The Misguided "Horror" of Dead Space

 

Dead Space is one of those games that reminds me just how old I'm getting.  I still remember buying this, in 2008 when it first came out as a first year at university.  Going to the local GAME (UK Chain of game retailers), picking it up and rushing back to my dorms to slam it in my 360 and play it through almost start to finish in a single go.  Despite the fact that I remember having a good time with it and despite the fact that I still had a fun time with it on stream recently, it still BAFFLES me to this day that various people I know personally and a number of media outlets will praise this game for being scary.

Before I start talking about ineffective the horror is I do have to at least admit that the idea of making limbs the primary target for weapons rather than standard headshots is a least somewhat interesting.  In most games, carefully placing shots to the noggin is part of the core skill set required for success but in Dead Space it asks you to instead aim for the flailing limbs of the monsters instead.  Luckily, with the protagonist Isaac being an engineer, a lot of his weapons come in the form of tools for cutting stuff with, so in this regard it's a nice melding of story and gameplay.  

But that's about the only nice thing I have to say about Dead Space.  While it is a competently made third person over the shoulder horror shooter which every bloody action-horror game has been since RE4, it is probably one of the least frightening horror titles in recent memory.  

The most striking problem with the horror in Dead Space is the enemies.  The first time you see a Necromorph wildly running for you it can be a little intense while you try and line up your shots to its shoulders and thighs to blast its appendages off but throughout the entire game there's maybe like, 6 flavors of Necromorph and they are ENDLESSLY repeated through the entire game.  So the first encounter with each type might get you but by the end of the game they become an annoyance more than anything else.  Another stupid "thing" you have to clean up before you can carry on following your little blue line.

This then leads into the second issue of the horribly designed areas that you must wade through as you embark on your adventure through the Ishimura.  Sure it all looks very nice and it's trying very hard to be atmospheric and oppressive but the overall design of the place is so obvious that it sucks any potential impact out of a potential scare.  A long corridor with a vent or a dead body at the end? Yep, that's an ambush.  A large room with a big door leading to your objective on the other side? Ambush or boss encounter for sure.  It's trying very hard to surprise you but the level design is so uninspired and lacking that there may as well be big neon signs flashing bright red with "THIS WAY TO NEXT COMBAT ENCOUNTER".  There's one point where a big tentacle grabs you and tries to pull you in a hole and the first time, unless your paying extra special attention, which you probably aren't, this is actually fairly effective.  But they do it again later on and it's so obviously signposted that you end up rolling your eyes as you get your Plasma Cutter out and prepare to wrestle with the shitty aiming.

But the worst thing, the thing that sucks all tension out of the game entirely is ammo and health management.  Resident Evil 1 for example is another game that I don't find particularly scary either because who the fuck in 2021 find slow shambly zombies scary after the complete over saturation of THAT genre?  But the game still holds a good place in the survival horror genre because while artistically it's not particularly scary, mechanically (at least your first time in) Resident Evil is intense as fuck.  Sure, you're playing as a highly trained S.T.A.R.S member and sure there's plenty of weapons lying around but ammo for those weapons is scarce.  It's all well and good having a grenade launcher that shoots acid but it's not much use to you against a hunter if you don't have any acid rounds for it.  Even the simple act of saving in that game could generate some intense emotions because "oh fuck what if I don't find any more ink ribbon soon" and this is an effective form of horror that's basically exclusive to this medium.  Dead Space however fucks all this up by tailoring drops and containers to whatever you are holding or whatever state you are in.  The game will only give you ammo for whatever guns you are currently holding with very little exception so if you are only carrying the plasma cutter, you can guarantee you'll be swimming in plasma cutter ammo for basically the entire game.  When the game does give you random ammo on the rare occasion? just go to the store, sell it for credits and buy MORE plasma cutter ammo. In fact, despite Dead Space having like 6 guns to choose from, you may as well never use anything BUT the plasma cutter.  It's strong, fast, has cheap ammo and is effective against all flavors of necromorph.  The game also does this with health so as long as you don't get one shot by a big machine you basically cannot die from normal combat.  

