The Last Candle

Sigh. The Haunted Apiary ARG is taking up way too much of my time. And now work has started. What’ll happen when school starts next Monday?

If you’re interested in the most up-to-date information and speculation on The Haunted Apiary, the channel #beekeepers on irc.chat-solutions.org is the place to be.

Halo 2 is coming, and everyone who owns an XBox has their wallet at the ready. Even though the first game’s popular and critical power will sell hundreds of thousands of Halo 2 copies on its own, something new has been added to the mix. An Alternative Reality Game (ARG) has surfaced, which is likely associated to the sequel but might just be about the Bungie game universe in general. (Bungie did a similar ARG with the Cortana Letters several years ago that involved Marathon, an early Bungie game. Not by coincidence, Cortana is the name of the AI in Halo.) The game involved a cryptic, possessed web domain, a niece in distress, stories embedded in odd places, and pay phones ringing from entities with questions. This ARG is quite possibly just an ad for Halo 2, but your usual ad campaign doesn’t get close to this strange, creepy and involved. (Hat tip to my sister, who clued me into this by posting about it on the Shack.)

The Haunted Apiary (Apiary as per m-w.com: a place where bees are kept; especially : a collection of hives or colonies of bees kept for their honey) ARG, as its being called, since the domain name where this all started, ilovebees.com, has been taken over by an “AI named Melissa” AKA The Operator, which has proceeded to implant itself within the domain and using the resources for its own needs. (Remember: it’s all part of the ARG.) A weblog has been sprouted by the owner of ilovebees’ niece, Dana, covering the attempted restore of control and rescue of her aunt’s domain, which was not successful. There’s a helpful sidebar at Dana’s page recounting what she knows to be fact in the story thus far (note , and she’s been updating the blog recently about what she’s discovering day-by-day. This is weird stuff.

It gets much weirder. Aside from The Operator continously doing strange things, the links page at ilovebees was recently changed to include latitude and longitude coordinates with times. People have been going to the appropriate place at the appropriate time, known as an axon, and finding pay phones. If the people are at the correct phone, the phone rings and if picked up, an entity on the other end asks a few questions. Get the answers right, and the axon goes “hot” (and as seen on the links page, quite a few have gone hot). If a set amount of axons for a category go hot, then a sound clip is hyperlinked for that category. How are the sound clips associated? Dunno yet: these axons only went online the 10th.

That’s the gist of it, but there’s much, much more weird-ness to uncover, including an embedded story in images and the HTML source about a Queen, manticores, and a Sleeping Princess. The story was originally kicked off by a few select people getting the letters that make “ilovebees” embedded in honey jars. “Rowan” has an excellent, comprehensive guide of all that’s happened thus far. It’s so intriguing and bizarre that I had to write something, but the community has created many pages devoted to following the Haunted Apiary. Unfiction, a page devoted to ARGs and the like, has a forum set up for the Haunted Apiary. Axon pages exist as well. Finally, aside to Dana’s weblog, the Netninja Bee Log seems to be the definite blog of events in the game thus far.

Whew. This is some creepy, but fascinating stuff. Viral marketing or tenacious, guerilla marketing, maybe. Or maybe not, but regardless: when the marketing — in this case, a game that flows between the digital and the physical world — is this much fun, who cares?

Did I mention that something big is supposed to happen on August 24th — today?

Ruthless Reviews (index page title: “Where Pornographers Debate Nihilists About Pop Culture” — okay then) has compiled a listing of the TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME with the subtitle, “How Mike Got It Down To Just 10 We Will Never Know”:

[#7, Old Man’s Child] Damn right these guys look old. They’re all f*cking bald! Did Crowbar turn into a black metal band when I wasn’t looking? Apparently baldness has found a niche in the black metal scene. It’s ok to be bald if you’re in a black metal band because being bald evidently means you are evil. And don’t wear your own band’s t-shirt to the f*cking photo shoot dude, that’s just a metal fopaux.

It didn’t make it into the group, but here’s a personal favorite I found a while back. Among everything else, the range of facial emotions is what cracks me up the most.

We had a great bout of Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams back in Chelsea last Tuesday. The Restless Dreams version of Silent Hill 2 is on the XBox only and features a bunch of new stuff, most happily a whole new subplot involving a previously non-playable character. Paul once again bravely took the helm, as Anthony and I stayed on as emotional backup. All together we formed: The Choir of Screams.

