Today I would like to welcome Hank Quense, author of Tales from Gundarland. 

I would really love to say that I like Obscure 2 (or Obscure the Aftermath, depending on what year you bought this game), but I can't. It seems that for every good point I could give this game, there is another equally bad point.

Here is the plot: Two years after the events of the first game, a brand new group of students attend college and start smoking a mysterious plant. (I personally love the first level of this game, where your mission is to get high and break into a party). Unfortunately, shortly afterwards this group of idiots start turning into hideous monsters. Including a few characters from the first game, who should have really known better.

I'll start with the positive. This game has a few improvements over the last. The players can now go to multiple locations instead of being stuck in a boring school. The inventory control system is also significantly improved and now all the players can access the same inventory. As before, the music in this game is incredibly awesome with a haunting choir throughout most of it. There is a decent amount of character development and also some solid scary scenes. Last but not least, the level design is very beautiful at times.



So why is this game bad? Most of the problems lie in the gameplay itself. Even on a modest normal difficulty setting Obscure 2 slammed my head into the ground and ignored my pathetic cries of mercy. Throughout most of the game I had only a quarter of health, and the few times the game graciously gave me a health pack it was for a setup with a main boss. It doesn't help that on the wii controller, the controls are painful-and I mean, literally painful. As in, expect to hold your arm up for extraordinary amounts of time painful.




Obscure 2 also likes to trick you. After I touched a mysterious flower on the wall, all my characters collapsed, and the screen faded to black. Thinking that I had died, I turned off the system. But as it turns out, I had only reached a save point! The game also gives you a fake ending, so if you turn off the system during the credits, you will miss a few vital chapters of gameplay.

This game also suffers from a couple of plotholes, the most obvious of all being when one of the main characters gets impaled in the stomach. But I guess that was only a flesh wound, because a few scenes later he's fine. He also had a nice relaxing car crash five minutes later as well. While I said there was decent character development, these people are sometimes underwhelmed by what's happening. One of the characters, Kenny, gives into the virus and turns into a massive flesh monster. Soon afterwards, he begins killing and terrorizing several people, and this only serves to mildly annoy his sister Shannon. And keep in mind that in the first game, Shannon was the type of character who would cry if a fly so much as got swatted.

There is also a very noticeable pattern in this game. One of the characters would either get kidnapped, or proclaim they can do something by themselves. The other characters go searching for this one person, only to discover a gruesome death scene. I wouldn't mind it so much except this game repeats the same formula again, and again, and again.

FINAL GRADE: 3 stars out of 5. This game is better than the sequel, but the toughness level almost kills it's appeal for me. But in all fairness, Obscure 2 did one thing right-it killed off Kenny's girlfriend Ashley off-screen. (Yay!)


And no, I don't know how Kenny managed to impregnate Amy as a giant man-spider. Nor do I wish to find out.

Blogger's Note: For a review of each movie, please scroll down to part one.

Over the years I could never really get into the Grudge series, for two reasons-the premise and Kayako herself. There was barely any motivation for her to go out and kill dozens, if not hundreds of people. And since she's not the only person in this world to die a cruel death, wouldn't the resulting curses cause a serious pandemic? Heck, wouldn't all the people entering her house cause a serious pandemic?



As a ghost, she was just far too powerful. She couldn't be defeated, she couldn't be reasoned with-heck, most of the times she couldn't even be communicated with. To prove my point, here is a list of all of Kayako's super-powers during both the Grudge and the Ju-On series. Kayako can:

1) Spontaneously disappear and reappear in a different place, usually when someone is running away.
2) Appear and 'grow' out of the floor or ceiling. She can also use her hair to grab someone and latch them onto the ceiling.
3) Appear in various objects, such as paintings, photos, and bodies of water.
4) Grab victims and make them disappear into thin air.
5) Possess people to the point of becoming psychotic/insane/cationic.
6) Influence physical objects such as cell phones.
7) Able to teleport people from one location to another.
8) Able to teleport people from one timeframe to another, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that the next leap will bring them closer to-oh, wait, that's Quantum Leap. Well, somehow it still happened in Ju-On The Grudge 2.
9) Able to possess a pregnant woman and be reborn as a living human being.
10) Able to physically rip apart a human being to shreds.
11) Resurrect the people she kills as zombies.

And if nothing else, Kayako can:

12) Start a frigging clone army!



What, you don't remember that from the Grudge? This is from Ju-On, and it doesn't fool around!

Inconsistency is a recurring theme in this series. Why does Kayako sometimes wait years to kill people but only days for others? Is her power only limited to people who enter the house? That isn't true in some of the movies, so why did she become 'unleashed' in the Grudge 2? Why does Kayako take her time to scare people before killing them? Is there a fear quota she is trying to meet? Why does she even want to kill people to begin with? What is the point of these movies????

So that's my two-part review of the Grudge and Ju-On movies. Will there be another one? Who knows-anything is possible, and they've certainly made remakes out of worse.

Hi everyone!

For the first time ever, I have concept art for War of the Soulites! A big thank you to Arthur Wang. He does amazing stuff and his website is http://arthurwangart.com/. This pictures depicts a scene in my newest release titled War of the Soulites 2 : Ouroboros. Don't have it yet? Here's your chance to win a free book! All you have to do is post a comment below and I will randomly select a winner. The contest will be running from now until Saturday at 10 p.m EST.

Cheers,
Natasha