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[brian0057]

Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece... or at least 70% of it.

 

[ACESHIGH]

Who cares? Survival horror when defined as intentionally shitty controls and frustrating player punishments was the last wave of decrepit, out of date quarter eating game design philosophy. If Resident Evil 4 killed that, then good. RE4 was scarier than any of the Resident Evil games that came before it. The

Spoiler: spoiler

lady pinned to the wall by a pitchfork through her head

made me jump four playthroughs in a row. The atmosphere as Leon explores the road to the village was creepy as fuck. Garradors and Novistadors were spooky as hell. Regenerators and Iron Maidens still give me the creeps on replays to this day. RE4 was everything good about RE without the crap that made it less fun. And it has some of the best shooting in any game to this very day. It did horror well.

It also did survival well. Punishing you for saving then dropping cheap deaths on you and sending you back to the last time you saved was a garbage mechanic that, again, was part of an outdated game design philosophy. If that's what the "survival" in survival horror means, then go play old shitty NES games with 3 lives and no continues. (And that's not even addressing the fact that "survival horror" is a marketing term that Capcom invented. If it's a genre, they made it. RE4 came out less than 10 years after the inception of the genre and was created by the people who coined the term. If they say it's survival horror, I say they're right.)

So if they make resident evil into a turn based strategy game but they say its survival horror they are right? The Resident Evil franchise from 2005 through 2015 has more in common with Gears of War and Devil May Cry than with games like Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark or Fatal Frame. They are still hit (RE7 - RE2Make) or miss (RE3Make, those MP games no one wanted)

There's no tension in a horror game where Special Agent Leon can suplex and roundhouse kick enemies, no matter how scary they look. And don't get me started on the dynamic difficulty, item dropping enemies, merchant where you can upgrade and buy new weapons (WTF) All those are arcade/action game mechanics.

Never understood what people found so cumbersome about tank controls. Press up to go where you want to go, down to retreat and left/right to turn. Regarding fixed camera perspective, I think it made sense for them to abandon it but the games lost their cinematic touch when transitioning to games where you can control the camera.

REMake modded on PC is still one of the best looking games out there and it was developed for a GameCube. As the franchise seems to have many subseries I think they should try one with fixed camera games again, at least as lower budget efforts compared to the mainline AAA games. They could use manhours for that instead of the MP games they try to push and crash and burn every single time.