Okay, Okay, so i keep getting emails to try games, in particular spammed to no end to try Amnesia: the dark descent. Honestly i've put it off because the trailers just made it look like someone took penumbra and reskinned it with the tile set from oblivion and thats sort of a one trick pony for me. I realize the irony of saying that after playing a dozen or so resident evil games but what can i say, im a fickle hypocrite like that about my entertainment.
Anyway. I've tried that demo and honestly? its okay. However i feel i have to post because i feel like the developers have shot themselves in the foot with the mechanics. To put one point up to cite as reasoning i would blame the sanity effects from removing me from any immersion the game builds up.
My experience whent something like this:
-walk into dark room. -see monster. -get creeped out. -start to hide. -suddenly get shakeycam/jellyvision 'insane' effect. -remember its just a game and death is nothing but a respawn with no time or data lost. -previous event loses all impact and ambient fear imbibing in the player.
Now this could very well just be me but when my guy could see clearly and i was walking around with nothing creepy actually happening i was more open to scares than when the walls are bloody and the screens spazzing out. It felt almost farcical in nature to me. It utterly ruined every moment in this horror game that should have scared me. Which at best renders it a grimdark adventure game with irritating sanity effects which are not needed in any fashion but an artificial way to attempt to instil fear and a sense of urgency in the player. Which, once you realise this in the first 15 minutes, you are constantly aware of the artificial nature. that it is all fake and nothing can hurt you.
In filmmaking terms this is what we call a huge no-no. Rule number 1 is to create a world that draws your audience in. If you are constantly reminding them- intentionally or not- that this is all make believe they distance themselves from the piece and are far more likely to notice the unpolished bits and pieces as they play and all the more decrease how much they enjoy your product.
Basically through their own attempts to make the game scarier they made the game no longer scary for me and in doing so defeated the point of their own creation.
Sometimes games developers need to remember they are not a board game dungeon master attempting to paint a scene and impress emotions on their player about events they cannot actually see and explore. They are closer today to theatre directors, assembling the parts on the digital stage for the player to take the primary role in a story of their own production. You dont need to set up a system to make them feel. just allow them to feel it on there own as they explore the world. Amnesia had a scary world, but in an effort to make an already scary world scary they make it no longer scary and in doing so the game i experienced was a failed product.
Not to say i dont recommend it but gameplay and story must go hand in hand but we are for more forgiving of story errors than gameplay ones. Heavy rain has plenty of plot holes, but the gameplay experience keeps you engrossed. This is a case of the opposite where they story keeps trying to engross you, but the gamelpay mechanics rip you right back out of it and its a shame that this happens but its just like the spamming of jump scares as you quickly alter your directional view in F.E.A.R. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice?...
Before i put up my review for Alan Wake i thought this was note worthy to write about.
I had been following Alan Wake for about 6 or 7 year maybe and as such had a lot of prior knowledge about it before it's release. However many of my friends had barely heard of it before it came out earlier this year, and many of them had been put off by the lukewarm reviews. Knowing these type of videogames were my forte' and i usually end up being the go to guy when they have a question like "what does X mean in silent hill?" or "how do i do blank in resident evil?" they all approached me with the same question: "What's the deal with Alan Wake's reviews?" See anyone can tell paid reviews are... i don't want to say crooked, just skewed. for example Halo Reach is getting 10/10 scores, but still has plenty of criticisms in the reviews. That doesn't make sense. giving something an absolute perfect score. saying it cannot be any better and then listing off its faults? its why i dislike numerical grading. Grading is subjective and articles should impress an opinion of the experience, nothing more- but thats a debate for another time. Point being, people are giving an impression of the experience. A game could be excelling in all its points from a technical standpoint and yet still the review is always the written expression of the reviewers experience. Which in the case of Alan Wake will often be marred by a pre-associated stigma in my opinion.
To be blunt, even with little knowledge of the games development, Alan Wake is an extreme case of 'what might have been'.
Let's go back to the beginning shall we?, It's the early 2000's and Remedy entertainment, creators of the critically acclaimed Max Payne series announce they are working on a 'dark survival horror game' according to a small blurb in the Official xbox 360 magazine. This naturally piqued my interest, i believe my ravings at the time involved "its my favorite genre made by the developers of my favorite shooter!" or something along those lines. Keeping my ear to the ground i searched out what little tidbits of information i could find. This would be a long wait however as it would be nearly 7 years before i got my hands on the finished product (In which time i started attending and successfully graduated from college AND university), the product i eventually got was not what i had been so eagerly awaiting however.
