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Being Scared in Games is Needed
zombieinthebackofyourcar writes "The Escapist has done an entire issue on why we love and need horror games. Jon Schnaars, an expert in psychology and mental health issues, writes about how we need to be scared to generate pleasure from the game. From the article: 'Perhaps the most important change made in the game mechanics of RE4 was fixing the camera behind Leon, providing a tight third-person shot through which the player could experience the action. Through this move, Leon has become every protagonist from every horror film ever made. He is the lone survivor; steadily trudging into the dark when all our instincts tell us it's a bad idea. And as the player, it is actually us proceeding into the dark, receiving (when we're not getting beheaded) our genre pleasure.'"
I don't know about Horror being needed. I sometimes like the idea of playing the monster, when the opportunity presents itself. Heck, I've certainly been one in the online games I play, where I go around slaughtering things to gain experience levels and take the victim's treasures. See it from their point of view. "Horrors, here comes that damn human again! Is there no end for it's thirst for blood? It'll probably go after our shaman some day, then were will we be as a people?"
Really, what we already know is that variety is what games need. If every game was based upon something jumping out of the shadows and ripping your lungs out, we'd have someone telling us what is needed is the safe-and-secure game genre where no harm comes to our valiant little avatar as he/she zips around collecting rings or what have you without repressing some proletariat.
My own take is I have long had a preference for games where the player explores the unknown. There may be danger, there may be reward, but cooling your heels doesn't do much for the sense of intrigue. Exploring dungeons and wiping out baddies, or going on raids day after day, to achieve enough levels to used some object or spell is, as a topic some time back pointed out, is work (you know, that four letter word.)
Ages ago I was totally wrapped up in the old fortran game Empire (eventually released as a PC game), until I'd played it enough to know what to expect. Nothing quite like the first time you're marching your little a into the black unknown only to find the enemy well entrenched, then to gear up your production for an assault. Eventually it was too slow and tedius. Same went for Seven Cities of Gold when you rolled your own New World (which wouldn't be at all like what you see on a normal globe) Exploring the unknown and facing risk is what gets the heart rate going, Grue or no Grue.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think the fear and scares were the only things that made Resi 4 great, but if more fear = more games of that calibre then I'm all for it.
Why do you persist in misusing the word "strafe"? Are you really that illiterate?
Real horror is seeing these in close proximity to each other:
L h R
H >
L
I still have nightmares about that.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I used to get genuinely, properly scared playing Doom as a 13 year old on my 486 in the 90s. No game since has done it - why? I think the answer is that we're moving the post all the time and we simply take more and more stimuli to scare ourselves - I'm not sure if the current technology is capable of it any more.
i'm no 'expert' on any brain-stuff, but I'd have to disagree on this. Sports games are incredibly successful, and none of this fear stuff applies here whatsoever. Madden, Tiger Woods, MLB, NBA, FIFA, Tony Hawk PS, and so on...
In one of Jack Vance's novels someone has determined that society has made things too safe in comparison to most of our evolutionary history, and people suffer some kind of debilitating angst as a result. So there's an organization whose members go around scaring the sh*t out of random people, in order to restore our species' cognitive balance.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think if a game is able to scare you, that's just a sign that the game has successfully pulled you in. Rather than being an outside observer to the bame, you become the character. I still remember play Half-Life for the first time, after a long battle with soldiers on the cliff-side, and climbing the ladder into the last tube only to have the crap scared out of me by a sudden, jumping head-crab. That fright is part of the reason I knew Half-Life was a great game...I wasn't playing as Gordon Freeman, I was Gordon Freeman.
It has tense moments in it, but it's certainly more of a thriller than a horror game. If you want to play a disturbing video game, try Fatal Frame 1, Fatal Frame 2 or Resident Evil 4.
And for God's sake turn off the light, otherwise it's like watching The Grudge during the day with the light streaming onto the TV screen.
Summation 2
such as MMOs.
Gain without potential for loss makes gain worthless. The adrenaline pumped when you're in a situation to lose your 'stuff' is more potent than the scant ammount pumped when you're in a situation where you have to run back to your body, losing maybe 10 minutes of playtime.
Of course, this wouldn't be feasible in current MMOs where your equipment makes up a majority of your combat prowress.
And in other games, where you lose experience instead of equipment.. well, that's just plain discouraging. It has to be random, and not in a dice-rolling sense: -if- you die in the wilderness, and -if- someone comes upon your corpse and takes a few things, and -if- you have a method of tracking that person down.. that's when it becomes feasible.
People love adrenaline. I'd think people pay more money for this drug then most others combined. Most of western cultures' pasttimes stimulate your body to produce adrenaline one way or another.
*DrugCheese rants*
System Shock 2, a true classic, was extremely scary. The player finds himself (or herself, but let's not kid ourselves) on a derelict spacecraft on which something has gone terribly wrong. The game is not to be missed.
And it wasn't any kind of gore, or zombies, or anything like that. Well, lots of things like that, but that wasn't the main cause -- it was the foreboding atmosphere.
Abandoned schools are scary. It taps into childhood fears. Seeing the 'regular' world turned upside down and redecorated with body parts and rust is deeply unsettling. The lack of regular communication with other characters in the game, the ambient sound effects - my god, the sound effects work in that game was good. I remember standing in what I think used to be a gymnasium but in the 'other' world, and just standing there, listening to this distant clank-clank-clank of some unseen machinery. I left my character standing there for awhile, just taking in the sound, and I truly began to feel disturbed.
It was shortly after that I descended the ladder to the first full-on satanic ritual looking setpiece in the game. This gigantic cucumber with four legs ran out and split in half as it opened its mouth, revealing about a million teeth, and i swear to fucking god I actually dropped my controller and shrieked like a little girl.
Good times.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
First "scary" game.
3:15 am in front of a 12" television with all the lights off and sound cranked up.
Land spaceship to pick up survivor.
Survivor has a pink helmet on... white = good guy, green = evil alien, pink = ???
well we're not going to let him in until I get a better look.
">knockknockknockknockknockknock"
"gonna have to..."
Big alien head appears on my cockpit and starts trying to bash in the window.
"BRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
AUUUUUUUUGGGHHH!! TURN ON THE SHIELDS TURN ON THE SHIELDS as in my haste, my hand bashes my Pepsi(tm) can knocking it across the room until I can hit 's' and fry the sucker.
----
"Boo" horror we pretty much have down. Besides "Rescue..." this has been used in Resident Evil, Doom, Unreal, etc to great effect.
"Creepy" horror we got with Silent Hill to great effect.
But the kind of deep "horror" that makes you lie awake at night? I dunno. I submit that that's only doable in books/movies because it's passive entertainment and so the viewer/reader is dragged along. But in interactive entertainment it's like negative reinforcement. You're going to have to do something to keep the player wanting to go forward while whacking them with things they dislike. (Unless you're into that sort of thing... or Goth... Kinda like that HR Giger game way back when... or... heh... Beyond the Forbidden Forest. Okay game but most of the fun was watching the grotesque ways you would die)
I haven't played a lot of videogames in a long time, but the summary made me think of something that could be pretty cool in a horror game, if any game designers are out there.
