: I mean, in the North America, it's bucks.
Phil: I don't know what's going to be down here.
Phil: But they're good games either way.
Tom: So pretty much either or.
Phil: Either or, whatever you can get a hold of.
Phil: So speaking of Deadly, since this is our horror-themed game, you've been playing a game fairly recently, a fair amount, right?
Tom: Well, not that much, because it's reasonably short, and the game in question is Left Dead which was developed by Valve Corporation and Turtle Rock Studios, who were acquired by Valve during the making of the first Left Dead game.
Tom: Now, if you ever listen to the VG press, you would have heard me talking about this before, and complaining about the lack of gore as being located in Australia, I was forced to play the censored version, right?
Phil: Well, is the sequel not censored in Australia?
Tom: No, both are censored.
Tom: No, the first one wasn't censored, the sequel is censored.
Phil: Oh, okay.
Tom: And, but more recently I found a mod which allows you to play the game uncensored, and it basically changes the experience completely.
Tom: The biggest way that it changes things is that they actually use the gore as a visual guide, as to whether you've killed a zombie in question, right?
Tom: So, if you're shooting a zombie in the head and they just do their generic falling over animation, which usually results in them taking a few steps beforehand, you can't actually tell what point they die at.
Tom: So, you might shoot them several times before they're actually dead.
Tom: Now, with the gore, when you shoot them, their head's going to explode or there's a massive hole in them or whatever, right?
Tom: So, instantly you'd know exactly if you need to keep whining about that zombie or move on to the next one.
Tom: So, it actually changes the gameplay significantly.
Tom: So, it's not just a visual thing, but as a visual thing, the gore is just absolutely brilliantly over the top.
Tom: Heads explode, they're fried in center, limbs get blown off, and my personal favorite is, our two personal favorites is one of them is when you shoot, when you plant an explosive, there's these Ctype explosives that attract zombies.
Tom: Now, so a large bunch of zombies run over to it, they all get killed, and you might expect limbs to be flying everywhere, right, as you would from your standard explosion, yes?
Phil: Well, wait a second, how are they attracted to the C?
Tom: It makes noise, and as we all know, zombies are attracted to noise.
Phil: I'm slowly learning.
Phil: My zombie knowledge is pretty limited.
Tom: Well, as is the enemy, the zombie, so you'll catch up pretty quickly.
Tom: So they run over to these bombs, but instead of massive limbs flying everywhere, though there is that too, sometimes you get an enemy flown many meters through the air with their intestines hanging out, so you get a brilliant stream of intestines through the air, then draped across the ground, which I personally enjoy a great deal, and the only disappointing thing about it is that this long line of intestines fade away, sadly.
Tom: Oh.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So it's like a ragdoll guy being thrown with basically like an intestine attached to him that's going like over meters kind of thing?
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
Tom: Exactly.
Phil: Impressive.
Tom: Yep.
Tom: And the fading intestine post-explosion is symbolic of one of the most disappointing things about the gore, and that is once a zombie is dead, it cannot be gored anymore.
Tom: So if you've got a pile of zombies and you place an explosive there, it blows up, nothing happens, which if you've got to gain this gore, you just think, I mean, that's going to add a little more to the aesthetic.
Tom: Wouldn't you say?
Tom: It just kind of stands out as being odd.
Tom: And the other awesome gore involved is you can shoot a hole through the stomach of many zombies and you can see through that hole, which once again is pretty cool and can actually be useful for shooting enemies behind them, which is slightly incorrect because this generally results from the sniper rifle, which through multiple zombies anyway, but it's another interesting visual effect.
Tom: So presentation-wise, it really is a brilliant experience once you've got the gore in there.
Phil: Well, that was in Rambo
Phil: I remember he got a rocket launcher that went through his stomach and in a certain shot you could actually see like a hole about the size of an orange through his entire body.
Phil: Unless I'm just completely making that up and fabricating it, in which case I'm a fairly disturbed individual.
Tom: I'm not sure.
Tom: You may have just imagined that, that I can't comment to it.
Phil: I'm pretty sure I watched it on Freeze Frame when I was a kid.
Phil: My question before you continue on with your impressions is, Left Dead, like I've always avoided it because I've always just known it as a multiplayer online shooter.
Phil: And given my online limitations, I've never really explored it, but people absolutely love this and they play it for hours on end.
Phil: I mean, is that a fair characterization?
Phil: And if so, I mean, what makes it so fun and compelling?
Tom: Well, the answer to that is, I have absolutely no idea.
Tom: And the person I was playing it with, by the way, is our very own Arnie, who did the intro theme song.
Tom: And he has played Left Dead for over hours.
Tom: And the original Left Dead for even longer than that.
Tom: So you're probably going to ask him, but I honestly have absolutely no idea.
Tom: This to me is a classic Valve game, in the sense that there is no level design in the games, right?
Tom: There's no sense of pacing.
Tom: There's no sense of spectacle whatsoever.
Tom: Basically, each level feels, as far as the gameplay is concerned, exactly the same.
Tom: They throw at you various sizes of zombie attacks.
Tom: I'll give you that.
Tom: They have a few different powerful zombies that you have to take out.
Tom: They basically do the exact same thing in each level.
Tom: You're going along, you'll fight a few large groups, and you'll be annoyed by some of these special zombie types, types on and off, in basically almost exactly the same quantities in every single level.
Tom: The levels are literally just long corridors.
Tom: You don't use the environment whatsoever.
Tom: So there is absolutely no way to differentiate one level from the other except in the setting.
Tom: And there's only two levels, actually, there's only three levels that stand out setting-wise.
Tom: The first one is the carnival level, which stands out for all the wrong reasons.
Tom: It stands out because of an incredibly stupid part where you've got a really thin corridor and a million zombies running at you, which is incredibly frustrating.
Tom: And as much as I criticise that, it's the one section of the game that is at all different gameplay-wise to any other level.
Tom: So it deserves some credit for its utter stupidity in the way that it's designed, because at least it's something different.
Tom: Now, there's two other levels that stand out aesthetically.
Tom: One of them is a...
Tom: I can't even remember what the setting's meant to be because of how generic it is.
Tom: But the reason it stands out is halfway through the level, this massive storm hits and you're walking through water very slowly and your movement is hindered and there's massive wind which makes you even slower still.
Tom: So the aesthetics then at least alter the gameplay.
Tom: So it goes beyond simply being an aesthetic gimmick and actually does affect the gameplay.
Tom: So that level somewhat stands out gameplay-wise, but you have to give it massive negative points because bear in mind, you literally go through the level, then the storm hits and you retrace your steps exactly back to the beginning of the level.
Phil: Is that the one in the swamp or is that where...
Tom: No, that follows on from the swamp.
Tom: So it is in fact following the previous tracing through water trope from the swamp, but at least it adds to it with the wind.
Tom: And the other level that stands out is the New Orleans level, which is, as far as the game play is concerned, exactly the same as all the other levels, but New Orleans Zombie Attack is a somewhat original setting as far as games are concerned.
Tom: It's all nicely dolled up for Carnival and whatnot, so that's a pretty cool setting.
Tom: But seriously, I do not understand...
Tom: The one other thing that it does very well is the AI of the zombies and the teammates.
Tom: The teammates actually hold their own.
Tom: Of course, they're going to stuff up now and then and completely destroy all the good work you've done, right?
Tom: But most of the time, they can look after themselves.
Tom: You don't have to be constantly healing them and whatnot.
Tom: They're perfectly competent.
Tom: They're AI as it should be as far as teammates are concerned, and the AI of the zombies is also very good, especially considering they're zombies, right?
Tom: Because zombies are basically the ultimate excuse to do shit AI design, right?
Tom: Because they're zombies.
Tom: But these ones, they've got interesting attack patterns.
Tom: They don't just charge at you straight ahead.
Tom: Their attacks can be somewhat unpredictable, so they're always interesting to take out, and the special zombies also are all very unique and to a degree require different strategies to kill.
Tom: But once again, this veiled sense of sameness and lack of ambition comes into the special zombies as well, where even though they might have a different attack pattern, once you get used to the game, you kind of just forget about what they're doing, and it's just a mindless blast fest where you're just filling everything with as much lead as possible.
Tom: And to answer your question, and to contradict myself completely, I think I do understand why people play this for hundreds upon hundreds of hours.
Tom: It is completely mindless fun, and it is fun.
Tom: If you're playing with someone you know, it's enjoyable, because it's not so distracting that you can't have a conversation while playing, and it's not too mindless that you're also not somewhat engaged.
Tom: And the fact that it is so unambitious and it doesn't have anything annoying in it, like retarded teammate AI, because bear in mind, you're always playing with four teammates, right?
Tom: So if you're only playing with one or two friends, then there is AI on your team.
Tom: So if that was poorly done, it would be a major pain in the arse.
Tom: So the reason it is, as far as I can see, so successful is that it doesn't do anything badly.
Tom: But at the same time, to me, it doesn't do anything that goes beyond being very, very just above mediocre.
Phil: Well, you criticize Valve for their saminess.
Phil: I criticize Valve for their safety.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: I mean, their games are...
Tom: I criticize them for both.
Tom: I said their saminess and lack of ambition.
Phil: They game test their games to such an extent and they're such technically minded people that they...
Phil: You know, they want to get the algorithm, if you will, of the game correct and have the, quote, perfect game.
Phil: And I think that that sometimes hurts them.
Phil: I mean, like with Portal, sometimes...
Phil: I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say that, remember, I'm the guy who just praised Deadly Premonition, but sometimes a game can be too...
Phil: polished too much or too much polish, you know, to the point where it's like, okay, just because you perfected this one thing doesn't mean I need to see it rubbed in my face for the next four hours.
Tom: Well, I think it worked in Portal because it is only four hours long.
Tom: And here's the thing.
Tom: And I think it also worked in the two Half-Life episodes, right?
Tom: Because once again, they're very short, concise experiences.
Phil: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Tom: But in Half-Life I think that is just, from a design standpoint, an absolutely abysmal game.
Tom: I just do not understand.
Tom: And of course, I do understand, as I just said, why this is the case.
Tom: But I just don't understand how anyone could actually like this.
Tom: Even though I know why they do, it just...
Tom: Well...
Tom: It boggles the mind to me.
Tom: Because you're playing it, and you can see, okay, they've put this in here because there's focus tests of this.
Tom: And the focus group has said, okay, now we've got to have this utterly stupid vehicle section, right?
Phil: Because...
Phil: I mean, there's a different, a very important distinction to be drawn from focus testing and focus playing, right?
Phil: I mean, there's a difference between focus group and focus playing.
Phil: I mean, very different.
Phil: Focus groups are what is typical of everything that you know about it, right?
Phil: I mean, you show them a show, and people say, well, couldn't have more tits.
Phil: And they're like, oh, more tits, okay, let's write that down, more tits.
Phil: Or if there's like a high brow humor, they'll go, okay, people didn't laugh between the second mark and the second mark.
Phil: Can we have a football to the groin in that section?
Phil: That's focus groups, and that's what kills good media.
Phil: But there's also focus playing where they focus test a game where basically they'll put players of all different levels of experience, and they'll watch them over an eight hour period or however long period, and they'll go, OK, that guy totally didn't see that exit, and he walked around aimlessly for seven minutes.
Phil: We need to signpost that exit.
Phil: And I think that's what Valve does, is that they focus play these games to the nth degree.
Tom: Well, it's a fair distinction.
Tom: But the thing is, as far as I'm aware, Valve focus test their stuff to the nth degree as well.
Tom: You maybe have more knowledge on this subject?
Phil: Yeah, I did not think that's the case.
Tom: Okay, well, that's just from what I've read of game-mule interviews, and bear in mind, I could have just completely misremembered that.
Phil: Well, it could also be that you may have conflated it, but maybe also the author conflates it, because people often do take those two different terms and merge them into one thing.
Phil: But the thing is, you were talking about Half-Life and I think on the one front you had people who were just...
Phil: you had three different groups.
Phil: One was people who were totally enamored with Half-Life to start with, so they're just going to love Half-Life
Phil: Then you had people like me who had heard about Half-Life hadn't played it, was kind of interested, and then was just overwhelmed by the two things, and that was the technical ability of the game in the time.
Phil: It was an overwhelming game in virtue of its technical.
Phil: And then secondly, there was just an immersiveness to it, and I always think back to Half-Life
Phil: I never think of the horrible, sucky levels.
Phil: I always think back to the coast levels, where you could just walk around and basically feel like you're in a real-world setting, and I think that's what people liked about that game.
Phil: So you said you didn't see what people could like about it.
Phil: That's what I liked about it.
Tom: Okay, well, see, the thing is I didn't find the coast levels engaging at all.
Tom: I thought they were absolutely horrible, because here's the thing.
Tom: Okay, I know technically they know what they're doing as far as the visuals are not a concern, but the thing is they do everything so safe.
Tom: It comes across as, yes, this is a believable coastline, right?
Tom: There's nothing that stands out that says, okay, this is something in a game that I shouldn't be taking seriously, right?
Tom: But there's also nothing there that says to me, this is a beach that I should care about or be interested in.
Phil: Well, here's the thing, right?
Phil: And this is what is so wonderful about it, in that when I played the game, I did a typical Phil Fogg-type thing.
Phil: I got my car caught on a...
Phil: I got the car caught on an aspect of the geometry very early into that level, right?
Phil: So I got a car caught on the geometry, and I'm like, OK, well, I guess they want me to walk from here.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Right?
Phil: So I walked the entire coastal section, like a hitchhiker or itinerant hobo.
Phil: I walked the whole level, right?
Phil: So I created my own favorite part of that game by not just speeding along in my Mad Max Dune Buggy.
Phil: And obviously that made the difficulty much higher because I couldn't just run over people and all the rest of it.
Phil: And I was basically living like a renegade hobo.
Phil: And yes, I made that the best part of the game.
Phil: It's like kind of like in GTA people made their favorite part, most memorable parts of that game by just doing what they wanted to do.
Phil: And so how is Valve to credit for that?
Phil: Well, they could have made it possible not to get out of the car, right?
Phil: They let that option open to the player.
Phil: So when my car got caught on the geometry, I could have just been stuck in the car and then gone, okay, I guess I'm going to have to reload from my last checkpoint.
Phil: So those are my points in defense of Half-Life
Tom: Yeah, well, I accept that, but here's the thing.
Tom: On that exact same level, I'm pretty sure I spent at least one hour wandering around on the beach due to completely fucking up the car on, you know, the section where you've got to drive up, it's right before the asphalt road.
Tom: You've got to drive up a hill and then do a jump or something along those lines.
Tom: Yeah, I flipped the car over, completely fucked it up, and I think at that point I didn't realize I could flip it back over.
Tom: And so I basically just wandered around doing nothing, well, exploring and that sort of thing until I did flip it over.
Tom: And here's the thing, I understand what you're saying, and I'm not saying your experience was in any way invalid, but to me once again, the thing about GTA and whatnot is they make that world something where you can create an interesting story in itself.
Phil: Right, like the time I got up on that parking garage and decided to snipe people in a row.
