Well what do people think about where Silent Hill has gone since 1999 (or whatever). I think it’s gone downhill a little, but I’m not sure it’s dying.
Silent Hill has suffered less, but I think it’s still gotten a little too over-the-top cheesy. The first one truly was scary as hell, much scarier to me than the Resident Evil games when I first played it, which was quite a long time ago. I remember little of Silent Hill 3 for PS2, other than that it had an amazing soundtrack. Too much of it was set in generic dark environments.
Also, RB, there’s another big thing in RE4 which takes me out of the game that I forgot to mention: kill an enemy, and his body evaporates into thin air right in front of you, leaving an ethereal beam of light surrounding an ammo pack (or green herb or whatever.) Not quite the same as gunning down a zombie in a hallway in RE1 or 2 and seeing his body still twitching for as long as you’re in the room.
That’s fair enough. I rather liked the ‘melting into the ground’ effect and thought it fit fine. And yes, the glowing item drops are certainly ‘gamey,’ but I’d rather that than have to search each corpse manually.
Obviously we’re not in agreement over a larger issue, but personally, I don’t like the idea of searching the body of a dead pitchfork wielding villager and finding a pack of shotgun shells or a fragmentation grenade or a can of first aid spray. The whole concept of replenishing your ammo by killing more zombies pulls me right out of “survival horror” mode and firmly into action shooter territory. At the very least, they could have made the game more horror-like and more in keeping with its roots by distributing ammo some other way. For instance, the merchant could have sold it (you couldn’t buy ammo at the merchant, although you could buy damn near everything else from him.)
The original concept of RE - highly limited ammunition, highly limited health items, and highly limited number of save points and available saves - was more challenging, and more tense, to me. The Resident Evil protagonists were never supposed to be superheroes. They were supposed to be ordinary humans (OK, members of some special elite task force, but really, still pretty defenseless against the enemies.) A couple of hits or a well-placed swipe to the head and you’re dead. RE4 (or arguably RE3) started the trend of making the player character into a superhuman killing machine capable of mowing down endless scads of zombies and monsters; I don’t like this trend at all and I hope against hope that the series will return to its roots.
I think the aesthetics and atmosphere of RE4 were fantastic (except for some cheezy parts, like the exterior of the island facility towards the end, and certain parts of the castle.) I would have gotten much more out of the game if that atmosphere were combined with the tension of RE1 or 2.
Eh, it didn’t pull me out anymore than having to search for ink ribbons to save my game, which put it dangerously close to “Where’s Waldo” territory 
The ink ribbons were a clever way of the game being able to limit your number of saves while also giving you the opportunity to earn more saves by finding more ink ribbons. It was always a great feeling to find a couple of extra ink ribbons in some unlikely place.
Over the past couple of days I have been replaying Code Veronica and I still enjoy it every bit as much as I did the first time I played it on Dreamcast. I remember my Mass Communications project in eighth grade was a commercial for Code Veronica, using clips that I recorded onto a VHS tape as I played and then edited together with the tape-based “Casablanca” video editing system our class used, with Nine Inch Nails for the background music. (The final product amazed the class and earned an A+.) That was in 1999! It’s almost 11 years later and I am still playing this game.
I never, ever had a problem with the fixed-camera angles and the control system of the original Resident Evil games. It was never supposed to be about the movement of the character, anyway; it was supposed to be about the atmosphere created by the stationary camera angles. It’s a totally different kind of gameplay experience than a fully mobile camera. Not better or worse, objectively, merely different, and I lament that is has been totally abandoned now because some people can’t cope with moving the character.
I didn’t realize “clever” was a synonym for “aggravating.” 
In hunt-and-click adventure games, it often is. (One of those irregular verbs - I am innovative, you are clever, he turns the game into a pointless pixel-hunt.)
According to Wikipedia as well as my memory, that game wasn’t released until 2001.
It was early 2000 (Feb.)
The Guardian’s game reviewer appears to agree with you :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/dec/01/splatterhouse-horror-games
I played Dead Space kind of recently (earlier this year) and I agree that it’s a step back to the survival horror that kept you on your toes. There really isn’t enough ammo to go around, nor enough upgrades hidden around, to allow you walk in to any room with anything like a sense of bravado. One missed shot does matter, and so does your choice of weapons for each enemy - you’ll be kicking yourself at certain stages for perhaps buying the wrong weapon, or squandering that upgrade point.
And the atmosphere is very spooky. Just like in the early RE ones, you’ll find yourself walking up to fallen enemies, wondering “is it dead, is it really dead??”.