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Rookersh posted:Oddly, RE3 felt the most dated to me. While RE/2 just focused on running/firepower, RE3 added the dodge mechanic, and I found it hard to pull off in an old game sense. With all the combat encounters built around the idea of you dodging rather then running, I was forced into losing health for little gain. This was made worse by the ammo building minigame, which I just found boring. Mix in a bad plot that is completely forgettable, and I really disliked RE3. The dodge mechanic is finicky and best avoided outside of certain tricks/enemies. The only real annoyance is that occasionally you'll try to aim at an attacking enemy and dodge, but most of those times you would've been hit before you could fire so it balances out. None of the encounters seem built for it so it's okay to ignore it. You can brute force the game, shooting everything and tanking the odd boss hit with your health items, if you know where ammo is or you know how to use the gunpowder to maximize ammo gain. Regular enemy dodging (i.e. what you used in other Resident Evil games) can get you through most of the opposition outside of some bad luck with random zombie speed or something. Ammo creating is a bit boring, yeah, especially if you play like me and use almost all of the gunpowder to make magnum rounds. I still find it interesting just because you can tailor your ammo to your play-style. Handgun run? Well you can make a shitload of handgun rounds, including special ammo for the default handgun that hits a bit harder. Love the grenade launcher? Make your regular grenades or turn regular grenades into one of the three specialty rounds. It's not executed well but I love the concept, if only because it's funny having fat stacks of .357 magnum rounds to kill Nemesis every time he shows up. (for some reason a few people I've talked to about the game don't know this, but if you mix three of the C-powders into a CCC-powder, you can turn it into 18 magnum rounds. I don't recall seeing it in any of the strategy guides or FAQs back in the day about it, so here you go I guess.)
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Aug 17, 2014 05:12
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Nemesis is one of my all time favorite video game characters. To say Nemesis is relentless is like the most massive understatement ever. He is the most relentless. You have to kill him about 20 times.
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Aug 17, 2014 05:57
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Scalding Coffee posted:RE3 was annoying as gently caress with constantly being chased by a fast enemy at certain areas. Silent Hill 4 did it right by having a slow, creepy guy follow you around everywhere. You know you had to do things quickly and the game won't stop you from doing certain things when Walter is around like they force you to in RE3. RE3 was like a clusterfuck of finding what the devs wanted you to do to advance the plot and avoid Nemmy. That's because Silent Hill 4 is one of the better SH games and RE3 is one of the worst RE games. I started with Nemesis, it is what made me a total RE fanboy for over a decade, but I do not ever want to go back and replay it. I revisited it a few years ago and I just...my nostalgia was ruined.Nemesis is just irritating and not threatening. The game also has an abysmal story even by RE standards and everyone knows about how awful Jill's Hooker outfit is. It's no wonder Carlos has bee ignored by everything after that game as well. Well except the movies but Movie Carlos is so much better than Game Carlos. Even back in the day I never quite got what was so "cool" about Nemesis or why he's this icon of the series. I thought G-Birkin iN RE2 was much creepier and more awesome.
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Aug 17, 2014 07:21
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You can also make freeze rounds with the gun powder which is in fact the most damage thing you can hit the Nemesis with, more damaging than Magnum rounds.
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Aug 17, 2014 08:17
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NikkolasKing posted:It's no wonder Carlos has bee ignored by everything after that game as well. Well except the movies but Movie Carlos is so much better than Game Carlos. To be fair you could make an entire game starring the secondary characters Capcom has forgotten. Rebecca, Barry, Hunk, Carlos, Nikolai, Steve's T-Veronica filled corpse in Wesker's closet, everyone from Outbreak and the Gun Survivor series, Ashley, Sheva. Almost definitely Helena. Claire Redfield is a fringe case in which they actually reference her rather frequently and she made it into a crappy CGI movie a few years ago and there have been multiple RE2 homage games in recent years. Did I forget anyone?
