Slashdot Mirror
The Survival of Survival Horror
Rich writes with this excerpt from GameTopius:
"When it comes to pacing and combat, Resident Evil 5 is being compared to Dead Space, as opposed to its previous peers, Silent Hill, Clocktower, and Siren. This is understandable: Resident Evil 5 is joining Dead Space in a new quadrant of the survival horror genre. These games are akin to survival horror in their look and style, and sometimes in the trappings of their stories, but when it comes to gameplay, they are faster paced, and emphasize tighter controls and tactical decision-making, not the ability to use as few bullets as possible on hard-to-hit monstrosities. The reasons for these gameplay changes have been carefully examined by designers and gamers alike."
I agree on the lack of scare in these newer games, but I'd like to have my scares while having some semblance of decent controls. The genre essentially says "Here's the game, here's the archaic and awful controls with which we cripple you in order to make the game scarier."
True, RE has historically had crippling controls. Fixing their controls with RE4 and moreso with RE5 isn't a problem in and of itself, but I think the threat from monsters should have been cranked up correspondingly.
Want to know a survival horror game? The first time I played Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. I approached it as a first person shooter for about one minute; then I realized that one bullet from a unseen assailant can instantly kill me. From that point on, I crept forward as carefully as in any zombie-infested underground research lab. A survival horror game loses its horror if you ever get to the point of seeing a monster onscreen and thinking "I can kill that, no problem." A single zombie in the middle of an empty room should still make you nervous.