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
Tom: Half-life to me is not attending to do that to the same degree, and where it is, it does it simply by being completely soulless.
Tom: And when it's not trying to do it, it's trying to be a much more overtly narrative experience.
Tom: And speaking of which, my last final symbol of this safeness is in the way they handle the cutscenes.
Phil: In Left Dead or Half-life?
Tom: In Half-life.
Tom: Left Dead actually does have traditional cutscenes.
Tom: And so in Half-life, now obviously QTEs weren't that popular at the time, but instead of just doing normal cutscenes where they just play the cutscene, right?
Tom: And you've got to watch out.
Tom: They did their famous, oh-so-famous and lauded, amazing deviation of having you be a player-controlled avatar in the scene where you can walk around and do whatever you want.
Phil: So in-game cinematic, and you don't just have to sit there watching it, you can walk around and it changes the volume of the character that you're listening to.
Phil: And it's been copied in most of the game I'm playing right now.
Phil: Resistance still does it.
Phil: Singularity did it.
Tom: It was hugely influential.
Tom: And there are many games that do do this well, and Half-Life is not one of them.
Tom: It deserves the credit for doing this first, not for doing it well, because here's the thing.
Tom: At the time, well, the last thing is, sorry.
Tom: The last thing is, it works so well in something like the brilliant opening scene to Half-Life where you're in the lift, right?
Tom: The monorail-style lift, and you're going into the facility, and you're listening to the speaker, and you're introduced to the environment and the setting and everything, right?
Phil: Right, just like the entry when you go in.
Phil: Just like when you arrive at City right?
Tom: And it works well in City as well, but it is just so crap when, later on in the story, when you're literally standing there, having exposition doled out of you, and the whole time you're just thinking, shut the fuck up.
Tom: If this was an actual cut scene, I could skip this utter mindless bullshit, right?
Phil: But in Half-Life when you have that first scene, I mean, it's when you're meeting the scientist and you're there with the gal and you're in the room.
Phil: Don't they have you doing things like chaining Jonah cartridges and, you know?
Tom: I can't remember.
Phil: I thought they'd give you some minor things to be doing.
Tom: I can't remember, but it would never have lasted like the cut scene because I cannot remember a cut scene where I was not standing around for at least a few minutes.
Phil: Waiting for it to end.
Tom: And, yeah.
Tom: But once again, I mean, they went for, instead of doing this where it is effective, such as the introduction to Half-Life and the introduction to Half-Life, where it is extremely effective to doing this in every scene.
Tom: And that, to me, is exactly the same as using a cut scene because you're not thinking about where is this going, where is this stylistic choice going to be effective.
Tom: You're just thinking, okay, this is how we've got to do it for the entire game, right?
Tom: And to me, it's even more safe than doing a cut scene because everyone is immediately going to shit all over a cut scene much more than this because there is a degree of playing direction.
Tom: So, to me, it perfectly symbolizes valves, focus on not pissing off people rather than doing something good.
Tom: They think, okay, so we've got this good thing that works really well in this scene.
Tom: Now, we don't have the ambition to try and think of what's going to work well elsewhere.
Tom: So we're going to do what everyone else sells, which is make a cut scene.
Tom: But instead of doing a cut scene, we're going to give the player control so they don't shit on us for doing this incredibly annoying thing that messes with the pacing of the game and bores people out of their minds.
Tom: But we're going to get away with it, because we're dickheads with no ambition.
Phil: No, no, no, come on, you can't say that.
Phil: I mean, the other thing, I mean, we can get, in another show, we're going to talk about how to express narrative in the game, right?
Phil: So let's just leave it at that.
Phil: But I don't think it's because they're dickheads.
Phil: Or because they're ambitious.
Phil: Because obviously, look at the body of their work.
Phil: I mean, they're doing stuff that is great.
Phil: Are they safe?
Phil: They're safe.
Phil: They're safe, but they're not ambitious.
Phil: I mean, they are doing stuff.
Phil: No, you're right.
Phil: That's what I'm talking about.
Phil: They're craftsmen, right?
Phil: They're tradesmen.
Phil: And they get stuck into this whole, I totally see what you're saying.
Phil: Not enough art, too much mechanics.
Phil: And then we'll file away for another show.
Tom: I mean, at the end of the day, you can say, right, that basically any Valve game is almost flawless as far as the mechanics are concerned.
Tom: But the thing is, I don't know, that's really not enough for me.
Tom: And they're not just doing it for the mechanics.
Tom: If they were just doing it for the mechanics, I don't see why they would make Half-Life.
Tom: If they were doing it just entirely for the mechanics, why aren't they making something like Doom, right?
Tom: There is a game, if you're making something like Doom, you can live entirely on the mechanics.
Tom: So, well, actually, that's a completely loaded bullshit what I was saying there, because...
Phil: Yes, it is.
Tom: It's so important to Doom, so just scrap that.
Tom: And what were you going to say?
Phil: Well, I was going to say these guys should be making business apps, not games.
Tom: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Tom: Well, it's worth this thing.
Phil: That's where you want...
Phil: Exactly, that's where you want technical soundness, right?
Phil: I mean, and that's the thing.
Phil: They need more...
Phil: I mean, Gabe is from Microsoft.
Phil: This is his history.
Phil: But at the same time, when you look at all these flawed games that are flawed technically, you can't blame gamers for flocking to something that is at minimum mechanically and technically sound.
Tom: It's understandable.
Tom: But now explain to me why exactly it is that Half Life and the like is so lauded for their stories.
Phil: I think that's just ignorance, because the people who are drawn to the technical ability of the game haven't had that much exposure to literature and everything else.
Phil: So it's kind of like the guy who's only seen Shawshank Redemption.
Tom: Which is, by the way, possibly the most sentimental film ever made.
Phil: Yeah, I know.
Phil: And as soon as I said that, I'm like, God, I just insulted so many people.
Phil: But no, that's not what I meant.
Tom: Well, I did, because that film is crap.
Phil: Let's say the only film that you've seen is Happy Gilmore, right?
Phil: You're going to think that's the funniest film ever.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So that's what I'm saying.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Okay, so does that close out your impressions of Left Dead ?
Tom: I believe so.
Tom: Oh, and we've just got to say, though, by the way, Steam has taken them, what, like five years to introduce the ability to choose where you install your game to.
Tom: So perhaps it would be nice if they did actually apply some of their technical nouns to Steam.
Phil: With that, there's been another game that we've been playing, both this week.
Phil: Oh, fuck it.
Phil: Cursed Mountain.
Tom: Or Cursed Mountain.
Phil: Cursed Mountain.
Phil: This is a game for the Wii.
Phil: And this is the first Wii game I've played in years.
Tom: It was also the first Wii game I've played in a long time.
Phil: Now, how did you hear about this game and why did you buy it?
Tom: Well, I heard about it probably on the VG press, though possibly just in general, because as I'm sure you're aware, I was and still am a huge fan of the Wii.
Tom: So I basically followed every game that was released.
Tom: And while you might say that means that was pretty easy to do, there were actually quite a lot of random games released for it.
Tom: And the reason I bought it was I saw it on eBay for I think $or $including postage.
Phil: Well, what was great about the Wii was that not only did it have the first party Nintendo stuff, which I'm not a particular fan of the first party Nintendo stuff, other than like Animal Crossing and WarioWare.
Phil: But the great thing about the Wii is that its exclusives were true exclusives.
Phil: They were the most creative games of the seventh generation.
Tom: Yeah, without a doubt.
Phil: It beats everything on the PC, beats everything on beats everything on PS
Phil: Now in the last two years, we've seen some really great independent games come up on all those three consoles or these platforms.
Phil: You know, independent games like Spelunky and things like that.
Phil: That was only towards the end of this generation.
Phil: Towards the very end.
Phil: But up until that point, the Wii was the best place for unique third party games to appear.
Phil: Games that never appeared on the PC and never appeared on any other format.
Phil: And Cursed Mountain is one of those games.
Phil: It's a truly unique game.
Phil: Like Little King's Story or Dead Space Extraction.
Phil: Any of these kinds of games that really made good use of the format and the install base.
Phil: So with that, I'm going to let you talk a little bit about it because I think you'll probably organize your thoughts a bit more.
Phil: I've only played about half the game, so I'm going to let you take over here.
Tom: Yep, I played through the whole thing.
Tom: And I'll start off with the other interesting thing about it is that it was developed by different companies across Europe and I believe in a few other places possibly out of Europe.
Tom: And so apart from those companies that were officially working on it, they must have also outsourced some other people because in the exact same IGN article that says this, they also then go on to say that it was created with people in companies across unique locations enforcing different countries.
Tom: So that's a rather different way to develop a game.
Tom: I'm not sure that there have been many games developed with anywhere near that amount of developers.
Phil: If I could interject, I mean a game like Assassin's Creed has people working on it.
Phil: Cursed Mountain has people working on it.
Phil: And if I could just jump ahead, in playing this game, this is a very low-budget game.
Phil: There is only one character that appears on the screen at any time, other than the enemies that he faces.
Phil: And all of the cutscenes are still animations.
Tom: They're the comic book style with vocals on at the same time.
Phil: Yeah, basically PowerPoint presentations.
Phil: I mean, this is a game with scant production values.
Phil: So the fact that it was created by people in companies, I'm thinking there's some investment going on here, some sort of tax reward.
Tom: Yeah, somewhat bog of the mind.
Tom: If they did work on it though, given the very low-budget nature of the game, for a project of this size, you have to say outclasses people working on something like Assassin's Creed if they were actually developing it and it wasn't all just some great tax reward, of course.
Phil: You know, what this reminds me of is like, Yakuza was supposedly the most expensive video game that had been developed to that point.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And if you look at the production values of it, obviously there's a lot going on, but there's still not that much going on.
Phil: And I have to wonder how much of that money went over to the actual Yakuza.
Phil: You know what I'm saying?
Phil: And Sega's stock was like trading...
Tom: Did you say Yakuza or ?
Phil: Yakuza
Tom: Because I was thinking Yakuza looked absolutely incredible.
Phil: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: But Yakuza that's just bizarre.
Phil: Right.
Phil: And you wonder where the money went.
Phil: And then that was the one where Sega had spent so much money on Yakuza and their stock tanked to the point that the stock was trading lower than a Japanese dairy company that was caught selling spoiled milk.
Phil: Right?
Phil: And I got to wonder that maybe the money didn't end up entirely in the game.
Phil: That's just bizarre.
Phil: Because when I play Cursed Mountain, low budget comes to mind.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Not people.
Tom: Well, the other thing is that these people, they are clearly all small developers.
Tom: I mean, in the credits, you look up the art guy.
Tom: It's not actually an art guy as far as I could tell from his blog.
Tom: It's actually a guy that goes around photographing Buddhist paintings in Tibet, right?
Tom: So as far as I can see, they didn't actually get someone to do the Tibetan paintings for them, but used his photos and scanned them.
Phil: Their PR may be just a little bit too good for them here, because looking at the math, you've got companies, listeners at home, follow along, you've got companies in quote, unique locations.
Tom: So one is, at least one is in two locations.
Phil: Or one is not a company.
Phil: In different countries.
Phil: So companies in locations in companies.
Phil: When did this turn into like a math problem to try and pass to get into university?
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
Phil: Okay, Fools, you've got a video game.
Phil: It was created by people in companies across unique locations in different countries.
Tom: Yes.
Phil: How many copies did it sell?
Tom: I guess very few.
Phil: Well, let me ask you this question.
Phil: What percentage of the time did the controls work?
Tom: Well, the answer to that is I would say probably about two-thirds of the time.
Phil: You mean the responsive Wiimote controls?
Tom: Two-thirds of the time is not responsive Wiimote controls.
Tom: That is bad responsive Wiimote controls.
Phil: I know one of our guest hosts, Dave Vader, he also had trouble with the controls in this game.
Phil: I had no problem with the controls in this game.
Tom: But that's because you only played the first half.
Phil: I only played the first half.
Tom: In the second half, and here's the thing, I would have said to you that the problem with the controls is once the thing starts getting more intense, as it does in the second half of the game, you're more likely to fuck up the motions, right?
Phil: Well, it has this joust-type movement, right?
Tom: Yep.
Tom: It makes it look like you're meant to be pushing the Wii Remote up as opposed to forwards.
Phil: You're supposed to be...
Phil: Yeah, they put a sign on the screen that shows you that the Wii's supposed to be going up, but what they really mean is you're supposed to be taking both the Nunchuck and the remote and pushing it forward to the screen and then up.
Phil: So forward and up, that's what they mean, but all they show you is to elevate it.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Is that the problem that you were having?
Tom: No, no, and here's the thing, as I was about to say.
Tom: The first half of the game, it took me a while to figure that one out.
Tom: Then I did it and it was fine, okay?
Tom: So then in the second half of the game, the battles start to get more intense and you've got to do so many more of them that the margin that...
Tom: you're going to percentage-wise fail more.
Tom: Now, the thing is, at this stage where like % of the time or % of the time, it was just fucking up completely.
Tom: I thought I'd do some experimenting because the battles are so easy, you can basically just fuck around in them anyway.
Tom: So what I did was I attempted to do each control a multiple...
Tom: a multitude of different ways, at different speeds and so on and so forth.
Tom: And I could not come up with a single motion that actually worked % of the time.
Tom: So my only conclusion as to why I had no troubles in the first half of the game was not due to the intensity because the battles aren't really all that intense, unless you make them intense yourself.
Tom: You can just wander around doing whatever the hell you want.
Tom: So after the experiment I came to the conclusion that the only reason I did not come across more failed control attempts earlier on in the game was simply because there were less of them, because there's not really a huge amount of combat in the game either.
Phil: No, there's not.
Phil: And there's not a lot of anything in the game.
Phil: It's mostly just walking about.
Tom: Well, it is, basically.
Tom: But that's the thing I found so enjoyable about it is because the setting is excellent.
Tom: It's basically set in Tibet, and they include lots and lots of Tibetan and Buddhist culture to a greater degree than you would in a lot of games.
Tom: And it's not like they're running some thesis on Tibetan culture.
Tom: And it is quite exploitive, in a sense.
Tom: But it's done to the degree where it has a facade of authenticity.
Tom: So you can get into it and enjoy it, right?
Phil: No, not right.
Phil: I mean, all they have is Tibetan prayer flags, okay?
Phil: I mean, what's so uniquely Tibetan about it?
Phil: They have these Tibetan prayer flags up everywhere, as seen in Uncharted
Phil: But there's nothing beyond that, really.
Tom: There is.
Tom: They've got all the Tibetan paintings.
Tom: They've got all the Rand Buddhist mythology in it.
Tom: I don't know, that seems enough for me.
Tom: You don't think so?
Phil: Where's the yak?
Tom: The yak, that is true.
Tom: That is true.
Tom: But that's my point.
Tom: It didn't go into a huge amount of detail, but it did enough for me because the story to me comes across as basically a s pulp style story, right?
Tom: So what do they do?
Tom: They don't go into any great detail of the culture that they're exploiting, but they take enough of it to give it a...
Phil: Flavor.
Tom: Yeah, to give what is basically a western style story a unique flavor to it, right?
