Hey, hey, hey it's almost Halloween! You know what that means? It means nothing actually. I'm far too old to be going around the neighborhood in costume to get candy. Though it is a frightening possibility that I easily could. And also I will most likely end up working that day. So even giving away candy to kids is out of the realm of possibility for me. Anyways horror games are some of the most unique experiences in our interactive medium today.
My first experience with the horror genre in video games came with Resident Evil 2. My brother had it and I would watch him play. However, I never quite got it. A young and naive version of myself didn't appreciate it. And then I grew up. My first horror gaming experience came strangely with the Nintendo Gamecube...you know that cute little purple box that kids carried around like lunchboxes to their friends house to play Melee.
Resident Evil or REmake as some call it now was released for the Gamecube in a year where I thought I was ready to take on what my brother played. Between this, Resident Evil 0, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem....well let's just say I had nightmares for a while.
Around this time my brother got a Playstation 2 and little game calle Fatal Frame. And if those games before scared the crap out of my poor childhood and my poor little Gamecube, then Fatal Frame made me wet my pants. That's how scared I was. This continued with Silent Hill 2 & 3, Haunting Ground...and other games that my older brother took delight in showing me because he was kind of an asshole.
Now I'm older and horror games are few and far between. At least in giving you that same feeling of dread and panic. Resident Evil has become a gun toting action game, Silent Hill was bounced from developer to developer after Team Silent left that the series lost any appeal. Fatal Frame hasn't left it's Japanese homeland and if it did it was a remake of the 2nd game (available in Europe and still the best game in the series) or spirt camera which was a neat idea, but poorly implemented spin off.
It's rare for a game to nowadays to give gamers that similar experience. A game like Dead Rising embraces the campiness and over the top antics with combinable chainsaws and zombie hordes. You still have some sleepers every now and again. Games like Amnesia or unfortunately Slender Man come to mind if you happen across any camera reaction let's plays on Youtube.
I myself came across a few obscure horror titles for Wii and even some pleasant surprises popped up...such as well Obscure II, Cursed Mountain, and Fatal Frame IV (again had to unfortunately import it) A nice surprise I heard about was Resident Evil: Revelations which I feel and many others feel is as close to RE getting back to the seeds it once sowed. And even though it wasn't a terrific effort ZombiU was a lot more survival horror than most recent games. It accounted for actual SURVIVAL and required you to think about routes, ammo management, sleeping, eating, etc.
So what are some of your horror memories? What horror games scared you when you were younger? How do you think survival horror has evolved? Is it better or worse? Comments and feedback are always greatly appreciated!
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