Yet despite all these massive glaring failures in both artistry and game design, the game still got 9/10s from critics across the board and millions of people signing it's praises about how they were shitting their pants real hard.  Maybe you should see a doctor about those weak bowels hm? 

But that's not to say it's a bad game, it's a fun game and nothing quite beats Isaac's legendarily strong stompin' legs but to this day I have no idea how anyone find this franchise scary.  Granted I haven't played much of the sequels but it seemed to lean more into the action focus than the horror focus and to be honest, that's fine, it was way better at being an action game anyway.

Five Nights at Freddy's

I couldn't have been more late to this party even if I tried.  A game series that's gathered a massive following and that has tons of sequels but only now am I getting around to actually playing it for myself.  The curse of a large backlog I guess.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game where you play as an after hours security guard in a chuck-e-cheese style pizza restaurant.  On your first night you get a message from the guy who worked there before you warning you that the robot mascots will wander the halls at night and if they see you they will attempt to shove you into one of the suits, killing you violently in the process.  Armed with nothing but some security cameras, light switches and a couple of doors, you must survive from 12am to 6am in the restaurant.  It sounds easy on paper but in practice it really isn't.

The game itself consists of not much more than the screen above.  You move the mouse down to the bar to open the camera and click the buttons on the wall to toggle the lights and the doors.  You'd think that you'd just be able to close the doors and just wait it out until 6am but the problem is that pesky little power percentage in the corner.  Turning on a light, closing a door, opening the camera all drain your power supply at an increased rate.  If the power hits zero then the lights go off, the doors fly open and the mascots are free to just walk in and give you a very bad day at work.  The crux of the game is quickly checking the cameras to get the rough positions of the mascots and only closing the doors when absolutely necessary.  Of course, once you get good and know what you're doing there's ways to game the AI to make your life a little easier but the game is pretty heavy on the randomness and sometimes you'll just die because the game wants you to.  It sounds really annoying but considering a night is only about 8 minutes and the restart is pretty much instant it's not so bad.

The horror in FNAF manifests itself almost exclusively as jump scares, which is usually something I hate but here I don't seem to mind it so much.  If a mascot gets into your room the game will leave you unawares for a moment before throwing the 3D model into your face with a loud noise quickly followed by a game over screen.  Kind of like any of those screamer flash games from the early days of the internet.  I think the reason I give it a pass here though is because it's not TRYING to be anything more than a jump scare game and it tells you this in its loading screen before the main menu.  It's not like, let's say, Dead Space, a game claiming to be at atmospheric romp through a derelict ship and then a good deal of it's "horror" coming from having Necromorphs jump out of small holes screaming at you.  While jump scares ARE cheap and I still hate them, at least the developer Scott Cawthon is up front and basically just flat out says to you "I'm going to jump scare you now, have fun!"

The game is cheap on Steam so I'd recommend going to pick it up.  I finished it in a single evening on stream (granted I had some help) but when you finish there's a sort of "hard mode" in the form of 6th Night and when you finish that you get Custom Night which lets you set the AI levels of each mascot to your own liking, so it's got some replayability too.  Even after the jump scares stop making you jump there's something rather compelling about the mechanics of the game that will keep you coming back.  Every afternoon I've been firing it up to attempt to clear a custom night with all the settings turned to max and it really is quite challenging.

If you're looking for a cheap horror experience, Freddy Fazbears Pizzeria is a pretty good place to go.

Children and Video Games

Let's talk about the relationship between video games and children shall we?  This is a topic that tends to fill me full of large amounts of rage because every so often an article is brought to my attention about how games are terrible and are "corrupting the youth" and all that shit.  More often than not these articles have two main points which are either games and too violent for kids OR that kids are playing games too much and they have some kind of addiction.  Well let's address those two points.

