Part of the reason for the shift may be that true survival horror games can be frustrating. When I tried to play Resident Evil: Code Veronica X a few years back, I got halfway through the game and had to stop playing because I had no healing supplies and no ammunition, and it was impossible for me to progress. So I restarted the game from the beginning, being more careful this time. I got further, but once more I found myself stuck with no supplies, and so I had to stop playing. I never finished the game, and that’s frustrating.

Scarcity of resources is a big part of traditional survival horror, as is the ability to avoid enemies rather than confronting them directly. In fact, the lack of experience points or loot encourages players to run from enemies, since there’s no reward in defeating them – only the possibity of being injured. And motivating players to flee rather than fight makes the game’s foes feel more frightening.

But one of the ways that games have evolved over the past decade is by better respecting players’ time. Diego Doumecq had an excellent post that explores this: “The games of yesterday were more directly designed for kids…. (They had) …all the time in the world”. I’ll admit – when I was eleven years old, playing Realm of Impossibility and Legacy of the Ancients on my Commodore 64, I had all the time in the world too. Diego writes about the pacing of games: about grinding, and having to repeat challenging tasks over and over until you manage to do it without your character dying.

Ever since video games have existed, the consequence of failure has remained consistent: you die, and you have to retry. Thus, a player finds himself repeating the same section of gameplay over and over, and this can grow extremely frustrating. Either you’re defending Nova Prospekt from an assault by The Combine over and over, reloading your progress each time, or you’re replaying Ghosts and Goblins over and over, starting from level one each time.

The first I’d seen of an alternative was when I played Heavy Rain. It’s the only game of its kind I’ve ever played where there is no Game Over screen as a result of player failure, and where you never have to reload a game as a result of failing. There are certainly consequences, and game characters can certainly die, but you’re never forced to repeat a scene in the game because you failed. As I’ve written before, this makes for a very different type of game experience, and I strongly feel that assigning this kind of irrevocability to a player’s choices and failures makes for a far more engaging game experience. In Heavy Rain, when I was playing through a scene in which my character was fighting for her life, I was anxious. I was sitting bolt upright in my chair and trying my damnest because I knew that if I screwed up and that character died, the character was dead. No reloading and trying again. And that is the sentiment that survival horror games need to capture.

I’m not saying that creating this type of game would be easy. Even if you create a cast of six or ten characters, it’s easily possible that all of them could die, and then what happens? But if the game designer combines an approach where less plot-critical failures carry consequences lighter than death (end up in the hospital, fail to get that really nice shotgun) and where the difficulty is carefully moderated to remain challenging without becoming deadly except during a small number of set pieces, this approach could work very well.

I don’t know whether the makers of survival horror games will latch onto this mechanic, but I’d absolutely love to see it happen.

Wikipedia defines survival horror as a game genre in which odds are stacked against the player so as to de-emphasize direct combat, and instead encourage the player to avoid enemies. This is generally done by limiting resources such as ammunition and healing items, and by making the player’s avatar relatively weak, as opposed to other action games like Halo or God of War. The setting in a survival horror game is generally dark and horrific, and challenges are often non-combat related, taking the form of puzzles, mazes, and inventory management.

From my perspective, survival horror titles are a dying breed. The old greats like Resident Evil 2 and Eternal Darkness may never be topped. Newer games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 are very good, but their status as survival horror titles is questionable. A quiz that I recently took identifies me as a “Survivor-Achiever”, apparently meaning that survival horror is my genre of choice. I’ll certainly admit that I absolutely love being startled/scared by games. But it happens so rarely.

Let’s take a quick look at the history of the survival horror genre. Leaving out oldies like the Atari 2600 game Haunted House, the genre sees its origins with the 1992 PC game Alone in the Dark, and with Silent Hill and the Resident Evil series that appeared in the late 90’s on the Playstation.

In the early 2000’s, we see Resident Evil: Code Veronica X and Fatal Frame, which are both clearly within the survival horror genre, and also Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, one of the first non-Playstation survival horror games.