Phil: It's like a Chinese food restaurant.
Phil: It's enough to say, yeah, yeah, it's not hamburgers and sandwiches.
Phil: It's somewhat Chinese.
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
Phil: I mean, the game reminded me a fair amount of the PlayStation game Disaster Report, which was a similar type thing where you were a singular character walking around in an isolated environment post an earthquake.
Phil: And you have to basically survive.
Phil: So in that case, it is a survival horror game.
Phil: And this game, I give you a hard time about it, but really it does...
Phil: We should probably explain that this is a game where a mountain climber is in Nepal or somewhere, Tibet, whatever, and he's trying to find his brother, who is a famous mountain climber, who disappeared without a trace.
Tom: Both of them are famous mountain climbers.
Phil: They're both famous, and he's looking for his lost famous mountain climber brother.
Phil: Who is a complete and utter dickhead.
Phil: And there's some mystical type things about it.
Phil: So as he gets closer to where his brother disappeared, he finds these empty villages, and there's some paranormal type activity going on.
Phil: And also, all the humans he interacts with, I guess you'd say are pretty creepy.
Tom: No, I wouldn't even say they're creepy, because this is the most bizarre thing about the game to me, and I know if you agree with this.
Tom: This was possibly the least scary game I've ever played in my entire life.
Tom: I mean, there's nothing...
Phil: What about Clonoa?
Tom: I've played, no, I mean, at times in Clonoa, no, actually, because Clonoa is incredibly easy.
Tom: I was going to say, because even in a game that there's nothing scary about it whatsoever, at least you might get a fright when you've been trying so hard and then you fuck something up, right?
Phil: Like in Nintendogs when you accidentally don't feed them for four years?
Tom: Yep, exactly.
Tom: But no, Clonoa was incredibly easy.
Tom: So let's say it's one of the least scary games I've ever played in my entire life.
Tom: There is absolutely nothing creepy about the atmosphere whatsoever.
Tom: The enemies aren't scary.
Tom: There's no jump scares.
Tom: It's just...
Tom: It doesn't even feel in many ways like they were trying to make a survival horror game.
Tom: Though presumably they were.
Phil: Who knows?
Phil: I didn't see any creative...
Phil: You know, overriding creative arc on this whatsoever.
Phil: It just seemed like the cheapest possible game they could make with a remote, with some adult themes.
Tom: I don't know.
Tom: Because once again, I think this completely taps into this old style of pulp fiction.
Tom: Especially...
Tom: Go on.
Phil: I was going to say, you say it's like a s pulp fiction.
Phil: I think it's like an s choose your own adventure.
Phil: Right down to the cover, I mean, it just looks like a choose your own adventure book and it plays like it as well.
Phil: There's nothing particularly scary, offensive or anything.
Phil: It's just an interactive piece of like Lassie like fiction.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: You know, where there's no consequences, there's no, you know, tremendously great implications for what you're doing.
Phil: It's just dull.
Phil: It's a dull game.
Tom: I don't know, because once again, I don't know, I don't think it's dull.
Tom: I think they do enough with the setting to make it interesting despite the fact that you are basically literally just walking through the snow.
Tom: Well, the other thing is, it is, I will agree, it's very dull, but what I mean is the dullness itself is enjoyable.
Tom: How many games are there where you get to climb a mountain?
Phil: So like you're thinking like Shadows of the Colossus type thing where you're riding through the wilderness on a horse for a long period of time?
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: I mean it's...
Phil: I mean there's something to it.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: It's a meditative sort of, you know, experience.
Tom: You're just literally basically just strolling through the snow for ten hours, but that in itself can be so enjoyable.
Phil: When I made this argument like half an hour ago, about a half-life too, what I loved most about walking up the coastal thing was like looking at the different kinds of moss, and you know, that was meditative to me.
Tom: Yeah, and as I said on that was that your experience was perfectly fine on that.
Phil: Okay, well...
Tom: So I covered myself well.
Phil: But in this game though, the graphics were so poor.
Phil: I mean, this was like a low-res Eternal Darkness.
Phil: This was worse graphics than what the GameCube was capable of.
Tom: Yeah, it doesn't even look worse than Eternal Darkness though.
Phil: I was playing it on HDTV, but I was playing it at a -ratio, and I had tuned it so that as if it were on an SDTV, it would look bloody terrible.
Tom: Yeah, I was playing it on p widescreen, on Ato Ap television, and it looks pretty damn bad even if you're not playing in HD.
Phil: Okay, so what notable things do you have left to say about this before we move on to the next game?
Tom: Here's the other thing about the appeal is...
Tom: The other thing about horror and this style of storytelling is part of the enjoyment is that it is bad.
Tom: You don't go into something like this hoping for it to be good, and this is the case in a huge amount of horror media, right?
Tom: You go into it specifically because it is, to a great degree, very poorly done, right?
Phil: Right, yeah, I mean, that's true of motion pictures as well.
Phil: I mean, the very best horror films are pretty poorly done.
Tom: Yeah, and while I'm not...
Tom: This certainly wouldn't qualify as one of the best horror films, horror games, but it has that whole aesthetic to it of badness while also going with something unique for the medium, because I can't think of many games that use Buddhist culture and Tibetan culture, and once again, I'm not saying it does it to a particularly high degree, but it does enough to flavor it like this, and also where you basically literally get to climb a mountain from the very bottom of it to the top with a very degree of progression to it.
Tom: So to me, it did enough to be a very enjoyable experience.
Tom: And the other thing is because it was so incredibly easy and reasonably dull, it was so incredibly relaxing to play.
Tom: And at the end, due to the large amounts of battles that you ended up fighting, you had to do with a fair bit of motion control stuff, and I just do not comprehend how they managed to keep it being so relaxing, where you're basically playing Wii boxing, and yet it is incredibly relaxing.
Phil: Well, there's a particular boss battle in this game, which is bloody awful.
Phil: The one that required you basically around the time I quit, toward the end of the sixth level, where you've got to joust this guy and stab him.
Phil: I mean, that's basically where I said, okay, what am I doing with my life?
Tom: None of the bosses were memorable at all whatsoever anyway.
Phil: Nothing was memorable about this game, other than it reminded me favorably of Disaster Report for the PlayStation which is an excellent, excellent game.
Tom: Well, I would say a lot was memorable about it, but certainly wasn't a physically good game.
Phil: And I can see why people who had a Wii exclusively would have liked this game, because I mean, it's certainly divergent from much of the subject matter that was available on the Wii.
Phil: And yeah, I mean, if I only had a Wii and access to this game, I probably would have put it on the same level as an Eternal Darkness type game.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So, I mean, in talking about this, we've talked, you know, this is our horror special.
Phil: We've talked about Deadly Premonition, we've talked about Left Dead, you know, and Cursed Mountain or Cursed Mountain.
Phil: I mean, some of these games are gory.
Phil: Some of these games are suspenseful.
Phil: Some of these games are paranormal, like as in Deadly Premonition.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: What is it about horror that you think translates so well to the video game format?
Tom: Well, I would say the only thing in particular that really translates well to it would be setting, because in a video game, it's very easy to immediately get a sense of setting, because you're putting the player literally in an environment.
Tom: And apart from that, honestly, I don't really think there's much that gaming does much better in horror, because even...
Tom: I don't really think that the interactivity gives you that much more, because in film or literature, horror doesn't need to be applied to yourself, because people are empathetic, right?
Tom: So if there's something horrific happening to someone else, you can have just a strong A reaction to it, as if it is to yourself.
Tom: So I don't think interactivity provides anything, but due to the nature of games, it's very easy to provide a really good sense of uneasiness and creepiness within the setting itself.
Phil: Well, I think also that there are two things that video games are able to provoke.
Phil: One is Vertigo, right?
Phil: I mean, do I need to expand on that?
Phil: We've all experienced Vertigo in a video game, be it skydiving in Grand Theft Auto or something as simple as MX versus ATV, where you have that sense where your stomach is skipping a bit.
Phil: And then in horror games, I think it's so effective because unlike in a movie, you're in control and you're waiting for it, and yet something can happen and it completely catches you off guard.
Tom: But the same thing happens in films, does it not?
Tom: And you can very easily...
Tom: At least there's a sense of vertigo in film as well.
Tom: That's a very easy thing to do in a visual medium.
Tom: I'm not sure...
Phil: Well, that's not...
Phil: Yeah, that's not something I can recall having occurred.
Phil: I can't think of a movie of hand that did that.
Phil: Not wanting to put you on a spot here if you can come up with one.
Tom: I can't really think of a game that has given me a sense of vertigo either, so...
Phil: Well, clearly, we're floundering here.
Phil: It's a shame that we don't have someone who's studied the entire history of, you know, horror gaming with us.
Phil: Oh, hang on.
Phil: What's this?
Tom: They would have a lot for discussion.
Phil: Yeah, they would, but you know what?
Phil: It looks like someone has just called in to the gameunder.net head force.
Phil: Yeah, I know.
Phil: We set up this now.
Phil: We put it on the internet.
Phil: No one's called it before.
Rob: I've been listening live the entire time, guys.
Phil: I'm just going to answer it.
Phil: Here we go.
Phil: I'm going to pick up the phone now.
Phil: You guys are both ruining the conceit.
Phil: We're joined by Rob Lozak from Power Level Marketing.
Phil: Rob, we've talked before...
Phil: Is that like power lifting?
Rob: No, no, it's power level.
Rob: It's a really, really big construction tool.
Phil: It's taking power to a whole new level of marketing.
Phil: Rob, we've talked before, and you've been a great friend of the podcast before, but Rob is an expert in the field of horror gaming and has spoken at horror conventions such as Screamfest, which goes without saying, it's now been renamed Spooky Empire's Ultimate Horror Weekend.
Phil: I'm assuming...
Phil: I like that name.
Phil: Spooky Empire's Ultimate Horror Weekend?
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: It sounds like something that would star...
Phil: It sounds like something that would star Chevy Chase.
Tom: Yeah, but that's awesome.
Tom: I mean, imagine Chevy Chase in a horror film.
Rob: I think he's been in a couple, as a matter of fact.
Rob: Very bad ones, though, but then that kind of goes without saying for most of Chevy Chase's movies, so...
Tom: So you're just sort of status as an expert right then and there.
Phil: I'm going to tell you guys an anecdote, and I promise this will be under seconds.
Phil: The first time my parents left me at home alone in Australia, we only had two TV stations, and there was a movie on which was the Amityville Horror, right?
Phil: So I'm nine years old, and I see this movie on, it's American, and it has this station wagon in it that is a Woody, right?
Phil: And I'm like, oh, this is like National Lampoon's holiday.
Phil: This will be fun.
Phil: I'll watch this movie.
Phil: And so I'm staying up by myself at home alone at age nine watching the Amityville Horror, all on the basis of seeing this vehicle and thinking that this is going to be a comedy.
Phil: And from that point on, I did not experience any other horror media for several years, and we'll get into that later in the podcast, but basically bringing Chevy Chase back into the argument.
Phil: That's how my whole horror experience started.
Phil: So we were just talking, Rob, Tom and I, about what defines a horror game, right?
Phil: Because, I mean, it can be many different things.
Phil: It can be the subject matter, like has it got supernatural elements?
Phil: Is it just gore?
Phil: Is it shock?
Phil: Is it monster closets?
Phil: Or is it like suspense and release?
Phil: You know, the kind of things you find in Silent Hill.
Phil: So before we have you elaborate...
Tom: Is it a pornography film that you're thinking of that?
Phil: It could be.
Phil: So what's your take on that, Rob, before you launch into the history of horror video games?
Rob: Well, you know, as far as horror goes, really it's anything that goes for a reaction to get you to jump, to scare you or to disturb you.
Rob: Now, that can be achieved through, you know, a lot of different ways, whether, you know, it's like you said, suspense, gore, just a straight up good scare.
Rob: But as long as you get that same kind of adrenaline rush or feeling of dread, you know, that's, at that point, you can go ahead and say, yeah, this is horror.
Rob: It's achieved that, so, you know, I don't have too hard and fast of a definition of it, but basically, if you get that reaction, if you get that fear, the dread, you're dealing with horror in one way or another.
Tom: So basically, it horrifies you.
Rob: Yeah, that's, well, it's not even horrified sometimes, even just a simple scare, you know, that's, because, you know, going back to Chevy Chase movies, I've seen Funny Farm, Funny Farm, horrified.
Rob: And there was no element of horror in that.
Tom: Well, except for the thought of him masturbating into the garden to plant his seed.
Tom: Oh.
Rob: Oh.
Phil: So moving along, I mean, maybe you can just, how did all of this start?
Phil: I mean, in the interactive arts, how did horror gaming come about?
Rob: All right, well, you know, if you go back to the very early years of gaming, horror has been a part of it.
Rob: Now, let's go back to the Magnavox Odyssey.
Rob: That was the first home console.
Rob: And that was early s.
Rob: And one of the games that came out for it was called Haunted House.
Rob: Now, you know, this is a real crude game like everything else back then.
Rob: And Haunted House really wasn't much more than a very, I'd like to say, a very basic version of hide and seek.
Rob: The way it worked was you had, it was for two people to play.
Rob: And the first player would hide his character somewhere on a screen.
Rob: And then they would place a, it was a plastic overlay, a plastic sheet that you would put on top of the TV.
Rob: It was a clear plastic sheet, but on the middle of this sheet is a, it's like a stereotypical haunted house.
Rob: The kind of thing you would see, you know, on cheap decorations for Halloween, kind of looked like the Bates house in Psycho, if you need more of a reference point than that.
Rob: And so...
Tom: In Magnavox graphics, though?
Rob: No, no, no, this isn't in Magnavox graphics.
Rob: This is actually a piece of art on a plastic...
Rob: A plastic thing that you would, it was actually the first worthless video game accessory you could never use for another game.
Rob: And you could just stick this on the top of your TV screen, and now, you know, player one is hidden somewhere in the house.
Rob: And player two has to find him.
Rob: And there's a few windows and things you can kind of look through.
Rob: That's the game.
Rob: So, you know, people will say, is that horror?
Rob: Well, you know what?
Rob: At the same time, Pong was considered a sports game.
Rob: So if Pong can be a sports game, this could be a horror game.
Phil: Right.
Rob: And that's, yeah.
Phil: It doesn't make you wish that the three of us were like...
Tom: Alive back then?
Tom: That's not even a game.
Tom: Couldn't you feasibly just play this without a television?
Tom: Just take the sheet of paper, put it on a table with a cutout character beneath it?
Rob: Well, yes, but how could you use a controller?
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars either.
Rob: No.
Tom: You use magnets beneath the table, right?
Tom: You stick a magnet underneath the character cutout.
Tom: You see what I'm saying?
Phil: If you're going to waste Alissa's time with this, then I'll tell this useless anecdote.
Phil: And that is the only time...
Phil: You guys know I'm a game collector.
Phil: And the only time I ever saw a Magnavox Odyssey was very...
Phil: When it's in the nascent stages of collecting, I was at a swap meet or flea market, as some people call them.
Phil: I saw a Magnavox Odyssey with tons of these like plastic sheets with it, you know?
