Above Average Joe Blogs

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image. Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark. That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of...

Kinder very surprised  On the 6th of December 1979, John Hurt got a little bit too friendly with a randy space spider resulting in one of the most awkward dinner scenes in movie history. Whilst the tag line promised that in space no one can hear you scream, the crew of the Nostromo, including the iconic Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), certainly did scream, as did, I imagine, the majority of moviegoers when they saw the Chestburster rip and tear through John Hurt's chest and skitter off into the darkness of the vessel to grow and torment the crew. If you are this close to an Alien you are in trouble. The alien, or to give it its technical term "Xenomorph, boarded the Nostromo when Kane (John Hurt) decided to enjoy his space Easter a little bit too eagerly, opening an oozing egg, and got a face full of legs and other unsavoury parts down the gullet. Ash, the not at all suspicious science officer, overrides Ripley's orders to maintain quarantine and keep Kane and t...

Loving Lovecraft So life gets in the way every so often and the again planned review of Under the Shadow has fallen by the wayside again (I will not promise to make it the next blog entry's topic as I can't seem to keep it!) but in its place is something I hope you will find equally entertaining.  He looks friendly... When I was around 14 or 15 a video game for Xbox came out call Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. I was instantly intrigued a) by the fact that this was touted as a horror game without zombies or ghosts and goblins but instead about unknowable horrors for the depths of space and the ocean, and b) how on earth to pronounce its title (try Cu-thu-lu). Good luck When I finally got my hands on the game I was not disappointed. The game was set in the early 1900s, following a private investigator investigating (as private investigators a want to do) the disappearance of a boy in the seaside town of Innsmouth. Naturally when he goes looking for the...

Joe's Little Blog of Horrors  "We have such sights to show you..." Vital Stats  Name : Joe McCormack (Joe Kerr if I ever wanted a stage name, that's it) Age : Endless (or 26) Nationality : British-Australian - with the accent of your typical British villain Job : Out of work law graduate, looking for work in criminal law (think mildly less sleazy Saul Goodman) and currently employed as casual at Myer packing up all your pervy orders of g-strings, bras, minimisers (and that's just the men! Ho, how funny!) Why blog : Inspired by my current audiobook - A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay - and his framing device of introducing each part of the book through a horror blogger analysing the fictional documentary that makes up the bulk of the book.  I've been obsessed with horror from an early age. My earliest memories of horror were things like A Nightmare Before Christmas, the Tim Burton film (but not directed by him, that honour goe...