1) Violence

There is a large portion of gaming which you could quite easily consider violent and there's probably a portion of those violent games that you wouldn't want a child to see.  Take the above picture for example which is a scene from Dead Space 2 where failure results in the hero taking a large metal tube through the face via his eye socket, that's something that maybe you wouldn't want a young child to see.

However, not all violence in video games in made equal.  Take something like Street Fighter for example, it's violent sure but not overly so to the point where a younger audience should be banned from viewing or playing it.  You can't just make a blanket statement that all games are too violent for kids and just ban them from everything, it depends on the game and it also depends very much on the child.  When I was a young lad I was playing Doom on the Sega Saturn, a game FAMOUS for it's high violence levels but now I'm 26 and I've still never shoved a chainsaw through a persons abdomen.

The problem is that people look at a game with it's guns or fighting or whatever and without knowing anything about the games actual content start ragging on it as "unsafe" for a younger audience.  Let's take something like Left4Dead, you can look at that and go "oh well it's full of guns, zombies and death there's no way that it's an appropriate game for kids".  Well I'd argue that Left4Dead is all about team work, resource management and group planning which are skills that would be quite beneficial to pick up at a young age, no?

All games nowadays also have age ratings and guidelines to tell you what sort of audience it's appropriate for and even a vague overview of what some of the themes might be in that title.

 With these clearly labelled on the box you have no fucking excuse.  This is a decent guideline for a parent to get a good idea of what they are buying for their children.  So if they know and trust their child can handle certain themes then maybe they could turn a blind eye to the age guideline and buy a certain title.  However if your child is begging for something like GTA, you ignore the guidelines and then get all shocked when there's guns, sex and gambling in it then you have only yourself to blame.

That's ultimately what it comes down to, the parenting.  If you're raising your kids right, guiding them through every aspect of their lives and helping them grow then there won't be much of a problem even if they do end up seeing or experiencing something a little over their head.  However if you're the kind of shit parent who buys your kid Mortal Kombat and then let them plop in front of it as a distraction so that you can take 5 then don't go acting all surprised when little Jimmy gets set home from school for trying to gouge a kids eyes out with his thumbs.  That's not MKs fault, that's YOUR fault for not helping your kid understand the basics of fantasy and reality, it's not like the box or download page didn't warn you.

2) Addiction

Video game addiction is another stupid topic written by people who usually have no fucking clue but let's just address video game addiction in kids.  It kind of goes hand in hand with what I said in the last paragraph where it all ultimately comes down to the parenting.

Kids are sort of stupid but it's stupid due to a lack of life experience rather than just being uneducated.  You put a kid in front of a video game and they start playing it and having a good time then OF COURSE they are going to want to do just that for the rest of time.  I work with kids and I've been in situations where I'll be playing a classroom game which involves nothing more than a ball and a box and sometimes the younger kids would be more than happy just to play that one thing all fucking day so imagine how intense playing something like a video game must be.  You tell a kid that they have to do their homework or something and of course they are going to be upset when the alternative to crushing boredom is video game fun.

That's why the parents role here is very important.  When I was a child I didn't have any sort of time limits placed on me like the whole "2 hours a day" which is what I've seen some websites argue.  For my parents it was all about helping me understand priorities.  Sure, I didn't WANT to do my homework but if I didn't do it then I'd get in trouble which may lead to detention which may lead to a greater deficit of gaming time so I knew that if I wanted to enjoy myself then I had to get the important shit done first.  "Business before pleasure" is what my mother always used to say and if your kid isn't getting their priorities straight then that's on you as a parent for not teaching that to them.

