Horror found in non-horror video games - XCOM: Enemy Unkown - 2012

XCOM: Enemy Unkown is a science fiction, turn based strategy game created by Frictional Games and published by 2K Games. This game is and incredible and genre breaking game. It breaks conventions and causes confusion and anger in the player. Basically, the player takes control of 'The Commander', the leader of the elusive XCOM Project that is initiated after aliens make contact with Earth and become incredibly hostile and start to abduct humans for testing. This means that general game play comes down to two things. Base management and turn based combat.

The combat is what makes this game very horrific in a good way. Imagine the scene, a UFO has been shot down by XCOM interceptors and has crash landed in the forests of Germany. A squad of expert soldiers have been deployed to secure the crash site and ensure that any hostile life has been snuffed out whilst trying to ensure that no more damage is taken by the space craft in hope of it being salvageable.

You control this squad, as you slowly advance towards this UFO all you hear is the wind whistling through the trees. An almost silent musical score starts to play in the back of your mind and you start to get a little tense. Then suddenly, little grey men burst out of the darkness. They are intimidating and armed to the teeth with sci-fi-esque plasma weaponry. The music gets incredibly tense as you try to deal with this threat. Once you deal with one of the two little grey men, you think that you can take the other with ease. However, one of your four elite soldiers get's annihilated by the remaining extra terrestrial.

One of your men panic and tries to take a shot at the little grey man, however he misses and hunkers down behind cover. Once you finally take down the last of the aliens, you continue progressing towards the ship slowly. You see what looks to be two humans, couching down near the UFO. One of your soldiers advance towards these 'civilians' but she is taken aback by the grotesque nature of this creature's face. It is a lanky, genetically engineered mess of part alien part human. The soldier freaks out and she starts to fire wildly at the two creatures, missing with every shot.

The 'thin man' takes a shot at the soldier with plasma weaponry and literally melts her face. With two of your elite soldiers dead, you send one of the remaining soldiers up to the two 'thin men' to take a shot with a shotgun. One of the 'thin men' falls but a cloud spurts forward out of it's chest. The soldier than took the shot breathes in this strange gas. Suddenly, this soldier is convulsing horribly and dies from what looks like poisoning.

Your last remaining soldier starts to fall back to the helicopter that is waiting back in the distance. The helicopter looks like it has faded into obscurity and seems a million miles away. This last man runs as fast as he can towards the helicopter, whilst taking shots at the 'thin man' when another strange alien creature bursts out of the darkness with a trail of fire following in it's wake. This creature is a strange spliced creature of machinery and flesh, with jet boosters instead of legs.

This creature bursts through the air and slaughters your last soldier with advance weaponry. This mission was a complete and utter failure. Back at base, Germany starts to panic after the terrible handling of this situation and withdraws all funding from your project. This means that a country has given up hope on mankind's survival against this alien threat and has accepted that fact. Earth is lost to these invaders.

Yeah... with that scenario in mind, you can see why this game is scary as all hell.
Come back next time folks.

                                                      All content belongs to Frictional Games

A look back at - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2006)

Well, I've been playing a whole lot of my old favorite survival horror games recently, and I came across this gem that had totally slipped my mind. No idea how it did because it is such a great landmark, even if people don't know it, in the survival horror genre. Let's begin shall we?

Call of Cthulhu : DCotE was released, for PC, in 2006. Developed by Headfirst Productions and published by our favorite publisher Bethesda Entertainment, this game was a buggy gem just waiting to be grabbed by a horror fan.

The Cthulhu mythos is an amazing setting to have a horror game. I mean come on guys, cosmic Gods who slumber in the sunken cyclopean city of R'yleh and are corrupting every man they possibly can to help them rise out of the sea and destroy the Earth. I mean, you can't get more doomsday-ey or horror than that.

Anyway, the plot for this game is very loosely based on the short H.P. Lovecraft story titled 'Shadow over Innsmouth'. We play as a detective by the name of Jack Walters, who was recently released from Arkham Asylum (not the one from Batman), which shows he is a bit unstable in his head.