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Aug 17, 2014 09:15
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Alteisen posted:You can also make freeze rounds with the gun powder which is in fact the most damage thing you can hit the Nemesis with, more damaging than Magnum rounds. I want to say the magnum fires slightly faster which is better for playing keep-away during a fight. In addition, Nemesis can dodge grenades occasionally. Besides the difference in ammo is minimal, like two grenades less, and magnum rounds are useful against every enemy in case you really need a hunter dead or something. I've seen some enemies take multiple freeze grenades, but not multiple magnum shots. The Dark Id posted:Did I forget anyone? Josh and the Revelations surviving cast. Mountain Lightning fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 09:20
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Well ya know if Capcom could remember Sherry, they can remember other people too! The fanbase has been literally screaming ever since I got on the internet 10 years ago about "IS THAT SHERRY IN RE4?? IS THAT SHERRY IN RE5????" and finally they delivered. So there is hope! Except for Rebecca. She originally fulfilled that "ridiculously young girl" niche but in RE time she's pushing 30 therefore she no longer has a purpose in these games. And Nikolai might be dead. That seems up in the air.
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Aug 17, 2014 09:40
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The Dark Id posted:Did I forget anyone? Billy loving Coen! RIP monkey suplexer, you were the only thing good about Zero.
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Aug 17, 2014 11:39
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NikkolasKing posted:Even back in the day I never quite got what was so "cool" about Nemesis or why he's this icon of the series. I thought G-Birkin iN RE2 was much creepier and more awesome. Nemesis rules because he already unlocked Mercenaries and got a sweet rocket launcher before you even loaded up the game.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:24
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NikkolasKing posted:Well ya know if Capcom could remember Sherry, they can remember other people too! The fanbase has been literally screaming ever since I got on the internet 10 years ago about "IS THAT SHERRY IN RE4?? IS THAT SHERRY IN RE5????" and finally they delivered. Survivor is canon and a file in survivor is written by Nikolai after Raccoon City.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:46
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I just want Barry. Wheeeeeere's Barry?!
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Aug 17, 2014 19:50
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Mountain Lightning posted:I want to say the magnum fires slightly faster which is better for playing keep-away during a fight. In addition, Nemesis can dodge grenades occasionally. Besides the difference in ammo is minimal, like two grenades less, and magnum rounds are useful against every enemy in case you really need a hunter dead or something. I've seen some enemies take multiple freeze grenades, but not multiple magnum shots. Josh returned to wrestling dangerous, mutated animals in Africa and live up to his 'legend' status, taunting them just before he elbow drops them. Cyra posted:I just want Barry. Wheeeeeere's Barry?! He teamed up with Josh. (In Mercs Reunion on RE5 if you have both Josh & Barry together they get different melee sets because they 'team up.' I like to think this is canon)
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Aug 17, 2014 19:52
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Mountain Lightning posted:Survivor is canon and a file in survivor is written by Nikolai after Raccoon City. It's worth noting that this isn't true in the Japanese version where the last entry (the only post-Raccoon City one) is written by someone else.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:53
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NikkolasKing posted:That's because Silent Hill 4 is one of the better SH games and RE3 is one of the worst RE games.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:57
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HERE COMES A LOT OF WORDS ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL STORY  Resident Evil 6 has a really bad plot, even by franchise standards. If you lay all the stories side by side and order the events sensibly, I mean, there's a narrative that makes sense there, but for a story that involves huge global bio-terror attacks, international missile strikes, the exposure of the illuminati, the death of the president, etc. there are no personal stakes for anyone involved in the story. The main character of Resident Evil 6 is clone Ada, the unplayable character that makes only fleeting appearances throughout the game. She was created as a deranged sex-toy homunculus by Simmons, and has an understandably tortured existence and worldview because of this. Simmons is a pretty standard stock character, the obsessive wizard/jilted mad scientist. This is the foundation of an okay plot, it's part Pygmalion, part Frankenstein, part Resident Evil super-virus hoo-hah. It's also