But you could argue that even if they do get all their important shit done and the ONLY thing they are doing is video games then that's just as bad.  Well once again that's also a parenting issue because like I said before, kids are dumb, they don't know where to go looking for things that pique their interest, they are completely reliant on you as a parent for that.  Sure, video games were my main thing growing up and even now but my parents were constantly poking me with suggestions for other things to do.  All sorts of suggestions, most of which didn't take till later and some didn't take at all but the point is they were TRYING.  While you as a parent shouldn't rely on games for this it can happen where the content of a game may inspire some kind of other interest.  For example the initial reason for me wanting to learn Japanese was because my dad bought me a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga and I was exposed to this other language that I thought was cool and now I can speak Japanese, live in Japan and have a nice job.  Like I said before, you can't just slam them in front of the TV and expect that stupid box to do all the work.

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The bottom line is that it comes down to parenting.  If you're a good parent who can teach your kid to live like a normal human being then they will turn out OK.  Even if they aren't massively successful in later life, but at least as people they will be OK which means they probably won't be completely fucked even if they do grow up to be lazy or whatever.

Any parent who blames ANY medium be it games, movies, books or TV for some kind of adverse effect on their kid is essentially admitting they have failed as parents.  If your kid is violent it's YOUR fault for not properly teaching them how to respect other people.  If your kid is "addicted" to gaming then it's YOUR fault for not teaching them how to have a sense of self control and understand moderation and trying to scapegoat just shows how irresponsible and how unready you were to have that child.  Don't rag on my hobby because YOU suck at life.

Day 1 Purchasing

When a new game gets released it can be an exciting thing.  Granted, I'm the kind of person who has become so jaded by disappointing releases over the years that I personally don't get too hyped any more, but I do remember a time when a new release would have me jumping for joy.  

But is it really worth running to the store and grabbing that new game? Or is it better to just wait? 

Well the answer to that question depends on what kind of game it is.  If it's a game with an online focus then maybe it is in your best interest to drop the first day money on it.  This may be doubly true if it's a game that isn't AAA developed or particularly mainstream.  Waiting on the title may mean by the time you get there the title will be dead and that's no fun at all.  

However for everything else?  I'd say it's almost always better to wait it out.  Let's take a sort of old example to illustrate my point.  

Dead Space was a game that I bought day 1 back in my University days for about £35.  It was a good game and I don't regret the purchase as such but looking at the page on Amazon for it it now costs £13 new or used for like £2 

Granted you may be a bit behind the times with this approach and you risk running into spoilers but you'll end up saving so much more money to buy even more games or other things.  Hell, Dead Space is an old example but a lot of titles see a drop in price even after a week or so.  If it's a single player game especially I'm sure it won't kill you to wait a week or 2.  Maybe then you can buy a whole bunch at once and go on a nice binge.

If you're blogging or streaming and you want to build a following then maybe playing the latest games is the best idea but your average joe should probably just wait it out.  Of course, if there's a company you really love then absolutely buy it new to show support but most of the time a little patience could save you a pretty penny.  

The Importance of Game Feel

A few days ago I had a bit of a gush about Killer is Dead and there is one thing I forgot to talk about in that post that I'll take about right now instead.

Killer is Dead has quite simplistic combat.  It only really uses two buttons and their aren't complex combos to learn or complicated weapon switching mix up stuff or even jumping, but the games combat still succeeds because it FEELS really good.  Everything Mondo does in that game has this weight to it that makes beating up on bad guys really fun.  Not only that, but there are lots of visual cues that tell you when your being a badass.  For example, dodging an enemy attack at just the right time will make everything go black and red for a second and you can do this crazy over the top slice thing that just involves mashing the square button on your controller.

This kind of extreme visual feedback makes you feel like your being some kind of amazing bad ass despite the simplistic combat and it really helps to carry the game.  One of the reasons that Devil May Cry (not DmC) is so popular is that you have that amazing game feel AND really deep combat so it's satisfying on multiple levels once you get really good at it.

On the flip side, a lack of this game feel can really ruin the experience on some games.  The best example I can think of right now for this is Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Ignoring the fact that pretty much everything about the game is a pile of shit, the general feel of this game just makes it awful to play.  The gun play isn't fun and visual and audio effects on hitting and killing enemies is just the absolute worst and as a result the game just feels like an absolute chore.  Pile that on with all the other problems the game has and well......just go and look at the results for yourself.

