Jimquisition: The Survival of Horror

[Cid Silverwing]

Jim, would you KINDLY stop using that shitty PCM scream at the start? You're basically pulling a screamer prank without the face.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

inb4 people complaining about Amnesia and similar games only forcing you to run away from monsters and using a simple engine.

These games are supposed to take the power away from you, that is the point. That is a staple of horror when its done right. A protagonist completely out of their comfort zone forced to cope with situations beyond them. It's the opposite of machismo and gun wank. They call it Flight or Fight, and most people in most situations would run their ass away from these situations or try and hide. Contrary to what other games and some parts of popular culture might tell you, not everyone is fucking Rambo.

The marketing point is brilliant. Pewdiepie is the biggest presence on all of youtube. Know what that means? The most popular youtuber is a lets player who largely climbed to the top by playing horror games. There is your advertising.

All of the above is a hundred percent correct, but what really frustrates me is how the general audience has been conditioned to expect to have the ability to retaliate against the opposing faction or creature of the Title of the Month. Stop by Outlast's Steam Community Hub and you'll see frequent instances of comments that go along the lines of "Eh. Where's my guns? I wanna shoot these inmates!"

Then you explain to the posters that guns would detract from the game's intended atmosphere - and they reply that they think the game sucks for not letting you spew hot lead.

You're Miles Freaking Upshur. You're a journalist, not a trained user of firearms! Even if you had one, what are the odds that Miles would know to keep his cool in such a way as to use that hypothetical pistol effectively? Guns would completely destroy the game's pacing. The knife-wielding Naked Twins? Bang. Dead. Chris Walker? Bang. Dead. Aaron Trager? Bang. Dead.

Gee, what riveting tension!

I mean, jeeze. Has CoD Fever permeated the gaming scene to such an extent that being ever so slightly challenged in ways other than for the sake of leaderboards or Prestige ranks no longer strikes anyone's fancy?

 

[Drummodino]

Sigh... now I have that image forever burned into my head. Good episode, but since I'm not much of a horror fan the lack of horror games doesn't bother me all that much. Shame for those who like them though.

Thank God for Jim!

 

[Datacide]

No love for Alan Wake? I thought that was one of the most innovative horror games with combat to come along in a while. It was pretty creepy and had excellent combat. Plus, it achieved all this with a T-rating, which I think also shows that we don't always have to have all the gore to make scary happen. I certainly prefer it with the gore, but I think Alan Wake achieves much of what Poltergeist(the movie)did for young teens on release.

I agree with Jim though that survival horror has really taken a back seat this generation. We certainly had some moments of greatness, but I'm not sure that the big companies have given up on it. Dead Space (1), The Last Of Us, Alan Wake, Bioshock, etc all show that there is still a big audience for horror and that these pubs/devs haven't given up completely. Someone even pointed out to be the other day that Demon's Souls is pretty much a survival horror game.

I'm not sure I really like the no-combat horror games as much. I agree that you don't need combat to make a horror game, but I think many times it can add a lot more to the tension than not having it.

Put I'm glad Jim keep swinging for the horror games...it is definitely my favourite theme in games and I'd certainly like to see more horror more often.

 

[Flunk]

Some of us don't care for horror games at all, but you do have a point that they don't seem to make any good pure ones anymore. But you can make that argument for a lot genres. RPGs are all actiony now Fallout 3, Skyrim and the entire Mass Effect series. The big game studios seem to think that shooters are the only type of game that will sell and every game needs to be more like Battlefield.

I'm hoping the backlash over this generation will mean next generation is more interesting and less constrained. He's hoping Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty:Who Cares sell very poorly so we can get something interesting made.

 

[Alcamonic]

I was not scared by your act. I demand my time back!
What makes a horror game per definition? Just having an eerie setting or is it required for you to be gunless/ineffective 100% of the time? Personally I thought that the first FEAR game went with a enjoyable mix of both.


Btw, does anyone know which movie is pictured at 3:34 (the smiling family)?

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

Good horror games really are hard to find, especially when one of your favorite series (Fatal Frame) gets put out to pasture, and not even because the previous games didn't sell well, but because it got buried amongst a squabble between Nintendo and Tecmo Koei. Instead of the four Fatal Frame game, we got Spirit Camera... and interesting idea, but ultimately a terrible game.

Speaking of Scarecrow, I wonder if Jim heard about the horrid condition Batman: Arkham Origins was released in? I'd enjoy getting his two cents on that.