Jack soon gets a new case in the 'sunny' little seaside town of Innsmouth, where a web of intrigue and pure horror starts to unravel as he learns of the towns dark secret and the nightmare that will never end... ehm yeah. This game goes a little overboard with it's plot, however, it is a generally good plot.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is fairly strange in this one. You play in an entirely HUD-less first person view, this concentrates the level of intensity to maximun capacity. making the player that little bit extra jumpy. This game is very survival based. Meaning, if you break a leg, you have to stop and fix it. This get's incredibly annoying after a while but it does show what developers are willing to go to when trying to keep to their genre.

Oh, and by the by, if you were hoping to blast your way through Innsmouth, well then you are in for a bad time. The game doesn't even give you a weapon until about 3 hours into the game. And by this time the entire town has already started hunting you down after the inn keeper fails to kill you in your sleep. There is a rather lengthy rooftop/building chase scene which is intense as it is hard.

Once you do get a weapon, the game get's no less intense or even easy. If you get spotted, your dead. Every man and his grandma will come at you with shotguns and try to wipe your soul from the Earth. This is where the game gets a little bit more insane. However, I shan't go on about this anymore.

This game does get fairly buggy at times, on the PC version without an unofficial patch. This means that on certain levels, things commonly disappear. There's a level called Devil's Reef, and you have to blow up five guys who are creating a giant storm. However, the rushed PC version denies sight of these guys altogether, so you are left shooting in the dark.

Anywho, I could go on for hours about the bugs of the game, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. This game is a brilliant mish-mash of insanity and horror with Lovecraftian settings all rolled into one giant explorable, although not sandbox style explorable, world. If you have not played this game, then I think that you should.

You know how I get at the end of a post. GO PLAY THE DAMN GAME NOW!

See ya next time folks.


                                                            All content belongs to Bethesda Entertainment

A view on horror games

It's been a while since I've posted on here so I'm just gonna say I'm sorry for that but, let's get onto what I'm going to talk about today. Horror games.

Now, if you read my Resident Evil 6 review, you'll know that I am a die hard horror game fan. I've played every Resident Evil or Silent Hill game you could think of. But, I think that the horror genre, in video games, has been watered down like hell.

I remember the first time I encountered a zombie in the first Resi game, the music and the dodgey cutscene of the zombie turning it's head was scary as hell. Whereas, Resi 6 just puts you there with a machine gun mowing down walking corpses. I'm not just going to talk about that series here, although Resident Evil is a big name in the horror genre.

Let's talk about why this has happened. In recent years, horror games have managed to grab a much bigger demographic than they used to have.

The companies created these games would have created the games in these ways to reach a much wider audience. This goes especially with the evolution of the Resident Evil series.

This series has drifted much closer to the third person shooter genre of games rather than horror. This is ok for a wide demographic but, for horror fans, this is slightly upsetting. The originals had a really unique way to play, with wide shot camera angles and dodgey controls that added to the horror.

These mechanics and viewpoints were taken more by the Silent Hill series. Now Silent Hill is probably the only series that kept to the original idea on horror. Silent Hill cannot really lend itself to the Gears of War-esque direction that Resi took itself because of the universe that Silent Hill is based in. Silent Hill plays on the mind of the protagonist, so you can never really go in just shooting monster's in the face. So Silent Hill needed to keep to  it's origins.

MODERN HORROR GAMES

We'll move on to some more modern IP's that actually manage to terrify a player. Dead Space is a great horror series, especially the original.

With the silent protagonist of Isaac Clarke wandering around a derelict space ship being jumped on by massively strange and creepy space-zombie-mutant type things, we are shown true horror in the science fiction flying-through-space type era.

Dead Space 2 did a little bit more of the running and gunning ideal that Resi went for, but it still managed to keep the horror in the series at the same time. However, Isaac Clarke is no longer silent and has a crazy personality. Ok, Dead Space is good and all, but let's talk about Amnesia.

Amnesia brings back the idea of true terror in a video game. Daniel, the protagonist, has no special skills or special attributes about him. He has amnesia, obviously by the title, and works his way through a creepy and strange mansion whilst being chased by mutilated/mutated creatures that appear from nowhere and annihilate you.

The scariest thing about this game is the fact that you cannot defend yourself against these creatures, unless some strange coding bug kills the monster for you.

There are a lot more examples of games bringing pure terror to the masses, but they are all I'm going to talk about. However, I will say that a lot of people are saying that horror is dead in modern gaming but, I just gave you 2 examples of games which scare the living shit out of anyone who plays them.

