Chefelf.com Night Life: satori - Viewing Profile

I'm re-reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road now, because I saw No Country for Old Men and got hungry for some McCarthy.

It's even scarier the second time around. *shiver*

I can totes see how that would be Good Times; when I lived in Charleston, SC untold terrible movies and miniseries were filmed there, but I'd watch them all so that I could see familiar. coffee shops and trees and shit like that. ^^

I follow you all the way on the RE franchise. 4 hit the spot for me, which was a great surprise.

I thought SH and SH 2 were excellent and that the franchise went downhill after that. 3 was ok - just - but 4 (The Room, I think it was called) seemed completely gratuitous. Sadly, I think that's a series that needs to be retired in favor of a new concept.

And the film they made of it was beneath actual discussion. Just thinking about it makes me want to throttle the director.

Yay, girls! *waves girl flag*

I really love survival horror, but I have a huge problem: I get too creeped out to play alone, and I live by myself these days...so it's been a year or so since I've played Resident Evil 4. I actually did play that one alone, but I'm such a scaredy-cat (and I live so far out in the country that I can hear coyotes at night) that for the first few levels I had to keep the sound muted while listening to NPR.

( A friend of mine from Chicago called me while I was doing this, and he admiringly told me that I was the biggest dork he'd ever dealt with, because not only was I dorking out to National Public Radio, I was also dorking out to a suvival horror game. This coming from a guy who's such an uber-dork he just nailed a job at The Onion. So I was extremely flattered!)

ANYWAY.

Scariest game for me ever, no questions asked, was Fatal Frame (Project Zero, as it's called elsewhere). It was sadistically terrifying, and I couldn't get enough of it. But only with my SO in the room. He got extremely testy after a while because I wasn't able to *stop* playing, but he was really getting tired of me making him stay awake. (It just wasn't the same when he slept; I needed his wakefulness to keep the ghosts from coming through the TV like Samara from Ringu and choking the life out of me. Shut UP.)

That game was truly designed for nothing more than making gamers shit themselves. Not only did you play a frail, helpless Japanese girl; that didn't make you vulnerable enough. You had to play a fragile, hapless Japanese girl who runs as fast as a slug copulates, who has nothing but a camera as a makeshift weapon (she draws the souls of the ghosts into the camera; there's nothing to kill because everything's already dead), and who is at the mercy of random camera angles (frustrating as hell, but very much in line with the spirit - heh - of the game). It was simultaneously pervy and scary, as are so many Japanese games. (Yep, every time you complete the game in various modes you get a new, more pervalicious costume for your character.)

I also played the hell out of the second one, Crimson Butterfly, which only sounds like an 80's hair band. In this one you play helpless, fragile Japanese twins, one of whom has a terrible limp and hinders the already pitifully slow sister from running from terrifying, moaning ghosts. On one level, the entire game is a tiresome escort mission, but on the other, deeper level, the developers do such a good job getting you to bond with your "twin sister" that after a while you develop real affection for her. At first she seemed like a frustrating weight who only got in my way during battles, but as the game went on I began to feel really protective of her. For a while she's absent, and by that time I remember actually missing her.

Until you play these games, they really do sound stupid. I mean, Japanese girls? No weapons, just a camera? You have to take pictures of ghosts to complete the game? Nightmare mode is impossible? Health items are rare as save points and hens' teeth?

You might scoff until you try to play it. It's an unremittingly dark game, literally and tonally. Like the film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the game is based on an ostensibly true story, and the supernatural element has a solid reason behind it, involving Shinto shrines and human sacrifice. The cinemas are done in grainy black and white, and the only real color you get in the whole thing are splashes of red (when dreadfully appropriate).

You don't get anything friendly in the entire game; the environment is scary, the ghosts (who can pop up anywhere without warning) are heart-stopping, and there's no music at all, just ambient noise and non-diegetic sound that pops up when you go into battle mode. In Project Zero you're alone throughout the entire story line, and the game's resolution is less an ending than an escape. I'd say that the soundscape in this game is at least as frightening as was, say, the fog in Silent Hill 2. It's like a separate character - a malevolent second character that wants nothing more than to drive you insane.

In truth, if you're at all a serious survival horror fan, you should do yourself a favor (or an unforgivably cruel jolt to your endocrine system - hello, adrenaline!) and get these games. I haven't played Fatal Frame 3 yet, because even though I could do RE4 alone (with the help of velvet-voiced NPR announcers), I couldn't even dream of trying to handle any Fatal Frame all by my lonesome. My ex got custody of those games in the breakup.

The Silent Hill franchise scares me too, but Fatal Frame puts you right in the action, which to my mind is much more frightening. There's no distance at all between you and the enemies when you're in camera mode, so it's really very much like being in your own horror movie. And dying in it - repeatedly - because not only is it terrifying, it also has very challenging gameplay. I find that after a while Silent Hill essentially just becomes a rather redundant hack-and-slash with scary environments, but Fatal Frame is short and lean enough to pack a solid punch.

Seriously, just thinking about it now, here in the predawn dark, is freaking me out. Plus, I hear coyotes.

Sorry, didn't mean to write a novel. I was just excited to see this topic. I'll shut up now and go look at puppies or something over on cuteoverload.com.