 

[Drake the Dragonheart]

Jim you do the crane thing really well I have to say. But jim, where the heck were your pants? Also, while funny, that ending bit was some serious nightmare fuel!

As soon as I saw Jim in a dress, I immediately turned off the video and went straight to the comments section. I have enough trouble sleeping at night, I don't need to have Jim haunting my dreams on top of it.

I now wish I had done the same. I wish I had done the same!

 

[Ariseishirou]

I still don't get why people think that the RE franchise is ever going to go "back to its roots". It won't. Why? Because RE4 was so wildly successful, and RE4 shifted the series from horror to action-horror. All of the previous installments ad been successful, but only moderately so, so when they shifted gears to an action-style and suddenly they were making profits hand over fist they assumed that "more action" is what the people wanted. RE5 also made shittons of money, and it was even more action, even less horror. Why on earth was anyone surprised, then, when RE6 was almost all action?

I think what Capcom failed to understand, however, is that RE4 sold so well because it was an incredibly good game. If it had been that good, but more horror than action, I suspect it would also have been a great success. RE5 - which, in my opinion, was just fucking awful - sold so well because of the high expectations after RE4. RE6, on the other hand, sold poorly due to low expectations after RE5 (and while it wasn't as good as 4, 6 was a hell of a lot better than 5).

What's the take-home lesson here? Quality. You don't need to strip out the guns and the action to make horror scary - just look at the first FEAR game, you're literally a super soldier with bullettime powers who fights hordes of soldiers and it manages to scare the pants off of people - it just needs to be disempowering (think of how many times Leon died helplessly and horribly in RE4) and atmospheric (yeah just killed like twenty guys in the same room... OH GOD ALMA AAAHHHHH).

 

[Saltyk]

Whelp, I don't know what Jim's biggest fear is, but I think I know what mine is, now...

Anyway, while I'm not a fan of survival horror games, I understand the point. I do find it odd that Resident Evil is no more Gears of War than what it once was. I think that those games did need some guns and such, but to make that the entire point seems to have missed the point of their own games. I half expect that if Nemesis appeared in a recent one, he'd be killed by a rocket launcher than just happened to be lying around.

I'm still curious why RPGs seem to have died. Back on the PSone, I couldn't go to a store without finding a really good underrated RPG. The PS2 still had a good number of quality games. But the PS3 seemed to have a trickle, if that. Was it the sudden inclusion of RPG elements into so many other games (primarily shooters) or did publishers decide that there wasn't money in making them? One reason I always loved the RPGs of old was that I could get a good 50 hours out of the game without needing anyone else to play with. I do enjoy online play and playing with friends, but sometimes I wanna play a game alone.

 

[immortalfrieza]

inb4 people complaining about Amnesia and similar games only forcing you to run away from monsters and using a simple engine.

These games are supposed to take the power away from you, that is the point. That is a staple of horror when its done right. A protagonist completely out of their comfort zone forced to cope with situations beyond them. It's the opposite of machismo and gun wank. They call it Flight or Fight, and most people in most situations would run their ass away from these situations or try and hide. Contrary to what other games and some parts of popular culture might tell you, not everyone is fucking Rambo,

Sorry, but I disagree. It's not the combat or lack thereof which makes horror, it's the constant sense of foreboding from an effective creepy atmosphere that does a good job of playing on one's deeply buried primal fears.

I know for me at least that the 2 best horror series I've seen, Silent Hill (until that godawful Shattered Memories anyway) and Fatal Frame, allow one to be able to kill everything they come across. It's the music, state of the area around the player and the far off creepy sounds echoing through the hallways/town/whatever that is what makes that makes it actually scary. BOO!!!!! scares work best when they play off of this atmosphere, building the tension before cranking it up to maximum.

I hate games that lack combat especially when it's for no given reason. This monster is baring down on me and I'm NOT going to beat the crap out of it with the nearest available object? I find it more annoying than anything. "Not everyone is fucking Rambo," but neither are most people unwilling to fight when it's needed. It's fight OR flight, not flight or flight.

 

[KissingSunlight]

I'm glad that horror-survival is more combat oriented than the crippled/impotent crawl-fest that made up horror/survival in the PS2 era. Seriously, the character you play in the past walks like they have been treated by Annie Wilkes. My experience with horror/survival games have been: Wow! This games has a really creepy atmosphere. Oh, look! There's a monster. I'll try to kill it. I'm dead. OK. I've respawned. Now, I'll try to run away from the monster. The game play control is so crappy that I can barely move. I'm dead again. After 15 minutes, I take the game out and play something better.