Horror has not died in modern gaming, it's just that the main series in this genre have taken a back seat to other IP's that do what the originals did, but much much better.

This was really just a rant that I decided to write on almost 20 hours with no sleep so make sure you don't take this incredibly seriously. This is just my thoughts on modern horror gaming.


                                                                             Silent Hill image belongs to Konami
                                                                           Dead Space image belongs to EA Games
                                                                         Amnesia image belongs to Frictional Games
                      

Resident Evil 6 review - November 5th 2012

You guys thought that this was just a horror film blog didn't you? Well it was, but now it's expanded into horror media. I haven't posted in a while and that's because I've been paying this little "survival horror" game.

This game series has honestly gone down the pan. Resident Evil 1, 2 and even 3 basically started the genre of games we call survival horror. However, these games have been getting more and more orientated towards the 'Call of Duty generation' of gamers than the more traditional horror gamer. Resident Evil 4 introduced a brand new control method with a lot more active and action based style of gameplay.

Now this was all fine for me, as a long time Resi Evil fan. The game was still full of scary horror elements and dreadfully tiring puzzles which is what fans had come to expect. However, this game had no zombies... I mean, how can you have a Resident Evil game with no zombies? How did this idea come to pass? I have no clue.

 Now, after the aftermath of 4 came the bane of all Resi fans. Resident Evil 5 essentially butchered the horror genre of games. This one was definitely aimed a wider demographic and basically chucked all the elements that 4 had kept from it's horror lineage and replaced it with button/key mashing when turning cranks etc.

This was a big shock for the fans of the series, this led to many fans calling the series Action Evil and taking a back seat to all upcoming releases. Now I am not going to talk about Operation: Raccoon City because that was just Gears of War with some zombies, so I'm going to move swiftly on to talking about Resident Evil 6.

RESI 6

Right so, we went from actual survival horror to slight action with a lot of original elements to Gears of War with this series. Resident Evil 6 is a whole new beast. This game is entirely focused on the action.

The gameplay is just an advanced version of the gameplay we got from 5.This isn't necessarily a bad thing but, oh my God, they did screw up with this game. The enemies have nothing about them, at all. 4 had the terrifying, chainsaw wielding doctor Salvador, even one of the villager's steal Leon's jacket after chapter 1.

This is fairly amusing for the fans. 6, on the other hand, has absoloutley no quality in the bad guys that Leon, Chris or even Jake, the karate master, face. After we get past this, the story is just meaningless. Every character's personal background is locked in a vault labelled 'Collectibles' so we don't get much emotional interaction between protagonists.

The main story is nonsensical and, even though they all meld into one story at the end, is just a very linear progression to an unsatisfying end. I wont spoil the end for any of those that would like to play this atrocity to horror games so that's all I'm saying on story.

So, we've talked about everything bad about this game, which is most of it, but let us talk about something that works well and is very interesting. Agent Hunt mode.

Now, this new game mode is interesting in the fact that Capcom have borrowed from Left 4 Dead 2. Basically, if someone decides to play any campaign mission with Agent Hunt active, on veteran of professional difficulty, then another player can join as a random spawning creature and will be charged with killing the protagonist. This is done well because the player who is playing as one of the protagonists wont know who the player playing a creature is. Obviously they will when they see that this controlled creature has a much higher intelligence than the lack luster AI that has no sense of self preservation what so ever.

Another game mode that is interesting to play is the return of The Mercenaries mode. In this mode, players take control of one of the several protagonists of the story and go onto a map in which they must eliminate 150 enemies in a given time limit. Time can be found as pick ups and time can be gained by killing an enemy using a melee move. This mode is your basic, stand around and kill stuff, kind of game mode. No depth, no story but is great fun with a friend and an hour to kill.

So, I'll come to a final conclusion about this game. This game sucks. Simply put. From a survival horror video game fan, I was very disappointed in Capcom for what they actually delivered with this game. Now, of course, if you like this kind of gameplay and this genre of game, then this is right up your alley. But, for the majority of fans of survival horror, this game was very disappointing and very lack luster in it's delivery of any aspect of this game.

Thanks for reading, come back Wednesday for my next post.


                                                                      All content belongs to Capcom