Who's Afraid of Shinra Tower?

Amid a lot of talk about how games can affect us emotionally, Lara Crigger at Gamers With Jobs reminds us how a simple trail of blood can affect us if it's couched in the right surroundings. From the article: "Hojo's Lab shows signs of struggle. Shards of glass are everywhere, and lying a few feet from the dais is a mutilated guard. The door to the holding tank is gone, ripped aside and crushed like so much paper; in its place glows a strange Mako light that is simultaneously pink and green. But Jenova - Jenova has evaporated, disappeared but not without a trace: she has crawled out of the laboratory, onto the elevator, and up, and up, and up, leaving behind a wide and thick river of dried blood. I know I have to follow. I do not want to."

Comments

Whatever

[czarangelus]

Slashdot is getting to be like Fark: there's always someone (usually multiple someones) around to crap on someone elses' parade for the sheer malicious joy of doing it. STFU. If you didn't think it was front page material, why did you bother to read the article in the first place? Why did you waste eighteen seconds of your life to tell everyone else how stupid it is? Why can't you just move on without making a snide comment? The same intellectual runoff in every thread is getting kind of dull.

I think it's a great article. I had the exact same reaction the first time I played FFVII, and I think a lot of other people did too. It's also topical - FFVII might itself be old material, but the video game industry is cranking out one unsatisfying suvivial horror after another. So what if it's dated - FFVII did right what a hundred other games have done spectacularly wrong. I think that if a few creative minds in the industry were tipped off to this article, they might reconsider the plot devices used to scare gamers. FFVII was scarier in its places than any Resident Evil I've ever played.