a pretty intimate, personal story that doesn't really justify the scale seen in RE6, but you could swing it if you went really baroque with the tone. The problem is with how it's framed, how it's told. Who is Simmons? We barely get to see this character. I played the campaigns in the order they were listed in the menu, and I had pretty much no idea who he was by the time he was dead. What is Neo-Umbrella? I guess it was some kind of feint? This seems like a really weird name to invoke for a faction that suggests an ideology that Umbrella never had, and is also drumming up the corpse of a franchise "character" for little reason. I still don't know exactly what Neo-Umbrella was supposed to be. The C-Virus. Necessary for the creation of Clone Ada, but squandered with the rest of the games enemies. The C-Virus does nothing thematically, it's just more big monsters. The idea of pod people hatching from hosed up cocoons and harboring deadly monstrous forms is a compelling one, but RE6 just has big armored doofuses come out of cocoons. The J'avo. Who are they? Why do they exist? How do they function? It seems like they were normal paramilitary/mercenary groups that were tricked into being inoculated with a virus, which drove them insane. How are they still using their intelligence and (simple) tactics, then? What drives them? Does someone control them? What are the stakes for Chris? At the beginning of the game, cherubic-C4-detonator-man is introduced, so that he can be killed, so that Chris can be mad. Chris proceeds to be mad and get amnesia (???). Eventually, Chris is maybe not mad anymore, I guess. Where's Jill? Seems like she should be doing something, given what a big deal getting her back was in RE5. The Helena character plays out a mini-version of the larger story, but what for? With a game as cluttered and hectic as RE6, there really doesn't seem to be time for this. Jake's story is fundamentally sound, but seems like it maybe should have been its own game. It has its own clear character arc and narrative. If all of the stories were like this, and the game were an anthology of small Resident Evil games, it might be okay. There's a lot I'm willing to overlook in a Resident Evil game. Notice that I don't care why there's ancient catacombs with chainmail-wearing zombie crusaders in a Chicago graveyard. It doesn't matter to me that the paramilitary squid monster can fly a fighter jet. Resident Evil 6 just strikes me as a supreme example of really bad storytelling. Its themes are weak and disordered. The characters are basically tangential to the narrative. The stakes of the story are inappropriate, there's no payoff. Nobody grows or changes by the end of the story. Though thousands have died in the course of the game, including the loving President, the entire game may as well have not happened, and things would still be the same. By contrast, Resident Evil 5 is brazenly idiotic, but actually manages to use its narrative, characters, and game mechanics to tell the story of the imperialist devastation of Africa through insane monstermen battles.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:30
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Anonymous Robot posted:...By contrast, Resident Evil 5 is brazenly idiotic, but actually manages to use its narrative, characters, and game mechanics to tell the story of the imperialist devastation of Africa through insane monstermen battles. And it manages to do this by having literal spear-chucking, grass skirt-wearing, ultra racist caricature natives. RE5 may be many things, but a thought-out musing on imperialism it is not.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:40
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It tried to be a virological warfare equivalent to the war economy of MGS4. Instead of the Patriots, you have some rich English family that appeared out of nowhere and shaped America to be a testing ground for Umbrella and its kin. Said family assassinated its Leader-father for no reason and disappears without a trace of existing. Half the cast are pointless and/or a waste of humanity, like Chris.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:41
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Lamprey Cannon posted:And it manages to do this by having literal spear-chucking, grass skirt-wearing, ultra racist caricature natives. RE5 may be many things, but a thought-out musing on imperialism it is not. Invoking racist dark-continent caricatures as conjured-up shooting gallery targets invalidates it as a treatment of modern African history? (The key scene of Resident Evil 5 is when you're forced to re-enact the Herero genocide through deliberate Holocaust imagery, and are given 5000 points for looting "dead wife's necklaces" from the corpses.) Anonymous Robot fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 20:43
