T w e n t y S i d e d
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Here is the original intro to Resident Evil that we discuss in this episode.
To be clear: When I described the old rendering techniques, I was talking specifically about the original Alone in the Dark. In that game, it would render the room once, making both a fixed image and some sort of depth mapSo your character could walk behind elements in the image.. Then it would take that single fixed view and render the dynamic stuff on top of it: The player, moveable items, monsters, etc. This was well before the age of graphics acceleration, so every single processor cycle was precious.
All of this is based on my observations from playing the game. I don’t know for sure how it actually worked. It’s certainly how I’d tackle the problem on those old machines.
Footnotes:
[1] So your character could walk behind elements in the image.
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Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
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Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The Middle Ages
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Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
You guys are liars!This isnt resident evil!There is no Milla Jovovich in it.
-sigh- In the latest Resident Evil (Revelations 2), as much as I like the game, they added a Red Queen AI
The best save system can be found in ori and the blind forest.Yes,you have limited resource that allows you to save,but there are a bunch of places where you can regenerate it,you get skills that increase it,and most importantly,you get a skill that gives you some health whenever you use your save,which is brilliant.
I’m with Shamus, anything that tries to pass an out of game issue (being able to save and close the game at any time because you have stuff to do) as an ingame skill/mechanic is not a good idea.
In an ideal world where gaming is never interrupted and you always have enough time to play to the next savepoint, maybe that can work, but that’s not the world most gamers live in.
That goes doubly for any puzzle game, in my opinion (be they adventure or jumping puzzles). If the main activity and challenge of the game is solving puzzles, making the player repeat them is a bad idea. Puzzles generally don’t stand up to replaying all that well.
I’ve seen multiple game keep two save system for this reason. One is for quitting the game and picking it up later and one is for reloading if you die.
If only Telltale had grasped the point of save systems, I wouldn’t have wound up demanding a refund on The Walking Dead…
Yeah, quicksaves. Those are something more developers should implement*Glares at EVERY JRPG WITH SAVEPOINTS*
Yeah, I don’t think that’s really a conflict. A major part of Roguelikes is that saves aren’t just a limited resource, they’re a nonexistent one – if you die, that’s it. But they’ll still let you save and quit, and you can resume from that point – you just can’t ever go back to an old save.
The typewriter system, combined with being able to stop playing any time you want, would work pretty well, I think. You still have the problem Rutskarn mentioned – if you die and it’s been *too* long since your last save, it’s too frustrating and you don’t want to keep playing – but that’s something you fix by tuning the availability of the resource. It shouldn’t be so rare you lose a ton of progress, but it shouldn’t be so common you can savescum your way through any difficulty. That’s probably a balance you only work out through lots of playtesting, though.
This also ties into a bigger problem with horror games – they’re generally scary because of the constant *threat* of death, but once you actually die most of the horror is lost, because you repeat a sequence and you’re no longer immersed. It becomes just gameplay, and if you die often enough the scary parts just become puzzles with spooky trappings.
But most jrpgs (of the past at least) arent like that.They have save spots,and if you dont manually save there,you have to redo everything if you quit.There is no save and quit option.
That never had much of a reason except a technical one. Storage space was limited and they needed to keep save files compact.
Newer ones are often much better about this, even enforced save-scarcity like dungeon-crawler Etrian Odyssey has a “quicksave & quit” function which deletes the quicksave upon reloading. On the other end there’s things like Tales of Xillia which just allows you to quicksave (to a single slot) anywhere, although there are already a million save points in that game.
The best save game system I’ve used was like this. Frayed Knights. Normal saves and the save-and-continue slot were not a “I have a limited number of saves,” but used an in-game bonus mechanic as an incentive to use the save-and-continue. You’d lose all your drama star points if you continued from a different save. It didn’t break the game for you, just made it a little tougher.
Exactly what IÂ was going to say. If a game’s going to limit saves, it should recognise the need to leave the computer sometimes and go do real life things.