You, as the player, control a character who is seen in a third-person view like what's described in the summary. This character is actually moving ahead of "you," though. The POV of the game is actually that of another character that walks behind the character that you control. That other character is basically defenseless, however -- think screaming chick from a horror movie. It's the job of the character you control to protect the POV character. So you fight the zombies and what-not with the character from a third-person POV, but every so often the zombies are trying to reach over the shoulder of the character you control, to claw at the POV. Cue all sorts of nasty death scenes where you get to watch your protector be overrun and killed, even as your own POV camera flips sideways to the floor...
Breakfast served all day!
...are increasingly hard to find. Honestly, Ravenholm in HL2 was good, had some good zombie action, but was really the only 'scary' part of the game. HL1 actually had more parts to it that I would consider 'scary,' if only for the general feel of the game being different (survival vs. liberation from oppressors).
Doom 3 got its 'scary' value out of the monster/zombie closets, though a few areas had some good 'n 'scary parts. Remember the imps crawling across the walls, or the shadows that made you think something was around the corner? Unfortunately, the game relied mostly upon the fact that it was a pitch black game, and the gameplay was somewhat lacking. (Don't mod down, its just my opinion.)
The last game that I actually played that had a true 'scare factor' to it throughout the whole game, probably in part due to the survival aspect, would be System Shock 2. Unfortunately, the odds of a sequel, let alone a good sequel, are slim to none.
Honestly, some games do need to have a 'fear' element to them in order to be good. The almost over-used FPS sci-fi genre must have the fear of fighting for your life against whatever badguys are thrown your way.
Different things scare different people. My sister is terrified of zombies, yet I look forward to the day that the dead will walk the earth. I prefer a more psychological type of game (eg. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of the Earth, though I'm a Cthulhu fan anyways). At any rate, I love FPS's, but fear is a good part, if not necessary, at least in order to get the good ole adrenaline flowing (if the four bottles of Bawls didn't do it already).
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
"[...]And as the player, it is actually us proceeding into the dark, receiving (when we're not getting beheaded) our genre pleasure."
So essentially he's saying "This bitch gives good behead."
'Perhaps the most important change made in the game mechanics of RE4 was fixing the camera behind Leon, providing a tight third-person shot through which the player could experience the action. Through this move, Leon has become every protagonist from every horror film ever made.
I saw it as exactly the opposite. Resident Evil was never known for it's camera freedom, but placing it in a fixed position behind Leon essentially removed all the fright from any live action moments (at least for me), relegating it to the FMVs. I'll illustrate the scariest moments I remember from earlier installments:
Resident Evil 1: Entering the first room with the dogs. The view is low to the ground as you enter and stop. You hear a new sound -- a strange clicking sound. Before you take a few steps in, a black shape lunges into frame from behind your perspective and starts eating Jill's face.
Resident Evil 1: Leaping hunters. After your first death at the hand of a hunter's leaping slash, that shrill cry is still scary. Because you can see every moment of the lengthy (at least for an attack) jump and the wait to see if you survive the hit is nearly interminable. That just doesn't translate well to a nearly first-person perspective (and didn't in Deadly Silence, either)
Resident Evil 2: The first licker room. You enter, the view is from outside through the window. You see the thing crawling effortlessly along the wall and just know it's going to pop right out soon.
I remember Inky charging down the corridor after me, his hot ghost/monster breath on my neck. In the distance was the glow of the power pill, promising heavenly salvation. Nearly there. Nearly there. Only have to get past this last, dark side-corridor... Clyde, nooooo!
Hell, the horror of just thinking about it now makes me want to shrivel up and die.
there is 2 kind of "fear", the horror one and the stress one. Before it was all about fear in gameplay. Now you have platformer (for the few that remain) that don't even have pit that kill you. you also no longuer have "game over". Game become more a work than a challenge.
As for sport game not involving fear, that is not true, they always have that in the competition form. you start to have feat to loose each time the opponent come closer to your score and even more if time enter the game.
If a game can draw any emotion out of you, then it is doing something right. Games are like stories - if they don't make you think, or love, or hate, or fear, or SOMETHING then they are just dumbing you down by staring at pretty pixels.
When Doom 3 came out, I upgraded my video card, setup my 5.1 sound system, and dimmed the theater lights. My friends would gather round as I played. People would fidget, jump, dodge, and squeal as things jumped out at them. The game was truly emotional for the people playing and watching. Now THAT is entertainment.
I had a similar experience with Shadow of the Colossus and Half-Life 2. Shadow made you hate what you were doing to those beautiful creatures. Half-Life 2 made you feel like you were in 1984 (the book, not the year!).
The biggest problem is getting enoug content without making the game repetitive. Shadow and Doom 3 both had this problem. But overall, making a provocative interactive story is difficult to do, but it is definitely a winning formula.
Aaaaaagh!
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
It's fear of the KNOWN dangers. Because you KNOW that whenever you enter that basement, an ugly bloody looking thing is going to follow you making screeching noises.
So you step in, and suddenly your radio begins generating static. You ran out of health drinks, and then you hear the screeching noises. You turn to the left, and it's a dead end. On the other side of the fence there's these arachnid creatures, and you only got your gun. Shoot the wrong target, and you'll get slain. Ah, isn't that beautiful... more dogs cut in half and they just started howling.
But wait, the horror's not finished. The horror only starts when you turn off the game and go to sleep, and notice how your clothes mysteriously resemble a beheaded bloody mannequin, and the noises out the street remind you of the radio static ringing. You try to sleep, read a book, and slowly you get tired.
But wait, the horror's not finished. Because you start dreaming about the game you were just playing a few hours ago...
You wake up and try to sleep again and have a heck of a stomach ache.
But wait, the horror's not finished. You remember that your mother asked you to show her your school grades, and you get them today.
I really hope that RE4 can live up to the hype in this article...I'm goin to gamestop to exchange the paper mario(boring!) for the RE4...It better be a thriller...
"Faith: Not wanting to know the truth."-Friedrich Nietzsche
Why would someone voluntarily play a game that would scare (or frustrate) them? It's not as if people eat food that is uncomfortably spicy or watch movies that cause them to cry. My mum was right: "Why do I keep dying? I should be able to just tap a button and win."
True stories and anecdotes, compiled from Slashdot comm
We don't need to be scared at all to enjoy a game. Many years ago the most popular games around, and arguably some of the most inventive, were adventure games, a la Lucasarts, including Grim Fandango, Curse of Monkey Island, etc. These games were engaging, funny, and downright pleasant to play. Immersive as hell, too. I recently tried Quake 4 and was blown away by the stupidity of the game. Get bigger guns. Get ammo. Throw grenade. Shoot and kill. How bloody novel. Hour after hour after hour of the same old sh*t. I haven't like a first person shooter since I played Theif. Boy, what a rant, but games today suck ass because idiots think that adrenaline is needed or it won't sell. So we end up with shelf after shelf stocked with the same f*cking game in fifty different boxes. Hell, at this point I'd be happy to play Zork :(
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
Anyone ever play thief 1? I was so into that, the first time someone killed me i nearly leapt out of my seat... all that sneaking around... crazy fun. ...malakai1911
7th Guest and 11th Hour.