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This is the kind of thing Wanderer does better but I'll take a stab at it.Anonymous Robot posted:HERE COMES A LOT OF WORDS ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL STORY It plays out like a Japanese drama, or daytime soap. I don't really remember the details on it but suffice it to say there is a cultural difference in how we view characters in a story. The way I'd look at it is that the series is over 15 years old and we know these guys so we're glad to see them doing what they do best after having survived this long, because their personal stories have already been told but they're more popular than some so they get the screen time. quote:Who is Simmons? We barely get to see this character. I played the campaigns in the order they were listed in the menu, and I had pretty much no idea who he was by the time he was dead. The one who urged the president of the RE1-3 days to nuke Raccoon City, I 'think' he's a bit of a retcon come RE6 but he's had his hand in the cookie jar as long as everyone else and that's what they imply. quote:What is Neo-Umbrella? I guess it was some kind of feint? This seems like a really weird name to invoke for a faction that suggests an ideology that Umbrella never had, and is also drumming up the corpse of a franchise "character" for little reason. I still don't know exactly what Neo-Umbrella was supposed to be. A feint as you say. Carla wanted to do as much damage and exhume the ghosts of evils past, so I think it's fitting if undeveloped. Again, this is part of the soap narrative. It's an RE thing too and by this point everyone knows what Umbrella did and why the BSAA was founded. quote:The C-Virus. Necessary for the creation of Clone Ada, but squandered with the rest of the games enemies. The C-Virus does nothing thematically, it's just more big monsters. The idea of pod people hatching from hosed up cocoons and harboring deadly monstrous forms is a compelling one, but RE6 just has big armored doofuses come out of cocoons. The way you describe this is pretty much what the g-Virus did with Birkin (and Sherry in a way). I do see what you mean, that you would have liked to see more than just monsters hatch and unfortunately we never saw what hatched from the one Ada found. (Probably Wesker). quote:The J'avo. Who are they? Why do they exist? How do they function? It seems like they were normal paramilitary/mercenary groups that were tricked into being inoculated with a virus, which drove them insane. How are they still using their intelligence and (simple) tactics, then? What drives them? Does someone control them? This is a good question, like the Plaga in RE5. At least Saddler in RE4 had a staff, as corny as it was believable. They were just mercenary groups who were tricked into taking the C-Virus which put them solely under Carla's control. Though, again and like you say, this isn't expounded upon other than a few hand waves. quote:What are the stakes for Chris? At the beginning of the game, cherubic-C4-detonator-man is introduced, so that he can be killed, so that Chris can be mad. Chris proceeds to be mad and get amnesia (PTSD). Eventually, Chris is maybe not mad anymore, I guess. Bold is mine. Chris is just doing his job at this point, he founded the BSAA with Jill and Clive, plus nine other unnamed people. His rival is dead and all he has is to just try and keep the world safe from Umbrella's ghosts. quote:Where's Jill? Seems like she should be doing something, given what a big deal getting her back was in RE5. quote:The Helena character plays out a mini-version of the larger story, but what for? With a game as cluttered and hectic as RE6, there really doesn't seem to be time for this. Japanese soap here again. Their story telling and culture is based around filial piety, so you're meant to feel for her and her family. This is lost in the West for various and some obvious reasons. quote:Jake's story is fundamentally sound, but seems like it maybe should have been its own game. It has its own clear character arc and narrative. If all of the stories were like this, and the game were an anthology of small Resident Evil games, it might be okay. I think it was just ambitious, because it is a rushed game. If it were just Jake and Sherry's game (but still had the size of all the campaigns together) then it would have been far, far better. Just keep in mind that most of the things you see in this game are in relation to what you'd see on a daytime drama. Except for the suplexing and body slamming 
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Aug 17, 2014 20:47
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Lunethex posted:I do see what you mean, that you would have liked to see more than just monsters hatch and unfortunately we never saw what hatched from the one Ada found. (Probably Wesker). If Resident Evil 6 was a good story, it seems like this would have actually been Simmons. We're told that there's still some of Helena inside of clone Ada, and that Helena was in love with Simmons, so it completes the bizarre romance going on for "Ada's" unanswered affections to have made a monstrous Simmons, just as Simmons' made a monstrous Ada.
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Aug 17, 2014 21:02
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Anonymous Robot posted:If Resident Evil 6 was a good story, it seems like this would have actually been Simmons. We're told that there's still some of Helena inside of clone Ada, and that Helena was in love with Simmons, so it completes the bizarre romance going on for "Ada's" unanswered affections to have made a monstrous Simmons, just as Simmons' made a monstrous Ada. I'm pretty sure you mean Carla in there. At least, I hope so.
