In case you don't know, “Amnesia: The Dark Descent” is a game set up in a castle where the main character finds himself with amnesia, only to later find out that the amnesia was self administrated in order to defeat his nemesis … or something like that. Now, what sets this game apart from other games like silent hill, fear, or dead space?

Well, the game mainly relies on it's atmosphere to do all the work for him, which rules out dead space from the equation, since it's based more on frights. It resembles fear in terms of atmosphere. You can get the chills simply by going down a hallway, but unlike fear, it doesn't have any of the action shooting sequences which makes it much more … engaging in a way. What threats does amnesia throw at you then? Well, the game only has 1 monster. A mummy. That's right, no space monsters, eyeballs, zombies, little kids, what have you. And it's not even that scary by itself, just a pretty standard zombie with some cloth around. What's the twist then? Well, apart from the standard health bar, there's also an sanity bar. This bar goes down when you spend     much time in the dark, open a door with skulls inside, that kind of stuff. It also goes down when you look at our foe, that's right, it can practically kill you with it's gaze, so the only thing you are able to do when you find it is run away like hell and find a place to hide, be it a counter, closet, etc. This means that when you are exploring and solving the puzzles you always have an itch on the back of your head “Is he going to show up now? From where? If he does show up where so I hide?”. Another important thing to note, the mummy reacts to the light, so if you do encounter it it's lights out just to be sure, but when the lights go out the sanity bar goes down, and the screen starts to deform and you start hearing some strange sounds, and if you are looking at the mummy it even gets worse? So, are you going to become insane or will you risk being found? This is what makes the game great, it explores the most primal aspects of human fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of being alone. Fear of the unknown doesn't really work you see the same little girl blowing up people for the 100'th time, and that's why amnesia gets it right

Well, we found out that the closer something resembles to a human the more we identify with them, so what does this mean in practical uses? Well, for one, zombies are fun to shoot. How do we figure that? Well, zombies resemble human beings in the way that they were once in fact humans, which means people see a zombie as a human being. However, the rotten flesh and other features they have acquired in their brief “death” tore them apart from the spectrum which we put ourselves in.

Other than this, while designing character or environments or an entire aesthetic for the game/animation we must choose one side of the valley to side with.

On the rightmost side of the valley we can find photo-realistic graphics, games that try to be has lifelike as possible, CGI, etc. Many games try to go for this aesthetic, trying to get every little detail the most realistic possible, which is good in its own right. However, this brings a number of problems. Because of the need to be the most lifelike possible, the development team will have to be more careful in creating every aspect of the game, being one of the most important of course, the graphics. It is possible to get an awesome scene with cloth and hair moving with the wind, and even some specs of dust flying around, but imagine that maybe the hair is clipping trough the cloth, then the whole experience will be ruined because that in fact doesn't happen in real life. So every little error that's found in the product will become much more visible if it were, shall we say, a cartoony feel. If the same problem with the hair clipping were to occur with a game with a cartoony feel to in, you may not have been as disappointed as if it were to happen in a photo-realistic game like, shall we say, L.A. Noir.

For more information about the uncanny valley … Google it.

So, there was a time long long ago, before Skyrim, before Oblivion even, a time where what you were able to do was restricted by the main storyline and plot. But then It came, Morrowind, the very first role-playing game I ever played. What's this about Morrowind you ask? Well, with all the commotion behind the new elder scrolls game, I can't help  to reminisce for the first game of the series, of the genre even, that I played ever.

What was so great about Morrowind then? The sheer scale of the world made it worthwhile. First time I started a new game I left the tow as soon as I had the chance, uncertain of where I should go, even on how to get there, So I just went down through the first road I saw, occasionally killing, or almost dying, with the mice I encountered in the way. Eventually, I stumbled upon a cave, and casually went in, only to become overpowered by 3 npc dark elves and dying. “This is bull****” I tough to myself and quit the game. The following day, I decided to start again, this time reading trough the dialog. This time around, I was able to return a lost ring to a wood elf, which in turn allowed me to  get better prices, and found out that said wood elf was stealing gold from the guards, which in turn made me go up to the lighthouse and spy on the guy until I found out his hiding place and steal all the gold back, as well as the ring I gave him before. 

