june gloom on 8/1/2013 at 08:34
I was referring more to a very tight inventory. It doesn't have to be SS2-style inventory Tetris, but being able to stockpile a small army's worth of equipment and ammo sort of takes away from what surhor's all about.
Sulphur on 8/1/2013 at 08:47
That's just about taken care of by the scarce resources metric. Corollary to, IMO.
faetal on 8/1/2013 at 11:57
Dethtoll, Dead Space technically qualifies under those criteria, but I'm not sure it's SurHor - what's your take?
SubJeff on 8/1/2013 at 14:11
I'd say it is. In fact, how can you say it's not?
faetal on 8/1/2013 at 14:47
I suppose because it is quite close to being a 3rd person shooter. The weapons are pretty effective.
Also, I haven't really played any survival horrors, since most of them have been console only or only received PC ports later. So my frame of reference may just be off. If you say it is one, I'm not going to dispute it.
Thirith on 8/1/2013 at 15:06
With something like Dead Space, I'd say that only genre nazis are likely to get their knickers in a twist about whether it's survival horror or not. Is the player character too strong? Are the weapons too effective? It's not like there's a hard and fast measure for these things. The game plays very much like Resident Evil 4, which in turn plays quite a bit like Silent Hill 3 which plays pretty much like Siren. At this point it makes more sense IMO to talk about the individual games and their differences than about some mystical ideal survival horror genre as if that were wholly independent from any individual gamer's estimate of e.g. the factors that dethtoll listed earlier.
Sulphur on 8/1/2013 at 16:11
Dead Space (1) certainly is sur-hor if you play it on Hard or above. Ammo's a little too abundant, and - with the right loadout - could make Normal a cakewalk. But it's suitably tense on Hard, and the enemies do take a bit of a beating before they go down.
DS2, on the other hand, is a bit too fast-paced and is more of what I'd term as an action horror game. How's that for genre semantics?
Also, the RE4 -> SH3 -> Siren comparison is a bit too much of a false equivalence, I think. Each successive game has its own gameplay quirks that alter its pace more towards action or horror. You could say they share some attributes in that they're all third person and feature a central horror theme, but there's more to the makeup of each than just that; the devil's in the details. And no, I don't look forward to breaking down what those details are either.
faetal on 8/1/2013 at 16:23
Borderline cases are always interesting. So if you have 2 people playing on normal difficulty, one of whom is bad at games in general, is one of them playing a survival horror?
gunsmoke on 8/1/2013 at 16:26
I include The Suffering, but I was always on the fence about it. Deth forgot to mention the monster transformations which, while awesome as shit, basically make you a tank from L4D and damn near indestructible.
Thirith on 8/1/2013 at 16:27
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Also, the RE4 -> SH3 -> Siren comparison is a bit too much of a false equivalence, I think. Each successive game has its own gameplay quirks that alter its pace more towards action or horror. You could say they share some attributes in that they're all third person and feature a central horror theme, but there's more to the makeup of each than just that; the devil's in the details. And no, I don't look forward to breaking down what those details are either.
That's exactly my point, though: genre shouldn't be about the details, it should be about broadly common elements. Yes,
Siren is different from
Dead Space, but the two still share more core features, I'd argue, than
Dead Space and
Doom 3. If the entire purpose of breaking down the points is that someone can say, "How can you call game X survival horror *starts foaming at the mouth*", then it's semantic masturbation, pure and simple. The games are close enough in what they do to be attributed to the same genre, with qualifications, for the purpose of any sane discussion. If the discussion is about hard-and-fast genre boundaries, and even more so if that discussion mostly boils down to pretending that personal preferences or highly subjective criteria are actually facts, well, IMO it leaves the realm of *sane* discussion.