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Aug 17, 2014 21:14
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Anonymous Robot posted:If Resident Evil 6 was a good story, it seems like this would have actually been Simmons. We're told that there's still some of Helena inside of clone Ada, and that Helena was in love with Simmons, so it completes the bizarre romance going on for "Ada's" unanswered affections to have made a monstrous Simmons, just as Simmons' made a monstrous Ada. I'm guessing you meant Carla, not Helena. Lamprey Cannon posted:And it manages to do this by having literal spear-chucking, grass skirt-wearing, ultra racist caricature natives. RE5 may be many things, but a thought-out musing on imperialism it is not. Yeah, there's a lot of really troubling stuff in RE5's narrative. If you turn your head and squint, you could almost wring political commentary out of it, with the fact the area has a lot of natural resources but the locals are either subsistence farmers or living in junkyard shantytowns, but there isn't a lot of textual support for that in the game itself. Lunethex posted:It plays out like a Japanese drama, or daytime soap. I don't really remember the details on it but suffice it to say there is a cultural difference in how we view characters in a story. The way I'd look at it is that the series is over 15 years old and we know these guys so we're glad to see them doing what they do best after having survived this long, because their personal stories have already been told but they're more popular than some so they get the screen time. Specifically, RE has a lot of writers in common with Japanese "tokusatsu" shows. Lunethex posted:The one who urged the president of the RE1-3 days to nuke Raccoon City, I 'think' he's a bit of a retcon come RE6 but he's had his hand in the cookie jar as long as everyone else and that's what they imply. I think it's totally fair to have some questions about Simmons and his importance by the end of the game, since most of his background is given in the files, and the files are designed to be difficult to find as they're treated like collectibles. This was not a great move on their part. That said, Simmons's presence isn't a retcon. Retroactive continuity is not simply adding onto previous events; it's a new work that establishes that a previous event was not what it was portrayed as being. Saying Simmons was in the room while the President made the decision to bomb Raccoon City isn't a retcon because it was never said who else had a hand in that decision. Lunethex posted:Japanese soap here again. Their story telling and culture is based around filial piety, so you're meant to feel for her and her family. This is lost in the West for various and some obvious reasons. Yeah, the idea that you might have to fight or kill a member of your immediate family is considered to be a horror element all by itself. There's a reason why it shows up constantly in Japanese drama; for example, off the top of my head, I can only think of a couple of JRPGs that don't involve you having to fight and/or kill a parent or (adopted) sibling. This isn't to say that it wouldn't be a big deal in a Western work's plot, but we're not quite as likely to throw it in just for the extra dramatic resonance. Anonymous Robot posted:(The key scene of Resident Evil 5 is when you're forced to re-enact the Herero genocide through deliberate Holocaust imagery, and are given 5000 points for looting "dead wife's necklaces" from the corpses.) If you think for one second that was a deliberate visual parallel...
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Aug 17, 2014 21:41
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WitchFetish posted:While looking for some good pics to use in a RPG I DM (character portraits, backgrounds and poo poo), I ended up finding some cool RE concept art that I uploaded to an imgur album so you won't even have to go to some icky NSFW site.  Without looking it up, I'm guessing the artist who did ninja Ada was involved with Okami.