... they all drew me in. I think a big part of the pleasure is seeing how tough you are. You want to keep watching until the next scary part and see if you'll still jump or wince.
I played those for hours on end and kept getting drawn back in by the story and fear and wanting to know what was next.
I grew up a horror-loving kid - watching all the B flicks with my friend in our dark basements. IT, The People Under the Stairs, Wax Museum, House, all the Nightmare's that plagued Elm Street
A game that can draw you in like that is even better. You want to keep playing to test your limits, see if you can handle it. Then you can go brag to your friends about beating "the scariest game ever," and show it to the girls and have them curling up against you. Maybe that's more with movies. But you know what I mean.
I love being scared. I can't get enough of it. I think it's true that people are a little too sensitive and understimulated in general, so maybe a good scream is what some people need.
What?
Ewww I hate horror games. Give me Super Mario World any day.
The Cradle area of Thief 3. And the library in Thief 2 was eerie as hell too.
Those type of scenes never scared me. What they did do was exasperate the hell out of me. "You moron! The psycopathic killer from beyond the grave is going to bash your skull with an axe as soon as you step in there."
"Don't these friggin' idiots EVER look behind them? Especially after four of their friends bought it that way."
And don't get me started on body disposal methods for supernatural psycho killers. These numbdumbs just bury Jason then act all surprised when he comes back a month or two later. HELLO!, you had to kill him ten times over just get him in the grave.
You can only heavily stun such a creature at best. Should one of non-idiot characters manage this then the correct thing to do is to bind ankles and wrists with HEAVY chain or rope then thoroughly dismember and slice and dice the creature. If intelligence was employed in the binding then the fact that the creature lives through this should pose no problem. Don't let a hack writer take your life at the last minute. The pieces should then be thoroughly burned and the ashes scattered in separate bodies of water. Any solid pieces should be encased in concrete and likewise scattered. Throughly soaking any remaining pieces in holy water is optional but can't hurt. NOTE: Do NOT put holy water on an intact Creature; it'll just wake up angry.
The case of the Liquid Metal Terminator was one of the rare cases of correct Super Creature Body Disposal. Sumbitch probably wound up in 40 different cars. RoboCop 2 had a good Creature Dismantling but they botched the job by dumping the pieces where his buddies could put him back together again. And those IDIOTS who thought running Christine through a car-crusher was sufficient, they should have checked with the Connors.
Maybe I should start one of those Evil Overlord type lists for Super Evil Creature Combat.
I killed a mob but I died... corpse becomes publicly lootable after a few minutes.
Will I get back in time to loot it?
Will it have dropped that zonewide uber item I wanted?
Will someone have just snagged the leet random drop, but left everything else on? I'll never know...
I just do not get the fond memories some of you guys express for RE1. I hated the game. The voice acting was horrible, the scripting was worse, the game play was decent, and the "scary" moments just weren't. And the camera angles did nothing more than piss me off; I died several times because I simply couldn't see the zombie standing two feet in front of me, because the angle was bad. And then there's the slowest-firing Beretta EVER MADE. Suspension of disbelief was simply impossible.
:)
I've since played RE2 to give it the benefit of the doubt, and found it improved but still unimpressive. It was still tedious and unscary.
I'm interested in RE4, but I have no interest in buying whatever console I'd need to run it
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
OK, you know you're a nethack addict when & and D scares you.
I've been there.
I admit, when I play horror games - I should say, when I played horror games, since I've gotten so bored with them - they do startle me. They scare me when I'm not bored to tears by their pathetic hackneyed plots stolen from B horror movies. So basically what I get out of it is a bunch of boredom punctuated by occasional moments when my heart is wondering what the fuck I'm doing to it.
YOU may need horror games. The author of the article may need horror games. I'll pass. What I need is more racing games that don't suck :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first being Clive Barker's Undying. A great example of a way to incorporate the more visceral "popcorn scare" with the deeper, psychological brain-twiddling you'd expect from Barker. (Or not, depending on how much you liked Hellraiser...)
The other, which I'm playing now, and while not quite so old as Undying is still a good one: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. When I read Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos short stories, the somewhat different rhythms of his early 20th century work created an unnecessary distance in the material. When you replace his stilted descriptions and florid prose with the experience of losing your grasp on reality, it becomes a much different animal entirely.
One of the creepier moments in Undying involves your Scrye spell. When you can peer into some forgotten trauma, you hear whispers and faint voices telling you "Look," and if you cast Scrye in the bedroom of a long dead woman, old matted blood appears on the sheets and you hear the yowling of a newborn.
The entire "Attack of the Fishmen" chapter of Dark Corners of the Earth is enough to make you wet yourself if you play it at night. Your character, a PI, goes to an inn in a little shanty town. If you forget to bolt the doors, then a bunch of cultist fishermen kick the door in and tear you apart. If you actually bolt the doors, then it starts a frantic chase where you have to run from room to room bolting the doors behind you and hoping you can outrun these screaming bug-eyed lunatics with cleavers and shotguns. The engine alters your perceptions to match your character's mental state, as well, so you hear the pounding of your heart and every heavy blown breath, your vision blurs and your hands twitch.
Those were two of the good ones, and they didn't make it very far at retail, unfortunately.
There was once a game called Iron Helix (Macromedia Director; marketed for Mac only IIRC.) It involved scurrying through an abandoned spaceship hunting DNA samples and trying to evade a robot that instantly killed your (robot) character on sight: no combat of any sort, only flight.) It was slow and had crude graphics (stop motion except for segues and a few special effects), but I still remember it fondly for the level of tension and suspense it created, sort of like the first Alien movie. Modern gamers would laugh, but Iron Helix was a whole lot more fun than anything I've tried since (including most recently Half Life 2 on AMD64) and the whole thing was pure adrenaline.
If you don't do nightsight and stick to a torch, Oblivion's dungeons are kinda creepy. As I level up I quickly become the most scary thing in the game and kind of wish the NPCs would treat me as such. As a silent killer who can kill the guy they're talking to without them even noticing, you'd think I'd get more respect than I do...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't think that the summary was accurate to the article itself. The article talked about the need to have a level of satisfaction when our expectations are met from having an immersive environment. That's not restricted to the horror genre of games as the summary implies. Every genre of games requires a level of satisfaction when our expectations are met or the game will get panned by players and critics. I use that abomination of Ultima: Ascension as the prime example of a game that completely failed to meet expectations and therefore generated no satisfaction. That article also mentions GTA. I wouldn't exactly call that a horror game.
There are some classic games that are so much fun, not so much from a playability standpoint but from an entire experience. I am a great fan of the Max Payne, Thief, and Splinter Cell series. Lots of great suspense and dark gameplay, but they pulled you into their environments, which is one of the key factors in the success of games of that nature.