Phil: And I was like, oh, that's interesting, but I don't want to buy that today.
Phil: And I never saw one ever again in the wild.
Rob: Well, you know, just to, you know, worthless, worthless fact again, there were only Magnavox Odysseys ever.
Rob: I don't know about you, but that's how many people owned them.
Rob: So it was, yeah, there were, I mean, honestly, more people bought a Wii U in the last three months than ever owned the Magnavox Odyssey.
Phil: The Wii U sales are in line with Magnavox Odyssey sales at the five-month point.
Tom: So that's the other takeaway.
Rob: Nintendo needs us as their PR department.
Rob: In the last three months, it's sold more than the Magnavox Odyssey.
Phil: Did this game at all though provide any of the visceral response of horror, or was it just the setting?
Rob: It was just the setting.
Rob: They decided they were going to put a haunted house as the setting for the game.
Rob: That's it.
Rob: There was no visceral.
Rob: Well, I mean, I'm not going to say that.
Rob: I don't know.
Rob: I was not playing games in
Rob: There could have been people who, when they found it, they said boo and scared their friends.
Rob: I don't know.
Rob: But it's a crude horror game, but I still say it's called Haunted House good enough for me.
Tom: Yeah, so we're basing the fact that it's horror simply on the title.
Rob: Sometimes that's all it takes.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: But how do we develop from there?
Phil: Where do we go from the Magnavox on?
Rob: There's not a whole lot of innovations over the next even years, but really the next things that kind of help evolve the game start coming along around
Rob: And what you're starting to see is you have the Atari out there.
Rob: You have some PC games that are finally starting to mature a little bit.
Rob: I mean, prior to this, there are other horror games on the PC, but they're exclusively text adventures.
Rob: You know, you just, here's your story.
Rob: You type in your next, you know, what you're going to do, and then, you know, the game responds in like.
Rob: So really nothing notable, but then a few things start to change.
Rob: And again, is the next big date I like to point out.
Rob: And there's a game on the PC that is called Mystery House.
Rob: Now, Mystery House is really notable for a dozen different reasons.
Rob: It's actually one of those games that is kind of, you know, if you look at the most important games in history, Mystery House is up there, even if most people aren't real familiar with it.
Rob: The game, again, came out in and it's developed by a company called Online Systems.
Rob: Who are they?
Rob: Well, later they turn into Sierra Online, and that's Roberta Williams' company.
Rob: And if you don't know who she is, shame on you.
Rob: She's the first lady of video game development.
Rob: Her baby series that everyone knows, King's Quest.
Rob: That was, you know, the big series that she is very well known for.
Rob: But Mystery House was the first adventure game she made.
Rob: And another thing that makes it really important is that it was one of the first adventure games to actually use graphics.
Rob: Prior to that, almost everything is just text based.
Rob: And she decided, well, you know what?
Rob: These adventure games are fun, but they would be a lot better if people just put graphics in them.
Rob: And so they made a game with graphics.
Rob: And it got a huge response.
Rob: This game, brace yourselves, everyone, sold over copies.
Phil: I think I've sold over copies.
Phil: And I don't even have a game.
Rob: We laugh about it, but this is like a Call of Duty number in on PC.
Rob: This is insane.
Tom: She was a billionaire after this.
Phil: And this is a game that has not even vector graphics.
Phil: This is basically line drawings that you would have made with a, not a TRS-but maybe something slightly ahead of that.
Phil: I mean, from our perspective today, these are very basic games, but they were evocative.
Phil: And you can tell from games like The Walking Dead, it doesn't have to be that technologically advanced.
Phil: And actually, the two games have a lot in common, in that they were basically interactive -invention type games with just a little bit of visual flash.
Phil: And for it to sell over copies back then, you've got to wonder, you know, in I mean, piracy was absolutely rampant, way more than it is today.
Rob: No, you just copied discs and gave them to your friends.
Phil: And it wasn't even a...
Phil: You didn't even think it was piracy.
Phil: It wasn't even a thought.
Phil: It was just like, oh, here, I have this game.
Phil: You can have it too.
Rob: It was equivalent of taking the song off the radio when you just recorded it, you know?
Rob: No harm, no foul.
Rob: It was a simple idea.
Rob: Exactly.
Rob: Now, one other little kind of fun note on this is the game that she made, this Mystery House, this is actually based on an Agatha Christie story called And Then There Were None.
Rob: years later, an Agatha Christie game called And Then There Were None showed up on the Wii.
Rob: Same story.
Rob: I mean, that story actually became very iconic in horror, suspense movies, and it got used over and over and over.
Rob: In fact, Roberta Williams made another game years later called The Colonel's Bequest in about
Rob: And again, it was the same, almost same premise.
Rob: It was just, you know, a much more full, rich game because, you know, another years of improvements had been made to PC games at the time.
Rob: So another...
Phil: And that's the story of gaming anyway, right?
Phil: I mean, everything is...
Tom: Ripping off Agatha Christie.
Tom: Right.
Phil: I mean, when I was playing Gears of War, I'm like, come on, not again.
Tom: It was the Lotus that did it.
Phil: Where do we go from there?
Tom: I've still got a question here, so going by the screenshot, this is effectively a text adventure just with graphics, right?
Phil: Mm-hmm.
Tom: Correct.
Tom: So far, notice a bit of a pattern.
Tom: You basically just dismissed a long history of horror text adventure games, right?
Tom: And you then picked immediately Mystery House, following directly from Haunted House.
Tom: Can you see the connection?
Rob: House is very scary back in the day.
Phil: Homes are scary.
Phil: They're full of electricity and water and cat doors.
Phil: I mean...
Rob: Bits of sharp glass and you drop something.
Tom: I don't know why we don't live outside.
Tom: It will probably be safer.
Rob: Okay, well, that ends up being Mystery House, the mystery adventure game, that ends up being one of the staples for horror for a long time.
Rob: For the next to years, that's actually very much a game that gets or a type of game that is used over and over in the horror field.
Rob: The next one that you'll start to see a lot of horror games show up, the next kind of genre is the shooter.
Rob: A lot of the idea of, okay, you're being attacked by something without a gun and start shooting it, that ends up being reused over and over in games like Area
Rob: The first big note of this though is a really god-awful game called Chiller.
Rob: And Chiller showed up in
Rob: And I'm pretty sure the conversation for making the game went something like this.
Rob: Like, have you seen these light gun games?
Rob: I want one, but I don't want it to be really hard.
Rob: In fact, don't let anything move.
Rob: Just give me a still screen and let me just shoot.
Rob: I can't have anything move though because I won't be able to hit it.
Rob: And let's make it really gruesome and, you know, let's be as controversial as we can.
Rob: And again, don't let anything move.
Rob: Make it really easy for me because I suck at these games.
Rob: And thus, Chiller is born.
Rob: And it's a really awful shooter.
Rob: Basically, it's just a bunch of different scenes of people being tortured.
Rob: They're in Iron Maidens, they're locked up in chains, and you just shoot the screen over about a two-minute length of time.
Tom: Are you shooting the people that are being tortured?
Rob: Yes.
Rob: Yes, you are.
Tom: This is adding insult to injury.
Rob: It really is.
Rob: And at one point, there's a baby stroller that shows up, and you can shoot the baby if you want.
Rob: The game was pretty foul on every level, despite how old it was.
Tom: I've actually got an idea here, what they should have done if they wanted to be really controversial.
Tom: You're shooting people that are being tortured, rename it Mercy Killing, and make it about euthanasia.
Phil: Weren't they the guys that made Death Race or Carmageddon or whatever?
Phil: Now, did this actually use a light gun, or were you using a controller to move around?
Rob: The arcade edition did actually have a light gun in some versions of it.
Rob: When it ends up happening with this game is that it was considered really foul at the time.
Rob: So, it wasn't allowed in arcades in the US, in Europe, in Australia.
Rob: The only place it really showed up were like in third world countries, and that's not a joke.
Rob: And this game was actually very popular in those third world countries.
Tom: Because third world countries are evil.
Rob: I think that's understood.
Phil: So, this was kind of like Operation Wolf, which is basically where you're shooting the guys on the screen.
Phil: It's like Duck Hunt or anything else.
Rob: Operation Wolf actually had the decency to move the screen very slowly, if I recall.
Rob: This was just static, man.
Rob: Just didn't move.
Rob: Now, funnily enough, or humorously enough, this game does show up on the Nintendo a couple years, or the NES a couple years later.
Rob: It's an unlicensed game, one of those games that did not have the Nintendo seal of approval.
Phil: Like Bible Adventures.
Rob: Like Bible Adventures, like Captain Comic.
Rob: There were several notable games that are just all awful.
Rob: They made a few changes to get it accepted, just by American standards, and they started saying, no, no, these people are actually demons.
Rob: They're actually demons who are taking on human form.
Rob: So if you look at the instruction manual, that's what it says.
Phil: You know, we laugh at that, but then when you look at most first person shooters, most first person shooters in the current generation, they'll either cover the faces of the people who are fighting you with bandanas, I mean they'll make them monsters or aliens or, you know what I'm saying?
Phil: I mean, there is this effort.
Phil: Or Arabs.
Phil: Or Arabs.
Phil: I mean, there is this separation.
Phil: There is this separation, you know, that you're not actually committing violence against people like the people you know at Target.
Phil: Do you think we'll ever get to that point, or do you think that's just too much for people to handle?
Rob: I think people could handle it just fine, but we have too many, you know, the ESRB in America.
Rob: They don't let anything really gruesome get through, and we'll talk about that later, because there was a very notable game on the Wii in the couple of early years of the Wii that was exactly what you were saying.
Rob: It was a very visceral game, so much so that it was banned virtually everywhere.
Rob: It's actually, I'd say, one of the most controversial games of the last ten years.
Rob: And, you know, I've played through it since.
Rob: I don't think it was a great game.
Rob: It wasn't terrible, but even with the changes, even if it were more gruesome than it was, I don't think it would have been so bad that people couldn't have handled it.
Rob: But violence in video games that's that visceral still bothers enough people that, you know, retailers won't sell it.
Rob: So that's what gamers, or what developers just have.
Rob: They've kind of come to grips with it.
Rob: They've come to terms with it.
Rob: You know, you make a game that graphic, you're going to have to find your own way to distribute it, which is a possibility now.
Rob: It's a lot easier to distribute a game now, even than it was five years ago.
Tom: And then there's Soldier of Fortune.
Rob: Are we referring to Soldier of Fortune magazine as a way to sell games?
Tom: No, The Game, The Game.
Tom: He was asking about gore, right?
Tom: And he moved into it from first person shooter.
Tom: So the first thing that came to mind for me was not a horror game, but Soldier of Fortune.
Phil: I'm not familiar with this.
Phil: I'm assuming Rob isn't either.
Tom: Are you serious?
Tom: You've never heard of Soldier of Fortune?
Phil: Only the magazine of which I subscribe.
Tom: It was a huge controversy when it came out.
Rob: Truth be told, when I read my issues of Soldier of Fortune, I'm only there to hire mercenaries.
Tom: I might have to hire one to kill the both of you for not knowing about Soldier of Fortune.
Phil: So was it extremely violent?
Tom: They basically had a whole gameplay system based around the gore.
Tom: So you would be shooting off the arms of people to stop them shooting you and that sort of thing.
Rob: Where did this game come out?
Rob: What did it come out on?
Tom: It came out on PC.
Tom: I'm not sure if it was ported to consoles.
Tom: I think it was eventually.
Tom: It came out in and it was a sequel that was ported to Xbox and the like.
Tom: And it was developed, by the way, by Raven Software.
Tom: So it had a good pedigree kind of.
Tom: Yeah, and was actually quite a good game.
Phil: But I mean, it really does come down to, maybe we can just divert before we go into the -bit era, is that in looking at the visuals, or rather in terms of gore, what part does gore play?
Phil: Can it get to a point where it's just too much?
Phil: And I'm thinking of games like the Splatterhouse Revival that came out just a couple of years ago for the HD systems.
Rob: Well, gore is the easiest thing to emulate.
Rob: It's not necessarily the scariest thing.
Phil: Though.
Phil: It's kind of like Dead or Alive extreme volleyball, right?
Rob: Sure.
Phil: It's easy to depict sexually attractive women in bikinis, but that doesn't make it sexy.
Tom: So what you're saying is that the characters in Dead or Alive extreme volleyball are sexually attractive to you?
Phil: No, what I'm saying is you can take all the characteristics of what people typically think are sexually interesting, but it's not necessarily erotic, okay?
Phil: So I have Dead or Alive extreme volleyball.
Phil: It doesn't matter how I got it, but I have it from a guy.
Tom: You got it in some back alley somewhere.
Phil: And after I wiped it off, I played it.
Phil: All Rumble Roses, for example.
Phil: And I play these games because I'm like, okay, this is going to be pretty cool.
Phil: I like playing video games.
Phil: I like women.
Phil: I like being aroused, so let's see what this is about.
Phil: But you're playing it and you're like, actually, this isn't very erotic, actually.
Phil: I think this is something that horror games deal with and that there are things that you can put up on the screen and it's not necessarily going to be scary.
Phil: It's not necessarily going to be horrifying.
Phil: It's not even going to gross you out.
Phil: Sometimes it's just a spectacle of the thing.
Tom: Well, I think the first thing you've got to do is separate gore from realism because they're not the same thing.
Tom: And the vast majority of the depictions of gore in video games are incredibly unrealistic.
Tom: So, yeah, if a game was to depict gore realistically, then it could easily be too much for people to take.
Tom: But the purpose of depicting gore is for entertainment.
Tom: And not many people go to Live Leak regularly to be entertained, right?
Tom: There's, of course, a morbid curiosity with going to places like that.
Tom: But that's not the main motivation.
Tom: Entertainment is not the motivation.
Rob: The -bit era, let's talk about that as we progress through our journey of the history of horror video games.
Rob: Now, one of the things that, as I've said before, there were already two kind of areas where you see a lot of horror games pop up, and that's the mystery adventure genre, shooting games.
Rob: And then as the -bit era really comes into play, we start seeing two more areas where they've always been around, but they really start to come to prominence.
Rob: The first is licensed games, especially once the NES hits.
Rob: And now you start seeing every horror movie that was ever around is getting its own video game.
Rob: Before all this, there actually was a John Carpenter's Halloween game on the Atari but that was about it.
Rob: When the NES shows up, we get a Friday the th.
Rob: There is a Nightmare on Elm Street, the classic Jaws that everyone loves.
Rob: Fester's Quest, are we all fans of Fester's Quest?
Phil: Yes.
Rob: Fantastic game.
Rob: That ends up being a really big area for horror games.
Rob: They just take those classic horror stories and put them onto a cartridge.
Rob: Most of the time, there is nothing scary about them.
Rob: It's just the name.
Rob: There wasn't anything real graphic in these games either, because they are primarily aimed at a younger audience.
Rob: But again, they are using the horror license.
Tom: Oh, the children who love Friday the th.
Rob: There is plenty of them.
Rob: Yeah.
Phil: Well, I actually played Nightmare on Elm Street.
