Games:

Oops. I forgot. By and large, I dislike Resident Evil-style “survival horror” games. This would encompass Resident Evil, and Silent Hill, to name the two big franchises. My first foray into this genre was Resident Evil: Code Veronica – I’d played RE a good long while ago, but I never played too much of it, so I never got bogged down by the conventions of the medium. RE:CV was great looking, for the time, but the limited, and limiting save points bothered me to no end, and one day, after playing for two hours JUST to find a save spot, I quit, and never played it again.

A year or two later, I picked up Silent Hill 2. I’d heard it was ridiculous in its creepiness, and figured, what the hey. Sure enough, so long as no one’s talking, it’s scary as all get out. But the combat sucks, the puzzles aren’t well-integrated into the story, and basically, it’s like a version of Myst where everything’s dark, and the control sucks. Whee. I never finished the game, ’cause I was so frustrated with it, and though it’s definitely a creepy game, there was just no point in playing it anymore. The mechanics were killing any sense of fun I was having.

Fast forward another year+, and I picked up the RE remake for the Gamecube. For $10, I couldn’t go wrong, right? Well, while the REmake looked really nice, all the mecahnics and game design were at this point something like six years old, and it showed. Part of the gameplay is managing your inventory slots. And not a small, trivial part of the gameplay, but one of the major, central game mecahnics. Gah. It’s AWFUL. The other mechanics involve solving Myst-like puzzles, and running to and from with some of the worst control schemes ever implemented in a modern game.

Another six months pass, and I pick up Silent Hill 3 from the local EB for $10. How could I go wrong? Gah. While this is a really, really nice looking game, the problem is that it sucks. The puzzles, again, make no fucking sense, and part of the gameplay involves running around in corridors so dark, you literally cannot see *anything*. Is this fun to some people? I just don’t get it. After about two hours, I just gave up, sick of not being able to see anything, or trying to solve ridiculous, nonsensical, context-free puzzles. Bleah.

I think the problem is that the Survival Horror games I’ve gotten have been cheap, and I keep expecting that since the last one sucked so bad, maybe this one will be good. I keep being wrong, man. Really goddamn wrong.