Honestly, I think that the editors need to be a bit more accurate in the description of the articles. I was about to go on a huge rant about the bullsh*t that we need to be scared in order to derive pleasure from games until I actually RTFA.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I was playing Resident Evil 2, and when all the crows busted through the glass, my date jumped into my lap and wrapped her arms around me in fear. It felt pretty nice.
God spoke to me.
Won't have reached hollywood cannon or audience expectations until a few things have been achieved:
Characters insist on staying in a dangerous situation or location - like an abandonded summer camp - until every single person (save one) is killed by a single protagonist.
When characters find a basement, they proceed to go down regardless of whether it's important to waste time with the basement at all.
If there is a basement, there should be no lights available.
When a toolshed, garage, or cache of supplies is found, the main character will bypass all tools and weapons that would otherwise be usefull, for flashlight or some item that only McGyver could make dangerous.
When the caracter finds himself (or herself) surrounded by undead or hellish circumstances, the opportunity to blattently rip-off (badly) three-stooges routines should not be missed.
Chainsaws - more of them. Can't go wrong with chainsaws. Why does Grand Theft Auto - a decidedly un-horror game - seem to be the only game that really gets-it here?
I'm sure I'm missing out on several hundred other examples - but I've got more work to pretend to do. In the meantime - RE1's "you the master of unlocking things" Jill has only scratched the surface of what is required from gamemakers.
Looking Glass Studios dissolved, but the programmers and the team responsible for SS2 are at work on a sequel, whose working title is "BioShock," I think. You can check Gamespot's coverage.
I do remember RE1 having an impact on me, but the one game that, if you let it, really ran up the creep factor was Sanitarium. It was a shame the game didn't get more run than it did. In terms of completely drawing you into the psychological drama, there have been very few that rank higher.
I always thought Myst was _almost_ the same way when it first came out, but there was just something missing that really made you a part of the game instead of a bystander.
Behold, the power of fleas...
In manhunt you have to protect a bum and then a reporter in the end to complete missions in the game. And it is done well. The bum keeps wandering off.
On a side note the reporters voice was debbie from Sealab 2021.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Stephen King once commented about why horror books and movies do so well. His point was that we need to feel fear in order to process the emotion without our real fears paralyzing us. He pointed out real fears: that we'll get cancer, our loved ones will die in car accidents, that our children will be kidnapped or molested. These are all very real fears that could actually come true. Yet, we read books and watch movies in which bad things (both plausible and unplausible) happen. Why intentionally scare yourself? Because the experience (as the article somewhat mentions) lets you live out or experience the emotion and yet go on with your everyday life.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Doom 2 was scary for one reason - the music and lighting. A badly pixellated imp is not scary at full brightness.
:P
Half-Life wasn't scary at all, except for the sudden heart-jump of a headcrap leaping at you, making that horrible screech, while you're in the darkness of a ventillation shaft.
Aside from mood being set by music/lighting, games continue to fail to be "scary". And they're not even all that scary - you just get a brief increase to your pulse from being lulled into a sense of complacency. After that, nothing.
Modern horror movies are the same way. Cheap thrills - one-shot pulse-raisers.
We need horror in games? We have no horror in games. We don't even have horror in movies. When either the gaming industry or even Hollywood can put out something that makes me refuse to sleep in a dark room, call me.
All games in the Resident Evil series are throwbacks to the "die, memorize, win" method of video games.
Run your console off of a battery only source. Then hope and pray you can get to the next save point before the battery runs out. Or worse yet, that the memory card isn't being written to when the power failure occurs.
You've been on that game for two hours straight? I just DARE you to go past the boss battle, after you defeated it, without saving.
For even more thrill, tie some catnip and a string to the memory card while it's still in the system. Set the game to autosave and then let the cat play with the string.
Whatever happened to being scared that a grue was going to eat you....
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
While RE4 was my favorite in the series, I think some of the other ones were actually quite a bit scarier. RE0, for instance. The old model of RE games was able to do more psychologically, especially with camera position, taking cues from Hitchcock and other Horror film directors, while RE4 ended up being more of a less-frightening FPS in a lot of instances. Either way, it's one of my favorite series of games.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I have to agree with other users. It's not necissarily NEEDED per say for every game but it is nice to have some games in the horror genre. I liked how DOOM 3 and F.E.A.R really played off of elements in the game to build fear. Doom you couldn't have your flashlight AND gun out at the same time so you spent a lot of time walking in the pitch black mars base. FEAR was just a whole new level of gaming with slow motion, dead girls walking by, people evaporating. It really was an intense game. I would definitly recommend both of these games and hope for more in the near future.
I do agree with him but if you played enough horror games plus watched horror movies there's not much that can really scare you anymore.
Scare as in "oh crap a zombie dog just jumped thru a window". Of course the situation in which you encounter a evil being or zombie will still be scary if not creepy it just isn't the same without the shock part.
Playing a horror game today for me isn't as fun as it once was. At least from my experience I know that something will pop out at me. Or something bad will happen around the corner. But eh that's human habituation for you.
RE4 is nothing like the other RE games in terms of gameplay. It's much more of a shooter, and an incredibly good one too. By the way, they're supposedly still working on the PC port for release sometime later this year, so that might be a good option for you. I highly recommend it, even if you specificly dislike the other games in the series.
when I turned a corner and peered into an office cubicle and saw that little girl with the gnarly powers crab walking toward me, I shit (and emptied a clip into her).
I remember playing Ultima Underworld "The Stygian Abyss" on my old 486DX with an early Soundblaster back in 1989 or 1990 (whenever it was). Possibly the first ever first-person game it had creepy shadows and scary music. That one was so great because of the atmosphere, it was edge of seat stuff.
Then later Ultima Online was scary because dying actually cost you something. I agree with the article. If a game can scare you then so much the better.
while sco {
wget -O
}
Resident Evil 1: Entering the first room with the dogs. The view is low to the ground as you enter and stop. You hear a new sound -- a strange clicking sound. Before you take a few steps in, a black shape lunges into frame from behind your perspective and starts eating Jill's face.
... loved to play it in the dark after midnight when the house was silent.
Couldn't agree with you more. This was the first moment I remember ever when playing video games where I literally jumped. Loved the game
... but being scared in a game isn't for everyone. I know that for myself, I've never been able to stand survival horror games like RE and the like. Other games that have horror elements will get me really on edge - for example, when I played through Half Life 2, and got to the Ravenholme level, I could only play a half hour at a time before taking a break. Based on sales of survival horror games, there are most certainly people that love those sorts of thrills, but it's certainly not a requirement!
(Note that I just RTFA, and to me it looks more like it's referring to how the refinement of presentation to increase the scarriness in RE4 served to enchance the game by enhancing it's genre appeal. I don't think the article is actually referring to turning all games into horror games, but rather, is more of a case in point of refinement in a game by proper focus on the genre can serve to enhance the game.)
...as a genre. It's mainly just sudden startling noises and visuals.