In which case, imo, the thing to do is differentiate between the limited-use ‘safety’ saves that persist after you continue the game and can be reloaded arbitrarily, and one-time ‘real life calls’ saves, that stop the game, can be resumed from one time, and disappear when you continue from them. Safety-saves can be limited however the designer wants, but Suspend-saves can be used without limit, since they don’t make the game any easier, just suspend-able.
Majora’s Mask had something like this, although it did limit the one-time saves a bit too much for my taste (you could only do that at the owl statues in Clock Town as IÂ recall).
I too don’t want my out-of-game decisions to mess with the in-game ones. I’d just get pulled out of the game, losing my immersion. Games are totally capable of being scary with a normal save system. For example, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is super scary, but has normal saves. So scary, I still haven’t finished it. :S
They Bleed Pixels has a similar save system, somewhat less intricate as it doesn’t have any RPG elements but it follows the same ‘collect orbs, use them in a safe spot to make a save point, doing this also heals you’ but it also tied some scoring mechanics into it. If you didn’t place a checkpoint you got extra points from all the orbs you picked up, and since the orbs were gained from killing enemies the better you were at combat the higher combo you could get going and consequently the more orbs you could get. I thought it was a fairly interesting system that rewarded skilled play and allowed for cautious play (you generally got plenty of orbs in between difficult sections).
I love that game!* I also agree with the save system – allows / encourages skilled play, but also lets you just save the game and quit (basically) wherever you want.
* The really late levels got too difficult for me to finish the game, though. :C
Isn’t that a bit backwards? The better you are at the game, the less likely that you’ll need more save slots.
Yeah it was the first really hard precision platformer style game I played so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, but ultimately it did get too difficult for me to press on. Might have made it farther if I had been playing with a controller but even then I feel like I would have hit a wall eventually.
Yikes, I’ve just twigged what ‘Viel’ is an anagram of.
This makes too much sense.
He did rather give it away. Not even trying to hide it anymore. “Brazen,” I think they call it.
So Josh is anagram of resident then?Or is his real name nerdiest?
Good show! *applause* XD
Meh. They’ve had better shows.
Compared to when I watched Jeff Green try to get through this, this is practically a speedrun. I imagine it’s a pretty short game once you know the puzzle solutions.
Only played the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 myself. Definitely have the same experience as Chris, camp doesn’t really detract from horror. They guy who looks like Napoleon can send his right hand after me all he likes and I’ll laugh at the conversation between him and Leon, but when I’m stalked by a Xenomorph-looking thing in the dark basement afterwards I’ll still be scared. Colorful, campy characters also means that I remember probably every RE4 character but remember exactly zero Dead Space characters. Being all serious isn’t necessary to shit your pants when caught in a dark room with a regenerating, spiky thing. Not that RE4 is survival horror anymore, but you know.
Agreed. Though it is a very fine line. You can’t let the camp get into the actual gameplay, mechanics and scenes. For example if Napoleon was talking to you hilariously badly and with a ton of camp throughout that entire part of the game [i]while[/i] you’re being hunted down like a rat by a cat in that basement level it would ruin the fear because I’d be too busy laughing my ass off to really be scared. In fact, I’d be laughing so hard that I would probably get distracted by the humor and die repeatedly. Which would get annoying very quickly and ruin any chance of being scared because I’ve already seen it and no what happens and now I am just playing it again.
