The Gamer's Quarter

[Ketch]

I've been wondering about what I'd call a stripped down Survival horror experience, ie. how primitive can the graphics and sound in a game be, but when combined with 'scary' gameplay actually make a game a 'survival horror'? ie. scary to people now.

With a bit of tweaking I wonder if Pacman could be made more nerve-wracking like a prototype Manhunt. Imagine if the ghosts had proper A.I with line of sight etc, but moved slower and weren't fluorescent in colour.

What a Sinistar question!

[dessgeega]

it looks like you should play haunted house on the vcs.
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[purplechair]

Does survival horror really need... well, horror? It seems to me that the basic idea behind games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill is that you've got a narrative path to walk down, with a load of obstacles in the way and very limited resources with which to overcome them. I guess it's like traditional horror films... the atmosphere is set by the protagonist's helplessness, rather than the actual imagary.

(Just so we're clear, I'm making this up as I go.)

So I guess you could make a survival horror game just by combining one of those Flash mazes (that, coincidentally, the internet likes to end abruptly with a shrieking, decomposing face) with a touch of Bullet Hell - tiny pips spawning around the edge of the area and setting a target for the player's current position. Like playing dodgeball on a tightrope.

I wonder if you could create genres based around other emotions - Survival Love, or something*. Give the player a path to walk and surround them with excellent temptations to draw them off it.


*I suppose any realistic relationship simulator would fall under this catagory - hoh hoh hoh hoh!

[purplechair]

Come to think of it, Pac-Man is basically survival horror already.

[dessgeega]

[Alc]

[SuperWes]

I downloaded the most amazing Cell Phone game yesterday. It's called Tower Bloxx, and it's the deepest simple game I've ever played. It's a mixture between a puzzle game, a sim game, and a mini game. You select the type of tower you want to build (from 4 types), then you play a one-button mini game to decide how many people are going to live in the tower, then you place the tower on a grid. Certain towers can only be placed next to other towers, making your placement important.

It's an amazing game that's almost worth having a cell phone for.

-Wes
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[Lackey]

[Alc]

3-Demon sounds pretty horrific. I may give it a go later with the lights off, if DosBox is feeling friendly.

I think the core of survival horror is prolonged anxiety. That's to be the main uniting factor - if a game doesn't cause anxiety in the player, if they aren't worried about what might be coming up, it isn't survival horror. Fighting for survival/limited resources are the means to anxiety's end. Spooky narrative and atmospheric music/surroundings are too.

[rf]

The only survival horror game I've played is SH2, and I didn't get far. That said, I have a hard time understanding how so many people see the survival horror "experience" as so effective and easily evoked.

In both graphics and gameplay, most games I've played have been unable to surprise, in a certain way, for fairly principled reasons. With console game graphics up until the PS2, which is the highest-era console I've played, you can usually tell exactly how much detail is in a scene. Your eye roves the image and deconstructs it into discrete polygons and textures, and no matter what grotesque stuff the game throws at you, you know it'll lie behind that distancing level of physical approximation. Similarly, you know you're not going to be thrown into a really disconcerting gameplay situation, because you wouldn't know how to respond; you'll interface with everything you'll encounter in the same, mostly repetitive ways you've interfaced with what you've already encountered. (I don't just mean the controls, but the little situations games use, "fights" and "exploration" and so forth.) For these reasons, games rarely give me fear of the unknown--specifically, the unknown I'm wading into--because it has to manifest itself along certain, comforting lines. I guess survival horror is supposed to about the titular survival more than fear of the unknown, but this isn't always how the games themselves are described, particularly the Silent Hills.

I haven't played Eternal Darkness, but it's techniques sound like a way of circumventing this problem. Though as lots of people have remarked, they're basically gimmicks, and it would be hard (?) to go beyond that.

One thing I would like to feel from a game is the sense of "shit, I just did something catastrophic, or at least catalytic--and there's no game over screen." In other words, it would be nice to be hurled into some sequence I truly never expected would exist, but without it being some scripted plot twist that I'd get a whiff of, inevitably, because I usually do things long after other people do. And to have this happen in a scenario I have some investment in, not some arbitrary scrawl in a sandbox that's fun because of its libertine detachment.

This is only sort of related to how simple a game can be, but, well, whatever.

[Lackey]

A lot of that sounds like a function of how willing or able you are to be immersed in the metaphor though.

A book, for example, can generally only surprise you with content and not form (there are exceptions, probably).
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[The Great Unwashed]

[Alc]

I was so disappointed with the "freakout" effects in Eternal Darkness that I think it discoloured my appreciation of the game a bit. I'd deliberately avoided reading about how they worked so they'd be fresh when I came to them, and when I did they were really disappointing. After the first time for each one, they don't really have any effect at all. I was quietly hoping for full-screen rendering changes (like the pills in Kula World or the mushies in Death Rally), done in a nightmare-ish way, though in retrospect my expectations were probably too high for a first-generation game.

[Lackey]

What messes me up about Eternal Darkness is that they seem to happen sometimes when the sanity meter isn't really depleted...or am I just imagining it? I would have ditched the meter alltogether. If the walls are moving around or bleeding I'll probably realize I'm losing it. I don't need a green bar to tell me.

I don't know about you but the blurry PSX era graphics freaked me out a little. Especially the perspectively incorrect texture rendering that often resulted in surfaces jittering or nauesatingly moving in odd directions.

Silent Hill 2 is not horrific because of unpredictability, surprises, or the threat of death, but because if you empathize with the characters at all the content is extremely disturbing. To me it's not that the monsters are very threatening but that they inspire this feeling of disgust and dread in the pit of my stomach when I have to deal with them. Then again, I think how much you get out of it depends on how sensitive you are to that sort of thing.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[simplicio]

[Shapermc]

[Lackey]

I'd like to see an unannouced pop-up book page in a novel. Although I guess the thickness of the pages would be a dead giveaway.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Six]

[Lackey]

I've played it! A few people here have, from what I know they just don't talk about it. I'm going to buy it when I think the price is reasonable (probably very soon).
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |