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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2308 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 Resident Evil: Village. It's the first time that I've played anything labelled "survival horror", and I'm trying to calibrate my expectations.

I'm getting flashbacks to playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. (Yes, I'm old.) The designers really like to take over your controls so they can show you an "exciting" cinematic, then hand the controls back suddenly to you. (The one indicator is a "[S]kip" prompt at the bottom right corner of your screen.)

Is this an RE:V thing? A Capcom thing? A survival horror thing?

The only fun survival horror game I've played was Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money. It was pretty light on the horror, which was good. I've always wondered whether there was anything else out there like that. Atmospheric, suspenseful, tense, but not going to give me nightmares.

Anyone got recommendations?

Subnautica?

Prey (2016) was really good. Perhaps heavier on the horror, but I’m not usually a fan of the genre, and I enjoyed it.

They're more adventure-ish than survival horror, but possibly the Echo Night series, depending on your definition of horror; the games involve ghosts, and some are antagonistic, but they're a far cry from Fatal Frame/Project Zero type spooky ghosts. Often, the goal is to free the ghosts, which may lessen the horror aspect and can be wholesome. But they can be hard games to recommend, due to possible frustration with saving/dying, some puzzles, and King's Field controls for the first two games. Emulation helps a lot.

I'm loving the old school graphics. I'll check these out.

It's a resident evil thing, starting with 4. They were pretty common in action adventure games of that era like God of War and Uncharted. Devs had the ability to develop great Hollywood -style set pieces, but it was hard to make them interactive for the player, hence the QTE.

RE5 has some hilarious ones. I'll never forget having to punch that boulder!

They were big in the early 2000s, I think the PS2 God of War games popularized them.

Resident Evil 4 was famous for overusing them: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o1_3SdXcdMU

RE6 had a menu option to automatically pass all QTEs for people who hate them.

That set of annoyances are typically called Quicktime Events, and while they're more common in survival horror, they're (thankfully) not universal there, nor are they specific to it (the FFXIV MMORPG calls them Active Time Maneuvers, for example). While they can be done moderately well, they're famously unpopular, and my impression's that the Resident Evil series tends to be on the jankier side even for survival horror (Silent Hill, by contrast, only uses them as a way to reduce damage when you've already been hit by an attack, or as part of the killing blow for a boss).

Although the origin of QTE are often attributed to interactive movie laserdisc video games that showed video clips stored on a laserdisc like Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, June 1983), Cliff Hanger (Stern, December 1983) and Road Blaster (Data East, 1985), these left little room for more advanced gameplay elements.

Ha! Thanks.

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