Hello, all. For those who don’t know me, my name is Trei, I am a teacher for adults with special needs, and I’m an all around gamer geek. This is the first of a twice-weekly segment I’ll be doing here on the TOA site, which I hope you all will enjoy! That said, on to this week’s post!
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chicago Typewriter.
I will be the first to admit that I have a strange relationship with the Horror genre.
I’ve never been a huge fan of horror movies, for starters; at first because I was too afraid to give them a shot, and then later because I found that most of them rely on cheap shocks and gratuitous gore to create the sensation of fear. Despite this, though, I have always had a fascination that borders on addiction with scary stories and video games. I love something that I can immerse myself in, where I am the one who’s pitted up against my own special Freddy Krueger, be it in the form of zombies in Resident Evil, or the Necromorphs in EA’s Dead Space. To me, it’s fun to be stuck on the edge of my seat, wondering what’s waiting for me in the next room… and if I’ll survive finding out.
Which, incidentally, is why I get worried when I read that the producers of Dead Space feel that people might be “too scared” of their game, and that they are altering the pacing of Dead Space 2 because of this. I’m not the first person to comment on this, for sure, but it’s proof of something that I’ve been noticing lately: Horror games are changing, shifting their focus from survival to action. And, I believe, becoming less scary by doing so.
Rewind five years, to the release of Capcom’s Resident Evil 4. The game was huge, in part because of its connection to the popular Resident Evil series, and in part because it changed that series. Dramatically. In earlier Resident Evil titles, you had to scavenge for everything. Guns, ammo, even saves! Resident Evil 4 decided to focus more on the action aspect of the game, though. It abandoned the series’ trademark ink-ribbon saves, and made it so that enemies would randomly drop ammo for guns that you had unlocked. In addition, it gave the player access to “power” weapons, from the “Chicago Typewriter”-aka a Tommy Gun with infinite ammo- to a doomsday device that killed anything that wasn’t the main character or the girl he was trying to save. With infinite ammo.
Like a lot of people, I loved Resident Evil 4 when it came out. I played until I unlocked all the special guns, and took a sadistic pleasure in mopping the floor with the game’s hardest difficulty. But once I that was done, the game went into its case and was never heard from again. Unfortunately, Resident Evil 5 continued with the trend, not only pumping up your guns (though I will admit, the triple-barrel shotgun is kind of cool), but pumping up the main character to the point that he’s going toe-to-toe with a teleporting super mutant, and asking ten-ton boulders to move by punching them (successfully, I might add). And giving him a helper to boot.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not scared when I’ve become the creature of the monsters’ nightmares. Hell, I’m not even scared when I’m on equal footing with the monsters. To me, the fear in horror games comes from being outmatched. The adrenaline rush comes from knowing that at any moment, those last six bullets could be gone, and I could find myself unarmed and playing a game of zombie dodgeball.
It’s this strange “power creep” in the genre that bothers me the most, I think. In order for a gamer to get pumped about that next big title, they have to be promised something even bigger than the last time. It’s like video games are becoming the Die Hard movies; we’re not just satisfied to shoot down the helicopter, so we have to use a car to do it. We can’t just be the guy with pyrokinesis in Bioshock, we have to be the Big Daddy in Bioshock 2. But where do we go from there? When the Big Daddy is one of the baddest guys in the first game, how do you justify introducing something stronger in game two?
Very often, you can’t if you want to maintain the series’ atmosphere.
Let me end by pointing out that I don’t think that any of the games I’ve mentioned here are bad. They are all fun action games… but they’re not scary. Dead Space gave me that hit of soil-yourself-scary, and I sincerely hope that Dead Space 2 can maintain that. But even the original shows signs of power creep, allowing you to decimate your foes if you upgrade your pistol
all the way, so only time will tell.
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Thanks for reading, and please please comment / critique! If you have anything you’d like to read about, just send it to me at kamiofthemoon@gmail.com, or if you’re a TOA Member just shoot a PM to TOA Trei Shouri. The segment will be starting a regular rotation as of Monday, with posts on Mondays and Fridays.
See you then!
((Also, I’m still coming up with a name for the blog, and suggestions are welcome.))
Name suggestion: Trei’s Tirades
Lol. It doesn’t come across that angry, does it?
I haven’t really played a “horror” game since the first Resident Evil. It’s never really been my type of game. I play Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead, but I don’t consider those horror games exactly because they aren’t they type of games that make me scared to go around the next corner or open the door and find out what’s behind it like the original Resident Evil did when I was 10-12 years old.
I agree though that these games all have a following, and should be left un-touched to appeal to those gamers. I have never liked the idea of weakening your game and what it’s known for hoping to capture a few more people’s attention.
No, its not angry…i was just going for the alliteration!
I’ve noticed this escalation in other entertainment medias too. It kind of ruins the aspect that attracted one to those medias in the first place. I haven’t played much Resident Evil, but I really liked Bioshock. It was original, new, and just starting at the bottom of it’s own escalation, so the gameplay was invigorating and exciting. the second one was a real let-down compared to the first.
I do like the old school scare your pants off games, but havent played much of the genre in the last few years.
Good job Trei!