I found out a murdered tax collector and found out the killer. I infiltrated the guardhouse to steal some sweet sweet skooma for further selling or using. And then when I was venturing out I found a guy falling from the sky in front of me, only to steal all his valuables and use the scroll he had only to die a few seconds later. What I mean with this is, there's so much content in there, that even if you tell me that Skyrim has loads of side-quests also, to me, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of Morrowind, especially because of that dammed quest journal they decide to put in, with the little arrows pointing to the location you need to go. Sure, I may have killed to get one of those features in Morrowind, but spending countless hours trying to find the place you needed to go to find a f****** metal cube just made it more rewarding when you in fact found it.

I could be going on and on about how great Morrowind is for me. Of course it doesn't have any epic graphics or anything (although you can tweak it with mods), or an easy gameplay, but the content is there, and the abnormal setting and storyline may capture your attention if you are willing to read walls of text, if not, simply going through the country killing everyone that comes at you is as rewarding as it sounds.

What I mean with all this is, when you finish every quest Skyrim has, killed every dragon, cleared every dungeon, had the most epic gear and all that stuff, go give a try to Morrowind if you haven't already.

So, what is the uncanny valley? Well, you know those robots that have some human characteristics, shall we say wall-e, where everyone likes them? and then there are those real life robots where everyone tries to be adding more and more human characteristics until it's just some freakish representation of a human?

Yea, most of the people, while acknowledging its a great scientific achievement and stuff will still be creeped out by it. Why is that? It looks more like a human then wall-e but if we had a real life wall-e and one of the other ones, we would still choose the less human one. But humans tend to dislike things that are different from them, so why is that? Well, it can be explained trough a simple graph.

What does this graph tells you? While you have a robot or such you don't even consider it to be anything close to a human, so you stand indifferent to them.  However, the more human attributes you add to said robot, the more like a human it becomes. Because it's obviously a robot, the human attributes stand out from it, something we can identify to, and that's what makes it appealing. However, there's a certain limit to this. The more attributes you add to it, the more it looks like a human, but there is a certain point in which it becomes unsettling. If you start having a lot of human qualities to the robot, it won't become distinctly a robot, but it won't become quite human either, it will just become a freak. This is because we identify it has a human, however, the non human attributes stand out, and because they are different, from ourselves we find them just creepy. However, if you push it a little farther it will become almost human, thus becoming more appealing to us again. The huge gap between the non human and clearly human is what we call the uncanny valley.

What does this means in gaming and animation? We'll find out next time.

So, you like to play games, games are fun and all, but can games really be considered an art form?

Maybe, maybe not, I believe it's up to everyone's opinion, however, I'm going to show some of the games that I think that shine as an art form.

So let's start with Okami. Okami is a ps2/wii game released in 2006 where you play as the Japanese goddess of sun “Amaterasu” reincarnated in the form of a wolf, that's right, you play as a wolf. This wolf however, as the power to use his tail as a brush to affect the surrounding environment, i.e. control fire, lighting and water, spawn bombs, cutting enemies just to name a few.

Now, what sets this game apart from other games of the genre? Well, despite its old age (for a videogame) because of its unique art style it still holds up till today as one of the most visually brilliant games ever and why is this? Because it doesn't try to maximize fidelity with real life, it was able to acquire an unique charm that will continue on for years.

This is accomplished because the entire game is setup to look like an watercolor painting which blends with the entire Japanese setting of the game, but also gives it its unique charm, which means even if they made a remake of this game in a couple years, yeah, maybe they could up the graphics a few, however it wouldn't be such a huge change like, shall we say, Morrowind to Skyrim.

Combat is nice allowing 3 different kinds of weapons which you can combine for different combat experiences, mixing them with your own powers … oh, and you can also pee on monsters for the to drop items.

So, for me, this is one of those games anyone could have fun just by watching them, it would be hard to keep up with the story since it spans over 35 hours, however, the visuals and the premise alone allow for an amazing experience, and has such, here's a gameplay video.

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