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Aug 17, 2014 21:57
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Wanderer posted:If you think for one second that was a deliberate visual parallel... Death of the author, homie.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:00
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Plan Z posted:
Maybe, maybe not. That outfit looks like it's based on Kaede's. Whenever you see one of these artbooks there are always a couple of outfits that are just plain old Capcom shout-outs. Anonymous Robot posted:Death of the author, homie. Nah, son. You don't get to ascribe a relatively complex and subtle historical analysis to a work independently of the authors' intention, especially in a work that's as blatantly tone-deaf to racial issues as RE5 is. "Death of the author" isn't axiomatic; it's a theory, and is rejected as often as it is specifically because of would-be critics using it to put meaning into a work that isn't there. RE5 is set in Africa specifically because one of the developers saw Black Hawk Down and thought it would be a sufficiently creepy setting, and is what it is because its producers are from one of the world's last great monocultures. The end. Any deliberate historical/cultural subtext to be found past that is an elaborate illusion. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 22:00
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Boxing Ada reminds me of Tiffany from Rival High School.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:08
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Wanderer posted:
I don't want to belabor this point too much, but at what point does feeding mutilated African corpses into a furnace via a conveyor belt not evoke industrialized genocide? That's without even going into the deliberate choice to include lootable jewelry on the bodies. Just because a game is (possibly) mindlessly reiterating pop-culture imagery out of cynical commercial motive doesn't mean it isn't still actually deploying those images, with all their connotations and signifiers. We're in the postmodern era, that's what it's all about, even. Who gives a poo poo what Capcom wanted to say, I'm talking about what they said. Anonymous Robot fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 22:23
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You aren't talking about what they said. You're talking about a motivation and interpretation that you ascribe to what they said, and that says more about you than them or their work. Using "death of the author" to defend that kind of symbolic interpretation is worse than useless and devalues the term for use in legitimate criticism. I've argued myself that the tone-deafness about the racist/racial content of RE5 lends it a sort of personal horror beyond what the developers could possibly have intended (i.e. the brutality of Chris's melee finishers, particularly his chest stomp), but going so far as to say the game represents any kind of symbolic recreation of any specific real-world event in or out of Africa, non-deliberately or otherwise, is going well beyond what post-structuralist criticism can justify. To my mind, the "death of the author" theory's hard limit is when you start talking about something other than individual reaction. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien swore until the day he died that The Lord of the Rings was not and was never intended to be an allegory for World War II, but that hasn't stopped three or four generations of literary critics from acting like it is. You're free to use "death of the author" to say that a scene works on levels other than what was intended, but once you start trying to build those levels, you've departed from the sensible use of the theory. Reaction and alternative interpretation are kosher; finding allegorical content where none exists is not.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:11
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We're coming at this from two different angles, then. Your writing suggests that you think I'm trying to mine the text for the innermost truth, the thing buried inside that changes the form of the text, and I'm not interested in that. I'm taking the imagery arranged by the game and juxtaposing it with historical events. I don't think it's at all unfair to read that kind of thing into a game about opposing burly white men who represent, on opposite ends, an international government agency and a pharmaceutical/oil conglomerate (the latter of which is creating monstrous figures in the name of eugenics), rampaging across the country, smashing people's homes up and stealing their diamonds, while plowing through different eras of caricatured native figures and dark continent trope scenarios. Resident Evil 5 is like one of the most deranged games ever, and there's no reason to reduce it to "Japanese developers were racist and trying to copy other things" when what's there is so much more interesting than that. (It's also worth nothing that death of the author literally means that authorial intent means absolutely nothing, that the text stands as its own product independent of its creator, and that the audience's participation with the symbols in the text creates the meaning therein. That's the whole idea. There are other, valid modes of interpretation- historicism, psychological analysis, etc- which take into account the author's life and intent, but those aren't what I tend to use, unless in a supplementary fashion.) Anonymous Robot fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 23:32
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I'm reminded of the Yahtzee video that came out around the type of RE5. He said something to the effect of "nobody cares when you kill a bunch of greasy mainland Europeans" in relation to RE4 not getting nearly as much criticism even though Leon is massacring a bunch of Spanish peasants.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:53
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Resident Evil 4 is a deeply faithful remake of Gymkata.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:58