I play World of Warcraft on a PvP server. I like the element that while I'm playing the game, at any moment I can be attacked from behind by the oposing faction (and very frequently am). It adds a whole dimension of threat and urgency to quests, and makes the game less mechanical to play because at any time, my plans to quest can be turned into PvP action.
Everblue 2 for ps2. everblue 1 never came out in US, but i picked the sequel up on a whim, because it sounded like a wierd enough game that it might just be awesome. Everblue 2 is a scuba-diving RPG, actually, and you wouldn't think that would sound scary.... a game where you dive to the bottom of the ocean and take photos of fish or salvage things, in order to gain money, to buy better scuba equipment....... BUT....
there are a few very scary moments in it.
there's a scene where you are diving into the wreckage of a sunken cruise ship, and you get inside of it and its pitch black, no sunlight can filter down that deep, and when you're actually in the ship, all light is blocked out. the water is murky. your flashlight allows you to see only a scant few feet in front of you. you know there are sharks in the area, and in the gameplay segments, there is actually only one music: a theme that plays when sharks (which can eat you) are around. so, as you explore the ship, you come across a doorway, and you open it, and its an old indoor swimming pool... and you hear the shark theme, which, as a gamer playing it, lets you know that there are threats nearby, and that you should be very very cautious and try not to panic, and that something big and scary could lunge for my throat at any moment.....
my experience with this area was one of the few times a game has honestly scared me. its one of those moments where I was so immersed that I forget i was playing a game. its a tight, enclosed level, and i hear the sharks, and I know that i need to be on the lookout for threats.... and then, all of a sudden, i run smack into a ghostly white face, illuminated by my flashlight and made more scary by the murky water.......
after jumping up and dropping my controller, because i totally wasn't expecting to find any ghastly apparitions, i realize that what I'm looking at is not a ghost, but a statue, remnants of the luxurious decorations of the cruiseliner. nothing as out of the ordinary as I'd thought, but the atmosphere, and the fact that I knew i was in dangerous waters, and then the running smack into the thing just made me jump and still gives me the heebeejeebees. truly effective game design... and unfortunately, in a game that almost nobody has ever played.
"However, as I progressed through the game, though the visuals remained impressive and the baddies remained gross, I could predict with absolute certainty when an imp was going to jump out from behind me. I'd look at a doorway, see a few places where a hidden door could open up, back up through the doorway, and give the imp a mouthfull of buckshot."
Now I know you didn't play Doom. You could actually see something.
"This started to become agonizing beyond belief and I cheated my way through the last four levels or so."
Or because the bosses were too hard.
"Whenever a first person shooter makes you want to not bother and just use a melee weapon, it's just because their monsters are so pathetic they would be trivial if you had sufficient ammunition to kill them all. But that's another topic entirely."
Not on Painkiller.
Nice thing about F.E.A.R. is that they played with your mind, much like RE or Silent Hill.
...Resident Evil on GameCube was much scarier than Resident Evil 4. The more recent one was action oriented, and because of the fully 3D environment, the graphics weren't as sharp as the pre-rendered scenes in the earlier version. The newer Resident Evil may be a greater technical achievement, and more fun for many people; but the first was all about atmosphere, and it was totally creepy.
I think the earlier fixed camera system added to that, since often zombies could be heard moaning and shuffling before they could be seen.
Horror is not necessary to a video game and more than it's necessary to Chess.
Horror as a genre is not needed unless you like that, but fear is.
I could think of a high emotion chess champion game in which you fear loosing in front of thousands of people for example or perhaps a chess game where you have your house or family lives on the line or if you loose that atomic weapons will be unleashed on your nation. Ok... That is a bit extreme. Lets just say you play a game of virtual chess for 1,000,000 of your gold pieces in World of War craft.
Well... Depending on how much you value your virtual gold, you will be sweating it and seriously thinking about each piece you move. Fear is the main reason behind gambling. It makes the game serious and ups the stakes.
Take if like this... Back in the good old days of Ultima Online, I would be dungeon crawling and then a player killer shows up. Now I could run or fight or I could die and loose my things...
Since I know dying will set me back a bit and make me try a frantic run for my gear and loot after I get rezzed, I have to weigh in my options to whether or not running or fighting will be fun.
And if I do run how much of a chance of actually making it out of the dungeon alive?
Of course throughout the years of playing UO there are plenty of times where I have fought and won, ran away, and sometimes died and had my things taken from me.
But the heat of the battle and the knowledge all my loot was on the line was exciting much more so than say fighting an AI monster who I knew I could simply walk away from if I lost too much health.
Also this applies to FPS games... Everyone was used to the Quake system in which you died and then you instantly respawned without much fear of dying.
However, when Counter-Strike came along you actually got scared of dying because not only did you loose the weapons you saved up money for buying, but you had to sit the rest of the round out until one side one.
That is the best formula for playing any game that is for those who want to fill that "gambler's buzz". The player must have some type of risk in where if they loose they will be punished and loose whatever they had previously worked on.
Personally, as comforting as save games and not loosing your items in MMOGs, a player must face some type of punishment for loosing.
There must be some fear of loosing otherwise we will get bored of a game like it had god mode turned on.
But I would also like to point out if that punishment for loosing is too great, then the game gets pretty tedious pretty fast (otherwise known as loosing over 15 hours worth of leveling when you die at level 59 in EQ arrrrgh!!!!)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I did not know that Redhat Enterprise 4 was a game.
I can see it now, "Hey, dude, did you see that killer init script I just fragged?"
while I did like the viewpoint in re4 I hated the game mechanics.....it went from being a survival horror game to being a twitch horror game. It was too fast paced to build suspense.
Wow, I thought that I'd really been enjoying playing through New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart DS since getting my DS lite, finding all the secrets, unlocking all the karts, etc., but now I realize that since I wasn't scared I was actually bored the entire time, and not completely engrossed as I had thought.
Come to think of it, this article rules out all of my favorite games, except the original Half Life.
I guess I'd better go play a real entertaining game, like Doom 3... that's unfortunate, the last time I tried it I thought it was silly and gimmicky instead of fun :( I guess my tastes need to be corrected...
I am the man with no sig!
...is started like this:
$ make menuconfig && make dep && make clean && make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
Granted it's all ncurses based (no OpenGL gore in this game), but after carefully winding your way through a seemingly endless array of levels, "wait, is this OHCI or UHCI?", "do I really need SCCP support?", "should I try to build ALSA in the kernel, or install it afterwards?", etc, then you save the config, and wait breathlessly through the compile, "oh, good--no gcc errors this time!" until finally it's done and you reboot...."AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! I was this close and got a kernel panic!!!! @#$!!!"
The horror!!!
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Just wait till Doom 5: The Nursing Home comes out.
or life imitates art. I am blessed to live in NJ whish has an abundance of abandonded building, schools, etc. While this is not unusual we happen to have a wed site and magizine celebrating it. Many a time i can remember being in some abandoned building, bunker, basement or tunnel system. Listening to...something...barely breathing..daring to only slowly peak around the corner because who know what vile creature might come running down the hall. The best games for me instill this feeling. You lose yourself. Silent hill, definatley creepy. It was made to not scare, but settle uneasily around your shoulder till the weight of it drives your shreaking towards open air and if available...sunlight. I remember the last trip we took saying " the only thing we need now is a zombie attack like in RE" while we trekked through an abandoned military bunker system....