Phil: Before this game was released, it was actually promoted that you would play as Freddy Krueger.
Phil: When the game came out, it was actually just a side-scrolling platformer, where you collect the bones of Freddy Krueger that you deliver to a furnace at the end of the game.
Phil: So the boss battles interspersed are Freddy's bones, or his hand, or his claw, or whatever.
Phil: It's actually kind of cool.
Phil: So you're fighting these things.
Phil: Yeah, but as you're going through the level, the whole conceit of Nightmare on Elm Street is that when you sleep, that's when Freddy Krueger can attack you.
Phil: And so as you go through the levels, if you're taking too long, your sleep meter goes down.
Phil: So you have to speed through the levels, and then you fight the bones of Freddy Krueger.
Phil: It's actually a pretty hard game, but I mean, again, I wonder why this franchise hasn't lived on, really.
Phil: I don't know why Nightmare on Elm Street doesn't have currency beyond the s, really.
Phil: But yeah, not all of these licensed games are terrible.
Phil: Yeah.
Rob: Are you talking about the movie or the...
Rob: Are you talking about the movie now or the game licensed for Friday Night Live?
Phil: No, the movie, the movie.
Phil: The game is not worthy of any sort of sequel whatsoever.
Phil: But Freddy Krueger as a horror character, I think is wonderful.
Phil: And I just don't understand why he was left back there.
Rob: He wasn't left.
Rob: They did a remake about a year and a half ago.
Phil: Really?
Rob: They rebooted the whole thing.
Rob: And Freddy, he's not as funny anymore.
Rob: He actually looks like a much more realistic burn victim now where he's kind of like a little...
Rob: No, it came out about two years ago and it was a big controversy because a lot of people didn't like that Robert Englund wasn't going to be Freddy anymore.
Rob: And they ended up actually right around the same time because it's a Warner Brothers movie.
Rob: They actually put Freddy as a downloadable character in Mortal Kombat
Phil: Oh, God.
Phil: That's terrible.
Phil: It's a good...
Phil: Robert Englund is genius.
Phil: He lives in Laguna Beach, which is close to where I used to live.
Phil: I mean, why not have him back?
Phil: Because with all that makeup and everything, you may as well have the guy in the...
Phil: in the Roger suit, you know?
Rob: I've actually met him at horror conventions a couple of times.
Rob: Really?
Rob: No, no, no.
Rob: He's actually one of the really nicest guys you'll meet.
Rob: That's the funny thing.
Rob: I mean, some of these...
Rob: Some of the celebs that show up at these things are...
Rob: They're very bitter.
Rob: They do not want to be there, but they have no money.
Rob: So they have a self-autographed picture for $or $like the woman who plays Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring.
Rob: From the old TV show, she's just...
Rob: She's a person that does not want to be there.
Rob: She's very unhappy.
Rob: But Robert Englund is just absolutely a class act.
Rob: He's really funny.
Rob: He'll always...
Rob: You know, if you just pass him in the hall, he'll even stop and talk with you for a few minutes.
Rob: And he's basically of the opinion that, you know what?
Rob: It's just time to move on.
Rob: I like to do other things as well.
Rob: He could have probably done Nightmare on Elm Street had he wanted to.
Rob: But he gave his blessing, and he's just happy doing a film here and there and enjoying semi-retirement.
Phil: Wow, that's a great story.
Rob: The last little bit is again the other big area, which is probably what ends up being the dominant horror category for a while, or just simple games, whether it's not simple games, but adventure and action games that just take classic horror monsters and put them in the roles of the villains.
Rob: The most primary example of that you can think of, Castlevania.
Rob: Castlevania was even kind of meant to even look like a movie.
Rob: There were always film credits kind of going at the end of the movie, made it look like the movie was on a film, or the game was on a film reel at times.
Rob: And so in Castlevania, who are you fighting?
Rob: Frankenstein, Dracula, classic movie monsters.
Rob: There was Ghosts and Goblins, Ghouls and Ghosts, whatever you want to call that franchise, where you're fighting Satan, Lucifer, a bunch of different devils throughout the game.
Rob: One of my personal favorites was Monster Party, just a classic, god, it was such a fun game.
Rob: They took monsters of every kind you could think of.
Rob: Some were classic, some were completely original ideas.
Rob: It was one of the goofiest games out there, but Monster Party definitely a game people need to check out.
Tom: Is it anything like Mario Party?
Rob: Not a thing.
Rob: This is just a straight action game, platformer action where you're just walking along, you've got a baseball bat, you occasionally turn into another monster, and you just kill everything on the screen.
Rob: Simple, beautiful, but really, really goofy sense of humor throughout the game.
Rob: So fun, fun stuff.
Rob: But for the most part, as far as all these -bit games go, they're not overly memorable.
Rob: They're good games, don't get me wrong, but as far as actual memorable for being horror, for being scary, none of them really did it.
Rob: There was really nothing that stands out except for one game.
Rob: And it never made it to America.
Rob: It was just a Japanese game on the Famicom, and it was called Sweet Home.
Rob: Sweet Home was a horror movie in Japan.
Rob: And so technically, this is actually a licensed game, but it was done, I believe, by Capcom.
Rob: And Capcom always took really good care of their licensed properties for whatever reason, why they felt the need to buck the trend of just making a dollar.
Rob: They always made really good games.
Rob: And so they took this game, the movie Sweet Home, and they made a horror turn-based RPG.
Rob: Lots of innovation in this game.
Rob: Characters, if they would die, they would actually die forever in the game.
Rob: It wasn't, you know, bring someone back to life.
Rob: Once you lost a party member, they were gone.
Rob: And this game is very, very special because this ends up being the, they call this the grandfather of survival horror.
Rob: This game is actually the inspiration for Resident Evil, which probably goes on to be the most famous horror game of all time.
Rob: Again, only available in Japan, but there was a fan-translated rom out there for anyone who wants to use an emulator.
Tom: Who wants to pirate the game and destroy the industry.
Rob: Yeah, that's true, but you know what, if you can't get, if until Capcom ponies up and translates this -year-old NES game or Famicom game, it's, but it's actually, it's very good game and actually does get very graphic, particularly when people die.
Rob: It's as visceral as you can get on an -bit cartridge.
Rob: And it's...
Phil: So, we've gone from Haunted House in to Mystery House to...
Phil: Sweet Home.
Phil: Sweet Home.
Phil: How did horror games evolve beyond this in the -bit era?
Tom: How did they evolve beyond the home setting?
Phil: Yes.
Rob: Well, we honestly, we stay at home.
Rob: We stay at the house.
Rob: We go to Splatter House.
Rob: Oh, Splatter House.
Rob: We go to Splatter House.
Rob: That's where we have...
Tom: Amazing.
Rob: In the -bit era, it really is just more of what I had mentioned earlier.
Rob: You know, you got more Castlevania games.
Rob: You get more monster games, more licensed games.
Rob: Nothing is real notable.
Rob: The only big game changer in this time is Splatter House, which basically, you know, puts you in the role of a Jason horror villain type character who you just walk around and beat things up.
Rob: It wasn't a great game, although by the time Splatter House came out, that actually was pretty good.
Rob: That one was worth playing.
Rob: The early ones, like the original Splatter House, was only available on the TurboGrafx-and then Sega got control of it and started putting it on the Genesis.
Rob: So that's where you could play Splatter House and
Rob: And Splatter House, again, was good.
Rob: Everything else, pretty forgettable, I thought.
Phil: Absolutely.
Phil: I mean, but just to take us back in time, I remember playing Splatter House on the TurboGrafx-when it came out.
Phil: There was a kid in the neighborhood who was rich, and he got every console there was.
Phil: And there were two games that we played on the TurboGrafx, and one of them was Splatter House.
Phil: And at the time, it was basically pornographic.
Phil: And again, recalling the true definition of pornography, it's just basically something that creates a purient interest.
Phil: This was something that for us was just like, oh my god, I can't believe how graphically violent this game is.
Phil: I played it this week in preparation for this interview on the Wii Virtual Console, and it's not even notable.
Phil: I mean, like, when I played it again, I was like, this is nothing.
Phil: I mean, this is not offensive on any level.
Phil: This doesn't evoke anything in me.
Phil: This is just like playing Mario.
Rob: Let's leave Splatterhouse behind, and we're going to, honest to god, this is really where horror comes into its own as far as a really important part of the gaming landscape.
Rob: And in the early s, we see a change in media, and that changes everything.
Rob: The CD-ROM, we get that on the PC, and then later that will go on to the PlayStation, Saturn, or however Sega wanted to put it on as their addition to the Genesis.
Rob: But once CD-ROM comes out, well, now we can really start to...
Rob: They can control the pacing of the game better.
Rob: The graphics are better, and so what happens is you're now actually getting genuine scares.
Rob: It's not just going for the visceral, or just showing gore or something like that.
Rob: They're actually going for legitimate scares now.
Rob: And so on the PC front, you start seeing some really great horror games.
Rob: Seventh Guest, Alone in the Dark, Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Father.
Rob: One of the weirder, more disturbing games was one called I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which, god damn, that was really one of the more disturbing games of the time.
Tom: Unlike the short story it was based on, by the way.
Rob: Was the short story bad?
Rob: Yeah.
Rob: Okay, well, they corrected it.
Rob: Actually, I know the author.
Rob: I can't remember the name of the author at the time, but he actually was...
Rob: Allison.
Rob: Was involved somewhat in the development of the game, and they got it right, man, because the ending of that game was just...
Rob: It just wanted to make you kill your will to live.
Rob: It was bad.
Rob: It was, yeah, I don't even like talking about it, truth be told.
Rob: It really bothered me.
Tom: Was this the good ending or...
Phil: Because there were multiple endings.
Rob: Yes, this was the good ending.
Rob: And basically what it is is...
Rob: Hell, I don't think...
Rob: If anyone wants to play it, you know, spoiler alerts for I have no mouth and I must scream.
Rob: But the gist of the story is there is a computer that has basically wiped out the face of humanity and there's like five survivors left that the computer controls.
Rob: And they experience different things in their lives to see how they may have made different decisions.
Rob: And long story short is by the end, they all start killing each other.
Rob: One is left and the computer doesn't want to be alone, so it takes the final character and turns it into a mouthless blob.
Rob: And it's just really gross looking and it bothers me to this day.
Tom: And that ending, by the way, was unavailable in Germany.
Rob: Well, I'm sure the Germans are very, very sad.
Tom: Yeah.
Rob: But...
Tom: Or relieved.
Rob: Perhaps.
Rob: So there were tons of these really good games on the PC because now we have this great new media format.
Rob: Going back to Roberta Williams, she actually came out with a game that a lot of people say was really...
Rob: This era was the best horror game and it was called Phantasmagoria.
Rob: Came out in
Rob: And again, just kind of like Mystery House before, this was a really innovative game.
Rob: It was one of the first games to use a live person avatar.
Rob: There was a lot of video clips.
Rob: This had a huge budget.
Rob: And they did a lot of video to do the horror scenes.
Rob: And a lot of it really, by our standards today, is extremely goofy.
Rob: A lot of silent deaths.
Rob: And if you watch them, one guy, he's showing how he killed his wives earlier on.
Rob: He basically chokes one wife to death by just sticking a funnel in her mouth and starts beating her and grinds it until she chokes to death.
Rob: Because, you know, she thinks she eats too much.
Rob: And a lot of stuff like that.
Rob: But again, a real, I mean, also a real controversial game.
Rob: There was kind of an implied rape scene.
Rob: It didn't get real graphic, but just the fact that rape was being shown in a game was something really, really heavy for
Tom: That's still a really heavy FNAB, by the way.
Rob: It absolutely is.
Rob: There's no doubt about that.
Rob: And as a result, this game was not carried by a lot of stores in America.
Rob: I know it was banned in Australia.
Rob: Not uncommon for a lot of these games.
Rob: It got a teen-plus rating in Germany, which I believe at the time was at least the highest rating they could give a game, kind of like the AEO today.
Rob: And despite all that, it still ends up being one of the top-selling PC games of that year.
Rob: I mean, it just did very, very well.
Rob: So this was a really big, really important game.
Rob: And again, honestly, I don't think it holds up so well today, but at the time, it was something else.
Tom: Did it sell over copies?
Rob: This time, I think it actually sold over a million.
Tom: Amazing.
Tom: So just a small change in the size of the industry.
Rob: Just a little, just a little.
Rob: I guess it's a -year period.
Rob: So becomes the record and then a million later.
Rob: So good for them.
Rob: I guess the other game from this era that I would mention is not really worth mentioning for a good reason.
Rob: It's a terrible game.
Rob: In fact, it's really one of the worst games of all time.
Rob: You'll see it show up on worst game lists, but it's so comically bad, I have to mention it.
Rob: It came out for the Sega CD.
Rob: It was later put onto the PC and it was called Night Trap.
Rob: Does anyone remember Night Trap whatsoever?
Phil: Absolutely.
Phil: I love this game.
Phil: Everyone remembers Night Trap.
Phil: Now, keeping in mind that I'm a collector, I bought this game at a hefty premium.
Phil: This is a great game.
Phil: It basically took the whole multimedia back.
Phil: It had these little videos that you could watch, and you were playing the role of someone who could tap into these security cameras.
Phil: You could watch what was going on in each room by basically clicking on it and then watching a horribly pixelated video of what was going on.
Phil: I think that the only reason this game was named in a congressional hearing on violent games along with Mortal Kombat and Doom was the fact that it had Dana Plato in it, and she was on this popular sitcom, what was it called?
Phil: Different Strokes.
Rob: Fullman's Big Show from the early s.
Phil: Yeah, and so I think that's the only reason why it was brought up.
Phil: It doesn't contain any sexually or violent provocative media whatsoever.
Rob: It doesn't.
Rob: It was portrayed a little bit differently though.
Rob: I think it was, and part of this was Sega's own fault.
Rob: I think they really did portray it in a way that made it look like you were watching girls at a slumber party.
Rob: And without explaining it...
Phil: You were, but they were wearing the kind of negligee that Lucille Ball would wear.
Phil: I mean, you were, basically you were looking in on a slumber party for college-age girls, and there was some sort of guy who was basically conducting a home invasion.
Phil: Okay, this does sound bad actually.
Phil: But in concept, it sounds horrible, which is why Congress does this stuff, right?
Phil: Because it's basically the summaries of what the game's about.
Phil: But in terms of its actual content, it was less than innocent.
Phil: I mean, in the last four hours, I have read more offensive posts on thevgpress.com.
Tom: Well, I have posted in the last hours, so...
Phil: This game was not violent.
Phil: I mean, the cover was great in terms of it being a horror game.
Phil: And yes, the conceit is that there is a home invader who is looking in on these girls having a slumber party.
Phil: But it wasn't very provocative in any sense, so...
Rob: Let down on all accounts in that regard.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And it wasn't a terrible game.
Phil: I mean, in terms of what the creator was trying to achieve...
Rob: It was a nice try, I'll give it that.
Rob: And maybe it's one of those things where if I was able to play it in when it came out, I might feel a little bit better about it.
Rob: It was a very difficult game to play, even just a few years later, though.
