The Gamer's Quarter

[Lestrade]

This is a spin-off from a post I made in the "Games You Are Playing" thread:

[player 2]

I really like this idea. Giving every item you have physical mass and size is one thing, but making that mass affect more than just your inventory box and actually affect your character's attributes is that next step. Giving everything multiple attributes that affect multiple other things just make the game feel right. It's a matter of consistency, I think.

I also think that adding more parkour elements would be great, especially in tandem with the item mass. Imagine being cornered on top of a building. You just unloaded your rocket launcher at the chainsaw zombie dames, but there's one following just behind. You chuck your rocket launcher to slow him and the mob down, turn around, and hope you can make the jump to the next rooftop. Your feet never plant, but you manage to grab the edge with your hands, and you pull yourself up.

I'd also really like to see QTEs integrated more tightly into the game. In the above scenario you could have the player reach their Wiimote (or SIXAXIS) into the air to grab the ledge. If you didn't do it fast enough you wouldn't get up very quickly (or you could even fall down). Or give me the ability to knock stuff over to block the zombies' path. Let me dodge more of their moves. Dynamic action would be great. Prince of Persia's "autokill" seems like it could be good here, but maybe add more risk/reward. If the setup of the autokill isn't perfect, let it only do half damage and put me in a bad position.
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[Lestrade]

That would be awesome, and I could see it happening. To me the point of all this crazy hardware is to remove the pointless abstractions (RE4's item merchant, attaché case) that detract from the immersion. I mean, how awkward, clumsy and plain annoying is having to heal yourself with an item from a menu screen in the middle of a firefight?

I would like to see RE5 do away with this series holdover as well. Either have an on-screen menu that lets you quickly press a button to access your healing items, and then choose the one you want (à la MGS's shoulder-button pop-up menus, but perhaps in a Gears of War-style cyclical display), or make a dedicated "heal" button. I suppose a Zelda-style bind-item-to-button system could work as well. Either way, get rid of that fucking menu screen.

I also wish for the death of the merchant; this is RE4's worst and most uncomfortable contrivance. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Having strategically placed weapons as you progress through the game (that you could grab, drop, or miss entirely) is a better way to introduce new firearms. I like how you can upgrade weapons in RE4; it adds a level of depth that really pushes home the fact that it is a shooting game, instead of an exploring game. Still, there must be a way of doing this (finding pieces/parts and then building the attachments yourself?) that isn't so out of place.

My point in general is, we have the ability to make games operate in a more believable manner. In a movie, if your protagonist just kept stumbling across important plot points via a notice stuck to a wall, we the audience would cry foul. In RE4, it's still lazy story-telling.

[extrabastardformula]

[Harveyjames]

Yeah, I like all those ideas. I think we're pretty much on the same page regarding what went wrong with RE4.

They should basically just make the whole thing more consistant. And more thoughtfully planned, so the experience of running around, diving through windows, panicking, running out of ammo etc. etc. that you get in the village is pretty much a constant theme. My favorite part of RE4 is the farm- just after the most intense shock-to-the-system-gunfight you've ever played through, you're rewarded with this eerily beautiful area, given a Mario 64-style subquest (find the blue coins!) and you get the dirty pearl necklace puzzle. Those opening sections are a masterpiece of pacing, and this is when you start thinking 'hey, this game could be one of the greatest games EVER'. Then it all starts to go a bit pete tong when that merchant shows up, and by the end it's lost focus completely.

I really loved the stuff where you were able to make choices that would affect later gameplay, like helping the dog or taking the left path or the right path- shooting the blue coins, and so on. I think I'd like to see a lot more of that.

Yeah, the Resident Evil movie would have been a lot more entertaining if Jill had found out all the important plot points via notes stuck to walls.

[JamesE]

[JamesE]

Please, HarveyJames, can we stop saying "lost focus"? That is a conjunction of two words that doesn't really mean anything.

While I do lament the lack of sidequests after the punisher grant, playing Wii RE4 has given me a greater appreciation for the game beyond the wooded section. An awful lot of the best stuff in the game (the Predalien sewer duel, "it", Krauser) comes far, far after it. It's like three distinct sub-genres of horror - the creepy murder in the woods low-budget flick, the surreal horror, the bioengineering nightmare. Towards the end it really builds an intense head of steam.
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[dark steve]

Yeah, the castle, for what it's worth, probably has the bulk of the more interesting setpieces/scenes in it. It's more of a structure thing that differentiates it from the village–whereas the first act has you tromping back and forth in sort of an organic way, the second is more segmented and videogame-y.
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[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

[Harveyjames]

That's the exact thinking that lead to Capcom putting a minecart ride and a giant robot midget in their Village of the Damned game.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

If they can do it with Qix they can do it with Pacman.
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[parkbench]

Hehe--what are yeh bawyin'?