I was so scared of PKs while playing Ultima in 98 that no other game has every provided me with as many thrills.
I have not played Doom3 (more than the demo), but was disappointed. Walking into every room, and expecting an imp, and being right _every time_, got old.
... wow. I'm a timid gamer as is, but they did a good job of things. (I'm about 4 levels from the last, I think, having crash landed someplace urban looking.)
... and that thing's obviously broken. What the hell happened here?
:D I like that FEAR keeps the scary moments on, while also letting me not worry (too much) that I'm going to be short on ammo.)
FEAR, on the other hand
The hallucinations really creep me out. I know they will happen, and am walking around, but they are always different, have that noise that accompanies them, and are VERY abrupt. Most importantly, they occur at the most unexpected places. Walking down a hallway? Looking out a window? climbing down a stepladder? Yikes! I once repeated the beginning of a level that had such a hallucination, and even EXPECTING it, I was still shocked. Pretty cool.
At some points, things are scary not due to monsters, but due to LACK of enemies. Walking around, why is everything dark and broken? There's blood there
ok, didn't mean for this to turn into astream of consciousness review of FEAR. I'll just say that it's scared me more than anything since resident evil. (RE scares me more due to the power of the monsters, and extreme scarcity of resources with which to fight them off. Survival horror my ass, I want a big gun.
Tetris.
The pricetags of games are scary enough
RE4 was a dreadful game. A colour palette of brown, beige and grey; a handgun that's less effective than a big stick would be; an inability to pick up a big stick, despite the fact you're walking through a *forest*; a targetting system that is *less* accurate the closer you are to something; villagers that take multiple headshots to kill, and then Mr Baghead shows up, takes ten rounds to the head, a grenade to the face and ignores all the damage while killing me with one chainsaw hit.
The only horror was the sickening feeling that I'd just paid £40 for this sh1t.
The last time I experienced a genuine scare in a video game was Dungeon Master on the ST. Low on health, out of food, depleted mana, but it seemed as if everything in the vicinity was dead, so I just took my eyes off the screen for a second to make a couple of notes on the map. Suddenly,from behind the party, a shriek from one of the Pain Rats From Hell, and the remaining health of my two fighters dropped by half. In a frenzy of clicking, I raced halfway across the map, and only stopped when I ran the party into a wall, then noticed how hard my heart was pounding. Because I was totally immersed in the game, I was genuinely scared for my characters/self and reacted viscerally, rather than logically.
Where'd that extra O come from? The word is lose. Past tense is lost. Current tense is losing. One O. Loosing is not a word.
"Hunt the Wumpus". Simple graphics, simple puzzle solving, but for some reason the combination of the music, and the flashing of Red on the screen when you were taken out by the Wumpus, was enough to scare the freaking crap out of me. Still to this day, if I play the game, the same level of fear creeps over me, from being instilled with that fear from day 1... ~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
I think a Gamecube to play it on would cost less than a copy of RE4 at the moment. I saw Mario Kart+Gamecube for around $60 the other day.
... but when I first played the 7th Guest, I was downright scared. Between the creepy and moody atmosphere to some of the unexpected and sometimes disturbing imagery, it was one of the best games I've ever played. I still remember the shortened version of the little song...there was a longer one, but I don't remember that.
Old man Stauf built a house,
and filled it with his toys.
Six guests came one night,
their screams the only noise.
No one knows what happened next,
there's no one left to say.
But if you should see old man Stauf,
get on your knees and pray.
Good times!
(Don't mod down, its just my opinion.)
You think you can get out of being modded down just by asking? Just for that, I'm gonna mod y--...aw, crap.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
There are lots of ways of sorting activity, but there are usually five things that players are seen to do in games: Explore, Compete, Socialize, Create, and Grief. Fear or fear generation can be well integrated with any of these, but is by no means necessary. What matters is that there is some dramatic narrative. That usually means some kind of foe, but that could be completely abstract. Gaming is entirely subjective as well. Did Starcraft really do so well for so long because of the fear, or was it all the rest?
I thought that F.E.A.R. had a great scare factor to it. The storyline was very intreging (sp?), at least it was to me. And the things that would pop into his head as you wandered down a hallway were just amazing. There is something about little girls in scary movies or games that scare the begeezus outta me. Am I the only person who though that the game was great and scary?
I've really gotta disagree with you on HL2. Ravenholm was a little scary, but mostly in a "when am I gonna find some more ammo, where the heck is the trap I'm supposed to use" way. Nova Prospekt however was frightening on a whole different level. Just thinking about the abuses that occurred in that place before AND after the combine arrived was quite creepy.
But maybe it's just me. I'm more scared by the things that aren't there than the zombies that are.
I could think of a high emotion chess champion game in which you fear loosing in front of thousands of people for example
Tone that back to two guys in a park, and the game can still be just as much fun. There's uncertainty (and perhaps a bit of anxiety) over the outcome, elation from making excellent moves, disappointment when things are going poorly, and intellectual stimulation when your opponent is an even match. Yet none of those emotional and physical stresses are fear. For a game like Chess, you actually have to concoct a situation under which fear will be felt. (Like someone with weak nerves at a national championship.)
Even in video games, the same holds true. I don't feel any fear when I play Pole Position. Why should I? My only enemy is the clock! But I do feel focused, elated, disappointed, frustrated, anxious, happy, angry, annoyed, and a whole gamut of other emotions, depending on how the game is going for me.
Tell you what. You find me the fear in crossword puzzles, and I'll agree with you that fear is necessary to gaming. Otherwise, can we agree that it's merely one of many stresses that can be used to make the challenge of a game interesting?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Condemned freaked the crap out of me, especially playing it in surround sound. The levels looked like something out of the movie Seven, and the audio really helped immerse you into the game. There are a few parts where I would jump out of my seat because I'd hear the floorboards creaking or see a shadow move only to realize it was my own character creating those effects.
If this theory is true, then why don't I enjoy horror movies? Sometimes they're gross, they're often boring, and I rarely enjoy the things. The only time I've been actually "arfraid" in a videogame was crawling under the bridge in HalfLife2 (I'm afraid of heights and that genuinly made me uncomfortable), but did I experience joy because of it? I liked playing Mario Kart more than I liked being uncomfortable under that bridge.
The first game that ever really had me on the edge of my seat was Zork I. I still remember getting lost in the twisty passages (yes they did all look alike) and turning on all the lights in my house, because I didn't want to get eaten by a Grue. Yeah I was 8 but it proves how powerful the imagination is.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Nah, System Shock 2 really scared me. Listening to SHODAN, droids, zombies, monkeys, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fear of falling in a pit, getting hit by a fireball, stomped, fried, or otherwise getting killed.