Rob: The technology just, you know, advanced very quickly after this game.
Tom: I think, Northfield, this was also criticized for being sexist, and is a bit of misogynist, so it just defends any game that is called sexist.
Phil: This game was not sexist at all.
Phil: In fact, it was empowering to women more than anything.
Phil: But anyway, that's not the topic of this particular segment.
Phil: So what happened after?
Rob: Well, after this, now we have our new media format, and now the media format goes to the home console with the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation.
Rob: And that's where everything starts to just blow up, especially once we get Resident Evil in
Rob: Now Resident Evil just ends up being the horror game.
Rob: It gives us the whole survival horror genre, and it's immensely popular.
Rob: I mean, it really hits a nerve with everyone who plays it.
Rob: Over time, it sold over million copies.
Rob: It's launched movies, books, bad movies, and then plenty of spin-off games.
Rob: I mean, the series, we're up to Resident Evil and I can't even, probably at least, just as many side games.
Rob: And it's just become one of the most popular game properties that's around these days.
Rob: And the first game, it really got a hold of people.
Rob: You're fighting zombies.
Rob: It really wasn't much like it before.
Rob: I mean, I'll be honest, I was not a fan, but I know I'm probably in the minority on that one.
Rob: I mean, judging by how freakishly popular this was.
Rob: This really was one of the defining games of this era.
Rob: I mean, it was on the Saturn, which I guess a few people played.
Rob: But on PlayStation, it found its home, and it found a huge audience.
Rob: And it's, I think, really one of the reasons how gaming even broke into the adult sector.
Rob: It started making it a little bit more acceptable for people over the age of to be playing video games.
Phil: No, absolutely, absolutely.
Phil: And you guys are succeeding in making me look and sound really old, because I have the Saturn version of Resident Evil.
Phil: I also was not a fan until I played Resident Evil on the GameCube and Wii.
Phil: They're completely different games.
Phil: Oh, they are, they are, absolutely.
Phil: But in playing this, I bought the Saturn version years after its release.
Phil: I didn't buy this at the time.
Phil: But, I mean, there is one part of that game with that part where the dog jumps through the window.
Phil: You know, you're walking through a hall, and then all of a sudden this zombie dog jumps through a window.
Phil: To me, that was like we've hit a new age here.
Rob: Yeah, very much so.
Rob: This gave you the jolt, you're like, oh my god, open a new room, something's going to get you.
Rob: Absolutely.
Rob: This is the...
Rob: This is that game.
Tom: The thing is, I think the dog jumping through the window was the only time that they really pulled it off, because I'm a lot younger than the both of you, right?
Tom: So I would have been, let's say, to probably more like or or something when I played this.
Tom: The only time I jumped was during that dog scene.
Tom: So I think what it did successfully was, it used just the fear of what might be around the corners to create the tension, but it didn't actually pull off any jump scares most of the time.
Phil: Well, the very fact that you recall that moment means that it was successful.
Phil: I mean, if this game produced a single moment, it is successful, because you can play different Saturn games, trust me, and not have any reaction to them other than, what am I doing with my life?
Phil: But the fact that you can put in a Saturn game and play it and have a reaction, like as visceral as you would have with an HD system, and Monster Closets as a result have come up to the point where you're playing...
Phil: I was playing Dead Space the other.
Phil: Day, and you go into a men's room, and you're opening store doors, and just the act of doing that, you're like, okay, here it comes, right?
Phil: You're just waiting.
Phil: As you open store door, okay, well, nothing happened.
Phil: Well, we'll open the next store door.
Phil: Well, nothing happened.
Phil: And you end up opening all of them and nothing happens, but that is a wonderful point of design because we're all expecting that at some point we're going to open that store door and that zombie dog or his grandson is going to jump out at us.
Tom: The other interesting thing about Resident Evil is that I didn't know that you mentioned is that it was inspired by Sweet Home, right?
Tom: Because the horror style in Resident Evil is completely American.
Tom: So I just thought that was kind of interesting.
Phil: Rob, how does that...
Phil: No, actually, I was interested in that.
Phil: Rob, how does Sweet Home influence Resident Evil?
Phil: I mean, it was a Japanese game, right?
Rob: Yeah, Japanese game, Japanese developers.
Rob: The thought was, you know, he wanted to make a game that takes place entirely in a house.
Rob: That's where the initial idea comes from.
Rob: And just, you know, I guess, just staying alive.
Rob: They never...
Rob: I mean, I've read a lot of documentation on it, and he constantly references Sweet Home, or they've constantly referenced Sweet Home as the...
Rob: This is the game, this is the grandfather of survival horror, and so there are elements of that game in there.
Rob: I haven't spent tons of time with it, but I'm sure there are plenty of little bits here and there that they picked up in Sweet Home that went on to, you know, influence the game.
Rob: Like I said, I think mainly just being lost in the haunted house and trying to stay alive while figuring out what's going on.
Phil: It's probably a lot like the relationship between the original, you know, Castle Wolfenstein, which was the D tech...
Phil: I mean, you know, the text game, which had very simple graphics, and Wolfenstein D.
Phil: And knowing Japanese developers, I bet that Resident Evil is absolutely pumped full of references from Sweet Home.
Phil: That's really interesting.
Rob: All right, well, you know, if we're moving on, you know, RE does...
Tom: No, before we move on, we've just got to say...
Tom: We've got to say, by the way, it sold million copies just to keep this sales obsession going.
Phil: Yeah, well, actually, before you move on, Tom, do you have anything to say about Killzone?
Tom: No, but I could say something about Yakuza.
Rob: I was going to ask, yeah, please.
Phil: Actually, there is a Yakuza game that does have survival horror.
Tom: And I believe it also...
Tom: It's not just survival horror, it's survival horror featuring a lot of zombies.
Phil: Yeah, because of Dead Souls, but out of respect for our beloved guest who has taken time out of his day to join us today, we're going to let him move on.
Phil: So, from Resident Evil on the set and PlayStation in where did we go from there?
Rob: Well, we start seeing a ton more horror show up on those consoles at the time, and so we start seeing the Silent Hill series takes off and does very well.
Rob: We get two Parasite Eve games from Square.
Rob: Capcom tries to strike gold again with Dino Crisis.
Rob: This time, they don't promote it as survival horror, they call it panic horror.
Rob: Panic horror did not take off, which is a shame because I thought Dino Crisis was a great game, but that was what they tried to do to describe it.
Rob: Again, not as catchy as survival horror, I guess.
Tom: That was more of an action game as well.
Rob: Yeah, it was.
Tom: So it's basically that the baby steps towards Resident Evil
Rob: Very likely, very likely.
Rob: And then on the PC front we see American McGee's Alice, which goes on to be just a very twisted telling of the Alice in Wonderland story, and not a half bad game either.
Phil: Well, in this era, I mean, we have games like Siren, Silent Hill, Manhunt and Echo Night, The Thing, The Suffering.
Phil: I mean, this really was a great era because this was an era in which, unlike today, your middle tier developers actually stood a chance of producing games and making money at them.
Phil: So it was really a great era, I think, for horror games.
Rob: Yeah, no, that whole -year period was fantastic because if your game sold half a million copies, which is what most horror games did.
Rob: Aside from the really big series, if you could do to half a million copies, you had a very, very successful game.
Rob: And then we kind of, for a while, saw the beginning of the end because when the PlayStation and that era comes out, the development costs for every developer just skyrocketed.
Phil: But yeah, back in the PlayStation
Rob: Yeah, no, Girl Lord of the Flies, and it's messed up.
Rob: It's not.
Rob: I think it's interesting.
Rob: I never could finish it.
Rob: I didn't think it was that good, but I mean, I can appreciate why people do like it so much.
Rob: I mean, I really like the concept behind it and just the way they approach the, you know, just kind of, you know, making it...
Rob: There's a whole psychological horror theory, and I think it's really cool.
Rob: Again, I didn't think it played real well, but, you know, it's just me.
Phil: That's exactly right.
Phil: I mean, the psychological horror aspect of it is something that you see in movies as well.
Phil: Like, but the game, yeah, the game itself is not great, but it's one of those things where in a video game, like if you're playing in Grand Theft Auto and you jump off a very high building, you know, you have this sense of your stomach moving, right?
Phil: And it's something that I wonder about, like with horror games, what is it about them that can evoke fear?
Phil: That, you know, like games can't evoke humor, right?
Phil: Very, very few games can evoke a chuckle.
Phil: Games can't evoke love.
Phil: Games can't evoke many of the very basic things that humans experience.
Phil: What is it about video games that is able, even in the lowest technological level, like Resident Evil on the Saturn, to get a response?
Rob: I go back to two things.
Rob: In gaming, the one thing that, particularly in later years, the one thing that they can always control, if they want, is the pacing and the timing.
Rob: I mean, you can, you know, that dog that's hiding in Resident Evil, they know exactly where the player is going to be when he's going to open the door or when he's near the door.
Rob: They can control that timing and they can lull you into a, you know, not being prepared for it.
Rob: They can completely just, you know, you're not paying attention and then bam, it hits you.
Rob: And I think that's one of the things I liked about Resident Evil so much.
Rob: I thought the pacing in that game is perfect.
Rob: And I know people, they claim that the, it's not as scary as some of the others, but I've always disagreed.
Rob: I've always thought that the big moments in that game actually trump a lot of the other, you know, earlier ones in the series.
Rob: I mean, I still held that scene where the zombie on fire jumps out of the locker, like how the hell you forgot him there, we'll never know.
Rob: But that scene always makes me jump.
Phil: No, the thing with Resident Evil is it goes, it has two modes.
Phil: One is holy fuck, and the other one is fuck, right?
Phil: I mean, you go from fuck to holy fuck time and time and time again, and that's why the pacing is so great.
Phil: You go from being scared to being, oh my God, how am I going to get out of this?
Phil: And I think that when you're listening-
Tom: I was never scared during Resident Evil
Tom: I would say it goes from-
Tom: Yeah, Resident Evil didn't scare me in now Resident Evil hasn't scared me.
Tom: But to me, the tension was not so much scared.
Tom: It was sort of a creeping sense of unease in the soul parts where you're just walking along, like when you're going through the medical experiments place, right?
Tom: But then rather than say like in Resident Evil where you then have a dog scene or something where something jumps in and gives you a fright, to me the payoff was more of an action payoff where it doesn't give you a fright so much as make you, it gives you a shot of adrenaline, but more in the sense of now I've got to beat the shit out of this, right?
Tom: That was more my reaction to it than say in the old Resident Evils where the jump scenes, the reaction was holy shit, what the fuck am I going to do?
Phil: No, I think in Resident Evil it was more a matter of unease.
Phil: I mean, you were uneasy the entire game, and that's something that you can evoke.
Phil: And I think when it comes down to it, I mean, video games are mostly successful when they evoke two of the most primal instincts of man, if I can get a little deep here.
Phil: But basically, it's when you're confronted with a conflict, do you fight or do you flight, right?
Phil: Do you run away or do you engage?
Phil: And the FPS shooters, FPS is basically fight, right?
Phil: The guy's in front of me, he's shooting at me, I'm going to shoot back at him.
Phil: This somehow gets into my lizard brain and releases some endorphins.
Phil: And I'm not judging that, that's fine.
Phil: I'm playing Resistance right now, and I love the game, right?
Phil: And then you have these horror games, which are less successful than FPSes obviously, which evoke the flight, which is like, it feeds the fear inside of you, that I've been caught off guard, I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with this.
Phil: What am I doing right now?
Phil: What am I dealing with?
Phil: Should I run away or should I fight?
Phil: And that's why I think horror games are so effective because they can just cut to the chase and evoke these feelings inside of you that other games cannot.
Phil: And that to a degree is why they're less successful because who wants to feel that, right?
Phil: In most senses, people want to feel like they're in control, which is why games like Call of Duty are so successful commercially because you're not challenged.
Phil: You're just like, you're the man and you can take on anything that comes up against you and you're just going to control the world that's in front of you.
Phil: Whereas games that challenge you, like Dead Space, put you in a more vulnerable place, you know, emotionally, so you don't want to deal with that.
Phil: You're here to play a game, why would I want to deal with that?
Phil: I think that's what these horror games, you know, ride the balance of.
Phil: And you see that with the evolution of Resident Evil where it's gone from this game where I'm not quite sure what to do here, I'm feeling something real.
Phil: Do I run or do I fight?
Phil: To basically saying, well, the commercial reality these days is people are going to play games where they feel more in control.
Phil: And that's what we saw with the latest Resident Evil.
Phil: So I'll just get off my soapbox now.
Phil: No, good views.
Tom: Well, that's what I would say we saw with Resident Evil
Tom: Just to go back to that again, but move on now.
Phil: Well, the difference with Resident Evil just to finally cap its defense, I would say that it straddles the fence perfectly.
Phil: And any shortcoming of that game was made up for in its pacing.
Tom: I'm agreeing with that.
Tom: All I was simply saying was that it got the unease perfect, but then instead of eliciting a flight response in the player as the early Resident Evil might have, it then instead elicited the fight response.
Phil: Yeah, well, absolutely.
Phil: I know Rob has talked about this before.
Phil: So it's specifically with REthat it was the beginning of the end, right?
Rob: Yeah, that's how I kind of...
Rob: I mean, at that point, it was ridiculously successful.
Rob: I mean, it's one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
Rob: And did fairly well.
Rob: I mean, it was originally the GameCube, so it didn't sell tons, but they put it on the PlayStation and that kind of brought the sales right where it should be and maybe even a little bit higher.
Rob: It was re-released on the Wii, did well, so it's been a real...
Rob: It's done well as far as the original development costs, but kind of like how the original Resident Evil spawned a lot of other imitators who tried to go into the survival horror category, a lot of other imitators saw this and said, all right, we're just going to do more shooting.
Rob: We're all just going to...
Rob: We're going to focus more on the action part of it.
Rob: And I think that's...
Rob: I mean, even Resident Evil itself, I think when you look at five and six, they turn more into action games and they decided to stop straddling the line and just go towards that direction.
Tom: I go over to the unease.
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
Rob: It was just kill.
Rob: And to some extent, I thought they did actually a decent job with Resident Evil Revelations on the DS, and I guess it's coming out pretty soon on the HD systems.
Rob: They went back a little bit toward that unease feeling.
Rob: I still don't think they nailed it nearly as well as REthough.
Rob: But going back to where we were, as I said, once the HD era kind of begins, developers can't put horror games on these systems, at least not in the early years.
Rob: The really only exception in the early years was maybe Bioshock, which again, fantastic game.
Rob: And to some extent, I guess you could say, developers can't make a game that's going to be profitable for them, because these horror games are only on average selling maybe a half million copies except for the real big franchises.
Rob: So a lot of the horror games will end up going to the Wii.
Rob: And so for the early years of the Wii, you actually see this huge rush of horror games.
Rob: You see Calling, Cursed Mountain, Silent Hill, Shattered Memories, Jew on the Grudge, Dead Space Extraction.
Rob: For the most part, none of these games are terribly good, just to throw that out there.
Tom: You're forgetting one major game here.
Rob: I haven't forgotten it.
Tom: No, the Vaporware game.