Anyway, I personally [i]love[/i] Resident Evil. In fact, other than Pokemon, Resident Evil was the first ever game series I truly fell in love with. I believe I was 9 or 10 the first time I ever played a Resident Evil game and it was the original. It was the first ever Survival Horror game I ever played, but I did not own it. When the 4th game came out on Gamecube I have to beg and plead to get it. I loved it as well. I don’t just love it from a nostalgia standpoint though. I rarely ever do as there are many, many things I absolutely loved as I child that I think are absolutely atrocious now. Because kids are stupid. I love it for several of the reason Campster stated in the video and it has many faults(not all of them being hilarious mind you. The puzzle were infuriating at times). I do have to mention though that this game created two characters that I absolutely adore. And no they aren’t Chris and Jill. In fact, I never really liked either of them much. You see, they aren’t interesting enough characters and aren’t well written enough for me to really get into them at all but they also aren’t on the same level of hilariously bad as, say, the Room. Or Wesker. The two characters are Rebecca and Barry. Barry is just unrelentingly, gutbustingly hilarious and all known footage of him form the first game needs to be preserved in a museum for future generations. As for Rebecca I more love the idea of Rebecca than Rebecca. Though I do really love her. You see, in a horror game I don’t like playing as big strong guys or gals. I do not like playing really competent people. Or badass people. I like playing weak normal people. People who aren’t great with a gun and can’t really bash someones head in easy. Maybe they can if they knocked them down and used gravity and their foot on their face multiple times they could cave in the head but it is not happening easily. I feel it ups the fear, for me at least. I get the feeling of being underpowered both from the gameplay and from the fact that the character I am playing in the game is not a really strong, competent person or a badass or someone incredibly intelligent or a superhero like Lara Croft becomes towards the endgame of the Tomb Raider remake. It’s why, despite the fact I like the first season better because I simply cared about the supporting cast more, I greatly prefer playing Clementine to Lee.
And that doesn’t mean “make ever single survival horror character a girl” (yes I know The Walking Dead isn’t survival horror). That is far from what I am saying. It just means don’t make them a badass, entirely competent, physically very strong, etc. Another good example is Leon from RE 2 before he became the ultimate badass plague murderer he did in RE 4 (unfortunately) back when he was just a rookie cop on his first day who didn’t really know what he was doing and was just as scared as anybody else. Yes he had formal training but he was still just a kid, and a pretty skinny one at that who did not look tough at all. He did not look like he could handle himself in a fight and that helped sell me on it and scare me because the gameplay also reinforces it by having underpowered mechanics. You can do this by having a really old protagonist. I would like to see a survival horror game with protagonist in his/her sixties, seventies or eighties. Perhaps they’re really an and a war veteran and the game is delving into their PTSD and the horror is more psychological than real. That actually sounds like a Silent Hill game though I would not know as I have only ever played a few hours of SH 2. Only because I do not actually own the game, not because i wasn’t liking it. I was liking it a helluva lot actually. Kind of want to buy it and play through the rest. I would like to say that I really, [i]really[/i] love Survival Horror as a genre though. Even just the idea of it. It is an entire genre based solely around eliciting an emotion from you which is great.
I have played all of RE original two times, I have played through about 2/3s of two but I have never owned it so I have never been able to finish it nor does the save exist anymore, I have never even seen a copy of 3 despite looking, I have played through RE 4 a dozen or so times (mostly to hear that voice . . . you know the one. Don’t pretend like you don’t stranga), played through 5 twice (once alone which was absolutely horrible bc of AI and the second time I played it with my cousin because he had not played it yet and I could not bear to put him through that AI torture) and I played about 1/4 the way through 6 but it was so god awful and painful to my soul to play that I could not physically bring myself to put it back in my 360.
If you’re going to do anything ‘interesting’ with saves, and there can be good cases for doing so, I feel your game should absolutely include a memo save option. The mobile releases of Final Fantasy for example. They wanted to keep the FF system of save points, but that works horribly with mobile gaming habits, so you also have the ability to quicksave and quit, and that save is then deleted on load. It lets developers play with the save system without, say, hurting someone’s sleep.
That is a pretty good solution.
The GBA and DS versions of those games had the same feature as well to better play to the stop and go nature of handhelds.
3DS can often just be paused and closed and it will go into sleep mode for hours. I can just stop playing Monster Hunter mid hunt and not worry about it. I believe the DS was capable of this as well too.