The earliest premise i can recall- and forgive any possible inaccuracies, as i've said its been a long time since i first heard about the original version of Alan Wake,- was a 'dark survival horror-thriller' about a writer named Alan wake, a insomniac who's wife had left him and with it he lost his muse and his writing ability. She had recently disappeared at the start of the original story, Alan alone headed to the washington state costal town of Bright Falls for some much needed R&R. He beings writing a book filled with and fueled by his nightmares. However Alan soon finds out that when the sun goes down the idyllic town changes, his nightmares come to life and a group of men in yellow raincoats are hunting him down. 'They come for him at night, and light is his only ally'. The tone was different, This wasn't a gritty episodic thriller, the music was different the world seemed different to the finished product. Even Alan himself was different. Hell the very type of game was different.
What we were shown was a free roam sandbox game unlike anything that had came before it and in all honesty still has yet to appear at all. By day alan explored the countryside, the towns and farms and locale's of bright falls in search of clues as to what was going on. By night the world turned against him and Alan needed sleep. Using Coffee thermos' scattered around the world to stay 'A.Wake' (ba-dum-pish) he could find a safe haven, somewhere either secure or a place he could rig with traps to ward off the light sensitive 'dark townspeople' that were hunting him down when the sun fell. One early example being using a tripwire and a floodlight to light up a narrow hallway if the door to it was broken down. Whilst this may seem vaguely reminiscent of the likes of dead rising, albeit on a much larger scale, back then this was a completely new thing. As the game progressed we saw new stuff being demo'ed to show how far this amazing game was coming along. There was nothing but good praise for it "it represents everything exciting about the future of video games" "most eye catching game of e3" "i literally could find no better looking game" ect, ect. The last big thing was this tech demo for intel's at the time most impressive core for gaming rigs which at the time was jaw dropping.
Then? nothing. The game fell completely off the radar. spending a few years considered as vaporware that would remain only a legend that never saw the light of day. Which in a way wasn't too far from the truth. Most people forgot about the game and those that didn't only looked at it fondly as something that 'would have been cool' and just dismiss it for the next big game that was soon to come out. Almost to the point where Alan Wake was considered this generations Duke Nukem forever ,which at the time of writing i can't help but grin to myself about that. Then finally three years ago Kotaku announces that Remedy has confirmed the project to still be in production but it has been "reworked" and the team are 'taking a break' to revitalize themselves for the "new" Alan Wake, leaving many wondering just what happened to the old one they spent the last four years working on.
Then there were rumors of a windows vista exclusivity which in fact would later turn out to be completely unfounded. Not only that but the game was not coming to pc at all, and was in fact an xbox 360 exclusive game now. Which, needless to say, annoyed many and the next announcement annoyed as many, if not more and left many confused. The game we would be getting was not what we had been waiting for. We would now be getting a story heavy, strictly directed episodic game. Basically the final version you have probably all played by now. The official line was that sandbox just didn't work to direct a heavy story which isn't strictly accurate for anyone who has played the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 or red dead redemption- a game that was in development for 5 years and released on the same day as Alan Wake- and that the game was rebuilt from the ground up as a "dvd boxset of a tv series" in terms of structure style instead. Something tried a while back by Alone in the Dark and wasn't particularly well liked for the choice then.
Of course there were rumors as to why this stark change was made. Some said money, Many blamed Microsoft. The most common was the crisis of the time forcing many studios to close, Rare being the poster-child example at the time, and that making the game was simply proving too complex and expensive and so to save the project they reworked it into a smaller game the console could handle. With lead by the hand directed pathways between set pieces, isolated by steep drops or high fences, to keep the player on track through small cross sections cut out of the ghost of the former, much grander world.
-and therein lies the problem.
What we see is good, great even (but wait for my review for that), however this is always damped by the ever constant looming, weighty shadow of what might have been this sense that no matter how good the product we receive is it still remains only a hurried cobbling together of parts from a far grander work to save a project from failure and that remedy had no problem releasing a neutered bare basics pale imitation of the original, eagerly demanded game was proposed to be. Now this does not mean the game we have is bad. at all. It does mean however that if the reviewer has been following the products creation for its entirety there opinion can be very harshly skewed by said feelings of being handed a half hearted, uninspired product only put out to recompense the developers on there losses.
At the end of the day though it is just as likely as any negative possibility that one day the developers just went "you know what, this isn't working out as what we want" and took it back to the drawing board. Which is absolutely okay and there is nothing wrong with such a decision. The most famous of which being the complete redesign of resident evil 2 long into its development cycle- and the series' 4th installment too now that i think about it.