Tom: Was it called Silence or something?
Tom: You know, they have this black and white live action trailer for it, and everyone was hugely excited for it.
Rob: That was Silence.
Rob: That was...
Rob: was it Sorrow?
Tom: I'm not sure what it was called.
Rob: That's fresh.
Rob: I remember what you're talking about.
Rob: Everyone was really geared up for that game.
Rob: It never happened.
Rob: But again, most of these games, with the exception of House of the Dead, Overkill, none of them were very successful.
Rob: Overkill did about copies, though, although that number always needs to be quantified to some extent, because most of those copies came after it hit the $price point.
Rob: It didn't particularly well in the initial release.
Rob: But the one game I did want to talk about on the Wii that really is important is Manhunt
Rob: Now, Manhunt was, I mentioned this earlier in the show, really one of the most controversial games of all time.
Rob: When this came, was just about to launch, this is a rock star game, they were, really, it was just within the final few months before it was going to be released, everyone started looking at the game, and it was just getting banned left and right for the content.
Rob: And there's a quote I like to read from the BBFC director.
Rob: That's the ESRB equivalent in England, I believe.
Tom: The British Board of Classification.
Rob: Thank you so much.
Rob: And this is what he said about Manhunt
Rob: Where possible, we try to consider cuts or, in the case of games, modifications, which remove the material which contravenes the board's published guidelines.
Rob: In the case of Manhunt this has not been possible.
Rob: Manhunt is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing.
Rob: This game got slammed everywhere.
Rob: It got the AO rating in America.
Rob: No retailer would touch it.
Rob: Nintendo was just like, please don't release this, Sony.
Rob: Same way it came out on the PSand on the PSP.
Rob: So the game had to be really retooled.
Rob: One of the things that was so amazing about this game or what they were really counting on, people considering amazing, these really over the top murder scenes where you would just...
Rob: I mean, it was really, really rough in some cases.
Rob: I remember in one case, the character would beat up a cop and then he would pick up a manhole cover and just start repeatedly bashing him in the head until he fell into the cover and then he would seal him up back in there.
Rob: I mean, it was really...
Rob: One guy got kicked in the groin repeatedly until he started just getting bludgeoned with everything else.
Rob: Another guy basically had his head stuck between a toilet seat and the bowl and was just repeatedly banging it until his head was flat.
Rob: I mean, it was...
Tom: It sounds like good, honest fun to me.
Rob: Well, that's the thing.
Rob: You can go on YouTube and you can watch collections of all these deaths, and I think they're actually pretty funny because it is...
Rob: Don't get me wrong.
Rob: It's very visceral.
Rob: It's very over the top, but it's funny because of all that.
Rob: But, you know, a lot of reviewers just said, mmm, no.
Rob: And in the context of The Game, it actually was a little bleak.
Rob: I will agree with that.
Rob: There really was no moment where you took a breath and said, ah, things aren't so bad.
Rob: I mean, it was just one bad situation after another in this game.
Tom: But I just say, isn't that so incredibly ridiculous that the censors are complaining that something is bleak?
Tom: Their main focus in their complaint was that it was bleak and depressing.
Tom: I mean, come on.
Rob: I wish they added nouns in this.
Rob: It would have been fine, but you know, no claims.
Tom: Yeah.
Rob: I do.
Rob: So anyway, I do actually suggest if you can find a copy of it, it's not expensive these days.
Rob: You can usually find it under $or so.
Rob: Take a look.
Rob: Even in the edited version, it's amusing.
Rob: Or just go on YouTube and watch all those scenes, which is actually probably just as good.
Rob: Then, let's see, where do we go from here?
Rob: I guess the HD consoles.
Rob: After about midway through their lifecycle, we started seeing a lot of great games.
Rob: The game development had finally gotten cheap enough.
Rob: Developers all decided, well, you know what?
Rob: If we just make high-end horror games, maybe we can make our money back that way too.
Rob: And so towards the middle of the HD, the and the PScycle, you start seeing all these horror games start going over there now, where everyone abandoned the Wii completely.
Rob: They all moved over here.
Rob: And there were some really good games again.
Rob: You had Bioshock, which I think is one of the...
Rob: I'm not a huge Bioshock fan as far as the gameplay, but I've always thought the setting and the story were really, really good.
Rob: You have Resident Evil games, again, we talked about, not really horror, but you have other good games like Dead Rising, which is just, you know, took the zombie concept to the extreme.
Rob: Alan Wake, Dead Space, a lot of fans of their...
Rob: some really original stuff like Catherine.
Rob: Catherine was all about the fear of relationships.
Phil: Really?
Rob: It's a brilliant idea.
Rob: It's just, you know, making you scared of relationships, and they possibly throw some demonic activity in there as well.
Rob: But it was...
Phil: That's where the game is.
Phil: The guy is basically engaged to be married.
Rob: To Catherine with a K, and then there's a little hot blonde comes along with a...
Rob: who's Catherine with a C.
Rob: And he has to decide what he wants to do with them.
Rob: And that was developed by Atlas.
Rob: It was actually the only game they really worked on last generation, or this generation, whichever.
Phil: That's true.
Phil: But is that really horror?
Rob: If you play this game, yeah.
Rob: It's a very tense game.
Rob: There's a lot more humor in it, but they actually do put the main character through quite a bit.
Phil: It's masterful, really.
Rob: That's actually one of the highlights.
Rob: That's actually a game that I know not a lot of people have played, and it's definitely well worth tracking down.
Rob: It's available in digital formats as well, if someone wants just to get it off whatever store they choose.
Rob: Aside from that, again, there's another Suda game out there, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, both of his creations.
Rob: I think Shadows of the Damned is actually not so great of a game, but Lollipop Chainsaw really is a lot of fun, and they're not particularly scary.
Rob: It's just classic Suda 's take on killing zombies and the underworld, and it's fun stuff if you like his kind of games.
Tom: You know what's a much more horror-based game, I would say, even though it doesn't follow any sort of horror tropes in terms of enemies, would be Killer which has a very tense atmosphere to it, and you are basically fighting these terror zombies, but we should have discussed that earlier.
Rob: Oh, well, swing and a miss.
Rob: And the last game I will mention, zombie packs have been huge now for downloadable content, whether it was just something as simple as turning enemies into zombies or something more substantial like Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption.
Rob: But the last game I think I would really want to talk about as far as the notable horror games that we have around was Limbo.
Rob: Now, I have certainly railed against Limbo on a reviewer standpoint.
Rob: I don't think it was a whole lot of fun.
Rob: I thought it was more of a game where it was just, okay, try not to die the same way that you did last time and learn from that experience and keep going.
Rob: But as far as the mood, the atmosphere, I can't think of a better example in recent years on how a horror game should look and how it should sound.
Rob: It's a real creepy vibe the entire time.
Rob: The story is just a little boy who's trying to find his sister.
Rob: They both died and he's searching for her in limbo, that world in between heaven and hell.
Rob: And it's, you know, say what you want for the game playing.
Rob: God knows I will say lots about it.
Rob: It's a really remarkable looking and just the feel of it.
Rob: I can't think of a game that really nailed the feel of a horror experience better than that.
Phil: Clearly, it did strike that same nerve.
Phil: In terms of you wanted to protect the character that you were playing, you know, much like Clem in The Walking Dead or whatever.
Rob: Yeah, no, again, you're playing a little boy.
Rob: I mean, it's, when you see some horrific deaths he goes through, you know, he's being chased by a very creepy giant spider.
Rob: Other little boys in kind of a Lords of the Fly way try to kill him and just all the things he has to go through because he's just trying to find his sister.
Rob: I mean, it's a real, yeah, it does strike that nerve and everything's just gloomy as hell.
Tom: See, now, I actually quite enjoy killing him just because the death animations were so good.
Tom: You're always one of the most enjoying parts of the game.
Rob: You shouldn't have kids.
Phil: Yeah, you shouldn't.
Phil: And we'll do everything we can to prevent that.
Phil: Please donate at gameunder.net.
Phil: Finally, we really want to thank you for coming on.
Phil: Rob, we appreciate that.
Tom: We did our best to ruin your presentation, but you managed to make it awesome anyway, despite our best efforts.
Rob: You know what?
Rob: If I didn't have these challenges, I would have just stayed on a message board where I could type to my heart's content.
Rob: This keeps me on my toes.
Phil: Exactly.
Phil: So if you are in Florida, when is Spooky's Empire Ultimate Horror Weekend coming up?
Rob: They've got one in May called Mayhem.
Rob: That's their May show.
Rob: Memorial Day weekend, which I believe is around May th, th and th.
Rob: I will not be speaking at that this year, but I probably...
Rob: Don't bother going.
Rob: Don't bother going to that unless you want to...
Rob: you're dying to meet Zach Wild.
Rob: He'll be there this year.
Rob: Same guitarist.
Rob: But the next horror show, just go to spookyempire.com and you can see what the October schedule is.
Rob: I will probably be speaking at that one this year.
Phil: Okay.
Phil: Well, Rob Lozak from Power Level Marketing, thank you so much.
Phil: We're not going to subject you to the rest of this horrible podcast.
Tom: Well, it should be horrible as we're discussing horror.
Phil: Well, we're letting him go nonetheless.
Phil: Yay!
Phil: I can see.
Phil: Thank you very much, Rob.
Rob: Thanks, guys.
Phil: Well, that was great of Rob Lozak to join us.
Phil: I wish he could have stayed around for the rest of the show, but obviously he's got more important things to do than we.
Phil: And another video game that we've both had experience with lately, I'm actually currently playing Alan Wake on the PC.
Phil: It's one of the two games I'm currently playing.
Phil: It's the game by Remedy, who are famous for doing the Max Payne series, Max Payne and at least.
Phil: And I went into this game having played and beaten Max Payne and not expecting that much.
Tom: So you're not a Max Payne fan?
Phil: I beat and
Phil: I mean...
Tom: You beat them, but that's all you're going to say positive about them.
Phil: I mean, it was very hard for me, because I beat them either this year or last year.
Phil: I think I beat Max Payne last year, Max Payne this year.
Phil: And it was on the console, so it was on a compromised version of the game.
Phil: So while I could see what they were going for, and I can give them kudos or kudos for doing the bullet time thing and the narrative, it was hard to appreciate it as much as if I would at the time of the release of the game.
Phil: However, Alan Wake carries over many of the same characteristics.
Phil: It's a third-person shooter, effectively.
Phil: It has a narrative, a strong narrative voice that goes over it, rather.
Phil: And a lot of the same kinds of style, a film noir kind of style to it, that the first two Max Payne games had.
Phil: So it's really a continuation of it.
Phil: They, of course, gave up the Max Payne IP to Rockstar, who has now gone on to publish the third one, and it was a commercial flop.
Phil: I was really impressed with Alan Wake on the PC.
Phil: I mean, it is a really fun game, first and foremost.
Phil: It controls well.
Phil: And then beyond that, they have a hyper realistic graphical style that is very impressive.
Phil: And again, I'm playing the PC version, so I don't know how this was on the but it is really impressive visually.
Phil: And then when you go into the mode where you're attacking, you know, paranormal enemies, they kind of start stretching and blurring, not blurring, but rather stretching everything.
Phil: So things get stretched slightly in every which direction, which gives it a dreamlike quality, which I'm pretty sure is what this is all going to play out to.
Phil: I'm pretty sure, and this isn't really a spoiler alert because I don't know what's going to happen, but basically Alan Wake appears to be going through a story that he has written.
Phil: So he's the author of the terrible things that he's experiencing.
Phil: So his book has come to life, and he is now a part of the book in a very Stephen King type way.
Tom: You don't even need to play the game to find out if that's true or not.
Tom: You need only look at the press releases.
Phil: Oh, is that right?
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: Well, throughout the game, you're collecting pages of your novel and things like that.
Phil: I mean, it's not deductive science to get to this.
Phil: I mean, it's pretty obvious early on that that's what's going on.
Phil: But it is horrific.
Phil: His wife is scared of the dark, and there's power outages and things like that.
Phil: You basically use a flashlight and a gun to fight off these spirits.
Phil: And it's a thoroughly effective and enjoyable game.
Phil: Have you played the original Alan?
Tom: No, I haven't.
Tom: I've got two questions just immediately.
Tom: First is, now you say it looks extremely good.
Tom: Do the characters look like they are mentally retarded when they're speaking?
Phil: No.
Tom: Okay, because they do in the expansion that I played.
Phil: No, they have basically in-engine cutscenes.
Phil: A little too many of them for my liking, but they do have them, and they look perfectly normal and fine.
Phil: They look like TV actors.
Phil: It's been done very well.
Tom: Okay, because in the expansion, or if you want to call it a sequel, the game looks fine until you start talking to one of the characters, and then it just looks abysmally bad.
Tom: And my second question would be, how much tension is there at horror?
Tom: Because the sequel, American Nightmare, is basically a % action game.
Phil: I would say there is no horror elements to this, much like Cursed Mountain.
Phil: It's basically just an action game.
Phil: Instead of shooting Arabs, you're just shooting ghosts.
Phil: It's not particularly scary or creepy.
Phil: When your fake wife is screaming at a distance, asking you to come and help her, that's pretty creepy.
Phil: It does have creepy elements to it, but it's really not disturbing.
Phil: Like my favorite horror game that we'll talk about toward the end of this show.
Phil: No, just a third person action shooter.
Tom: Well, that's disappointing because the third person action shooting in American Nightmare was pretty boring.
Phil: Oh, yeah.
Phil: The shooting in this game, too, is not great.
Phil: You know, it's more the storytelling and the overall presentation of it that I'm enjoying.
Tom: And because the other thing is, I'm sure you remember as this was discussed a while ago, and if you weren't there, you would have been there while editing the discussion, I thought the presentation in the sequel was pretty much abysmal.
Tom: The voice acting was in general just terrible.
Tom: The writing was beyond bad.
Tom: The one really good thing was, and I wonder if they spent most of the effort on getting this done well, whereas in the first one, they didn't have a gimmick like this that they might have been focused on, was basically in the sequel, you're trapped in this area by a television character from one of your shows, and he is acted out by an actual actor in live action.
Tom: He was very entertaining.
Tom: That was very well done, but the rest of the presentation was just terrible, and the thing that really annoyed me about it was, they're so in love with Stephen King right now.
Tom: I'm not a Stephen King fan, but if you're going to do something that is a tribute to something, at least do it well and copy the source material well, which I think they just completely missed all the style and all the good things about Stephen King, and it wasn't just Stephen King.
Tom: They were also copying shows like The Twilight Zone and whatnot, and they just clearly had absolutely no concept of what was actually involved in making their shows, which is somewhat important when you're there making a tribute to them, because you've got to be able to mimic them accurately, right?
Phil: Well, right, but I'm wondering if perhaps American Nightmare was basically released not in a retail setting, but only on XPLA, and then later, what, on Steam or whatever?
Tom: I don't know.
Tom: Yeah, it was basically an expansion pack, except those don't exist anymore, so they called it a sequel.
Phil: The way I saw it was that it was basically a tongue-in-cheek rendering, much like the zombie Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption.