A striking difference between the original game and the subplot is the absense of some old, trusted friends. The most basic utilities in the Silent Hill series are the flashlight and the radio. The flashlight, well, it makes the dark go away, quite often revealing terror and/or heralding monsters of your arrival. The radio emits static when a monster is in movement nearby, increasing the volume as the distance lowers. (But: Mannequins don’t move until they hear or see you, so they don’t set off the radio. And it can really suck, as in the kind of suck that causes you to yell as if hungry dog sinking his teeth into one of your calves like it’s a beefsteak.) So far in Restless Dreams, we haven’t located a flashlight or a radio, and now we’re going into the Apartments, which ties with the nasty, angry prison as the scariest setting in the entire game. The Aparments are very dark and very creepy, and while it’s likely we’ll see at least the flashlight when we enter (since we wouldn’t be able to read the map, open doors, and other literal actions), the radio has probably been nixxed entirely. This is a scary idea: tools we usually rely on to help us and save us from utter fright have been snatched away for potential huge effect. Thrilling.

That relention of basic expectation gets me to the meat of this post. After years of playing these “survival horror” games, I’ve decided that all types of scares can be categorized into three small groups. (Who came up with the genre title “survival horror”? I blame Capcom and the marketing for Resident Evil. Survival horror is silly, and possibly redundant. When in a horror game or movie are the characters not trying to survive?) This will be nothing more than explaining the compounded parts in your typical horror game, but it should be fun. Thus, here are my takes on the types of fear factoring available to the modern horror game (or, even better, just about any medium that employs horror):

The Creeping Terror – Constant, high anxiety. These are the moments in a game where nothing, like an action sequence or a cut scene, may be actually happening, but tension created through present or past means is still very thick and very awful. The player is worried about moving forward.

While The Creeping Terror is a mainstay for any horror production, it’s heavily prominent and utilized in the Silent Hill series. Creating an atmosphere of constant horror is THE base machinery for Silent Hill’s method of creating madness. In Silent Hill, if the radio isn’t stretching your nerves tight, you can be afraid of breathing hallways. Or the stomping of some unknown creeper on the floor above, pacing. Silence doesn’t even provide solace when all you can hear is your own footsteps, waiting for the radio to suddenly begin blaring or for any wayward noises. The only “safe” segments in Silent Hill are when you’re saving the game or watching a cut scene — that is, when you’re not actually controlling the character. Counting on previously-cleared rooms being safe are a cruel hoax, as plot devices might show themselves or monsters might come back. You’re only really comfortable in Silent Hill after you turn off the game.

Resident Evil doesn’t use The Creeping Terror as great an extent. You can find “safe rooms,” rooms with typewriters (for saving the game — painful RE mechanism #1) and chests for storing and switching out items (lots of inventory management — painful RE mechanism #2), and these rooms in the entire history of Resident Evil have never been breached by the insidiuous evil that’s maligned the outside world. You can take a breather in this kind of room, organzie your thoughts, let the evil play outside a little bit. Plus, in Resident Evil, you’re in charge of ex-military and police operatives — people capable in a tight situation. Playing a confident character makes the player feel more confident in turn. People in Resident Evil may be in dire situations, but they’re up to the task: they’re strong. If you play a weak, susceptible, emotional PC who has handled a gun fewer times than he has toes, the player is likely to feel so much more vunerable. (And that’s exactly the type of people you play as in Silent Hill. Save the third game, maybe. Heather’s got guts, or at least severe apathy for the crazies in her path.)

Sudden Death – A sudden shock or startle that might incite sudden and uncontrolled convulsing, screaming, or button-pushing that inadvertantly leads to things like firing random shots or reseting the game entirely. Infamous in those Flash movies that pretend to be simple games requiring close scrutiny of one or more pictures, but after 30 seconds of putting your nose to the screen in search of minute details, the movie blasts a terrifying noise and replaces the previous image with some ghastly melted face or similiar horrific picture. Nice. While this is something of a cheap trick (i.e. you could do it over and over and over again in any way just to get a reaction), it’s a definite staple of the horror genre, because when used tactfully and expertly, the sudden shocks are the parts you remember the most. People who play these games want to be scared. They need a climax to the story after pages of anticipation, and the sudden scare supplies that. (Which is why those startling Flash games are so terrible. They don’t offer any benefit to the viewer at all: just a gag to set ‘em off. Of course, if that’s your thing, go nuts. No, really.)