If a game feels good there is a lot people can look past and it'll motivate them to keep playing.  This is really the case with me and Dead Space, a game I can't stand for it's pseudo horror monster closet filled bullshit but killing enemies and stomping them with your giant boots feels so good I can't help but enjoy myself when I play it.

So yeah, game feel, it's important, get it right.

No one knows how to do horror anymore

I mentioned a long time ago that the Survival Horror genre was pretty much dead.  In that post I called the developers of Silent Hill: Homecoming a bunch of knobs who had no idea what they were doing.  Well right now I'm going to expand on that by pointing out exactly just how fucking useless today's developers are when it comes to delivering scares.

So, I'm going to take 4 scares (2 from Silent Hill, 1 from Resident Evil and 1 from Dead Space) put them side by side and explain why games from over 10 years ago were better at delivering fear than modern games despite all the fancy graphics and processing power.

SCARE #1! SILENT HILL 2 BATHROOM FREAKYNESS!

So in Silent Hill two there is a point where you have to walk around a prison.  This prison is already a pretty terrible place with strange noises and some...thing...muttering the word "ritual" at you as you walk through cells, but it's one of the bathrooms that will really shit you up.

So you walk into this bathroom and there is nothing in it, at least nothing of importance that I remember.  While here you can make James check the doors of each stall by knocking on them.  Knocking on the doors yields no response and you can't get inside, but things start to get super weird when you start to leave.  Just before you make it to the exit, you hear a sound as if someone fell over accompanied by a woman's yelp.  Now I use the word yelp instead of scream because this isn't a jump scare.  The sound of the crash or the scream isn't loud enough to make you jump, but it sure as fuck creeps you the fuck out.  The strangest part of the whole thing is that if you go back, nothing has changed at all and it doesn't change anything in the level, it is there PURELY to fuck with you and it does a damn good job.

SCARE #2! SILENT HILL: HOMECOMING BATHROOM BULLSHIT!

So Silent Hill games are pretty famous for having freaky bathrooms, but Homecoming shows just how the developer had no fucking clue.  The bathroom is the place you get to meet your first enemy in homecoming, but there is no tension built up here at all.  You pull a knife from a wall and a movie nurse walks out of the only "locked" stall to act as your tutorial fight.  As soon as you check the door and see the knife in the wall you can pretty much see how the whole situation is going to go.  Also bathrooms in homecoming from what I remember tend to have a dead body in them, or at least at the start they do. 

What makes the SH2 scare so much better than the Homecoming scare is that your mind is filling in the blanks.  You just ASSUME something terrible went on in that prison stall but the game doesn't actually show you anything at all.  The sound it makes isn't even that bad when you think about it, it's the kind of sound you might hear if someone slipped and banged against the door, but because of the way the game messes with your head you are just assuming that something terrible is going on.  Homecoming on the other hand does the opposite of this and just shows you death and blood everywhere so when you see a dead body for the millionth time you end up just ignoring it because it's nothing more than set dressing for the level.

SCARE #3! RESIDENT EVIL HUNTERS

The Hunter is Resident Evil is a stroke of fucking genius.  Not because it's a particularly good monster or anything like that, but because of the way it is introduced to the player.  First off, the entirety of Resident Evil up to the point with the Hunters you are fighting stuff like zombies, dogs, crows and shit like that.  Dead people or animals that have been infected by the T-Virus.  I think before the Hunters you have to fight Yawn, but even he isn't so bad because 1) It's still just an animal and 2) He isn't very hard to fight, and his venom can be counteracted with shit lying around the house.

The Hunter on the other hand is somethin' else.  You don't even see it when it first turns up, you just get a first person cutscene of it running into the main house and straight away you know something is fucked up.  Then it scares you even more by actually showing up and being stronger and faster than anything else.  You can just evade it like a zombie, and it's not easily killed like the dogs, these things will make you panic while you try to figure out what the fuck is happening and them BAM! off goes your head in one swipe, enjoy loading your game to try again shitlord.