[JamesE]

[Harveyjames]

JamesE what is your problem

I thought my definition was pretty sound. You can see quite clearly what my problem was with the game. This is some crystal-cut shit. I'm just going to quote myself because I have so much faith that what I said was ok.

[Lestrade]

[Shapermc]

[Lestrade]

Well said.

[dark steve]

I don't really see a clear line of intent, re: "what RE4 was trying to be (and then betrays)" as opposed to "what I thought RE4 was going to be/what I wanted it to be (and then wasn't)." Which are fine sentiments, but, I guess it's the difference between saying the game isn't what you'd hope for and that the game is objectively marred in some way, which sort of irks me a bit. If the game has a biggest strength, it's probably the combat/camera system, which gets a pretty even work-out in terms of variety and difficulty curve all the way through. Stages are rooms with set-up obstacles and treasure that you clear in a very linear order. It's a bit obscure about this in the beginning, and a bit more frank in the middle (which, yeah, isn't it's best bit in terms of area-to-area cohesion, although again, I do think it has most of the best bits anyway). I understand how the atmospheric transitions could bother people (like james said, goes from swampy zombie nightmare to surreal, gothic castle to creaky biological nightmare), although I think each is pretty well contained in and of itself.

I guess the shopkeeper is a bit of an RPG item salesmen, although the only real fix for his role I can imagine would be less obvious RPG item salesmen (bartering directly with items, maybe). Treasure huntin' and gun tuning are both pretty enjoyable, and I wouldn't want to be rid of them.
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[Shapermc]

[JamesE]

[dark steve]

From Fulci to Argento to... who's Cronenburg but a notch below?
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[Mr Mustache]

Am I the only won who thinks RE5 looks to be incredibly problematic, where RE4 was only sort of problematic?
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Straight up

[Shapermc]

Honestly RE5 doesn't look like much of anything yet, let alone problematic.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Harveyjames]

[Mr Mustache]

[Dracko]

haha racism
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[JamesE]

[Harveyjames]

Hey Dracko, I'm going to respond on your behalf to save you the effort:

[Dracko]

THANKS, HARVEY!

Killing brain/un/living dead Spaniards and Negroes is an issue that must be addressed post-haste, lest Capcom open its ever-restrictive geek borders to Aryan supremacists and South Africans.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lestrade]

[Harveyjames]

OH YEAH, FUCK.

Capcom have as much political nous and savvy as a 16-year-old japanese girl emailing me to say 'I don't want Terrorist to bomb Japan. I hope USA Bombs all the terrorists. P.S I work in a bakery now, I eat a lot of breads! Burp! \^0^/'

Seriously, that whole 'you americans can't police the world forever!' shit in RE4, coupled with the fact that they don't appear to have ever heard of someone who's heard of someone who's heard of feminism, worries me just a little bit.

Yeah, they're not afraid of relying on the base human fear of the foriegn 'other' which we all know is not a clever thing to do. Politically, RE4 was such a hodgepotch of ill-considered messages and ideas I'm willing to believe they're just genuinely naive, which is why ultimately I can ignore all the potentially offensive silliness in the games. Dead Rising was actually quite smart and had a vein of anti-american, anti-consumerist satire running through it, so who knows, maybe there's hope.

When you get down to it, the zombie genre is kind of a celebration of the beauty of the human form. We remove the humanity from humans so we're just left with the body to admire (and dismember). If you've looked at stuff like Leni Reifenstahl's amazing Africa photography you can see how there's really a case to be made for an all-black zombie game. Just... at least let us play as a black guy or something. Please! Or this game will be end up being horrific for all the wrong reasons.

[Shapermc]

Harvey, you need to play Crackdown if you want to see racism at its most blatent and niave.

Also, I don't necessacarily see it as problematic for these things because of The Serpent and the Rainbow. Harvey, you need to play Crackdown if you want to see racism at its most blatant and naïve.

Also, I don't necessarily see it as problematic for these things because of The Serpent and the Rainbow. Well, ok, I’ll expand a bit.

Basically, I think that the whole “Spanish are teh Zombies” was honestly naïve. It seemed to me that the game was more aiming for “This isn’t about Zombies in the USA,” which the “Parasites in Small Spanish Village” theme drives home. The problem is not that Capcom didn’t take things seriously, it’s that they know most gamers don’t take games seriously enough to have anyone look at it from this angle. It’s more like “we need to make this repetitive to drive the point home to gamers” not “we need to associate Spain with evil.” They’re more like Pavlov, not Hitler.