This is certainly Resident Evil’s strength. Subtlety and crescendo? Nope. Straight from piano to fortissimo every time. And that’s what makes Resident Evil so great: switching from crawling down a hallway with no action to blasting zombies’ heads off at point-blank range can be an instaneous switch. The adrenaline goes from 0 to 60 in milliseconds.

Not that Silent Hill doesn’t feature sudden scaring. It most certainly does (and in large amounts), but the method of influencing the player through Sudden Death isn’t nearly as important and prevalent as keeping the tension high and then letting loose with some immediate terrifying event.

Drawing the Curtains at Dusk – (Or, ditching the euphamism I chose to match the rest of the titles, evil foreshadowing.) I couldn’t think of a better name for this. This type of scare is when the event or action isn’t necessarily pronounced or largely prominent (comnpared to Sudden Death or The Creeping Terror) but points out that something very awful is coming down the line. Instead of “AIIGHHH! O-GOD!”, as Sudden Terror invokes, but “What…the…heckwasthat?”, and then you start sweating. Curtains at Dusk is pre-emption of The Creeping Terror, creating the path for the real terror to come tumbling along.

This milder terror usually appears during the beginning or introduction sequences of games, drawing in the player slowly into the world. Silent Hill did it through a big pile of blood and bones in the middle of a foggy street as you hunt for your lost child; James in Silent Hill 2 sees a Patient Demon shamble into fog (Silent Hill is a very foggy place) long before he fights one; as you turn a sharp corner in the police station at the beginning of Resident Evil 2, some fleshy beast dashes by the window in the direction of the room you have to enter to continue the game; Fatal Frame does numerous cut-scenes about faces and noises just off the camera before it gorges you with paranormal fright; the freshly-dead crew System Shock 2 comes back to life in the form of spiritual iterations, acting through the motions they made before they died, before fading forever into history; and it goes on. Drawing the Curtains just makes a damn good introduction.

But foreshadowing doesn’t happen solely at a game’s beginning: Silent Hill 2’s infamous Pyramid Head in his first leering, taunting appearance from behind large metal bars. James can’t reach him because of the bars and vice versa, but I would bet solid money that a good fifty percent of the player base at that point turns off the console or at least break out into a mild panic because they know they’re in big trouble, possibly very soon. And they are. It takes only a couple of rooms after that pleasant union that the user gets to witness a very awful cut-scene starring the ‘Head.

My analysis doesn’t imply that recent horror games are formulaic or, at least, past genre expectations. Just like I expect my action films to feature lots of explosions, a good amount of violence (and preferably a lot), and generally mass quantities of dynamic, I look to the library of horror games to sate my love for the scary surreal, and all I’ve mentioned here are the general spook tactics. It’s akin to making a list of parts required to make a car and coming up with “chassis, transmission, tires, [etc]”: the parts may create a whole, but application is what differentiates it from the rest.

We’re in high anticipation for the upcoming scare-fest Silent Hill 4: The Room. The newest foray into terror and a circus of undescribable monsters isn’t released until September 7th, but Game Rankings.com is already tracking pre-release reviews, as is GameTab. The Room, which introduces some big changes to the series including a Heads-Up Display, no flashlight or radio, and a limited inventory a la Resident Evil, has thus far garnered a lukewarm 77% from Game Rankings and a 68% from the overly downer GameTab. Neither score is quite 100% that all of us Silent Hill fans were hoping for, but 77%/68% will have to do until Silent Hill 5 is released on one of those shiny futuristic next-gen consoles.

Analyzing consecutive scores from Game Rankings starting with the original game, the quality across the series seems roughly even with The Room taking the lowest score. Of course, The Room also has the fewest reviews, leaving opportunity for positive reviews in the future to leverage up the score. The popular and critical favorite is the great Silent Hill 2. Game Tab scores of the series show much greater deviance: The Room has only 68% so far, down from the high of 84% hit by Silent Hill 3. Hopefully that 68% will rise quickly as Game Tab (naturally) finds all those glowing reviews that are just waiting to be picked up.