OOh, scary. As in, this is one of my favorite videogames, and Spoiler Warning those who rip apart poorly written game stories is playing it, shit.
Some quick things if it’s cool…
The BSAA Jill and Chris costumes are just additional costumes to wear, there’s no additional content related to those.
Towards the end of the video when the window cracks, one of the very small things I like about this game is that in the original game (before the Gamecube remake) that glass would be broken by zombie dogs jumping through right then. So then with that knowledge playing the remake or HD remastered versions, and getting to that window the first time and it cracks then nothing happens was pretty intense. Then as Josh said, later coming back through the hall and the dogs do jump through is pretty pants shitting.
I agree with Chris in this a lot, about the various ways in which the game is made with the idea that each element can add to the scare factor or tension. And like Chris I generally approve of different ideas around saving.
But one thing not mentioned yet, is I like how the game deals with game difficulty. Where we get annoyed about “hard” mode meaning enemies have more health, and calling it a day, in this game higher difficulty means more enemies and less helpful items to pick up, though granted enemies can also take a few more hits to kill.
When mentioning the ideas between fixed cameras and more free cameras, mixed with Josh stopping at a particular moment to admire the camera framing, makes me think of how you guys have mentioned during previous games your dislike for when the camera is pulled away to focus on something the devs wanted the player to see/notice, and the idea of that compared to the framing available in a game with fixed cameras.
The use of camera angles as a tool to unobtrusively guide the player is fascinating. Looking at the first encounter with a zombie (around 10:30), as you retreat down the hallway, you alternate between positions where you can see the zombie but he’s close to you, and positions where you the zombie is farther away, but offscreen. The former encourages you to back away to protect yourself, and the latter encourages you to back away to get a decent shot.
The game never forces you to make any choice, and an experienced player has lots of opportunities to either kill the zombie or run past it. But I imagine the vast majority of new players will follow the same pattern, always retreating.
This also encourages a particular play style, when combined with limited resources, of extra caution. Since at some point you HAVE to take risks, it heightens the tension of those moments, which in turn makes you vulnerable to jump scares and the like. Even the lame find-a-key, use-a-key puzzles can become stressful if you’re trying to do them with a zombie in the room, and you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
I love fixed camera angles… i’m actually surprised that they haven’t been used so much as a stylistic choice on more narrative/enviorment driven games since the devs. can control EVERY SINGLE Camera angle and show you exactly what they want you to see (and more importantly with a horror game), what you don’t see, Silent Hill 2 and 3 being the prime example of stellar placement of cameras in order to hide objects or enemies out of view, even when they’re are 3 meters away from you, emphasize a particular object or puzzle to make it more obvious to the player (like making a camera angle so that that a hole in the wall is on center frame) or set up some butt-clenching frames (Look for “Silent Hill 3 Wheel Chair”).
And i have the sneaking suspicion that although Tank controls and Y and Z axis fixed aiming do heighten tension by making aiming and moving/dodging a complicated task, they where probably designed to be used in service of the fixed camera angles: Whenever you move trough a hallway the camera is always jumping around, pushing forward on the stick will turn into going backwards, or still forward until you let go of the stick, making it disconcerting. Tank controls were probably introduced to alleviate this issue, meaning that pushing forward, will always make you character go forward (base on where they’re looking) regardless of constantly changing camera angles.
Given how obsessed games are with being movies, I wish they would use fixed camera angles as a mean of fulfillment more often. Beats 5-minute cutscenes any day…
I think that in one of Yahtzee’s many, many “here’s a random game idea that I don’t have the skill to make” columns on The Escapist, he proposed a survival horror game set in the near future where your character had various cybernetic implants. You would be blinded early on in the game, but your character could hack the area’s security system and watch themselves moving around using security cameras. Boom; justification for fixed camera angles :)
The biggest problem with fixed camera angles is that transitions from one to the other are always problematic,especially when they lead to reversed controls.And then there is the “enemy is off screen” problem that can lead to bullshit damage/death.
