The roots of horror excellence

It's one of the things we completely lost lately. It is that feeling that might have decided the console war between Saturn and PsOne. It is one of the things that makes games look like art, and art like games. It is the primordial need of fun and fear, it is what action daily tries to neutralize, and sometimes impinges upon.

What if I told you that a game with no ending, no social, no artistic direction, no weapons might be the best of the year? The peak of this gaming span?

In Slender you're a person lost in the woods, in the dark. Equipped with a flashlight, you wander with the task of finding 8 different papers. On the first you read "NO NO NO NO" and see a drawing representing a man with long limbs and a pale face. On the second "Face, No eye". Once I picked it up, my game ended, the Slender man was inches away, facing me, making my vision blur over a broken television effect, getting closer until the game quit and came back to Windows.
That was my last game, I'll never launch it again. Every deep enough person should do the same. Slender gets easily under your skin, uses your deeper feelings of loneliness, fear and curiosity to shake your perception of what is playable or not.

Analyzing Slender is easier than playing it. Game play is shaped in a way that your enemy will never appear if you don't turn around, so you may just keep going one way, touring the structures you find in the forest in search of the papers, and get away with it. You're not going to do that, even if you knew about this feature. The environment reacts to your success, adding noise every paper you get (as I verified on Youtube). Steps and wind sum up to an incredibly growing feeling that you are going to get caught. Slender is implacable, there is no way to harm him, no way of freeing the woods of his presence.

In a similar fashion to what Silent Hill did with its first three releases, Slender convinces you that there is no way out of your nightmares, and when your feelings are compromised, you have no chance of getting rid of loneliness and the absence of hope, your mistakes or the weights others release on you are not possible to overtake. You are haunted by the slender man, you are alone, you have no hope. You turn around, you die, you go back to Windows. When you finished the first Silent Hill, were you sure that there were going to be happy moments for you and your daughter? When you finished the first Resident Evil, did you really think it was the last tyrant you'll ever face or that humanity still stood a chance?

Speaking about Slender, the game, it is fair to notice how it perfectly fits in this generation. It is both an elementary game like Dear Esther or Journey before it, and a perfectly crafted horror game like Silent Hill was. It rides both waves. Representing this intersection, it sounds obvious that a game with no ending, no weapons, no tactics, no online features, no plot twists will be, by some fair reviewers, labelled as a masterpiece. Because it stands where we needed someone to step up. It might just be the most important game of this year.

1 Million dreams

I often brag about my collection of games. I have a Master System II, a Saturn, a Dreamcast, a Playstation 2, a WII. I may have around 150 games in total. That is absolutely nothing, since a couple of days ago an unbelievable collection went to the highest bidder on eBay for 999.999,99 USD.
Yes, 1 Million dollar. Let's try and make an evaluation of this load of fun.
The collection has ALL games ever made for Sega systems, ALL for Nintendo consoles until Gamecube, and ALL Nec games and consoles. That sums up to a stunning 7000 games, and 22 consoles. Most of them are factory sealed. Let's focus on the games alone. If you paid 1 Million dollar for 7000 games that would mean you bought each of them for 143$, which can be considered a bit high, but considering that a sealed copy of some of those games is worth even 3000$ for collectionists, the 1 Million seems just an investment. Reason would suggest we'll see most of these games re-sold in hours. The buyer could just throw the consoles away and he would get much richer anyway.

The collection is, on a pure gaming standpoint, a one of a kind opportunity. There are rare games, but the number of cartridges and disks is too high for them to be played. Last year the same collection sold for about 1.200.000 USD. That means a loss, which becomes explicable if we think that nobody can ever play 7000 games. That's just too much, if we played 10 year for 8 hours a day it would mean 4 hours a game. You don't even START playing Final Fantasy 4 or Shen Mue in 4 hours. Let alone enjoying them. Selling game per game is the only way these games can live on, the only way this collection has any meaning other than a financial asset which price is going up and down.

So, please start splitting this package, dear buyer. It will be tough to sell all games, but if every game is sold at 1000$ (1/3 of what we said before), you'll just need to sell 1000 of them. The rest you can keep it for yourself, or you can open a museum and raise money with it, letting children play with 'New Zealand Story', 'Toshinden' or 'Wonder Boy' . Don't waste this big electronic inheritance.