Archive for October 27th, 2011

A quick bit of advice. If you’re interested in playing a neat little Halloween-themed community level and you decide to give this week’s featured level, Halloween [Silhouette Platformer], a spin, crank down the volume on your television and put on some music of your own. Something moody, or something that has a creepy edge to it. Throw on Howard Shore’s History of Violence score, or Michael Nyman’s score for Gattaca. Heck, switch on just about anything by Clint Mansell. Just don’t listen to the music this designer has included. It is wretched, and he doesn’t care how many people tell him that. “No, I won’t change the music,” he says in his description text. “I like my level the way it is. Deal with it.”

While that statement does qualify him for the Douche of the Week Award, it’s also decent advice. The level is worth playing because it stands out as a silhouette platformer (a term I did not know before playing it). So many level designers are trying so hard to make their levels so very creepy and scary and Halloweeny, but they wind up with levels full of screaming that just feel generic. The visual style of this week’s level grabbed me immediately, evoking that feeling I get when I pull the Halloween bins out of the garage and my wife and kid start planting the decorations on the lawn. So…I found a way to “deal with it”…and you should too.

Now then, when it comes to being evocative…

After the jump, I think we’ll be okay now Continue reading →

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(Kelly Wand and some other folks will help close out the Halloween series. And please remember that these aren’t necessarily great movies. We endorse them only as relatively obscure horror movies with something to recommend them.)

2008’s “The Uninvited,” directed and written by the aptly named Bob Badway and starring the delectably dark-eyed Marguerite Moreau, is an undistinguished title for any horror movie, since it’s generally assumed that most paranormal pains in the ass aren’t invited guests, except at seances, and even then they’re not even guests but more like unpaid magician entertainers. Good to know that if you’re murdered, you get to spend the rest of eternity waiting around for New Age douchebags to hold a dinner party and make you do a bunch of stupid pet tricks for their amusement. Actually, maybe only the ghosts of dogs show up at seances. That would explain a lot. Trust only psychics who eerily intone, “Here boy!”

After the jump, it gets worse/better Continue reading →

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