SCARE #4! DEAD SPACE ANYTHING

None of the monsters in these games are scary, not a single one.  Enemies tend to just jump out at you and scream and are easily killed in a couple of shots from pretty much anything.  Bosses are even less scary because most come with giant "fuck me" lights, and the ones that lack "fuck me" lights have pretty blatant weaknesses.  The enemy design in this game is weak and they are not scary nor do they make you panic.  It doesn't matter if one sneaks up on you or they attack in groups because you always be able to deal with them no matter what guns you have.

In the case of Resident Evil, I might not be carrying the Shotgun or the Grenade Launcher.  So when the Hunter appears to take chunks out of my dopey arse, getting out of that situation with just a pistol is a real shit sucker.  Then again in Dead Space, if I had that piece of shit machine gun, it still didn't really matter because it would get the job done well enough.  Also I didn't feel the need to conserve ammo because it would drop so fucking frequently and I was playing that shit on hard mode.

To sum it all up and to sort of repeat myself from the survival horror post I made in the summer.  Stop making shit like Dead Space, Homecoming or whatever other arsehole "horror" games exist at the moment, go study the good ones and come back.  It's been far too long and I'm getting sick of it

Now That's Some Bullshit #5: Survival Horror

Well this blog has been filled with way too much happiness and sunshine recently, so it's time to talk about some bullshit.  Today I'm going to discuss the whole survival horror genre.

So a long long time ago, on systems long since forgotten, there was a game called Alone in the Dark.  This game is basically the great granddaddy of the genre.  At the time it wasn't called a "survival horror" game, but it's the title that basically set the standard for everything to come after.  So from the impact made by this game, we were given similar games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame just to name some of the most well known ones.

So, just what is a survival horror game exactly? I think this is something that needs to be cleared up

As far as setting is concerned, you're usually playing as some kind of normal man or woman, thrust into a life threatening situation that involves horrible looking beasties coming to get you.  But it isn't the beasties that make these games scary, it's the implications behind your characters situation.  A good survival horror game will make you feel as helpless and alone as the characters and that is part of the reason why Silent Hill 2 in particular is so famous.  In terms of mechanics, you are usually given a very finite supply of items in order to get to by and every situation and encounter has to be carefully planned so that you don't waste them.  You'll usually find that running away is the best option, not only because the enemies are scary, but because you as a player are terrified of being in a situation with very little to actually survive on.

But then something went wrong.

Now before anyone starts foaming at the mouth, I fucking love Resident Evil 4, it's an absolute blast, but it is NOT a survival horror game by any stretch.  What I hate is what this game caused, all the best horror franchises started to become over the shoulder third person action games.  All the atmosphere and horror of previous great titles had been thrown out the window for more cinematic action games with grotesque creatures.

It was with Dead Space that the bullshit really started to flow.  The game wasn't bad, but it wasn't scary AT ALL and it was really trying it's hardest to provide a scary game.  Sure, it had jump scares but gone was all the dread, all the mystery and all the decent characterisation.  But the genre wasn't dead here, it just took a shot to the leg.  The game that really executed this genre with a horrible bloody thump was Silent Hill: Homecoming

THIS game was the gigantic piece of shit to kill the genre good and proper, and it's not been able to recover since.  There was a standard that was expected of the Silent Hill series, and the group of knobs that worked on this game really dropped the ball.  They failed to understand anything about the horror genre in general, let alone survival horror games or even Silent Hill.

But you know what's the worst thing? Since then I have played 1 game that I can say was actually unsettling in some way, and that's just fucking sad and on top of that it's an indie game developed by 1 guy as far as I know.

The games industry really needs to go back and study these old great horror games if they ever want to make something that can be properly called a Survival Horror game again.  Until then, this entire genre is just a load of bullshit.