The 2004 game Doom 3 has many survival horror elements, but most people agree that the game is first and foremost a first-person shooter.

In 2005, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was released. Although there is little question that it’s a survival horror game, I found it to be buggy and horribly frustrating. It also marked XBox’s attempt at an entry into the survival horror genre.

2005 also gave us Resident Evil 4, which to me really marked the death of classical the survival horror genre. Resident Evil had always been the flagship of survival horror games. While Resident Evil 4 was a fantastic game, it was clearly far more of a third-person action game than a survival horror game. Condemned: Criminal Origins and F.E.A.R. came out right around the same time. While both tried, neither was truly survival horror, due to a focus on combat in each.

Dead Space gave me new hope. While it can’t really be classified as survival horror, there were a few brilliant moments in the game that gave me a frightened feeling I haven’t really gotten from any game since Resident Evil 2. This is probably the best we’ll see in terms of survival horror for the forseeable future. I hope that games like this thrive in the future.

Lastly, Fatal Frame 4, which I have not played. Fatal Frame 4 was released for the Nintendo Wii in 2008, but only in Japan. That would be why I haven’t played it. It’s sad, really.

I’m not sure whether true survival horror as a genre is dead or not. I really do miss running from horrible creatures that you’re not supposed to kill. In most of the true survival horror games, you gain nothing from killing monsters. No cash, no loot, no experience points. Thus, running is generally a more attractive option. You’ll need that ammo when you’re backed into a corner.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Were you to ask me what my favorite Playstation 3 game is, it wouldn’t be Resident Evil 4. It wouldn’t be Uncharted. I’m not even sure it would be Pixeljunk Monsters. It would be Dead Space. I’ve written more in depth about how Dead Space has taken up the mantle of survival horror once held by Resident Evil, but beyond that, the game is just an excellent third-person shooter. The gravity mechanics, the pivoting plasma cutter, and the pure atmosphere afforded by the soundless vacuum environments make Dead Space the best shooter I’ve played in a long time. Certainly the best console shooter I’ve played since Resident Evil 4.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Yes, I mean all five (actually six) of the Resident Evil titles. I have copies of all six on their original platforms, and they’re all great in their own ways. I’ll admit that I find the even-numbered titles to be the best of them, but my Resident Evils is like my childrens. I love them all.

The first Resident Evil looks horrible by today’s standards and has dialogue that isn’t quite as well-written or performed as the dialog in most porn movies, but I spent the majority of a recent flight crammed into my little airplane seat playing the DS version. I’ve got to say – the game is still fun, and it’s damned hard. When you’ve got a limited number of typewriter ribbons to save the game and you’re playing in the admittedly short chunks of time that you typically have on a portable game console like the DS, having limited saves makes for a really difficult game. But the DS version added a lot of nice stylus puzzles, and some weird tacked-on knife fighting bits that keep you on your toes.

Of course, I still have my original copy of Resident Evil for the PS1, but with a portable version available, I may never sit down again for the PS1 version. On the other hand, I very well may go back and play Resident Evil 2 on the PS1 for… what? The sixth time? Depends on how you’re counting, I guess. The initial game is one that you can play through four times: twice with each character, since there are two nearly-identical missions. After those initial four plays, I think I went back through once or twice immediately, one time completing the game with only 6 saves and using no first aid sprays so that I could unlock some weapon or uniforms or something. I think I replayed twice after that, years later.

Resident Evil 2 is arguably my favorite of the series. The scare factor is just through the roof, and that’s what I love so much about the game. Resident Evil 3, on the other hand, is the bastard child of the series. Whereas RE2 had a “Nemesis” that appeared only in the game’s second mission, RE3 has his retarded brother who follows you around, moaning “STARS!” instead of “BRAINS!” In RE2, the Nemesis was one of the best parts about the game. In RE3, it’s just kind of dumb.

