Is Street Fighter IV out in teh STates yet? I’m curious as to people’s opinions on this. It’s been out here in the arcades since the summer, and the home version just dropped recently. NO ONE plays it, not at the arcades, and I doubt at home. The game is terrible, imo. They took out SFIII’s brilliant parry system (hitting forward at the moment the strike would hit you) and replaced it with this stupid counter move that charges and, if it hits, makes the opponent clutch his gut and fall down. if you hit the guy doing this counter move once it will just flash and the move will continue, but if you hit it twice it effectively stops the move. Problem is it takes a good couple seconds to charge, so any double hit (ryu’s pickaxe kick) or two hits (two jabs from any character) renders the move utterly and completely useless. Or you can just jump over the guy and wail on him from behind. Totally stupid “innovation.”
Problem is, Resident Evil is a good game. There will be millions in sales to bear this out, just as there were millions for many of the previous RE games.
People don’t play horror games so they can be quick, powerful, zombie murdering badasses. They play them to feel the panic that comes from only being able to focus on a few enemies at a time and knowing there are more just around the corner.
This is why Dead Space, god love it, has to rely on jump-out scares and creepy atmosphere rather than actual fear for one’s survival. I couldn’t finish a single Silent Hill game (because the combat in it was both frustrating and dangerous - it’s nearly impossible to get out unscathed), but I breezed through much of Dead Space on normal difficulty. Just stomp all the bodies and watch the air vents–cover the cheap scares, in other words–and the game becomes a Gears of War in space, plus dismemberment.
It took me awhile to find this article (so I’ve already repeated some of it), but it puts forth the idea that players’ demand for tight controls has already extincted the horror genre of games. It’s worth a read to understand exactly why RE4 and RE5 need not to play like every other third-person shooter out there.
Not yet, but there’s some buzz for it in some circles.
And you’re right. Resident Evil is a good game, but it could be that much better and cleaner if they implemented some better AI. At least the AI was pretty bad in the demo. You can just run through the infected.)
Your third paragraph runs right into another one of my problems with the game, which is that “horror” shouldn’t be induced simply because the game’s designers want to make it so your movement (or lack thereof) is the engine for the horror. The main character (the male one) looks like he eats steroids for 10-daily snacks, yet he can’t move when shooting a 9 millimeter pistol. He can’t move when swinging a combat machete. If a limit must be made, make it so for at least larger caliber weapons, movement is limited. For the elephant gun, you don’t move when you’re firing a round (which makes sense). For a 9 mm, moving and firing isn’t too much to ask for. My favorite is trying to conserve energy and using the combat machete. Of course, when you get within range to hit them, you miss, because otherwise you’d be in their zone of striking as well. That’s not to say that melee combat isn’t impossible; it’s a pain in the ass and much much more complicated than it should be.
Resident Evil lost its way because of the lack of gore and the bad writing. What is the difference between Silent Hill 2 and 3? Writing. Also, now that you have a partner, and it’s cliche that any game that has a partner does this, it’s only a matter of time in the game before you get separated or have to hold one switch and your partner has to hit another matching switch to open a door/fire a missile/order Chinese take-out.
I’m down with restricting ammo. Why would ammo be in some random crate in Africa? Start off with a bunch of ammo, and let that be it until there is some kind of ammo drop-off. Have the areas that those drop-offs respawn randomly (much like the AI Director for Left 4 Dead).
No more George Romero zombies. Have different stages of infection, where the longer a target is exposed to the virus, the more dangerous the zombie is (or the opposite, if that works better). You try to run between two zombies, you should get held back, or your movement should be restricted in some fashion.
I’m a complete baby when it comes to horror games. I played them in a basement with a couple of friends when it was dark and that’s when everything went down. Three grown ass people in the basement, scared shitless. The game that made the most pain for us was Fatal Frame.
The real culprit in the downfall of the genre is writing (well, that and difficulty).
Being serious here I always found that the problem with the survival horror game genre is that the developers typically forgot that they were making games. So you get things like the Resident Evil series where the games control poorly, the game play elements are poorly paced, and they play up a hideously bad plot because they decided that the story and environment was the game.
The Fatal Frame series (which I love) has similarly slow protagonists but because I know that any second something terrible could happen that I need to catch on film the in game tension never goes away.
I really should stop trying survival horror games. I keep going back because exploration plus atmospheric tension plus some puzzle solving should be a perfect match for me. Unfortunately everyone seems to model their games on Resident Evil where the challenge is that they’re annoying to play.
Fatal Frame also had the added difficulty/horror with being forced to get as close to the source of the scariness for bonus points.
I don’t care.
I still covet this game.
I still squeal like a little bitch when I see the trailers for it on my Resident Evil: Degeneration Blu-Ray.
I will still sell my husband’s left nut in order to get this game. Or at least make him buy it for me for my birthday.
Want!
*My new cat’s name is Wesker. That says everything, I think.