Editorials
[BEST & WORST ’13] Adam’s List Of The Worst Horror Games Of 2013!
Yesterday, we took a look at the best horror games 2013 had to offer. That was the fun part. The easy part. The year that was brought us a bevy of fantastic games, and sadly, it also introduced a handful that were memorable for all the wrong reasons. After the break you’ll find my list of some of the worst games I had the misfortune of playing in 2013. Enjoy.
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Aliens: Colonial Marines was The War Z of 2013. I didn’t dislike it as deeply as the majority of the world seemed to, that is, until the real controversy stirred up post-release. A majority of it stemmed from the quality of the demo and retail versions of the game, with the former being of a significantly higher quality than what we had to pay for. Then there were allegations that Gearbox was unwilling to devote the resources and talent to the project by allocating their ‘B team’ to work on it while their real talent focused on other projects, like Borderlands 2. Unfortunately, the shitstorm came to a close when one of the (many) studios behind it — Houston based developer TimeGate — had to close its doors.
I hope Colonial Marines doesn’t completely kill the Aliens games, but there’s no denying that debacle has had a substantial impact on the series.
Speaking of hot messes, next up we have Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut. It was supposed to be the ultimate bundle for a ridiculous(ly awesome) cult hit that gave us all of its DLC as well as bonus content, including new scenarios and HD support. What we got was a game that was riddled with game breaking bugs that rendered it literally unplayable for far too long. This forced some talented fans to come up with a patch of their own that remedied some of the more serious issues. That’s embarrassing.
The first Nazi Zombie Army was a nonsensical and borderline unforgivably unpolished game that introduced zombies into the solid Sniper Elite franchise because hey, zombies are popular. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was messy, sure, but it’s also a damn fun (and cheap) game to share with a few friends.
It’s follow-up was something I was looking forward to since its unveiling, if only to have something “scary” to play with my friends. Once I finally had it, it took me about an hour to realize that there is nothing new about it. The issues I had with the first are still there, proudly on display because its developer had no intention of spending any more than the minimal amount of effort that would be required to churn out a sequel. The enemies, characters and weapons are back, as are the wonky AI and clunky shooting. If you played the first, skip this. There’s nothing (new) to see here.
It’s almost as if Terminal Reality saw my review of Infestation: Survival Stories (formerly known as The War Z), where I dubbed it the “worst zombie game ever made” and decided to take that up as a challenge. If their goal was to make an incoherent mess of a zombie survival game that made no attempt to hide the fact that it was a shitty, desperate attempt to make money off the insanely popular Walking Dead name, then they did a fine job. If their intentions were anything but, they failed. Miserably.
In no reality is this worth seeing, touching, playing or even acknowledging.
Of the games on this list, Nether is the one I’ve spent the least amount of time with. A couple hours, tops. In most cases, this wouldn’t be nearly enough time to formulate a real opinion on a game, but a few hours in and I just couldn’t bare to play it any longer. To remedy this, I watched a friend of mine play it who had already spent an unhealthy amount of time with it. Apparently, they’re more willing to endure video game punishment than I am. The problem is obvious: Nether isn’t fun. It isn’t broken in the traditional sense, but it is broken in that it fails to do the one thing video games need to do, and that’s to provide entertainment.
Nether has at least one intriguing idea at its core in that it strives to be a moderately ambitious survival horror MMO, but unless they renovate it from the ground up, I don’t see this catching on with a large enough audience to sustain it.
Can someone please tell me why it’s so difficult to make a decent top down isometric zombie game? Housemarque did a fantastic job with Dead Nation, yet outside of that there’s little the subgenre has to be proud of. Burn Zombie Burn came close, then there’s a slew of abysmal attempts, like Konami’s Zombie Apocalypse, which somehow got a sequel, and this. How to Survive doesn’t even come close to being the worst game on this list, but with all the similarly themed games that came before it I found it far more difficult to forgive its more serious flaws than I would had it released back in 2009-10.
So that’s my list. I showed you mine, now you need to show me yours. Come on, don’t be shy.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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