The game that should have been named Resident Evil 3 is the one they ended up calling “Resident Evil: Code Veronica X”. It was the first Resident Evil game for the Playstation 2, and it had a better plot, better graphics, and better game mechanics than the other games. At times, it even featured limited 3D, mediating the series’s much-maligned camera angle issue. I only wish you could have set the difficulty level lower. That way, I might have actually finished the game. Code Veronica is the only Resident Evil game I’ve not completed. Yeah, I’m discounting Resident Evil 0, Umbrella Chronicles, and the other spin-offs.

When Resident Evil 4 came along, it changed everything. It was a bit of a reboot for the series, replacing the mindless flesh-eating T-virus zombies with parasite-infected Las Plagas villagers and Nemesis with chainsaw-weilding crazies with burlap sacks over their heads. It reintroduced Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 2, and turned the series away from its survival horror roots. Still, it was an excellent game.

Resident Evil 5 gave us co-op. I’m nearly finished with the game, and I can tell you that the best thing about it is the co-op. I first played alone on my PS3, and then tried the co-op with my brother while I was visited him on the East Coast. I can tell you that the game is about seventeen times better when played co-op. When playing single-player, the AI partner you’re given is idiotic to the point of absurdity. At least the PS3 trophies have funny clever names like “It BELONGS in a Museum”, “They’re ACTION FIGURES!”, and “Master of Removing”. If you get those references then you can renew your geek card.

Even with my complaints, I’ll be keeping every one of these games. I can only hope that when Resident Evil 6 is eventually released, they bring back some T virus zombies, just for old times’ sake. The flesh-eaters are always the scariest ones.

Keepers is a new weekly segment in which I’ll discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I never owned a gamecube. Part of the reason is because I never saw many gamecube games that I was eager to play. The one that was always at the top of my list was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

As soon as I got a Nintendo Wii, I got myself a copy of Eternal Darkness, and I was not disappointed. You follow the lineage of the Rovias family as its various members come into contact with the book of Eternal Darkness. At its core, Eternal Darkness is a survival horror game. But its magic system, its inventive plot, and its amazing insanity effects are what really makes the game shine.

Perhaps Shane Satterfield puts it best in his Gamespot review:

When hearing about the sanity aspect of the game, it’s easy to brush it off as a novelty, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the game, as you come across unsightly manifestations of evil, your character’s sanity meter will start to fall. As your meter begins to dwindle, you’ll be cued to the fact that your character is starting to lose his or her grip on reality when blood begins to run down the walls. However, this is just the precursor to the game’s incredibly inventive insanity effects. If your sanity meter hits rock bottom, your character will really start to lose it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room to find you’re walking on the ceiling, or you’ll be placed in a scenario that doesn’t seem quite right. But the sanity effects aren’t confined to affecting the character onscreen–they will also influence you. Without giving away too much, if some technical issues should arise while playing the game, don’t be too quick to take action.

I never finished playing Eternal Darkness, which is part of the reason why it’s still on my shelf. The Ulyaoth Black Guardian at the end of chapter 9 kicked my ass, and as hard as it tried I simply could not beat it. I want to go back to it some day. But damn that boss was hard. Brandon, if you’ve got any advice here, I’ll take it. Hell, if anyone has advice on how to beat this boss, lay it on me.

Eternal Darkness is available for $20 on EBay, and frankly I’m amazed. It’s got to be a pretty rare game at this point, and I’d expect it to go for at least triple that.

Someday, I can only hope that they’ll come out with a sequel to Eternal Darkness with insanity effects half as good as the original. I’ll be snatching that one up as surely as I’ll be buying Beyond Good and Evil 2.

I recently finished playing Dead Space, which I quite enjoyed. The next Playstation 3 game I’m looking at is Resident Evil 5. They’re both ostensibly survival horror titles, although Resident Evil has certainly slid away from that.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between the two games, but more specifically, there’s a similarity between Dead Space and the older Resident Evil titles. I believe that as Resident Evil has undertaken a major shift beginning with Resident Evil 4, Dead Space has taken up the mantle once held by the Resident Evil franchise.