Only played 2 ‘n 4 to completion. I’mma say 2 was apparently a loooot less stingy with ammo AND tapes because I was never for want of the either…that or I was just a hoard’n muthafugga! It was also the first one to really push the ‘body horror’ aesthetics that would become a staple of the series. The ‘wall of flesh’ final boss was particularly hilarious.
Skyrim sorta did the arrowhead thing with the claw near the beginning. They gave you what you needed to solve it, but then also let you brute force the door, if (like me…) you were utterly oblivious to the fairly-obvious clues. Hardly perfect, I’d say, but nice to have a couple of options.
The most intuitive way to do something like that would be introducing the first item as something that needs to be examined to use; either the dagger comes in a sheath you need to take off, or the medical supplies come in a box you need to open. Then the companion can say something like “can you open it, Master of Unlocking?”
With regard to that specific arrowhead puzzle, put an empty chamber that needs an arrow shaft next to it, and people will go “huh, I wonder if I can break this arrow to fill those two slots?”
I thought it was fairly intuitive given that they have an “Examine” command, and I really liked that they didn’t make it so obvious as to be “Oh, you found an arrowhead earlier and took only that.”
And then Bethesda was so proud of that puzzle that they added at least half a dozen exact duplicates… :-/
Those “puzzles” are weird. Lore-wise, theyre there to essentially function as a captcha test (“Prove you are not a draugr”) and to stop any random adventuring idiot from stumbling around ancient burial sites for traitorous dragon-worshipping immortal wizards… but that doesnt make them any less of an annoying busywork for the player.
Well, the Draugr are there to deal with any wandering adventurers. The doors are there to keep the Draugr from wandering off, getting lost, and falling down a ravine. The keys go off with who ever is supposed to have them… they just didn’t expect that the Dragons would lose the war, and the keys would end up splattered around Skyrim. It doesn’t explain why no one ever looked at the gold or silver claw and said, “well, that creeps me the snot out, let’s melt it down and make jewelry out of it. I need to learn how to smith Daedric armor.”
I had to look up a walkthrough for the first one of those, because I had no idea that you could rotate items in your inventory.
It’s a puzzle based around “how to use our interface”, rather than on something in-world, which is a pretty bad way to make a puzzle.
So speaking of Resident Evil Revelations, I played it on the 3DS. And I thought that they ended up with a really good tension-raising tool by playing around with the control scheme they had to work with.
So the 3DS has one analog input and one D-Pad, both on the same side of the console so you can’t use them both at once. But Capcom wanted to make a third person shooter. So what they did was make your default state moving, with left and right on the analog slider turning your character. You hold down one button and your character brings their gun up and lets you fine aim with the laser pointer on your gun. Hold down the other button and you can strafe, fixing your facing and letting you walk side-to-side. And hold down both buttons at once and you can strafe and fire but not change the angle of your aim.
This really works. Every fight involves making decisions: Is my positioning good or do I need to move? If I start firing here and going for headshots will that allow a monster to sneak up beside me? Do I need to turn or sidestep here? And these decisions vary based on the weapon you’re using.
So even though the game might not be too much on the horror side for some people, it is still very fun to play and every fight brings an element of tension as you have to consider what kind of movement and aiming ability you’ll need.
Oh and if anyone here is interested in Alone in the Dark as one of the proto-Resident Evil 1s, I highly recommend the LP of Alone in the Dark 1 that’s on the LP Archives. Use the Internet Archive link at the top to view the videos. It’s a very respectfully done subtitled LP that lets the game and it’s atmosphere shine. And then you can watching the Alone in the Dark 2 LP from the same author to watch how that franchise changed tone lightning fast compared to Resident Evil.