One thing that has turned me off to modern games (as opposed to the old-school ones) is that "dying" has no meaning. With virtually continual savepoints and infinite lives, "dying" usually means nothing more than a 30-second setback nowadays. Therefore, I don't feel any excitement, because it really doesn't matter - completely the opposite to the experience of having one life left as you enter level 8-4.
RE4 didn't really scare me until the point where I was controlling Ashley and had to avoid the suits of armor. Jesus were those things fast! And since Ashley can't use any weapons... well... My breathing went shallow =P
That's the only part in the game that has truly scared me. Resident Evil 1, however, had quite a few moments that scared me. I plan on trying a few of the Silent Hill games, I have SH2 sitting on my PS2 harddrive right now, just haven't had the motivation to pick it up just yet... I played maybe ten minutes of it, and it feels exactly like Resident Evil. The controls, then look, even the way they present letters and other readables. It screams Resident Evil.
Doom 3 has startled me too many times to count, but it did get predictable. I haven't played through all of Resident Evil 2, but that game had it's moments as well.
"FEAR, on the other hand ... wow. I'm a timid gamer as is, but they did a good job of things. (I'm about 4 levels from the last, I think, having crash landed someplace urban looking.)"
*tip* When dealing with souls, use a pistol. When dealing with a lot of souls, use two. *tip* The other is to go for head shots. And last. Use slo-mo often (I made it a middle-mouse button).
I think that perhaps what the author was trying to get at was that if games are going to take future steps towards maturing as a storytelling vehicle, they are going to have to deal with fear.
Books, television, and movies can all convey fear. Games have a little harder time with it.
"For those new to the game, they will die straight up, lose all their equipment and spend 90% of their time watching... is this exciting to them? Unlikely."
That's what SP mode is for.
I'm posting AC so I'm sure no one will ever see this, but:
:D
Check out Call of Cthulhu. It is far from a perfect game, don't get me wrong, but as far as horror goes, it's very Lovecraftian. Better horror than about 98% of the other games out there. Play at night with the lights out
"With virtually continual savepoints and infinite lives, "dying" usually means nothing more than a 30-second setback nowadays."
From someone who's never experienced the frustration of FarCry's checkpoint system.
Wow, nice trolling there, Mr. Adhominem Coward!
It's amazing: PA already covered this.
Clicky.
Have you tried the Thief games? They've got some pretty anxious moments. Thief 3 has some of the scariest moments, like an abandoned mental hospital with things in it. I'm not really sure what they are, but I know it's dark and they show up quick.
Nothing really scares me when it comes to artificial horror like movies and TV shows, but the game F.E.A.R. scared the shiat out of me, and I hype the game to all my friends!
This is not my sig.
Resident Evil 4 wasn't scary, it wasn't even close to being scary. It was a fun adventure game!
Why wasn't it scary? Because the character wasn't scared! If I was a bit nervous about going into the dark cellar with loud noises of gruesomeness emitting from within I was always reassured by Leon's causal "I'll wipe the floor with you, your friends, your boss, and your minions, and then I'll get going!" attitude.
Games that truly freak me out are the games like Fatal Frame 2 where you are going up against horrific creatures from beyond the grave and you are a terrified teenage girl who's only weapon is a flashlight and a camera. Did I mention that you can only fully see the ghosts from behind the camera's constricting lens? You'll be walking around a room and get attacked by a wispy grey blur and then whip out the camera to see the freakish armless kimono wearing woman wriggling on the floor towards you!
I swear, if I played that game at night with no lights on I wouldn't sleep until the sun cast away all demons and I had spent half the night reading Penny Arcade to cheer myself out of horror and jumping at every shadow.
Aaaaa! Invincible room size ghost sitting on the skulls of the people's he's killed! Waahhhaaaaa!
You know what game really scared me? Super Solvers Midnight Rescue. From the creepy music that played through the 4-channel tandy music card, to the spontaneously appearing monsters. Home Alone for the PC also scared me.
Only Kings Quest 5 could also do it to me, during that scene where you have to stand still for a while to trigger a loud event.
It's a reincarnation or a variant (depending on your viewpoing) of the ancient Greek idea of catharsis, using video games instead of theatre.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
If manipulating people through fear is an integral part of video games, then Jack Thompson is way ahead of the curve.
The Resident Evil games just don't work for me - to me, they're too "arcadish" in that I find the story flimsy, an excuse for the gameplay. The gameplay should serve the story, not vice versa.
On the other end of things, there's Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem . The Gamecube was an odd choice of platforms for this grown-up title, but this game alone is nearly enough to justify picking up an old used 'cube. The gameplay was solid and fun, but it was always in service to the story: even your most basic actions were affected by a choice that you make in the first few minutes (which God you're aligned with affects how you interact with different monsters).
On top of that, they had a brilliant sanity system - as you lost sanity, they'd introduce subtle audio effects (using the surround sound to do so), and introduce visual distortions and hallucinations (like blood dripping and statues' heads turning to follow you). As you truly lost it, they'd gradually escalate to doing things like playing tricks where you'd hallucinate walking on the ceiling of a room you've just entered - or even alarm you by simulating a system crash, or pretending that you've just reached the end of the game, without resolution (showing you an add for the fictional sequel). There's another one where they simulate someone playing with the volume control on your TV's remote - first you think, "Hey! Where's the remote?" before thinking a split second later, "Hey, that's not what the volume control feedback looks like on my TV!" There are dozens more, they're truly inspired and some of them will get you.
If you have not played this game and you want a truly scary experience, give it a look. It's the best game I've played since Deus Ex (for a different genre game with a brilliant, driving story line). It's one of maybe 5 reasonably modern games that I'd say are truly don't-miss masterworks.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Comment removed based on user account deletion
YOu didn't play Project Zero, did you?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What did you need the torch AND the gun for? Just turn up the brightness, most places have slight fogging so you see the enemies as black silhouettes on slightly less black background. There were two places where I needed the torch and neither required the gun.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
IMHO, that's the best way for games to be: the story serving the gameplay. If I want a really good story, I'll read a book or watch a film.
Let me just get one thing off my chest: I am obsessed with Silent Hill. And more specifically, Silent Hill composer, sound designer and now producer: Akira Yamaoka. I have been in love with the games for years, ever since I first played the original on the PS1. The main reason — but I stress, not the only reason — for that is the music and sound. Akira Yamaoka has made four truly wonderful soundtracks that make Silent Hill what it is. Try playing Silent Hill with no sound, I guarantee you that it will be much less scary.
The Cradle.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
If a game scares me, I probably won't play it! Where's my blankey...