Resident Evil 2 is probably my favorite title in the series, in no small part because that game scared the everloving snot out of me. I jumped – literally – more than once when playing that game. I have very fond memories of sitting in my mom’s house in a dark room wearing headphones, and falling out of my chair every time a T-virus infected zombie smashed through a window or a Licker dropped down from the ceiling.

Beginning with Resident Evil 4, the formula changed. It was an action game. A third-person shooter rather than a survival horror game. I’ll admit that I loved Resident Evil 4, but it was not a survival horror game. Dead Space, on the other hand, is quite definitely a survival horror game, and it gave me some of the best scares I’ve had since Resident Evil 2. I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit acclimated to game scares, and largely because of that, the game doesn’t have me jumping the way I did when I was 19, but Dead Space did a damn good job.

Of all the games I’ve bought for my Playstation 3, I think Dead Space is also the first “keeper”. Generally, when I’m done with a game, I’ll sell it on EBay and use the money to buy the next game I’ll be playing. I only keep it when the game is so good that I plan to replay it some day. Oblivion, Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, Resident Evil 4, and Mario Galaxy are all games that have fallen into that category. But I sold Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed. I’ll definitely be selling Mad World. More on that later.

Resident Evil 4 didn’t have much in the way of scares, and from what I’m hearing of Resident Evil 5, it’s sounding like the even-numbered ones are the really good ones. But Dead Space did a better job of scaring me than any other game since Resident Evil 2. That’s why it’s a keeper. That’s why I’m proclaiming that it’s taking up the mantle once held by Resident Evil. Word.

…except the name of the game does not have the word “poop” in it.

Yeah, it’s juvenile. Yeah, it reminds me of some of the crude text adventures I’d played on my Commodore 64 when I was 14. And it bills itself as “survival horror”. But it’s old school in that it’s not easy. A timed text adventure? Getting all the different achievements is the tough part. Bizarre, yet entertaining. Good game for Friday the 13th.

Play “Don’t Shit Your Pants”

I really need to stop titling posts “Thoughts on..” All I apparently do is think meanderingly about games.

I just tried out the Playstation 3 demo for Resident Evil 5, and in many ways, it’s a little disappointing. Granted, it’s a lot like Resident Evil 4, which I loved, but it seems to be lacking some of the charm. I’ll fully admit that this may be because it’s only a demo, and I know I’ll eventually be buying the full version regardless. It’s also much more difficult, although that may have to do more with the lack of save points. In the demo, when I die, the game is over. No return to last save.

I am loving Resident Evil’s quick-turn when you press down and X. It’s been a mechanic that the series has used for a long time, and I really wish I had that in Dead Space. When you’re playing a shooter without a mouse, turning quickly is always a problem. Even more so when it’s a shooter where you can’t move and shoot at the same time. Despite my misgivings, I’ll be buying Resident Evil 5 when it’s released. I’m a huge fan of the Resident Evil series, and I’d be surprised if this game was suddenly bad after so many good titles.

This seems a good time to look back on the series and analyze why I’ve loved the Resident Evil games so much. I’ll be skipping discussion of Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil: Outbreak, because I’ve not played either, but as a fan of the series, I’ve played the other games – most more than once.The original Resident Evil wasn’t the first game in the series I tried, and I’m sure that lessened its impact on me. Still, I played the Playstation version all the way through twice, and I enjoyed it so much that the Nintendo DS remake “Resident Evil: Deadly Silence” has made its way into the small collection of about a half-dozen DS titles that I’ll never get rid of.

Resident Evil 2 is probably my very favorite game in the series, largely because of the one thing it did better than any other game I’ve ever played. That game scared the everloving crap out of me. Not in the “oh-this-is-really-eerie” kind of Silent Hill way, more in the “AAAARRGH!” kind of way, when you’re backtracking down a hallway where you’ve been a half dozen times and zombies shatter through a window you’re passing. The only game to come close is Dead Space, which I’ve got to admit is very well done.

The game they named “Resident Evil 3” was not by itself a terrible game, but it was far inferior to both of the previous two games. I don’t remember much of the game, as I played it more than a decade ago, but I distinctly remember being underwhelmed.