Phil: This was something that was basically ha-ha, here we go, you guys love the game, check this out, isn't this cool?
Phil: Which might explain the half-baked nature of the game that you're experiencing.
Tom: Yeah, but at the same time, the tributes did seem rather earnest as well.
Tom: But yeah, we can't really get a proper comparison, both of us only played one game, and I am very much hoping that Alan Wake, the original, is a hell of a lot better than the sequel, because I was very, very much enamored by the whole concept of it pre-release and was following it until it got delayed for like two and a half years.
Phil: Well, lest I be mistaken here by our listeners, I'm actually really enjoying Alan Wake, if not just for the visual style of it.
Phil: The fact that it's deciding to, yeah, we can do photo realism, but we're going to apply a creative filter to it.
Phil: It really does feel like we're a remedy should be in terms of evolving their game development skills.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: So are we ready to awaken from Alan Wake?
Phil: Move on to the next topic.
Tom: I've got one last question for you.
Tom: How much has the wife featured in it so far?
Phil: Well, fairly prominently.
Tom: Okay, because she in the sequel had a standout voice acting performance.
Tom: She was extremely good on that.
Tom: Whereas everyone else was pretty damn bad, but she was excellent.
Phil: No, she's played a fairly good role.
Phil: I don't have a problem with it at all.
Phil: I mean, the voice acting overall has been pretty strong, though it is difficult to do when you have a narrator.
Phil: It's hard to do that in an honest sense because narrators are obviously a dramatic device.
Phil: Well, with that, I think we're ready to move on to our final feature of Episode where we will talk about our favorite horror games.
Phil: And I guess I'll kick this off, because I will certainly go short.
Phil: My experience with horror games, as I described to you and to Rob earlier, I was really scared off from any sort of horror media from the ages of on.
Phil: After my Amityville horror experience, I wanted nothing to do with anything scary at all, on any level.
Phil: I mean, it completely freaked me out.
Phil: And then at my first, quote, co-ed party, a girl who liked me had rented a VHS tape of Freddy Krueger, Nightmare on Elm Street, right?
Phil: So, of course, I couldn't be like, oh no, I'm not going to watch this, right?
Phil: I have to sit there and watch this.
Phil: And so, you know, I was and now I'm like and I've been able to bypass any sort of horror experience, and I'm watching Freddy Krueger, Nightmare on Elm Street, and of course, it's completely inoffensive, right?
Phil: It's not scary at all.
Phil: It's not interesting at all.
Phil: It's just gore.
Phil: Not even good gore, and you can tell it's fake.
Phil: So, I'm like, okay, all right, that's good, but after that point, I did not have any interaction with horror, film or game until around probably.
Phil: And where I said, okay, I'm old enough now, time has moved on, right?
Tom: I'm years old, I'm finally ready.
Phil: Right, I'm ready, yeah.
Phil: I mean, yeah, I'm grown.
Phil: I'm a man, right?
Phil: So, I go to the game stop, and I'm buying games, and I see Silent Hill
Phil: I'm like, you know, fair enough, it's a cheap game, I'm a game collector, I'm a game player, I'm a gamer, fuck it, you know, I'll buy it.
Phil: So, it's a Saturday night, and I take it home, and I tell Velvet, well, you know, we should turn off the lights, and just play this in the spirit in which it's intended, let's go, let's play Silent Hill
Phil: I am probably minutes into it, and I'm like, that's it, I'm done.
Phil: Turn on the lights, and I took the game out of my PlayStation I put it in the case, and the next morning, on Sunday morning, I took the game back, and got a store credit, and bought, you know, God knows what, right?
Tom: So you still weren't ready.
Phil: I wasn't ready, it freaked me out.
Phil: I was not ready.
Phil: The radio static, the fog, whatever it was, and now as a collector, I'm like, damn it, Neil, I still don't have Silent Hill as a part of my collection, because I was like, okay, I'm taking this back, because I'll never play it, because this is too scary.
Phil: So I took it back, and about, you know, flash forward about another seven years, and I bought Condemned for the because it was like $at a retailer.
Phil: This was a launch game for the and, you know, the collector in me was like, okay, it's a horror game, I heard it's pretty scary, there's probably shit, so I'll probably never play it, so I'll just buy it, because it's like $
Phil: So I bought it, and then about three years later, I played it.
Phil: And so this is the first horror experience I've had since The Amityville Horror when I'm eight years old.
Tom: Well, you're forgetting about the Silent Hill and Freddy Krueger experiences.
Phil: Well, those were fleeting, fleeting nudity.
Phil: True.
Phil: You know?
Phil: They didn't really count.
Phil: So I put in Condemned, and this is a game that I absolutely loved from the first...
Phil: I mean, second, until I beat it.
Phil: This is a game that is horribly horrific.
Phil: I mean, it's a terrible game.
Phil: It's not a first-person shooter.
Phil: It's a first-person action game.
Phil: And most of the carnage that you inflict comes using blunt instruments, right?
Phil: And it's set in places like a doll factory or a mannequin factory or an abandoned department store or an abandoned school or an abandoned hospital.
Phil: Like, it's just the creepiest settings.
Phil: And you're playing, again, this is some sort of, like, FBI agent that has paranormal experience who is framed for crime.
Phil: And Condemned is even better than the original Condemned.
Phil: Really?
Phil: I mean, it's...
Phil: Yeah, well...
Tom: It gets a pretty bad rap, generally, compared to the first.
Phil: It's not...
Phil: It is a better game than the first game.
Phil: The first game has better level design.
Phil: The second game is a little bit more cynical in terms of its commercial presentation.
Phil: So, for example, one of the great things about the first game is that you're a heavy set, overweight Hispanic dude, right?
Phil: And your cohort that's helping you out, your inside source, is a chubby African American defense worker, right?
Phil: And in the second game, she gets turned into basically Vivica Fox or Vivisha Fox, I don't know how it's pronounced.
Phil: But she basically is turned into a sex object and you get turned into like some sort of stud, right?
Tom: So what do you say if they both get turned into sex objects, just to be clear?
Phil: There are some superficial problems with the second game.
Phil: But overall, in terms of their horror, these are creepy, creepy games and I'm so appreciative of them because it opened the door for me to play other games like The Suffering or many other, you know...
Tom: Do you think you'll ever make it up to Silent Hill?
Phil: Well, I did play another Silent...
Phil: and beat another Silent Hill game on the Wii, whatever that one...
Phil: that was called, Shattered Dreams, but I don't think I could...
Phil: That's a little scary though.
Phil: No, it's not.
Phil: I don't think I could ever go back to Silent Hill but maybe I could, because at this point I am just appreciating these games as commercial enterprises, and I'm able to separate myself away from the emotional reaction that I'm having.
Tom: You say that now, but when the static begins, you'll be thinking differently.
Tom: Right.
Phil: Well, what is your favourite horror game?
Tom: My favourite horror game is actually Silent Hill, but we're not going to talk about that really.
Tom: I'm going to say one thing quickly, just to once again demonstrate my superiority and toughness, because this came out in, what, so I would have been playing this when I was or right?
Tom: Now, Silent Hill, I don't know if it is, it's probably meant to be a bit less scary than Silent Hill right?
Phil: Yes.
Phil: Silent Hill is basically the apex of the Silent Hill franchise, as far as I can find out.
Tom: But it's still got a pretty big good reputation for being quite scary, especially as far as PlayStation games go.
Tom: Now, when I played this, I thought it was just an incredibly enjoyable experience, and I got very, I did not get very fine at all.
Tom: As far as I can remember, I got up to...
Tom: When you meet the policeman in a cafe and some flying monster jumps in through the window, very much like in Resident Evil, and it's almost as effective a jump scare as that, but I spent literally hours after that point just wandering around aimlessly in the fog.
Tom: So perhaps that also explains something about my like for Cursed Mountain.
Tom: But what we are going to talk about is Rule of Rose, the controversial PlayStation game.
Tom: Now, you actually played this, didn't you?
Phil: Right.
Phil: Well, this game was controversial in Australia.
Tom: It was controversial all over the world.
Phil: Well, it wasn't controversial in the United States.
Phil: I mean, this game did not raise an eyebrow whatsoever, and it was released by Atlas for the PlayStation in
Tom: Yup.
Tom: Rule of Rose was notable for the controversy it created due to the perceived erotic undertones to the game, which featured a cast of minors.
Tom: For that reason, Sony did not originally want to publish it, but Atlas, who liked to publish obscure, controversial Japanese shit, stepped in and took the reins of publication in
Tom: Meanwhile, the European Union Justice Minister criticized the game, saying it contained obscene cruelty and brutality.
Tom: He also called for the pegging classification system to be changed, which annoyed various European Union members because Franco Frattini is a dick.
Tom: And by the way, Franco Frattini is, was at the time the Justice Minister.
Tom: So at the same time, three French deputies introduced a bill calling for the game to be banned, claiming that the goal of the game was to tape up, sorry, to rape, beat up and kill a little girl.
Tom: Which sounds like an art house film.
Tom: Red Ant, who were Australian distributors and are now defunct, as most of the Australian games industry is, were going to distribute the game in Australia and New Zealand, but decided not to go ahead with it before even submitting it to the OFLC, as presumably it probably would have been banned anyway.
Tom: In a group of European Parliament members presented a motion for a European Parliament resolution on the ban on the sale and distribution of Rule of Rose in Europe and the creation of a European observatory on trials for the minors, which probably consisted of compulsory telescope inspection of children's rectums for evidence of rape.
Tom: Rule of Rose was not released in the UK due to this rather over the top reaction, which was clearly a political move by the European Union, as we have to remember the UK is generally pissing off the European Union due to their size and power.
Tom: It was nevertheless released in the rest of Europe.
Tom: In the UK, review copies had already been shipped out to reviewers when the announcement that it would be released was made.
Tom: Peggy had this to say about the controversy.
Tom: I have no idea where the suggestion of in-game sadomasochism has come from, nor children being buried underground.
Tom: These are things that have been completely made up.
Tom: We're not worried about our integrity being called into question because Mr.
Tom: Fratini's quotes are nonsense.
Phil: I played the game.
Phil: I enjoyed the game.
Phil: I was creeped out by the game.
Phil: I only stopped playing the game because of poor game design.
Phil: There came a point in the game where basically they have a puzzle level where you have to walk from room to room in the correct sequence and it has a bad camera to start with and is terrible.
Phil: In terms of its overall presentation, the game is brilliant.
Phil: I would say that the protagonist is years old.
Phil: Please.
Phil: I mean, she could not be older than
Tom: This is a Japanese game, though.
Tom: You have to remember.
Phil: And I understand why they're saying she's but she couldn't be older than
Phil: This is a horribly sadistic game about bullies, basically private school bullies.
Phil: I mean, there's a scene where a girl is put into a brown Hessian sack and then kicked relentlessly by other children.
Phil: There's allusions to sexual activity between minors.
Phil: I mean, if a game were to get an AO rating, this would be a game that should get an AO rating.
Phil: And it didn't get one in the US probably because it was released by Atlas and no one really gave a shit.
Phil: It had such a low run.
Phil: And I remember buying it because I knew I was moving to Australia.
Phil: And I was like, OK, I know this is a collectible game.
Phil: I know I won't be able to buy it in the country I'm moving to, so I better pick it up now.
Phil: And I particularly remember stuffing it between copies of like FIFA and NHL and very normal games.
Phil: Exactly.
Phil: But when in playing it, I thought it was a really compelling game, but it's frankly disgusting and frankly shocking in its content.
Phil: So, you know, Fratini is not entirely crazy.
Phil: I mean, I think you are crazy if you're a politician wasting your time talking about a video game when there are so many other social issues to discuss.
Phil: And also it's an artistic, you know, endeavor.
Phil: I mean, you'd be just as nuts talking about...
Phil: It's no less offensive than any Tarantino film, for example.
Phil: It does contain children performing acts of violence, which is, you know, disturbing, but that's what the horror genre is all about.
Tom: Exactly.
Phil: So, yeah, it's one of my favorite horror games as well.
Tom: Yeah, and it's one of my favorites, even though I haven't played it.
Tom: I've watched a lot of YouTube videos of it and basically came to the conclusion that the cutscenes and the general presentation are great, but the gameplay looks absolutely horrendous and there's very little chance that I'm going to be able to play through the entire game.
Phil: Yeah, the gameplay was good to a point, but then when it gets down to you've got to go to the basement to find this thing before you can go to the attic, but you've got to go to the attic before you can go to the basement, you know, it's just full of backtracking and exploration and all the things that I hate in video games.
Tom: And easily the final and most important and notable thing about it was the trailer and random gameplay footage on YouTube inspired me to write a word novel, which is undoubtedly better than the game itself.
Phil: Wait, wait, wait, how many words?
Tom:
Phil: Ho, ho!
Phil: I thought you meant
Tom: No, no, not novels.
Tom: It wasn't quite that inspiring, no.
Phil: Okay, well, this is going to be something that we'll obviously be promoting in the future at gameunder.net.
Phil: Probably not.
Tom: I don't think we want to be associated with it.
Phil: Well, we'll set up another website for that.
Phil: So this closes out our horror special, unless I'm mistaken.
Tom: I don't think you are.
Phil: So please do follow me since Tom refuses to have a Twitter account.
Phil: You can follow me at gameunderphil on Twitter.
Phil: Visit our website, gameunder.net.
Phil: If you like the show or hate the show, each of our shows does have a comment section, and we really do want to hear about what you do or don't like about our show, so we can ridicule you and not adjust our show in any manner whatsoever.
Tom: I think we would adjust what we're doing, but we would include more of what you say you hate.
Phil: Oh yeah, and we'd ridicule you while we do it.
Phil: But you can also stream or download our show directly from gameunder.net, and you can subscribe on iTunes, RSS or Stitcher Radio, and also at laserlemming.com.
Phil: We're featured over there as well.
Phil: And we're going to close out this show this week with an original composition from one of our listeners, and co-hosts in the past, Arnie.
Phil: You can follow him on Twitter at arnieA-A-R-N-Y
Phil: He's got an original composition here that you wrote the music to, and he did the lyrics to.
Tom: Yep, the music, I sampled one of my songs, which sampled someone else's song.
Phil: And I think basically he's giving here a history of the survival horror genre in musical form.
Phil: And there's no better way to finish out a show like this.
Tom: Yes, well, I believe what he's doing is talking about the death of survival horror with a slightly different take on it compared to what you normally hear.
Tom: And also I did write the lyrics as well as the music.
Phil: Oh, really?
Phil: Wow, that is impressive.
Phil: So here we go, and thank you very much for listening.
Phil: Please tell a friend and subscribe to us however you can to let us know that you're listening.
Phil: Thank you so much.
Phil: This has been The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: One still felt in control of one's destiny.
Tom: And this feeling of being in control has become the pair, it literally is.
Phil: Thank you.
Tom: The poem was funny.
Phil: Shifting camera angles, and we're back.
Phil: The Game Under Podcast.
Tom: Thanks for watching.
Rob: I'm excited to hear some names of the credit-free and terrifying spirits of this day.
Phil: Just be patient until he or she is dead!