The last horror/survival game that I liked was Doom 3. I liked the idea of choosing between the flashlight and the gun. Nothing is more scary than shooting blindly in the dark. Yet, everybody complained how illogical that was.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Yeah, fair point. That was a pretty decent epis ... Oh no ... OH DEAR GOD! MY EYES!!!

Jim, there's horror and then there's horror. And then there's that vid.

 

[Toadfish1]

So Jims just gonna keep pretending The Last Of Us didn't come out?

What game is that?

Oh right, the game I gave a 10/10 review score to.

And yet you never ever mention it when you discuss modern survival horror. You continue to say that all AAA horror has become a homogenous bunch of crap akin to Resident Evil 6, ignoring that one of the best examples of a horror game ever made came out this year.

 

[Sanunes]

SNIP

For me the problem with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is that it wasn't scary for me and I have heard that from several of my friends as well. The problem for me are the changes they made to the mechanics of the game, of course others might find what they left in the game to make it scary, but it hurt the scare factor for me.

Fair point. I personally really liked the changes and thought the atmosphere was ten time scarier, in part because there were few pigs. And I wasn't much a fan of the sanity meter in the last one, though it was well implemented. What I thought was the scariest was the unpredictable nature of the pigs. I remember one killed at on some bridge in the sewers, but when I re-spawned, he wasn't on the bridge. It was one of those ghostly-appears-anywhere pigs, which killed me a lot looking back.

But to my larger point, you bought the game. You supported the idea of a sequel, even if you didn't enjoy it. Do you think you'd get an Amnesia III if there is one?

I cannot say I wouldn't buy the sequel with complete certainty, but I would have to be convinced (or do more research) to buy it and not just buy it because I enjoyed the previous game like what I did with the second one.

 

[Metalrocks]

oh my god, the ending. i cant sleep tonight.
true that today horror games from AAA companies are not that kind of horror we like to see. i still enjoyed RE6 for some odd reason, maybe because you can play so many characters and it does play more or less alright. but yes, being scary, thats sure not one of them.

but amnesia still dint scare me as i hope it would. even silent hill 2 wasnt scary to me or made feel uncomfortable. havent played outlast since i rather wait for a discount and dont really have interest in the slender game.
fear is the only game that actually scarred me since even with guns, you coulndt kill alma and she really had her creepy appearances. but yes, it lost its touch later on.

lets just hope that one day, a AAA will make creepy game as capcom almost managed with RE revelations.

 

[cowman2000]

The ending was way 2spooky4me. I shat myself for the first time since my birthday. That's today.
Anyways, I never grew up with survival horror games. My parents didn't want me playing games like Silent Hill 2, or any RE game. Dead Space was probably the first survival horror game that I beaten. Honestly, I'm not too big on the genre. I love me some story based games, and I love some great action games too, but horror games never hit it for me. I just don't get scared while playing them.
Yet I agree with you Jim, there is a huge difference between a horror game, and an action game. If I go into Dead Space 3, or Aliens CM, or RE6, I expect a horror game, what they should be, but not an action game. I just checked Steam too see what genre RE6 was in, it was in action, where it should be, but when I checked Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, it was also in action. Is the line becoming less and less visible between survival horror games and action "horror" games? If I would show a new gamer Silent Hill 2, would they be more interested in that than a game like Resident Evil 6? I don't think so, because most gamers only play shooters and sports games. We like to think that we are the majority, the ones who play Journey, The Stanley Parable, Spec Ops, Dark Souls, Catherine, etc. But the truth is we aren't.
Also, I wouldn't consider RE4 a survival horror game. I would consider it an action horror game, and that game is the perfect example of how that genre can work, L4D another great one, but what we are getting these days are games that are advertised as horrors, but are more action than anything else.
The two genre's can coexist, but it's when game companies mix up the two that it becomes this whole mess.

 

[geizr]

There is a lot of piling-on that has been levied against the AAA studios and publishers. However, one thing strikes me as always being odd. If the stuff is so bad, why does it continue to sell? Also, if these studios and publishers have been running in the red so long, losing money hand-over-fist, how have they continued to exist for so long? At some point I have to beg the question of our perception of reality. No matter how much we theory-craft about the way things ought to be and what will eventually happen, reality always remains the ground-truth against which we must assess our contemplations. If the AAA industry is as bad as we constantly make it out to be, why does it persist to exist?