The first three Resident Evil games shared the same game engine, although the graphics of the sequels were much better. I remember being amazed at how good Resident Evil 2 looked on my original Playstation. But Resident Evil: Code Veronica X was the first game in the series to introduce a limited three dimensional camera. And that game was hard. It’s the only Resident Evil game I’ve played that I haven’t completed. I got a bit more than halfway through the game before I ran out of ammunition and healing supplies and found myself in an unwinnable scenario. I had to start completely over. My next time through, I got a bit further, but ended up in the same spot. Badly hurt, no healing supplies, and very little ammo. So I quit playing.

Resident Evil 4 was a totally different game. It wasn’t even really a survival horror game so much as an action game. A third-person shooter. And it was fantastic. They kept the weapons and the inventory screens, the characters and the green herbs, and you still couldn’t run while you were shooting, but the long-held fixed cameras were gone, and so was the T virus and the Umbrella corporation. Instead, they introduced Las Plagas. The laser sight made it the only shooter I’ve played on a console that I really liked, and the wildly creative levels such as the mine cart fight made it one of the best games I’ve ever played.

So now we come to the fifth title in the series. As I said before, I’ll definitely try it. I just hope that the demo is a poor example of the gameplay in Resident Evil 5.

I’m just beginning the fourth chapter of Dead Space, and I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised about a number of things. I’ll admit that in many ways it feels like a direct copy of Doom, but Dead Space calls itself a survival horror game rather than a shooter. As such it borrows concepts from the earlier Resident Evil games, and this works to its favor.

For example, the game has succeeded in starling me at least twice, and the last game to do that was Resident Evil 2. [insert golf clap here] The game’s store also has a vault feature, which works exactly the same as Resident Evil’s chest system. Neither actually makes much sense, but they’re very useful inventory management tools. I could go on about save points and weapon upgrades, but those are very common mechanics.

The method by which weapons are upgraded is also pretty cool. You’re given a grid with different points. By finding power nodes, you can weld them into the weapon’s grid and upgrade ammo capacity, reload speed, damage, or other attributes.

I would probably consider Dead Space more a shooter than a survival horror game, but that said, the game still has a number of genuinely cool moments. The weapons are also unique and a lot of fun to use. They’re generally focused towards removing limbs from enemies, since in Dead Space, as Yahtzee so eloquently put it, “limb shots are the new head shots”. One really neat feature of the game’s main weapon, the plasma cutter, is its ability to change the angle of its cut from horizontal to vertical.

While I much prefer mouse and keyboard for this type of game, I found the Dualshock 3 controls to be as intuitive as any other gamepad game I’ve played. I’ve often said that the only shooter I played with a gamepad and enjoyed was Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space comes very close, largely in part to the fact that every weapon in the game has a laser site. There’s another thing Dead Space has borrowed from a Resident Evil game. Now I only wish I had Resident Evil 2’s quick turn ability, where I could pull an instant about face by hitting a certain button. With all the necromorphs sneaking up behind me and dropping out of overhead vents, it would be very very useful.

The game’s two coolest innovations are the zero-G areas and the total vacuum areas, which sometimes overlap. There are zero-G areas with air, and there are airless areas with gravity. The zero-gravity areas are implemented so much better than Prey’s gravity strips. You stick to walls with gravity boots most of the time, but can choose to leap through space and attach to another surface at any time. And the coolest thing about the vacuum areas is the sound. Without air, sound doesn’t travel well, and even life-or-death struggles make nearly no sound. Speaking of sound, the creepy music in Dead Space is probably the best spooky music I’ve ever heard.

I also appreciate the game’s transparent checkpoints. When killed, rather than going all the way back to my last save, I only go back to the previous checkpoint, although I may not know exactly where that was. The game is also very easy to navigate, as in addition to the 3d map, you can also hit R3 to see a line along the floor leading to your goal.

Overall, I’m enjoying the game, although given how quickly I’ve reached chapter 4, I’m wondering how long the game will be.