Yet no matter how great resident evil 2 was, we always want to see the "resident evil 1.5" that might have been (which is actually possible- more on that at another time), the scrapped version could be absolutely terrible, full of ideas that seem great but utterly fail. However the fact that there is a version we will never play has an air of mystery and revealing of the 'man behind the curtain' to it in equal measure. We feel something is kept from us that may be just as good, if not better, than what we paid our hard earned money for. At the same time it just shows the developers are more than a logo on the case. They are human. They can make mistakes, bad design choices and can also have the good fortune to perceive these problems and take more time out of there own lives to improve on it till they feel it is ready for you, the audience. Still this ability to fail can inspire a lack of confidence and make us more, if not overly, critical of faults in the final product and judge it on "what could have been" instead of the faults and merits of the stand alone shipped retail product which is all a review should ever do. Honestly i think there are very few reviews for it that don't have a little bit of that sentiment to the final opinions on the critiques of the game and i have had to think really hard before finishing my review if i am letting my prior knowledge alter my opinion. At the end of the day i managed to write a review for Alan Wake, the game remedy worked damn hard for you on for a long, long time and write about the game, without wondering about the game we could have gotten.
For at the end of the day this is what Remedy had the pride to put there name on and ship with confidence that it represents the best they could do with the project. Sure things could have been better if things had been done a different way, if it stayed on the pc as well. At the end of the day this is what we received and can only judge it as such. Still i'm sure for many reviewers this has proved hard to do and i don't blame them. I don't think it means you should dismiss the reviews, i just hope i made some sense with this lengthy diatribe and you see what i mean or at least made some sense out of this wall of text in which i have tried to express my opinion some of the overly, an seemingly unneeded, harsh criticisms you have seen and emailed me about.
-and most of all, as usual, thanks for taking the time to read and i hope you found it interesting as always.
So first off forgive the lack of any articles, but ive moved house, had to deal with a lot of crap to get the net hooked up and now im in the final month of my film degree.
but ive been playing some horror games on and off, namely semi recent releases like F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin and Resident Evil 5. Though ive finished nothing of late so i dont think i can warrant a good article on any games ive not seen the credits roll on.
However the last few months have seen the net crawling with threads on forums debating if resident evil 5 IS even a horror game at all. In my personal opinion it is an action shooter with horror overtones, it doesnt intend to scare any more than gears of war does but there are mild jumps and rushes of adrenaline from certain set pieces though the soundtrack has greatly shifted from action and suspense to action movie music. -and i have said often that music is a key ingredient in a successful horror piece. But!, on the flipside of this we have fear 2, which literally has a shock a minute to the point where my controller was almost consistently on rumble and you were turning clone soldiers and the homeless creatures from condemned into clouds of so much red matter. this was so over the top i quickly became desensitized to any and all attempts to shock me or instill fear as i played. Plus if any fast moving or stealthed enemy showed up i simply hit the time freeze button and shot them in the head.
but this is getting into a ramble and those are topics for much longer posts at a later time, what i wanted to comment on was the current parting of ways between to series that have gone hand in hand as the two leading sides of the survival horror coin, and thats resident evil and silent hill.
Or more specifically Resident evil 5, and Silent hill Shattered memories.. For those wondering what im on about dont feel stupid, this games been prettty under the radar thus far. Its a re-imagining of the original silent hill on the wii pc and psp, developed by Climax studios, again taking over for team silent on this wii centric remake with a twist ill get to in a second.
So first off lets look back at the mid 90's resident evil and its "stylish but shameless rip off" as it was dubbed at the time silent hill have just been released. Both archetypal horror stories, you play a person in there 20's looking for missing people they know in an isolated location where unnatrual events have come to fruition pitting the player against a menagerie of monsters, either science or supernaturally based. Each have there charms, great memories for the game enthusiast to hang onto, yet remain distinctly different regardless of there obvious first glance similarities.
Now jump a decade on and we have a great divide between the once all too similar franchises. Resident evil is a new type of creature altogether, finishing the transition to full 3rd person shooter it began in resident evil 4. its still at its heart the same franchise but the essence of the game contains a little more in common with gears of war and other bloody shooters pitting your against humanoids with guns and weapons and large behemoth creatures to take down as you progress. Basically it lost the survival. when you had to survive in the early games thats because there was not enough ammo to take down everything, you had to survive by dodgeing the lurching zombies as you ran through the tight corridors, in 5 you have rocket launchers by level 3 onwards and hardly anything is greater than an equal threat.
Though silent hill appears to be going the other way, the remake is focusing on combat evasion rather than a rambo style "turn everything organic into a red paste" shoot off. tie this into the freezing environment replacing the rusty , fiery hell and i think its the one franchise of the two that is sticking to its roots, albiet in new and interesting ways and i for one am really looking forward to the new silent hill far more than i did for resident evil 5 and i dont think i'll be the only one.
So there my point, ill cut my ramblings off before they get to tangential, but there you have it folks, taking the fight to the majini guns blazing as the special forces chris or hiding in the frozen hell of a new silent hill as disturbed writer harry. i know which one of the two id call survival horror, but whats our view?, discuss.
So when it comes to horror games one of the sites i frequent most is Chris' survival horror quest , Which is stricly survival horror only and includes his reasoning for why, and what he concludes is a survival horror game, following certain criteria he has come up with. Being he is a games designer and i am a film maker our ideas of "the rules of horror" are obviously going to deviate at a certain point, so i thought i would use (steal) the idea to express why ill be choosing the games i choose for this site. On his site Chris' has stated something along the lines of not wanting to do all "horror" games in his quest to play them all and as such focused purly on survival horror. Personally im not on a quest, nor am i in any hurry as my lack of recent posts will attest, to complete a list. This is just one gameing fanatics opinions on games in the horror genre and all its subgenres therein and i will review games and post articles at my own lesiure and i am, most importantly, not aiming to play every one ever so i will just review what i can when i get a hold of it. As such i dont need to limit myself to one subgenre, of even just videogames, and can include any game i choose as a 'horror' game. Sohow do i go about it?
1:Whilst it goes without saying that the game must have horrific themes there is a degree of leneincy to games that arent scary but fit the theme, such as the gothic rpg koudelka. 2:There is such a thing as horror comedy (ala the evil dead) and i would list some games that arent exactly serious like zombies vs ambulance or the gregory horror show as such but others are comedic to the point of sheer absurdity and for my own personal tastes i wont focus on them. 3: ive got to own it, this may sound stupid but every game i review is in my possesion, this isnt a deal were i rent it specifically for this purpose, these are games hand picked from my own collection to be used as an article within this site, this means i will "go back to" any game and replay it for a fair and up to date review. 4: I dont limit to just a 3rd person shooter like resident evil or silent hill either, text adventures, point and click, fps and rpg are a few other genres which posses horror games hat fit my criteria. 5: it has to genuinley scare me, though not allways but this immediatly qualifys i as an entry. 6:Though not allways another genuine immediate reason is if the character dies, and i dont mean falls off screen or runs out of lives i mean actually only has a life and will die for good, usually on screen, they dont come back, hence the need for survival. 7: the artisit approach, again another giveaway but the locations, lighting ,sound ect all the "mise-en-scene" of a piece is crucial evidence if it is horror or not, this is more based on my studies of film than gameing but it still applies ,especially as the bridge between the two mediums draws constantly closer.
those are the 7 rules for now, though thats easily subject to change. I m fair in all my reviews and hope to, in a year or two have this place as a comprehensive site to find reviews and articles to honestly give well gauged representations of games in the horror genre.
http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/forum/viewtopic.php?t=800 In this thread on the horror gameing forum chris' survival horror quest. a user once again begs the question "should resident evil be considered striaght up survival horror>?". In my opinion its more sci-fi action orientated, but then the forums owner ,Chris, piped in and the topic lead to the possiblility of desensitization. When weve been chased through racoon city by the nemesis, explored a haunted shinto mansion armed only with a camera and even venture into the depths of silent hill to confront peoples inner fears why should we be scared by anything nowadays anyway? I brought forth the point that this could lead to manhunt style constant elavation of the shock factor to try and outdo previous horror games we are now desensitized to, in a way i might add i find particularly tasteless. To which it was then pointed out not too many cuasual gamers play as much horror as i do, which is very true, but also there are so many games, like resi 4, cold fear or the suffering that you have no doubt in your mind that the protagonist will make it out of whatever hellish situation he or her is in with no trouble they cannot cope with. and i believe that is the sign of a horror game that is not accomplishing goal number one "initiating in the audience the idea that the character needs to "survive" not that they automatically will. case in point obscure 2, these characters are just students, will very little chance of survival against the monsters overtaking the fallcreek campus, and in fact some of them do die through the course of the game, in cutscenes no less so they are meant to die with the narrative plot of the game which just makes you think "woah, if the jock (for exmaple) died, then hows the nerd going to make it through the same situation and live?. after all the greatest fear is death and fear of the unkown, so not knowing if your character will live is one sign of not a great but fantastic horror title, though of course the second factor is allways having a plot with enough intrigue and emotional development to allow you to atcually gain some sort of emotional attatchement to the characters you are playing as, there fore when they get closer to death, you heart beat starts to increase. Though on that note i believe the third pillar that forms the foundation of a fantastic horror game is sound, or the absence thereof, no matter how realistic, or out of the date the graphics may be as long as the character devlopment is engrossing, the situation is horrifying and opens with many questions that will most likely not all be answered by the end and a memorable soundtrack then the game will scare and will be remembered as a great game. Least thats the Danny Smith(aka: me) method of thinking on the subject.
Which is off topic by a mile, but does resi 4 count in the same genra niche as silent hill 2, resident evil 3 or obscure?, well i guess theres no diffinitive answer as everyone sees a game, as like a piece of cinema the different way so its never set in stone, which is why chris' list is constantly changing but oh well, if we didnt bitch about stuff like this thered be no reason for internet forums anymore.
and then were would we spend our time?, outside in the real world, no thanks, the real world blows.