I have a feeling that RE5 is going to involve VooDoo, and to get the perfect feel for that you need to go to certain locations. Just because those locations are prominently black populations and “third world” shouldn’t mean that this is an attack on smaller places of minority. It just means that videogames aren’t mature enough to even mostly look at these things from a “pop” level (Dead Rising was not a “pop” game, where RE kind of has become).
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Dracko]

Guys, I really think you're making too big a deal out of all this.

And Crackdown is intended as parody.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Shapermc]

[Scratchmonkey]

It's a good example of how only good enough writing in the vein of GTA can carry social parody, because Crackdown winds up feeling silly and heavy-handed. The main problem as I see it is they didn't do a great job making it clear that they were trying for "social stereotypes are ridiculous and we are parodying them" versus "immigrants oh nooooooo". Parody pretty much requires decent writing to work.

As for RE5, it's a bit difficult to do anything related to the Haitian zombie legends without involving poor black people because of the obvious. That's not to say that it could be done extremely poorly and in bad taste; it could also be handled quite well.

I'd love to see more of a parkour-y element to running around in the cities. The use of buildings in RE4 was probably my favorite element in the game and is why I don't particularly like the latter two-thirds of the game, since they pretty much drop that situation entirely.

[Mr Mustache]

[Harveyjames]

The standard conspiracy theory would be to assume that they're in the pocket of some body or major shareholder who tells them their corporate mission is to bring 'American values' to the rest of the world, like Michael Eisner once said of Disney. However, their first major game for an American console was Dead Rising, and that was full of anti-American satire. The storyline ends up being about some governmental cover-up over a U.S. sanctioned mass genocide in South America, and it's some kind of comment on American consumer habits and foriegn policy (the zombie virus that destroyed the town was originally designed to make cattle easier to keep and breed- "do you have any idea how much meat Americans consume in a day?" asks the professor.)

So it's not like Capcom are being manipulated from above- that's why we can only assume that the person in charge of RE4 was just genuinely naive. It's not really acceptable, but thankfully it is ignorable... the dumb cutscenes in RE4 didn't make me enjoy the game any less.

[Mr Mustache]

I don't believe that there is any conspiracy, nor do I think that a company as large as Capcom needs any external entity to make their bad decisions for them. It's simply a product of laziness.

Black Hawk Down was a terrible and terribly racist movie.
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Straight up

[Shapermc]

[Harveyjames]

Well, that's a pretty big question you're asking...

Bascially, no-one cares if RE4 is racist, and RE4 isn't going to make people hate spaniards just like RE5 won't make people hate blacks. The problem is more nuanced; showing dichotomies of good and evil in dominant media has the effect of 'culturally programming' people, if you want. When good is always white and bad is always black- we don't even have to be talking about races here- it makes people more malliable and receptive to the idea( that the George W. Bushes of this world like to perpetuate) that there is an 'other' who is 'evil' and that they are 'good' and that the world is divided down two lines- good people and evil people. It's a dangerous idea and the root of all intolerance.

When dominant media (games played by millions of people!) consistantly assigns 'good' to one race and bad to all the others, the effect is potentially as toxic and damaging as it is retarded. It sows the seed of prejudice and racial superiority in impressionable minds.

[Isfet]

Edward Said would probably not enjoy RE4 or 5.

i just kind of wanted to throw that in there.

i'm agreeing with Harvey and Mr. Mustache. they've pretty much said anything i'd want to say, and probably more eloquently, but really, watching the RE5 trailer earlier, i couldn't help but feel that it was offensive.

though maybe i'm biased. maybe i'm taking into account all the other instances of racism towards blacks in Japan, and applying it to something where it isn't actually present. EDIT: i realize that may sound sarcastic, but it's not meant to be.

[extrabastardformula]

the fact that openl;y racist expressions of glee greet the RE5 trailer on other videogame websites taints everything no matter what the intent may be.
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[Scratchmonkey]

I hadn't seen the new trailer and after doing so, I can appreciate more what Mr Mustache is saying. Parts of it have a definite queasy Italian-exploitation-movie vibe.

While looking for it I did find this, though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCeaHIEujPM

[Harveyjames]

[Scratchmonkey]

[Dracko]

kill whitey
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[The Soviet Onion]

Black people in a videogame? CLEARLY SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

[Dracko]

Throw your Pokéballs at them.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]