I wasn't sure what to expect upon starting up ERIE. Possibly because of that, it ended up being a very neat half hour gaming experience. The game is pretty simple overall. You begin in a pool of water with no idea of where you are. Quickly, you read papers scattered around which start to inform your understanding of the location and what happened.
Unfortunately I'm still not completely sure as to the specifics, but it seems like a game best played when you are unaware of the story anyway. Without knowing anything you can enter the game with a fresh perspective! I would recommend that as it helps make everything a bit scarier and interesting as events unfold.
In regards to gameplay, it is quite simple. There's little you ever have to do aside from marking your pathways as well as collecting a few key cards. Well, you don't have to read letters or mark your way, but it just seems something most players are going to do. Although you are not given explicit goals, it quickly becomes easy to understand what to do. Level design is also not bad. Even for someone like me who tends to get lost without looking at a map every second I was able to get a feel for my surroundings (eventually).
The game is very eerie and contains a few "boo" moments. For a little while, I felt legitimately annoyed, until discovering things were not as hard as I was making them up to be. Overall, this is a great little gameplay experiment if you want to play something spooky.
PS: The video up top is my first playthrough of the game, which took around 30 minutes.
AMY is a recently published survival horror game for XBLA and PSN. Although it comes out on PSN next week basically anyone in gaming press (or gamers) have checked it out on 360 and have a lot of negative things to say about it.
Mostly, reviewers don't seem split at all. They know what they feel about the game and demonstrate it in the best way they know how - a horrendous score. Now, I've spent around 6 hours with the game so far and it is pretty bad. But is it the worst game ever? Is it worthy of scores of 0 to 3 (yes someone did rate it zero)? Now 1 and 2 seem basically like scores for something that is completely unplayable. AMY is definitely playable - how else would reviewers supposedly beat the game otherwise?
What the game does wrong is how strangely retro it is. It takes from the old school of survival horror design, which was never very popular. No one will ever be found applauding the control scheme and design choices of AMY nor would they be happy about Resident Evil's tank controls. It's so odd that the game is this awkwardly controlled. Did the team play any games in the past few years?
Still, the game works and you can get accustomed to the controls. I have a feeling that most people who put out scathing reviews only sampled the first few chapters. The first few are the most rage-inducing. Even I was seeing red when traversing the same sections of level over and over again due to stupid deaths and mistakes. Taking a full day away from the game though and coming back to it I can see that it is not a steaming pile of poo. It's not good, but it could have been worse. Vampire Rain, Onechanbara, and Siren are three games that come to mind that are in the horror genre and are worse. Yet nobody seems to bring them up. AMY is the "worst game ever!!!!!1!"; except it isn't.
If you ever have the opportunity, you must play Fatal Frame at night. The PS2 game the first of a currently four part series (3 parts have made it to the US). They also happen to be some of the scariest games I've ever played. It might be because I have a huge irrational fear of ghosts in any capacity. Playing in the dark and alone brings you into the game world so well though and so I suggest everyone try it at least once. Surround sound would also help with the horror, but it works quite fine for me without that.
Please play it in these conditions if the chance ever comes up. For those of you who were scared of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, this is so much more terrifying. Of all the horror games out there, the series is one of the few I've ever jolted in my seat from. Or shouted. Or felt dread over when exploring new rooms.
That's all I had to say. Regular blogging shall resume later.
Genre: FPS, Horror Rating: M Developer: Irrational Games Publisher: 2K Games Platform: Xbox 360 (Also: Mac, PC, PS3) Release date: 2007
When this game came out I was super psyched. It looked like an incredible shooter with horror elements. What mostly made it seem so fantastic to me was the style. The world of Rapture was a dirty, crazed art deco dream and I wanted to live in it. God damn if those initial preview videos and screenshots didn't tantalize my younger gaming self. This was without me having ever played the System Shock series, which it was a spiritual successor to. The game just looked damn great.
I can't say I remember too much about playing it those few years ago. All I really recall is the gaming audience at large shouting about how creepy the game was when my thought was "you call this scary?". Obviously everyone takes to "scary" stuff differently but it was anything but. Despite that dismantlement, the game was a dream to control. I still feel that way about the controls. They're very tight and responsive for being a console game. Maybe the difficulty is toned down, but it's not very hard to nail shots.
I still enjoy the backdrop for the game and the controls and the voice acting. The story however leaves much to be desired. I couldn't really care less about what was going on with Andrew Ryan and Atlas and whatever on earth else. It just doesn't seem a very pressing tale - and why am I helping anyway? FPSes generally aren't renowned for the tales they weave, so Bioshock can be forgiven on that count.
