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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Survival horror.

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STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:38 / 10.11.05

Scratch that last question, btw.

16:32 / 10.11.05

I've been playing the Cthulhu game on X-Box for about a week now. The Sanity mechanism is great and I like the visual effects that follow the horrors you encounter. However, the controls are sometimes a bit too loose for my taste. That hotel scene took me two frustrating days to get through. I kept opening the doors by accident instead of latching them shut.

I also don't care much for the save game style where you have to find hidden save points. The character interactions could be better too. I enjoy RPGs (like Jade Empire or KOTOR) where you can control the dialogue interactions. Sometimes Cthulhu feels too much like a movie. Maybe next time around they can make custom characters and varied plot directions. the best part of the pen and paper version is choosing your occupation and character size. I usually end up with a morbidly obese investigator.

It certainly is terrifying though. I've actually been stopping my playing an hour or two before going to sleep so I don't have nightmares of Dagon's children and shoggoths chasing me across rooftops.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

17:10 / 10.11.05

I'm with you on the controls thing... the amount of times you're standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE THING YOU KNOW YOU NEED TO INTERACT WITH and it doesn't register... same with opening/bolting doors. And the save points thing... that pisses me off in the majority of XBox games, to be honest, and they don't appear to be that few or far between here, so it hasn't bothered me too much so far...

I'm prepared to put up with its technical failings, though, (which, to be fair, aren't unique to it, or by any means the worst I've encountered) and yes, the sometimes flat character interaction, because it really does FEEL like a Lovecraft story. I've sat through appalling movies, and read terrible, terrible books and comics for their Lovecraftiness- a pretty (well, very, imho, though probably not amazingly) good game is a vast improvement on that.

13:43 / 12.11.05

I'll write a longer post when I have the time to gather my thoughts on the subject. But one question does occur to me, do people still consider Resident Evil to be survival horror?

I mean, the first two, definitely. But after that the series, it seems to me, devolved and is less about the horror and more about the guns. I'm not dismissing the series as such, as I'm currently playing, and loving, RE4. I just think that the RE series has shrugged off it's survival horror roots somewhat.

Anyone else almost wet themselves the first time they found the first zombie in RE1? What about the first time you encountered a Licker?
Scary stuff.

14:41 / 12.11.05

Resident Evil: Nemesis is well survival horror. It's still set in the RE universe - so you've got conceits like zombies, lickers, big fuck-off cancerous kaiju monsters - but Capcom took a thread from RE2 and spun it into the main gimmick for Nemesis: being pursued by an unstoppable, hulking killer.

RE:N take the series back to it's survival horror roots by cribbing from the sources: Halloween, Terminator, Friday 13th, Hellcop and so on.

Resident Evil Code Veronica X On Infinite Earths... that wasn't survival horror from the moment Claire did her gun-fu fall-to-the-floor-and-unleash-ballistic-ultradeath in the intro.

It looks like Capcom had two different development paths halfway through the series, a) Claustrophobic, tense, paranoid stalked by a super-killer survival horror b) Gung-ho action with deathguns with zombie movie window dressing. For now it looks like they're taking b) and running with it.

21:25 / 12.11.05

which is a pity, don't get me wrong RE4 is a quality game. I just sorta miss the atmospheric claustophobia of the first couple of resident evil games.

The re1 remake on the cube is fantastic though, the controls have been drastically changed for the better, and it goes without saying that it looks nicer. The best bit, however, is the new gameplay elements that they added. Once you kill zombies in this game you are required to burn them or they come back to life bigger and stronger and with the ability to open doors. Needless to say that the paraffin that you require to burn them is in short supply, adding a nice little element of strategy to the proceedings.

20:39 / 13.11.05

Are the Fatal Frame games any good?

I love survival horror when done right and bought a gamecube for Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil 4 alone. Zero was as someone said earlier in the thread, a stinker. I've played all Resident Games except maybe 3 which I didn't like at the time. I recently finished Silent Hill 4 after ignoring it for a year. I think it's actually the worst survival horror game I've ever played. Silent Hill 2 being the best, Resident Evil 4 a close second.

Also checked out Siren which is pretty awful too.

After three bad survival horror games (RE 0, SH 4, Siren) I really want to play one with solid gameplay and good story. I'm really only playing games for story. Writing, voice acting and endings are high on my list of gaming priorities.

Which Fatal Frame games are good? I've heard only the second one is worth checking out.

The Return Of Rothkoid

02:05 / 14.11.05

Why didn't you like Siren? I thought it was great. You need a lot of patience, though.

Fatal Frame (or Project Zero, depending) is a great series. Both are good, though if you're looking for the constant shocks a-la Silent Hill, you'll not find them there.

19:55 / 15.11.05

Why didn't you like Siren? I thought it was great. You need a lot of patience, though.

It's very very frustrating.

I like Silent Hill series for atmosphere, rich stories and outstanding scripts (2 being the best in my opinion).

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:58 / 15.11.05

Yes, it's frustrating. That was a given with that game from the outset, though. It's no more frustrating than Silent Hill, I thought...

Was there nothing else about it you liked? I thought the zombies in it were exceptionally freaky.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:59 / 16.11.05

Just started playing F.E.A.R. today. Not sure if it counts as SH, but I reckon so. It's veeery good. It's like a cross between BPRD and Global Frequency, but a game.

03:06 / 17.11.05

i like call of cthulu. it adds a vital ingredient to the genre. a sense of interaction; that there's a game present as well as atmosphere. it's not the most polished & enjoyable game i've ever played but it's a game and that's a cause to be happy.

i don't find it scary i have to say. just kind of relentlessly drab and dour. bloody annoying though! play it on "boy scout" is my advice to anyone who's going to get it. i'm playing it on PI and some sections are taking me hours to beat. as for the difficulty levels unlocked after completion, i really don't want to know.

16:02 / 17.11.05

fatal frame games are great for atmosphere and chills but eventually, imo, feel very shallow & lacking in gameplay.

20:56 / 17.11.05

Rothkoid: I liked the story and the director does understand horror quite well even if I felt he doesn't how to make a good game.

14:06 / 12.06.06

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Resident Evil 4 at the moment. Picked it up from Gamestation used for 50 squid: bargain!

It is, quite frankly, brilliant. It takes the context of the last five hundred RE games and picks up the pace so you're suddenly engaging in running battles with pseudombies wielding pitchforks, harpooning a giant mouth with fins in a tiny boat and doing your best T1000 nitrogen special with creatures from the biological twilight zone.

Action has moved firmly into the 3rd person shmup camp, smooth analog stick action with context sensitive actions. Go up to a ladder? Press A to climb up or push it down. Want to dive out that window? A. Want to kick open that door? A. Want to ropeslide over that super-zombie's head? A A A. The game has a very arcadey feel. Special moments in-game and, eek, cutscenes require you to be hair-trigger with special combos of buttons or you get hurt.

The plot is pretty much standard RE at GCSE level with a bit of Two Bad Dudes mixed in: someone's captured the President's daughter, is Leon a bad enough dude to rescue her? Along the way you team-up, get betrayed and switch for a few pulse-pounding chapters with the game's weakest character.

I'm up to the hospital on the island and I've just met the... the... regenerators. Status: afeared.

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