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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?

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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