Speaking of easy though, this game is terribly so. Yes, I am playing on the easy difficulty but sometimes even then in other games I'll meet with an unfortunate end from time to time. There is just constant opportunity to revitalize your health that it's not worrisome. They really could have just given you health that automatically recharges and it would have been about the same. Overall, I really like the game and am about 3/4th through it right now with no deaths. I'll get back to it after I polish off other games.
When I was younger I was enamored with zombie films. Any movie I could possibly get my hands on from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster would become my "favorite". It was a weekly ritual to visit and pick up some new horror film - zombie preferable. Strangely, I skipped out on Braindead/Dead Alive for years because the cover disturbed me.
Interestingly enough, when I was even younger I was frightened by The Rocky Horror Picture Show cover. There must be some deep-seated fear of lips in my head. Anyway, zombie movies were my life. When Resident Evil 4 came out it was really exciting. It was a fast paced zombie game that gave you lots of power. When it came time in a chapter to survive in a 2 story house being assaulted by zombies I lost my mind. THIS was the perfect style of gameplay. This is what I had been waiting for. I made a save right before that chapter so I could play it over and over and over again. It was just like a zombie movie.
I remember when Dead Rising first premiered. My heart nearly stopped. This was probably one of the last few times a game really got me caught up in excitement and for good reason. It was almost exactly like Dawn of the Dead, location-wise, and that was a movie favorite of mine. The game didn't disappoint me and instead of playing through the missions I would simply run around surviving and killing the ever-increasing waves of undead.
When Left 4 Dead first started coming into the picture I went bananas again. While "action"-style horror games were no longer catching my interest this was different. Here was a game again like what I Had always wanted when dealing with zombies. There were multiple occasions where you were stuck fighting it out in a house with partners. I played the hell out of L4D. Before that, I'd spent a good while on the Half Life 2 mod/completely new game Zombie Panic which was quite similar, but actually allowed you to be a zombie after getting bitten up and dying. I can't tell you how cool that was to me, since Stubbs the Zombie never really seemed a great game.
When Left 4 Dead 2 came about I no longer really cared. I had built up such affinity for the original four survivors that this felt unfair. I didn't want to start up all over again. Thankfully, Killing Floor came around to satiate me with even more frentic gameplay. It also had melee weapons before L4D2. While KF might not be 100% zombies I took it as if they were.
Since all this has happened I have really gone out of the loop with modern horror games. I barely touched Bioshock and have yet to try Bioshock 2. I've not played any Dead Space game. Resident Evil 5 was such an affront to the rest of the series (what happened to Jill?!) that I still don't own it. Whatever else comes out as horror these days is usually ignored - and I'm still pretty sure horror is my thing! It's just that the Doom-style super powered and nasty monster stuff has never appealed to me. I enjoy feeling that my "life" is at risk with each turn.
However, today I saw a trailer for a game which excites me again. I remember seeing screenshots of it or something a couple years back but had since filed it away as vaporware. Apparently this is not the case!
It feels so weird to be excited over a game. Usually the current types of trailers with blasting audio don't elicit any reaction. Bullets flying around and huge explosions have lost their severity. But here is this cinematic trailer that makes me get the sudden urge to play it right now. Maybe it's due to the fact that the supposed island in the title hearkens back to Zombi 2, in my mind anyway. That movie was one of the first zombie flicks I ever saw and it has stuck with me ever since. It is fantastic. Even though I doubt the story of Dead Island will revolve around voodoo and whatnot it still looks great. Normal people being forced to survive zombies is always neat to see and I hope this game really does come out at some point. Until then, I'll try to satiate myself with more rounds of L4D finales and zombie flicks.
I'm just gonna leave you with the trailer for Zombi 2 and maybe later I'll share a list of my favorite zombie movies.
Here's the second vampire-centric game so far! As shameful as it may be to say I've never played any games in the Legacy of Kain series before. I have 2 but was waiting for a rainy day before busting any out. Either way, on an actual rainy day here I stuck it into my PS3 and wished I'd done so months earlier.
This is a great game! There was an issue with the brightness which couldn't be fixed in game but I'm starting to think it may be my television which is causing the issue. That was certainly a little tough to deal with because the game already takes place in dark corridors, alleys and whatnot in the dead of night. In fact, there was a point where I needed to kill a woman chained to a wall but she was completely shrouded in darkness. I had to strike wildly around with only her shrieks of terror to guide me.
Despite the brightness issue this game was solid and fantastic. I enjoyed the feeling of power that I had inhabiting this vampire and sneaking up on unsuspecting street people for a bite. I haven't had this much fun with a game based around vampires since Vampire: The Masquerade.
Again there was talk about vampires not being able to touch water so I figure that's a legitimate thing and not just the constraints of programming. I bring it up because that's how I led my avatar to death. He was supposed to jump over a pool of water to reach the other side, or so I thought. My poor avatar met his death four consecutive times. Finally I figured out what was actually supposed to happen but by then it was definitely time to play something else.