I would have to conclude that the only ones not enjoying these games are we "few" who harumph and scoff at the "dribble" put out by these companies. Some of us label others who disagree with our assessments (or preferences/tastes/etc.) as being "idiots", "morons", "sheep", "fake-gamers", etc. However, it strikes me that the people who actually buy these games and enjoy them do so for their own reasons, and their reasons are such their ability to enjoy the game is not diminished by the issues we have with the game. They simply get on with enjoying themselves, while we stew in our own constant self-righteous indignation. If we don't like what the AAA games are putting out, we are certainly in our right to refuse purchase. However, at some point, I have to question the constant assessment that the entire industry is headed for disaster for every step because it does something we "few" don't like. Unfortunately, for our sense of self-importance, we don't represent the entirety of the gaming market, and I have to consider the strong possibility that the larger game market really is fine and okay with the current AAA games andw they are sold and marketed.

To be sure, there is a lot about the AAA market that I don't like, and I have often made the call for people to simply close their wallets. However, it seems to me that it has to be acknowledged at some point that the is a substantially larger contingent of the game market for whom all the issues we have with AAA games, how their made, marketed, and sold, just simply don't matter. Unfortunately, for our sense of self-importance, we don't represent the entirety of the gaming market, and it seems to me there is a good possibility that the larger game market really is fine and okay with the current AAA segment.

I know this may sound depressing or defeatist, however, I feel that at some point we need to get a little bit better perspective on the AAA game segment in regards to the size and nature of the demographic for whom these games apparently appeal. I find it hard to believe that any company will just keep cranking out copious amounts of a product that doesn't sell. Such behavior would border on a level of insanity whose only inevitable outcome is the complete failure of the company, and it doesn't take that long for that inevitable conclusion, at least I don't think. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe these companies really are head for disaster in the next 2-3 years, if they don't change from their current course. But, considering they've been going this long, I think there has to be something propping them up and keeping them alive. There are several possibilities, but I think the one that makes the most sense is that the situation may not be as bad as or unaccepted by the market, as a whole, we sometimes try to paint it.

Just my two cents.

 

[Grabehn]

October really is the worst month. Why does everything suddenly have to become about "horror" and "scary" things? Because of some bizarre American fascination with this "Halloween" thing that almost nobody else in the world gives a crap about?

Actually, a lot of countries out there care about it. Over here it was seen as such an awful thing, that there were even TV spots calling out parents to make their kids dress as fairies and shit. It was both depressing and hilarious.

And even more so, about 4-5 years ago some guys from evangelical churches (don't know if that's the actual term in english) asked for that day to be their holiday, and still most people call it Halloween, and it does basically take over the entire month. (I couldn't care less about some random religious made up holiday though)

 

[immortalfrieza]

There is a lot of piling-on that has been levied against the AAA studios and publishers. However, one thing strikes me as always being odd. If the stuff is so bad, why does it continue to sell? Also, if these studios and publishers have been running in the red so long, losing money hand-over-fist, how have they continued to exist for so long? At some point I have to beg the question of our perception of reality. No matter how much we theory-craft about the way things ought to be and what will eventually happen, reality always remains the ground-truth against which we must assess our contemplations. If the AAA industry is as bad as we constantly make it out to be, why does it persist to exist?

The AAA game industry continues to exist because it's hanging on by a thread. Studios are constantly closing, laying off their employees, and selling off their studios to other AAA companies, all the while using their names to sell half-assed games to blind fanboys, On Disc DLC, DRM, and other underhanded tricks to sell enough keep themselves just barely afloat. 5 million sales of a game is STILL considered a loss in the AAA industry, when only a decade ago even getting half a million would be considered a smashing success. Regardless, surviving isn't anywhere close to thriving, the practices across this industry are slowly suffocating it to death. The people here are painting AAA gaming as really bad and unacceptable because these practices are not only terrible for the consumer, they're terrible for the health video game industry at large. We are complaining as much as we are because we all can see the writing on the wall and realize that we're slowly heading for a crash, all because these AAA companies are pursuing ridiculous sales figures that they can't hope to obtain and overall aren't worth the effort to get even if they do.