FMV cutscenes! So great! The Crusader games had those, they were all hysterical and cheesy and had the people from Wishbone in them! It was an amazing nostalgia trip to watch them with dim memories of the show bubbling at the back of the brain.
I wish we still had live-action FMV cutscenes. I don’t care how bad they’d look or anything, they’re so silly they’re perfect for all video games.
Gosh, it’s been so long since I played this game!
I’d forgotten how ridiculous some of the writing is. And I don’t mean the dialogue (well, OK, I do, but…) I mean the character motivations and actions.
We’re in the creepy mansion. Jill and Barry go look in the dining room, leaving Wesker alone in the hall. When they come back, Wesker is gone. So they search the hall. He’s not there. Barry – “I think I should go search the dining room again!”
Lemme get this straight. We know Wesker WAS in the hall, but he’s not there now. The ONLY place we know he DIDN’T go from the hall is into the dining room, because that’s where we just came from. So, Barry proposes to go look in the ONLY room in the ENTIRE mansion where it’s impossible for Wesker to be.
I get the need sometimes to have your companions get out of the way so you can have a solo adventure (case in point – the “I’ll be here studying this blood indefinitely” bit) But they literally could have given Barry ANYTHING ELSE to go do that would have made more sense than what he did.
Yeah… also the part where these guys love to split up. You really always want someone watching your back in a situation like this (and no, I don’t mean a haunted mansion with zombie dogs outside, I mean being on unfamiliar terrain with no way to call for help and possibly no help to call) and with only 3 of you, well you never should have separated in the first place.
I could never get into the original resident evil games, for the same reason Chris said that it is good…the controls. Chris posits that the tank controls make it scary, but to me it’s just silly. I may get scared by a zombie appearing down a hallway, but instead of staying scared I immediately get frustrated that I was attacked by something that my character would have been looking directly at. It creates a disconnect between myself and my in game avatar, which takes me out of the fear.
If anyone has ever played Dead or Alive 3 single player, the final boss fight changes the camera angle makes moving and dodging nearly impossible, but I didn’t finish the game and think “oooh what a tough fight”, I say “that was only tough because they cheated”
It’s the same with Resident evil, it just always felt like they were cheating.
Marlow Briggs does this too, of course. Of course.
granted, I didn’t play RE1, just RE2 and 3 (way back when my PS2 wasn’t in a box somewhere)… but I don’t remember having to operate a stick for each leg, where if I pushed both forward I’d move forward, but I’d have to move one forward and the other backwards to turn. Yet people keeping saying “tank controls”. What?
It’s actually called tank controls because the controls tank the game’s sales.
I think the idea behind the coinage is that you can’t determine turning *and* movement with the same action – you have forward, back, and then turn left or turn right.
But like the idea of a tank having to have one wheel go backwards and one go forwards, you can’t keep forward movement while turning, unless we’re counting drifting, at which point what type of controls you’re using don’t really matter.
So it’s shorthand for “Stop and turn then go” controls.
Tank controls, in video games are based off the character as opposed to the camera. In a generic 3rd-person shooter, if you press forward on the analog stick, the character will move away from the camera. With tank controls, however, they will move whatever direction they are facing. If they are facing towards the camera, they will move towards it.
Loving zombie month, are there any plans to tackle Dead Rising? It’s kind of one of my unabashedly favorite zombie games, even if it’s super-duper goofy.
The cornball and horror mix makes me wonder if it’s a pacing issue. You can raise the level of tension a lot higher with regular breaks than with just high terror from the off, and the ribbon save system is there to enforce longer play sessions to better build immersion. So you have corny acting between moments of actual terror over an hour or so, and have the rising tension of how much play time you’ve put on the table and stand to lose, slowly boiling the frog and getting you right up to the point of losing your mind. This obviously requires the luxury of a big, uninterrupted block of time, but then the same goes for horror films, too.