I must say Ultima Online was a frightening experience at first. No other game made me feel the way it did. It was just so tense. You would battle your opponents with sweat dripping down your forehead into your eyes. But after years and years spent mastering every aspect of the game, I no longer had the tense rush. I became so battle hardened every situation was looked upon and all options weighed without a single emotion. I became cold calculating machine. It got to a point where there could be 15 people standing outside my little house waiting for me, I walked onto my tarrece and yelled "Be right down guys, just have to refil my potions," and I was off to battle these seemingly unbeatable odds. Of course I couldn't win per se, I could only kill at most 3 of the 15 assailants at one time, they keept being resurected, but they could not kill me. Walking them between my houses, I would make short stops in each to refil my provisions. I was supremely confident of my abilites. Never did another game put so much on the line in terms of loss, and never did another game reward a player's skill so much. The risk was great, but that is what made it more rewarding. Today's games are sugar-coated candylands by comparison. Even UO itself was bought out and turned into a candyland with a non-candyland attachement. Articles like "Players don't want grief" just make me disgusted. Gone are the days of Player Justice, and with them any semblance of real gameplay.
I have an idea.
Getting the shit scared out of me does not give me pleasure.
Sex does.
Make games about sex. Fuck horror.
True, true. I did leave out Nova Prospekt. Honestly, I'm not trying to say that Ravenholm was the only scary part, just that being a huge zombie fan, I found it one of the most entertaining due to its usage of the different types of zombies, and the atmosphere as a whole. Don't get me wrong, the game had a whole 'creepy' bent to it in a "whoah, this could happen in the future" type of way, but I just don't find it to be enough to keep me up at night. Worrying about the government coming to take me away while I'm sleeping keeps me up at night.
On a related note, can anyone think of a good zombie game that actually follows proper Romero zombie form? Last I checked, in any FPS, or most videogames for that matter, the zombies are either headcrabs, posessed people (Doom 3), or are a result of a disease (Resident Evil). There are no FPS's (to the best of my knowledge) who's entire premise is the survival of a zombie outbreak. Sure, there's Urban Dead, but it's not an acceptable substitute. There's Stubbs, but thats more of a humorous game. I want a good FPS (or a third person; Max Payne would be good) that has a zombie survival aspect to it. Make it as realistic as possible, but also as close to the good zombie movies as possible (Original Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, etc). Any ideas?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
### The Resident Evil games just don't work for me - to me, they're too "arcadish" in that I find the story flimsy, an excuse for the gameplay.
The story of RE is certainly very B-movie like, but I still found the story extremly fun and enjoyable, nice characters, interesting places and best of all, all RE parts actually connect to each other quite well, some however better then other, RE0 and RE4 where pretty dissapointing in terms of story continuity.
### The gameplay was solid and fun, but it was always in service to the story: even your most basic actions were affected by a choice that you make in the first few minutes (which God you're aligned with affects how you interact with different monsters).
I found that choice in the beginning terrible, since it was a meaningless choice, if I remember correctly you are presented with a blue, green and red thingy and have to pick one, neither of which has any meaning at that point in the game, very annoying. Another thing that I found awful in Eternal Darkness was the character switching, nothing wrong with a few more characters to play, but Eternal Darkness switched between so many that it was extremly hard to keep track or fell anything for them, was just yet another random person to switch to.
### On top of that, they had a brilliant sanity system - as you lost sanity,
The sanity system was fun, but only for like the first three hours of the game, then it simply was annoying, since it had no influence on the gameplay at all, it was simply yet-another-sanity-sequence which one had to wait to get over. It certainly was a nifty idea, but the implementation was very non-impressive.
### If you have not played this game and you want a truly scary experience, give it a look.
Never found Eternal Darkness much scarry at all, just to much bones and blood and stuff, all just looked fake and uninteresting in terms of story, since there was nothing happening to care about. That said I never played through the game, only the first 8h or so, simply got bored of it.
...you fear loosing... if you loose... I could die and loose my things... not only did you loose the weapons... if they loose they will be punished and loose whatever... not loosing your items... punishment for loosing... There must be some fear of loosing... punishment for loosing is too great... loosing over 15 hours worth...
Where is your fear of not knowing how to spell "lose"?
(Just to be on-topic for a moment, I completely disagree with you. Some gamers enjoy fear of "loosing" or being punished for doing so, but not all. I suspect not even close to all; neither I nor any of my friends are that competitive in our gaming.)
I personally hate reading the escapist, I don't find it particularly entertaining and the way the articles are laid out is makes me feel like I am reading a gaming magazine, do I need 15 pages for an article that could be fit in one? oooh text on top and next to pictures, am I 3 years old and need to be placated with 3 lines of text and a 640x480 bitmap?
anyway, that's why I don't read articles by them submitted in slashdot, maybe this should have been a journal entry but i'm sure i'm not the only one who feels this way.
2 words.. Al Lowe
My kid asked for santa to bring him a PS3 and I shit my pants.
No, you've just told me that _you_ need stress in a game. (And another post down the line apparently needs fear of losing.) But from there to extrapolating that all humans need stress, it's a big blanket generalization.
E.g., some of the most fun games I've played were Lucas Arts adventures like Secret Of Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle. There was nothing stressful about them. They were just funny. In fact, if anyone played DOTT in a way that made them get stressed, I'd seriously worry about them.
The fact is, not all humans are the same and not all humans play for the same purpose.
E.g., in the MUD/MMO arena we've known for years that there are, for example, Bartle's 4 player types, and they have fundamentally different goals and reasons for playing a game. A Socializer for example is there mainly to socialize or otherwise peacefully interact with other people, and they actually _resent_ being stressed by those they interact with. (Which makes them the favourite prey for griefers: a victim which takes it personally is the sweetest kind of victim for a griefer.) An Explorer for example is mainly interested in discovering things and plays in a thoroughly non-competitive manner: they're really _not_ trying to compete either with other players or with the environment. They're _not_ there (mainly) to either be the greatest in PvP, nor to achieve tangible material goals like gaining more xp or gold or epic equipment, nor to prove that they can overcome some challenge. I.e., there's very little reason to get stressed when playing as an Explorer.
And you can see it the best in MMOs if you look not at the Real Man (TM) die-hard willy-waver gang grinding up their PvP rank, but at crafters and the occasional social class like SWG's Entertainers. Some people genuinely play those classes because they prefer doing something peaceful and non-stressing, and not just for gold for a bigger sword or as part of the hologrind to Jedi. Some people genuinely like to just, you know, get together and chat while hacking at an ore vein with a pickaxe, in a thoroughly non-challengin place. Some people genuinely like to get together and RP, or have a party in the Mos Eisley cantina, and forget the stress, not look for more of it.
E.g., take movies or books, which are another popular passtime. The genres don't include just action and horror flicks, they also include comedies, romance flicks, documentaries, and generally a ton of stuff which causes exactly zero stress in the viewers. And in a sense you can see shades of Bartle's player interests again. E.g., an "Explorer" kinda personality might just watch a documentary on the Discovery Channel instead of getting all pumped up on adrenaline with an action flick.
Basically, just because most games so far have followed the model of porn movies, where all they ever try to do is appeal to your base instincts and hormones, doesn't mean that that's the only model or possible audience. Yes, there are people who need stress and pressure, and you can see that at work too: some people don't seem to be happy unless they're stressed, and will actively seek or create reasons to be stressed. But then some (most?) don't.
Basically, the sooner we get out of blanket generalizations like "all games need a challenge" or "all gamers need stress", the better off we'll all be.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.