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I've never thought the developers on RE5 were racist. They're just ignorant. I don't think anyone other than a Japanese development team could've made RE5, because nobody else on Earth has the same kind of exposure to Western culture without an attached understanding. Anyone from anywhere else on the planet would've either had the multicultural background to understand RE5's plot as written wasn't a very good idea (and I think it's indicative of the kind of relationship that Capcom Japan has with Capcom USA, or had at that point in time, that nobody on the U.S. side of things managed to communicate to them that they were holding a live grenade) or would not have been inclined to make a game that was quite that slavishly imitative of an American film. They did make a game, in the end, in which the African people aren't much more than tools. Tricell bribes them with alcohol and food to keep their facilities up and running, condemning them to lives as traditional subsistence farmers when they're sitting on what could be millions of dollars in oil rights, and Wesker uses them as cannon fodder against Chris and the BSAA. I'd agree with you so far as to say that there are historical parallels to be made. It's graceless and awkward, though, and no work in which a generic white dude mows down two thousand poor black people is ever going to be anything other than controversial, regardless of why it was done. Anonymous Robot posted:We're coming at this from two different angles, then. Your writing suggests that you think I'm trying to mine the text for the innermost truth, the thing buried inside that changes the form of the text, and I'm not interested in that. I'm taking the imagery arranged by the game and juxtaposing it with historical events. I don't think it's at all unfair to read that kind of thing into a game about opposing burly white men who represent, on opposite ends, an international government agency and a pharmaceutical/oil conglomerate (the latter of which is creating monstrous figures in the name of eugenics), rampaging across the country, smashing people's homes up and stealing their diamonds, while plowing through different eras of caricatured native figures and dark continent trope scenarios. I do think it's unfair. It is, at best, a misuse of the "death of the author" principle as it's been traditionally applied. At best, it's an inadvertent parallel, particularly since the Holocaust imagery in the basement of the Umbrella complex is carried out against the stored test subjects and Wesker's own employees, rather than against the local Ndipaya tribe. Trying to find an allegory in something when none exists is a deliberate attempt to "change the form of the text" (in this case from a survival-horror video game with a notoriously shaky plot to a relatively subtle commentary on African imperialism), and doing so without the author's conscious participation is a fool's errand. I'm pretty down on "death of the author" as a concept to begin with, because that's how you get bullshit like kids walking up to J.K. Rowling and telling her that the ending of Harry Potter "doesn't count." It's too often employed as an attempt to assert ownership over an unowned text. Much like the whole "Mary Sue" thing, kids who don't understand it have robbed it of most of its original purpose. Anonymous Robot posted:(It's also worth nothing that death of the author literally means that authorial intent means absolutely nothing, that the text stands as its own product independent of its creator, and that the audience's participation with the symbols in the text creates the meaning therein. That's the whole idea. There are other, valid modes of interpretation- historicism, psychological analysis, etc- which take into account the author's life and intent, but those aren't what I tend to use, unless in a supplementary fashion.) I'm aware of what it means and I don't agree. It's useful in some cases as a shorthand to discuss ways in which a given work or scene does not function in the way it was intended, either for good or for ill (i.e. The Room as inadvertent comedy gold, or Roger Corman's knack for making films that succeed on the precise opposite of the emotional spectrum from what he was going for), but once you start getting into unsolicited allegories, you're outside of the theory's utility. It is, at that point, literary fanfiction: it can be fun but it says nothing about the original text. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 00:22
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Policenaut posted:So some production company is trying to pitch a detective drama based on Resident Evil. So they don't have the rights to do it, and thier proof of concept isn't original footage, but clips from Hannibal, Seven and Prisoners edited together? That's not a pitch, it's barely even fan fiction - with a proof of concept, you're meant to film something yourself cheaply to get a studio to invest in the idea. They've just edited a bunch of clips of other people's work together and said "Capcom give us copyrights please thanks". You know all those "idea guys" on Kickstarter? The ones who say "I have a great idea for a game, give me money so I can pay someone to make it, though I don't have the resources at all"? Pretty much the same thing, really.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:47
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So elsewhere I was defending RE4 from "those" kind of RE fans and as usual I was pointing out how the series has trended further and further towards Action all the way back to RE2. This however gave me a kind of interesting idea for a little opinionated topic. Well, I find it interesting. How much of Horror and how much Action are there in each game? For example... Resident Evil 100% Survival Horror 0% Action. It's what started the genre going really, inspiring countless clones and derivatives. Resident Evil 3 75% Action 25% Horror The Dodge mechanic, ammo creation, the psuedo-QTE choice things, Nemesis...the whole game was geared towards combat.
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Aug 18, 2014 22:52
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NikkolasKing posted:So elsewhere I was defending RE4 from "those" kind of RE fans and as usual I was pointing out how the series has trended further and further towards Action all the way back to RE2. This however gave me a kind of interesting idea for a little opinionated topic. Well, I find it interesting. Resident Evil was an action game that had dumb loving moon logic adventure game puzzles grafted onto it and like three effective jump scares and gross mutant monsters to constitute horror. With wiggy camera angles because it was the PS1 and you could get away with experimental 'cinematic' poo poo back then. It was always an action game series. The series just became better at being an action game as it progressed. From the get go your primary gameplay was taking a shotgun/grenade launcher and blowing a zombies head clean off and taking out a giant roided out mutant final boss with high explosives.