I think corny horror works because it feels out of place and at its best it goes straight to uncanny valley (Silent Hill). And in American cinema it’s a well established genre — Critters, It, Child’s Play, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc…
Also, in my experience, horror fans are able to suspend their disbelief and “just roll with it” to a much greater extent than the average person. All for that delicious adrenaline rush.
My personal favorites are hellraisers 1 and 2 and screamers.Wishmaster was also fun,but that one has little scares.
Wait, wait, wait… how come I was the only one to notice that Jill Valentine was wearing her cap in her BSAA (Bull-Shit Association of America) document?
We’ve barely selected our characters and they’re already flinging dumb in our faces? NO respected organization (HAHA, respected…), much less a supposedly military one, would allow one of their operatives to take a document photo with any distracting accessories, especially glasses and GODDAMN CAPS!
Problems with the story, Carla?
The story collapse interpretation of plot holes is probably my most-referenced idea from here.
I don’t think there are any zombies in Rebel Assault, but there could be a Star Wars Month at some point? Just an idea for a rainy day, perhaps. Er. Rainy month.
Prior to Zombie Month I don’t think I would have necessarily voted for it, but I think it’s worked really well (as a complement to more-regular seasons rather than a replacement, of course!). So, if there were any plans to do Theme Months in future: strongly in favour of.
We cant let Josh have a star wars month,or next he will ask for a souls month!We need to put our foot down now,while we still can do so!
Zombie Month has been awful and the whole Theme Month notion is a terrible idea!!
I’d like a Star wars month. But what games?
Rebel Assault (1 or 2), check
KOTOR – didn’t they try that and it failed to record?
Jedi Knight? The first one had fmvs.
The space shooters, not sure they’re easy enough for viewers to follow?
Oooh, I know: Star Wars Rebellion! The glory of what was basically a windows reskin with a constantly pestering droid!
Heh – aye, I believe when you run KOTOR, or possibly KOTOR 2, it scans the surrounding area for Rutskarns, and if it finds one, crashes. As Campster would likely readily affirm, there are plenty of Star Wars games to choose from, though! (Honestly, that list is like the Terminator – even when you think it’s done it just keeps on coming…)
Depending on when in the future the hypothetical Star Wars month happens they could do one of the older Battlefront games as a way to talk about the new one (the new one to my knowledge lacks single player so would likely not work for an episode).
When’s the movie coming out again? Also Republic Commando.
Why not a real star wars game? Like, maybe, Star Wars.
I have fond memories of playing a Star Wars text adventure on the Apple II, rather a long time ago. I only ever got to play it when we visited my uncle.
In my experience, the camp always added to the horror elements because of how surreal the entire experience became. This is especially true in the first game, but I think the same can be said for most of the games in the series until 5.
Even moreso when I was younger, I think the camp succeeded in making me more uncomfortable than a lot of the intentional scares.
I really like the first Alone in the Dark game (and to a certain extent 2+3), and am enjoying the comparison with this game. I’ve heard a lot about the Resident Evil series, but I’ve only played RE2 and Nemesis briefly (and seen a few of the films), so don’t know much about the games really.
Alone in the Dark was unlike anything I’d played at that point, and I really enjoyed the horror element (it borrows heavily from Lovecraft, but I don’t think I’d ever read anything by him at that point). I recall it’s puzzles being generally quite obvious compared to the adventure games I was playing at the time, and of course it would generally give you plenty of clues in various books and things you could find. The CD version had some great music and fully voiced narration, which again was very impressive at the time.
Common elements so far between RE1 and AitD: Able to select from a male or female character, mysterious “empty” mansion, able to move furniture to block enemy progress, fixed camera angles, limited guns/ammo, focus on puzzle solving rather than action.
Oddly enough though, Alone in the Dark doesn’t have much of a limitation on save games, you have a set number of spaces but can use them (and re-use them) at pretty much any time (perhaps in RE1 this is down to console limitations? How much space was a game limited to on a PS1 memory card?). I think you can also pick up everything too, so no worries about juggling your inventory.