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Aug 18, 2014 23:22
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Yeah, the problem is that you could ask ten people what "survival horror" is and you'd get thirteen answers minimum. I've spoken with people who don't think it's really a horror game if you have the ability to fight back at all, which means the only real survival horror games on the PlayStation are Martian Gothic and a couple of the early Clock Towers. The whole discussion sounds like you're trying to figure out a way to make your opinion an objective truth, and that's a fool's errand.
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Aug 18, 2014 23:30
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All I know is, when Resident Evil first came out, all everybody ever talked about was the hallway with the dogs bursting through the window. As a kid, I found the Lickers in Resident Evil 2 to be extremely scary as well. Sometimes you would walk into a room and all you would hear is the low groan they make, followed by the "click click click" of their talons hitting the floor. Mr. X loving blew my mind, I was not at all prepared for him to follow you to different rooms. SolidSnakesBandana fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 23:37
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Nohman posted:Resident Evil was an action game that had dumb loving moon logic adventure game puzzles grafted onto it and like three effective jump scares and gross mutant monsters to constitute horror. With wiggy camera angles because it was the PS1 and you could get away with experimental 'cinematic' poo poo back then. It was always an action game series. The series just became better at being an action game as it progressed. From the get go your primary gameplay was taking a shotgun/grenade launcher and blowing a zombies head clean off and taking out a giant roided out mutant final boss with high explosives. RE1 was built more around avoiding enemies than gunning them down. Who plays the first RE game to blow off zombie heads? If you waste all your shells on that, you're just leaving yourself vulnerable to the Hunters when they show up. The smart move is to avoid the slow-rear end zombies the best you can and conserve ammo for the Hunters. At least that's how I do it. In any event, the controls seem to me to be tailor-made to make the game as unwieldy as possible. Seems like an odd choice if the game was encouraging you to fight it out and kill everything... Wanderer posted:Yeah, the problem is that you could ask ten people what "survival horror" is and you'd get thirteen answers minimum. I've spoken with people who don't think it's really a horror game if you have the ability to fight back at all, which means the only real survival horror games on the PlayStation are Martian Gothic and a couple of the early Clock Towers. But just because you get ten different opinions doesn't mean some of them aren't wrong. Those people who say all of RE and all of SH, the two most iconic horror video game series, aren't Horror, are examples of being wrong. Never confuse "it scared me/didn't scare me" with horror. How much a piece of horror fiction scares you is the completely subjective part. Whether or not it is horror fiction though is an objective fact. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 23:38
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NikkolasKing posted:But just because you get ten different opinions doesn't mean some of them aren't wrong. Those people who say all of RE and all of SH, the two most iconic horror video game series, aren't Horror, are examples of being wrong. An opinion's only wrong if you base it on objectively inaccurate information. I can see the merit in an argument, even if I don't personally agree with it, that a horror game in which the horrible things can be soundly beaten with a stick until they go the gently caress away isn't a horror game. Horror is in the eye of the beholder, and what scares the hell out of you might be a fun romp through the city for me. As such, trying to apply a vigorous objective standard of measurement to a subjective criteria is just going to get you into arguments. That may be fun for you, who knows, but it's not going to prove anything.
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Aug 18, 2014 23:46
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Well I agree with that more or less. The numbers I gave were all BS for example. But it seems self-evident to me that games like RE3 were more focused on combat than RE1 ever was. Then Code Veronica had stuff like Steve crashing through a window and shooting a million bullets even though he was wielding Lugers. Stuff like that shouts "ACTION!!!" to me. There is no rigorous scientific measure I can apply here - it was just an idea for a topic or discussion, nothing more or less. But I never expected anyone to say the first RE game wasn't Horror at all. That is honestly a viewpoint I have never once heard in my life. Oh sure I've heard people who say nothing about it was scary and that it was just boring. But "horror" =/= scary. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was "Horror."
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Aug 18, 2014 23:51
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